Word: first
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Warehouse. Two nights later, Met-goers saw the first performance in 19 years of Puccini's Manon Lescaut. In front of new sets that were hardly more imaginative than any of the Met's old ones, great Lyric Tenor Jussi Bjoerling and Soprano Dorothy Kirsten sang like opera stars, but acted in the old arm-flailing tradition that has long been the curse of the opera stage. The first matinee was a revival, after nine years in the warehouse, of Saint-Saëns' Samson and Delilah. As a vehicle for Dramatic Tenor Ramon Vinay, the strong...
Manager Edward Johnson could claim with justice that his last opening night before Edinburgh's Rudolf Bing takes over next season (TIME, June 13) was "one of the best." But by the time the first week was over it was evident that the old Met had not noticeably changed its ways: it still had probably the world's best singing, some of the world's most outdated staging and acting...
...Standards. Toledo-born Art Tatum played his first professional engagement at 16 as a dance-band pianist. Two years later he left the band to go on his own as a soloist. "The other boys used to razz me," he says. "They said I had no left hand, so I made up my mind to show 'em." Tatum is still sensitive about criticism of his bass, but can claim, with the enthusiastic approval of his fans, that he does more with his left hand than most pianists do with both...
Last week Manhattan audiences were listening to a new symphony that Russians had heard once, were not hearing any more. Leopold Stokowski. and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony performed the U.S. premiere of Sergei Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony. The first movement was dark but thematically appealing, the slow movement harmonically and rhythmically as dull as dishwater. The fast finale oompah-oompahed along in Russian style until about 30 bars from the end. Only then, for about a dozen bars, did listeners hear the powerfully dissonant Prokofiev they had known in the Scythian Suite and the first violin concerto. After...
...think art should be shocking, necessarily," says Painter Paul Cadmus, "but it should be disturbing." Cadmus, who combines a steady hand with a jaundiced eye, had never failed to disturb people and earn a living by it, but his first exhibition of paintings in twelve years, which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week, made his earlier works seem almost sissified...