Word: idioms
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Elliott Carter: The Early Music (CRI). The cerebral composer has his roots in the folksy American idiom of Ives and Copland, as this disc surprisingly shows. Elgar: Violin Concerto (Deutsche Grammophon). Itzhak Perlman triumphs in Elgar's most restrained major work...
...such influences are melded into a wholly modernist idiom. Hodgkin does to the Indian miniature what Matisse did to Islamic decoration; the source is not simply quoted but transformed. The miniaturist's precision of edge and line is replaced by a fuzzy, affable kind of formal system-nursery-toy versions, almost, of the sphere, cube and cylinder, those intimidating Platonic solids of programmatic modernism. His pigment, however, has an extraordinary range of effect. His work sports in the transparency, density and sweet pastiness that only oil paint can give. Surfeited by color, twinkling with fields of dots (like enlarged...
Such missteps are rare. The bulk of the show-bulky indeed at three and a quarters' hours running time-is authoritative despite a setting and idiom which differ emphatically from the Shakespearean, the modern, or anything yet between the two. This Verona, though at times unsubtle suburban in tone, also glitters with an extra vagina sense of the exotic...
...building was designed by Colin Madigan, of the North Sydney firm of Edwards Madigan Torzillo Briggs Pty. Ltd., in a high-speech version of the idiom that used to be called New Brutalism 20 years ago-aggressive concrete planes and deep slots of shadow, directly descended from late Le Corbusier. To this is added some invocation of palace and fortress architecture. The plan has a very strong sense of procession, and is designed to allow a large flow of visitors, estimated at about 1 million a year, to stream through its halls. Three of its sides look like an irresolute...
...failure of The Confidence Man does not necessarily mean a corresponding failure of musical idiom. The quality of Rochberg's lyric invention is high, and the fast-moving sequences, such as the minstrel show, are handled with dashing technical assurance. Even the two scenes with the angel, ironic though they are, display a strong command of modern musical materials. Rochberg has issued a challenge in The Confidence Man, to both himself and other composers, a challenge to make modern music speak again in the language it inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries. Whether it can be done persuasively...