Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jean-Louis Scherrer, had a couple of extravaganzas worthy of an Edith Wharton parvenu. Compared with these flights into fairyland, the Balmain show is almost severe. De la Renta's gowns show the most exquisite materials and embroidery but are presented, as it were, in translation -- to a modern idiom. The last-minute bolts of georgette appear in a series of elegant sheaths, delicately layered, that have the cool beauty of a waterfall. One knockout skirt is of raffia -- the straw-hat material -- that looks amazingly like embroidery...
...boundaries of dance. Tharp was one of many choreographers who were trying to harness their talents to the Russian's genius, and mostly these efforts flopped. But her Push Comes to Shove (1976) showed a different, up-to-the- minute Baryshnikov -- impish, racy and reckless -- and a new idiom for classical ballet...
...ultimate success of any new opera, though, depends on the composer. Glass's stubborn refusal to "develop" his uncompromising idiom has exasperated some, who point to the more flexible, eclectic style of John Adams (Nixon in China) as a way out of the minimalist box. Glass's chug-chug style remains instantly recognizable, but his music has colored and deepened over the years. The Voyage lowers, thunders and rages -- it begins with the same six-note figure that opens Wagner's Die Walkure -- vividly reflecting Hawking's visions of terror and wonder and Columbus' dark and stormy night...
Passionate and energetic by nature, Johnson felt most drawn to an Expressionist idiom. His particular heroes were Chaim Soutine (especially the convulsive Ceret landscapes) and, later, Oskar Kokoschka. At the outset, his homages to Soutine's surging hills and toppling houses had a somewhat illustrational tone -- painting from the motif, he sometimes used a distorting lens to produce the effect, as earlier landscapists had used a smoked Claude Lorraine glass -- so that the image turned out more optical than visceral. But as his sense of the relations between mark and motif increased, Johnson's landscapes accumulated power, and some...
MOST PEOPLE THINK OF CLASSICAL MUSIC as a white enterprise, but two new chamber-music CDs from Koch International Classics celebrate a pair of worthy black composers. The felicitously named SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR (1875-1912), an Anglo-African, was equally at home in the Dvorak-tinged idiom of his Clarinet Quintet and the simple strains of Negro spirituals, which he set compellingly for piano. The album boasts fine performances, especially by pianist Virginia Eskin. WILLIAM GRANT STILL (1895-1978) was similarly eclectic. A staff arranger for the Paul Whiteman band, he could pen a delicate gem like the Seven Traceries...