Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a warm, loving tribute to the late Lorraine Hansberry, put together from her own writings. The interracial cast, ably directed by Gene Frankel, works well as an ensemble to thread an elegiac mood through the range of comedy, rage, reminiscence and introspection...
...which whites as well as blacks speak for her in the first person - most notably bright, blonde Barbara Baxley and beautiful black Cicely Tyson. The production is necessarily episodic, fragmentary and uneven, but the cast, ably directed by Gene Frankel, works well as an ensemble to thread an elegiac mood through the range of comedy, rage, reminiscence and introspection. André Womble expertly manages a wide variety of black male parts, from an African nationalist to a run away slave; John Beal does equally well as the nigger-hating home owner of Raisin in the Sun and, in a scene...
While the overall tone of the book is tragic and almost elegiac, the individual scenes are often hilarious and demonstrate Donleavy's adeptness at using his lyrical Joycean prose to explore human emotions. A scene of touching pathos, for example, is broken up when Balthazar is discovered naked and feverishly ill in Breda's bed by her employer's wife. The female fight that follows is unmatched in literature for its comic ferocity. Hair curlers are grabbed, bellies butted, Balthazar's breakfast food spilled, bottles of urine knocked over, dresses ripped-all while Balthazar lies abed...
...tuned sharp and played with a monochromatic tone which, while rather beautiful, was at odds with the coloristic shading of the piece. Instead of varying from lustrous to astringent, from cantabile to martellato, Mr. Buswell overexercised most of the themes with an unvarying weightiness. One notable exception was the elegiac close of the slow movement. Mr. Buswell played with proper aggressiveness in the Magyar uprisings and heroic cadential moments, but has yet to attain a master violinist's inevitable subtlety in place of gratuitous exhibitionism. He lacked a master's shaded touch in the scrupulous relaxation which informs Bartok...
...Instead, the bad boy of Russian music seems to have found a new mood of lyrical quiet and contentment. His artistic debt to Sergei Prokofiev is as clear as ever-embarrassingly so at times-and some of his melodic writing in the first movement is downright dull. But the elegiac sweep of the middle adagio movement and the jauntiness of the finale compensate admirably for these shortcomings. The concerto is not quite a masterpiece, but Oistrakh and the Moscow Philharmonic under Conductor Kiril Kondrashin perform it as though it were...