Word: frenched
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...speaks ill for Harvard's intelligentsia. Certainly the first and last pieces on the program by Samuel Barber and Manuel DeFalla could not possibly be considered "difficult" works and, to those familiar with Schoenberg's atonal period and the orchestral songs of Mahler, the Octandre by Edgar Varese, the French avant-garde composer and the Four Orchestra Songs by a young American, Benjamin Cutler, should not have posed insuperable problems of listening. More importantly, perhaps, they all provided ample opportunity for the orchestra to demonstrate its improved technical virtuosity and musical sensitivity...
...Manuel De Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with Luise Vosgerchian as piano soloist. This luminous work, which uses the piano more as a part of the orchestra than does a formal concerto, combines evocations of Spain and its festive music with the muted orchestral transparencies of French Impressionist compositions. The orchestra and its marvellously accomplished soloist gave the work a stunning reading. The rapport between them was evident from the first and, throughout both Mr. Senturia and Miss Vosgerchian brought out DeFallas alteration between Latin passion and delicate poetry with judicious phrasing and well-varied tone coloring...
...ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF Music, by Marc Pincherle (220 pp.; Reynal; $18), is a bold undertaking by a noted French musicologist: a history of Western music from early Christian chants to the present. Like any authoritative book that covers so vast a field, it seems perfunctory at times. But the basic information is there, and great taste has gone into the selection of 240 illustrations, ranging from a loth century B.C. harpist to Jazzman Sydney Bechet...
AFRICA, by Emil Schulthess (Simon & Schuster; $20), grew out of a trip to "Rocher Noir," between Libya and French Equatorial Africa, to photograph an eclipse of the sun. Photographer Schulthess got his sun pictures, but he also took hundreds of others throughout Africa (a desert woman nuzzling her child, a Masai herdsman and his flock), which together seem to say more about the Dark Continent than many prose books...
...difficulty in establishing a literary school is that someone is always cutting class. Novelist Nathalie Sarraute, dean of women of the French school known as the New Realist, inveighs against psychological novels, yet psychologizes in her own works. Her cofounder, Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, is an object worshiper who would rather describe a love seat than a love scene; yet this is not consistently reflected in the novels of his disciples. They do have some common characteristics, notably a way of writing in flat tones of a world that is bleak arid joyless, where people lead lives hollow of meaning...