Word: dross
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HEINRICH BIBER: EIGHT SONATAS FOR VIO LIN AND CONTINUO (2 LPs; Cambridge). Although the Baroque revival has dredged up a good deal of dross, it has also led to the discovery of some golden nuggets. Sonya Monosoff plays these with rich tone and temperament and gets colors seldom heard today, for Biber liked to use scordatura, an unorthodox tuning of the strings...
That is what I assume Babe is getting at, and unfortunately it all sounds much better than it is. The first act charmingly and subtly presages the fourth, but a prodigious deal of dross is stuffed to fill the gap between them. Characters pass the time mysteriously hiding information from each other in innumerable false suspenses, or alternatively describing over and over what has been going on. When these devices begin to wear thin, Babe returns to the stage a crew of tedious mystics who repeat each other's lines after the familiar pattern of the Western--you know...
...show, you see, comes in the best of its songs, which--like the madrigals and the ballads--are at once both charming pieces of music and very gentle spoofs of themselves. The rest of the show, however--the jokes, the patter, the thundering choruses--is so much dross: dull, dated, tiresome stuff. Unfortunately, Mr. Tigar, or whoever, seems to find the dross screamingly funny, and the music rather second-rate. Consequently, he has built up an unmusical and ungainly case which closely resembles the staggerer I posed to you a while back, and he has stuffed the poor Yeomen...
...with parasol at the ready, Major Stockholder Joan Whitney Payson joined Manager Charles Dillon Stengel for baseball's least auspicious event of the week: the launching of the National League's fledgling New York Mets. Asked if he thought he could alchemize a champion from the best dross that Whitney money could buy, Casey instinctively retorted: "I expect to win every day." Then, from the most voluble player in the league came an uncharacteristic halt in the Mach 2 verbiage. "Maybe," sighed Casey, "I'll be shell-shocked...
...bout will be with the foil which is a modern descendent of the short dross sword. The conventional fencing weapon, it weighs 17 ounces and is 43 inches long. A seven-touch duel will "be equivalent to five rounds in a boxing match," Marion said...