Word: dioramas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...animated diorama of 1830s concert life, a full panoply of period instruments thrillingly revived under the banner of musical authenticity. Assembled on the stage of London's Queen Elizabeth Hall last week were ranks of gut-stringed violins, wooden flutes, valveless horns, leather-headed kettledrums and even a pair of ophicleides (bass keyed bugles since supplanted by tubas). Standing before them, feet on the ground but soul in the sky, was Norrington, at 54 newly emergent as a formidable leader in the early-music movement...
...survey of 144 paintings, 100 drawings, maps and documents, 42 sculptures and 65 prints, which has been on view at Burlington House since December. Do not walk to this one; run or fly, if you can. It will not travel; when it closes on March 11, a diorama of the energies that constituted one of the great moments in Western imagination will vanish. And the ritual of visiting Venice itself would be an imperfect substitute...
...eight tableaux and does much, if not most, of the singing in each. At the composer's request, Giuseppe Crisolini-Malatesta based the sets and costumes on paintings by Fra Angelico, Giotto and Matthias Grünewald. As staged by Sandro Sequi, scenes are played in small, diorama-like boxes to emphasize the work's distant, legendary quality. The only serious dramatic defect is the sixth scene, the sermon to the birds, which was intended to be the high point. What was supposed to be a grand laser spectacle representing the flight of the birds in the shape...
...noted George Orwell, is how long ago they were written. That was in 1945. Today they appear to have been composed somewhere between the Jurassic era and the Iron Age. The plummy clubmen, the young wastrels in spats and waistcoat, the shockable aunts, the frosty butler belong in a diorama at the Museum of Natural History, not onstage. Yet here they are, spouting the ancient lines: "He looks as if he'd been poured into his suit and forgotten to say when." "From the collar upward he stands alone." The japes about class and custom once seemed spun...
...miniature stage, containing strange images like a diorama of another world, was one of the favorite devices of surrealism, used incessantly from Max Ernst in the '20s to Joseph Cornell in the '40s. Nevelson gave it a unique density and gravity. She took the box's power as theater and subjected it to a constructivist rigor of formal layout. The past life of the wood pieces was still apparent: the nicks and flaws, the signs of use and disuse, all preserved and yet held at an emotional distance by the pall of black. But her instinct...