Word: difficult
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rutted, twisting route, shrouded here by patches of fog, mined there by enemy booby traps. Last week, amid cries from critics who wanted to travel either the high road or the low, Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles churned resolutely along the center route. At times, it was difficult to see where they were going, but it was clear that, by way of deterrence and diplomacy, they hoped eventually to arrive at peace...
...amused himself with Reichsmarshal Goring's private zoo, had a pretty German cottage dismantled and shipped back to Moscow. He went riding every morning, ice skating when there was ice, and was proud of his fitness. Years before, New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Walter Kerr, explaining how difficult it was to learn anything about Zhukov's personal life, had said that the only time he had come close to Zhukov was when a little boy in a Moscow street had pointed to a house and told him that Zhukov lived there with his two sons and a wife...
Roger Sessions writes "difficult" music and likes it that way. When the headlines reported MODERNIST SYMPHONY BOOED, after his first Symphony was played in Philadelphia in 1935, he was delighted. When people called his Violin Concerto unplayable, he shrugged and looked around until he found himself a fiddler who could play it. Last week in Princeton, N.J., Sessions' long (75 minutes) one-act opera, The Trial of Lucullus, got its first hearing in the East. The score was, as usual, pretty tough going, but at least nobody booed...
Nevertheless, Lucullus was difficult. Composer Sessions explains that his music is "of line, rather than of detail," and since today's listeners are accustomed to focusing on detail, they find it hard to follow. Sessions has never pushed performances of Lucullus or of any other work. Says he: "I like my work too much to go to anyone with a score under my arm." Sessions is getting played in spite of this attitude: his lurid suite from The Black Maskers was performed this season by the Boston Symphony and is scheduled to be played at Tanglewood, where he will...
Meanwhile, some of Sessions' early compositions, e.g., the "modernist symphony" and The Black Maskers (1923), have already passed from the realm of the fiendishly difficult to the comparatively easy, and seven of his works, including Symphony No. 2, are on LPs. He would not mind if the process continued. "Of course I would like my music to be liked by a great many people," he says. "It just doesn't work out that...