Word: impressionist
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...given by U. S. symphony orchestras, thousands more by every conceivable combination of instruments, from jazz bands to harmonica ensembles. Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths gaped incredulously as this symphonic work began to outsell their own best sellers. U. S. lowbrows who had never heard of shy, hermit-like French Impressionist Maurice Ravel sang, hummed, whistled and danced to his Bolero...
...Mere I 'Oye, Le Tombeau de Couperin, et al.) which have long ornamented the symphonic programs of three continents. A miraculous orchestrator and an adept at poetic description in sound, fastidious, precise-minded Ravel had, following the death of Claude Debussy, succeeded to the place of No. 1 Impressionist composer. Born in 1875 in a Pyrenees town, of a Basque mother and a French-Jewish-Swiss father, Ravel kept all through life an affection for Spanish folk music, allowed its idioms to influence many of his compositions. Despite a reputation for extreme diligence at the Paris Conservatoire, where...
...musical impressionist like Debussy, Paul Dukas and Jacques Ibert, Ravel worked with combinations of tone as impressionist painters did with blurred combinations of color, got nebulous and exotic effects from his orchestra. He was an eclectic, often deliberately imitated the idioms of exotic or historic peoples, dishing them up in his own particular French sauce. Thus his opera L'Heure Espagnole and his descriptive orchestral works Bolero, Alborada del Gracioso and Rhapsodic Espagnole are built up of Spanish idioms; his La Valse has a Viennese, his Le Tombeau de Couperin an early 18th-Century flavor. A movement...
...Wagner and other romantic composers, he created a musical language of his own, painted tone-pictures of impressions from nature, conceived a whole new palette of instrumental and harmonic colors. Critics, fond of loose similes, called him a symbolist like Poets Mallarme and Verlaine; others called him an impressionist like Painters Renoir and Monet. The latter title stuck. His work-fastidious, poetic, voluptuous and all but perfection in technique-had an immense influence on the composers of the early nineteen hundreds. Besides a picture of an incurable Bohemian, Biographer Thompson offers a systematic critical study of all of his compositions...
...disease, despair and degradation of human beings at the bottom of Russia's Tsarist pile. Gorki's pre-Soviet cellarful of morbid, introspective thieves, drunkards and derelicts has been brought to the screen by France's Director Jean Renoir (Madame Bovary, Toni), son of the impressionist painter. In a foreword he announces his film as "human" rather than specifically Russian drama. For realistic squalor and decay Renoir copied the 1936 slums of Villeneuve-la-Garenne, Paris suburb...