Word: dictional
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GALILEO, by Bertolt Brecht, is like a formal ballet of the mind in which the prince of science and the princes of the church dance out their accustomed roles. Anthony Quayle makes diction a diadem, as he leads the Lincoln Center Repertory Company through a highly creditable production...
Somewhere under all of that basaltic opacity and frentic word-accumulation something, presumably, is being expressed. The obscurity of the diction (an alembic is anything which distills or refines) and the ambiguity of the description reduce the poem to a mere order of words unified by consonant repetition and inarticulate verbal echoes...
After a series of ill-starred ventures, the Lincoln Center company has put together a creditable production, and it is luckiest of all in its British star, Anthony Quayle. His Galileo leaps at the tantalizing bait of new knowledge, delivers his lines with a purity that makes diction a diadem, and knows bitterly the heart's blind wounds for which the mind has no tourniquet...
...second issue are dependent upon more polite selections. It is of course easy in such cases to avoid examining the poem behind the shock; here, it is a disservice to the author. In this and his other poems, Bidart exercises a kind of Jewish irony in his diction which recalls Alan Dugan, last year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. This is certainly a refreshing change from the surfeit of pseudo-Lowell which burdens other magazines. Bidart's conversations are pleasantly conversational, and his imagery works primarily to advance the narrative. With deceptive simplicity, he sketches the complex...
...guter Hirt" (BWV 85), "Ihr Menschen, Ruehmet Gottes Liebe" (BWV 167), and the motet "Komm, Jesu, komm" (BWV 229) elegantly and unpretentiously. They produced a full but never heavy sound; the chorus's long threads of melody were sung smoothly and sensitively; the diction was inpeccable. Collins's phrasing and dynamics avoided the spectacular, but could be striking on occasion through their subtlety. He chose to take the final cadence of "Der Herr denket" simply and quietly, rather than grandly and pompously; as a result, this cadence was one of the most satisfying moments of the evening...