Word: idioms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are hints of Rossini and Donizetti in all this. Yet Bach manages to translate traditional themes into his own idiom: the opera's feeling is classical; its music is modern. The opening sets the tone, with sounds as light as Lloyd Evans' airy sets. The momentum flags some what in the middle, but then at the end the composer recaptures his inspiration with a beautiful fugue, all six singers joining in joyous celebration. The cast is admirable. Beverly Evans as the maid is a good bit more than admirable, combining a fine mezzo-soprano with a deft...
...Selected Poems (Seabury Press, New York) and Bells in Winter (Ecco Press, New York) have long attracted glowing attention from other writers and poets, especially those who share Milosz's state of spiritual and political exile. Says fellow Pole Jerzy Kosinski: "He remains very Slavic in his idiom and main obsession: What is the essence of life? Why are we here? It is not how to live, but why, for the sake of what?" Emigré Poet Joseph Brodsky adds: "What this poet preaches is an awfully sober version of Stoicism which does not ignore reality, however absurd...
Orbach was talking about the curtain. For anyone unfamiliar with theater idiom, however, other nightmarish alternatives presented themselves. The moment was that terrible, that ghoulish and-it must be said-that calculated. Merrick's decision to reveal the director's death as a grotesque curtain speech resulted in the kind of attention and publicity that a more private notice-say, after the final curtain to cast, crew and friends, or at the scheduled opening-night party-would never have attracted...
Erwartung's nightmare ambiguities can have a haunting power. The Santa Fe production makes them rather tame, except in the astringent sonorities arising from the orchestra pit. Soprano Nancy Shade, as the woman, has command of Schoenberg's difficult idiom, but her voice lacks the dramatic weight for a role that, as Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers describes it, is essentially "Isolde in nervous disintegration...
...critics were scandalized, as much by the "uncivic" behavior of Aksyonov's heroes and heroines as by their use of colloquial speech, mixed with underworld and concentration-camp slang, invented words and such Americanisms as gudbai, Brodvei and bugi-vugi. Funny, fresh and richly expressive, Aksyonov's idiom has been his contribution to the larger effort of modern Russian poets to rescue the Russian language from deadening officialese...