Word: finest
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Musically, the production proved to be more than adequate, despite the fact that Tenor Ramon Vinay and pretty Soprano Gre Brouenstein showed signs of strain. The chorus, one of the world's finest, performed brilliantly. But the chief attraction, as usual, was the staging. Wieland sees Tannhäuser as a harried misfit in a world of rigid conventions. Dressed in a black cloak (while the other minstrels wear brown), he moves among stiff, almost mechanized people of the court. Preparing for the crucial song contest in the second act-usually staged with casual confusion-uniformly dressed...
EACH year the U.S. grows a bit richer in the rest of the world's art. Some of its finest fruits (opposite and overleaf) have fallen recently to museums in Boston, Detroit and San Francisco...
Detroit's Rubens has been called the finest of his sketches to be seen in the U.S. He painted it originally as a study for a big, sumptuous tapestry. The classic grandeur Rubens intended is conveyed by the small study, but casually, which makes it all the more effective. The picture was one of 15 little gems of European art that hung in the Grosse Pointe home of Philanthropist Edgar B. Whitcomb and his wife until both died last year and bequeathed them to the Detroit Institute...
...PLAZA. It was built by "the Astors, Astorists, Astorites, the Vanderbilts, Plasterbilts and Whoeverbilts, who wanted a place to dress up and parade and see themselves in the great mirrors. So they sent for the finest master of the German Renaissance style, Henry Hardenbergh, and he did this-a skyscraper but not the monstrous thing the skyscraper was to become later. He still managed to keep it with a human sense. There were Ravenna mosaics on the floor, but they covered them up with rugs. A lot of it has been spoiled by inferior desecrators...
...finest story in the book is Moravia's The Unfortunate Lover, about a catty mistress who plays a cruel game of Iloveyou, I-love-you-not with her mouselike lover. The best war story is Indro Montanelli's O. Henry-like His Excellency. A monocled, tight-corseted army corps commander named Delia Rovere is clapped into a Milan prison by the Germans in the spring of 1944. He lets his junior fellow officers know that Italy expects them to face the firing squad with courage: "An officer is at all times merely on temporary duty...