Word: czechs
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DVORAK: Serenade for Strings, Op. 22; Czech Suite, Op. 39 (Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Armin Jordan, conductor; Erato). Dvořák is best known for his last three symphonies (including the inescapable "New World") and his omnipresent Cello Concerto, but many have long admired his smaller works. The Czech Suite brims with rustic high spirits−it includes a polka, a sousedka, or "neighbors' dance," and a dashing furiant−while the Serenade for Strings is a five-movement study in country-squire elegance. Jordan, a Swiss conductor who came to general attention leading the score...
...story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. Yet what emerges is comedy-black, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly Middle European as the despairing wit of Prague's own Franz Kafka. Skvorecky has mixed history with high unseriousness before-notably in The Bass Saxophone, about a Czech youth playing in a German dance band during the war-but his latest work is unquestionably his masterpiece of that modern specialty, the heartbreaking belly laugh...
Skvorecky's alter ego is Danny Smiricky, 48, a Czech émigré professor at a college very like Skvorecky's academic home for some 15 years, the University of Toronto. Danny teaches dark Old World lessons from Poe, Hawthorne and Stephen Crane to nice Canadian boys and girls whose idea of horror is derived from Stephen King movies. As for The Red Badge of Courage, Danny's students read it not as a commentary on war but as one more case study of a young man's identity crisis...
...little barrage balloons, tugging at their cables above every spot that might offer a target to low-flying German planes, kept the island from sinking into the sea under the weight of men and machines massing for Dday. London was a kaleidoscope of uniforms: British, Commonwealth, French, Norwegian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Polish and, of course, American. So many U.S. officers worked around Grosvenor Square that G.I.s walking through the area kept their arms raised in semipermanent salute. In the southern counties, near the coast from which the armada would sail, military convoys clogged the crooked lanes of the countryside; entire...
Kundera brings lightness of being to life by narrating, in classically simple form, the lives of two couples. Tomas is a top-notch Czech suregon; Tereza is his emotionally dependent mistress. Though Tomas loves Tereza more than any other woman, he makes love to as many women as possible; he is incapable of giving up his erotic friendships, though he is afraid of hurting Tereza. During the political unrest of 1968, Tomas and Tereza move to Switzerland; they are followed by Sabina, Tomas's next-best mistress. Some time later Tereza, deciding that she lacks the strength to live abroad...