Word: harps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Miki's score uses nine Western instruments plus the koto (a kind of harp), samisen (a Japanese lute) and the tsuzumi drum. The composer manipulates a few simple musical motifs to achieve great emotional resonance as the themes recur; a sensitive, fragile hybrid that combines traditional Japanese elements with contemporary Western compositional practices, it must be heard in the theater to make its effect. Director Colin Graham, who commissioned the work for London's English Music Theater in 1979, staged the sometimes violent action subtly and with formal grace...
...sensitive as an Aeolian harp, intelligent as I.A. Richards, and there was as yet no indelible sign on the Cambridge landscape that I had been there. A trial could change everything...
...violin strings for no apparent reason, other than perhaps to impress the orchestra-seat audience with his bow technique. The horns, in contrast, played their statement of the main theme with little passion. Shostakovich's conceptions and Jarvi's interpretation began to shine, however, with the entrance of the harp's sustained chords. The composer glutted the music with fat harmonies and lines, which Jarvi wrings from the orchestra, at a cost; a wobbly beat in the strings during the difficult passages before the timpani and tambourines enter, playing rhythms camel riders know well...
...Garrison) is the shysterish Samovar the Lawyer. Chico (Frank Lazarus) is a larcenous tongue-in-cheeky footman to the imperious Mrs. Pavlenko (Hewett), the Dumont role. Perfectly at ease as Harpo, Priscilla Lopez is a creature from another planet, who at one wonderfully zany moment plucks out the inevitable harp solo on the spokes of an upside-down bicycle...
...commission's proposed visit to the embassy was a condition "imposed by the criminal government of the U.S.," and that Iranian government leaders did not really want the visit to take place. Nonetheless, they said, the Iranian government had been exerting "intolerable pressure" on them. "The government leaders harp on the theme that we are weakening them and that we are a state within a state." So, said the students, they were washing their hands of the whole affair. "Our responsibility for the hostages is over. We will turn over the spies to the Revolutionary Council...