Word: gallicisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Couching his pacifist message in Gallic irony, Giraudoux bandies about the question of whether the Trojans should pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to hold onto Helen, the world's most beautiful woman. As with the role of Cleopatra, it is virtually impossible for any actress to live up to that kind of advance billing. Jennifer West fails abysmally by playing Helen as a dumb, dumb blonde, more waitress than temptress; far from launching a thousand ships, it appears doubtful whether she could pilot a coffee cup across a hash house...
...Beauvoir, are the worst kind of illusion; reality is bile. Yet on the very last page, there seems to be a smidgen of vague hope, at least for the children-maybe. That is small compensation for a novel that is distinguished otherwise only for its predictable course and Gallic ennui...
...French Composer Pierre Boulez, 42, has the punctilious Gallic virtues: rhythmic deftness, a feeling for nuance, pointillistic detail. In compositions from Debussy through Anton Webern to Boulez, few conductors can equal his idiomatic mastery of bristling complexity and tangy dissonance. He probably never will build a repertory of the standard war horses; as a freelance conductor, he remains a self-confessed dilettante who works "entirely for pleasure...
...Mehta, an Indian from Bombay who now conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic-and who last week touched off a furor by denying that he was the least bit interested in conducting the New York Philharmonic*Yet what the musical performance lacked in authentic accent was balanced by the thoroughly Gallic staging of French Actor-Director Jean-Louis Barrault...
...languid Romeo et Juliette-an opera that only illustrates the composer's remarkable capacity for turning great poetry into sentimental salon entertainment. Furthermore, the performance was sadly deficient in the French accent, both in words and music. Franco Corelli nearly strangled on every attempt to produce the pure Gallic B-flat, while all of Soprano Mirella Freni's undeniable charm was defeated by the pallid music she was asked to sing. New Director Paul-Emile Deiber grouped his singers around Rolf Gerard's workaday sets in a series of static tableaux that had little to do with...