Word: jested
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...music I have written up to now," said Giacomo Puccini, "seems a jest in comparison." He was speaking of his last and most ambitious opera, Turandot, which he left unfinished at his death in 1924. Completed by his friend Franco Alfano, Turandot is rarely performed despite the exotic splendors of its score. Chief reasons for its neglect: a certain harshness that sets it apart from the big Puccini favorites (Tosca, Bohème, Butterfly), some devilishly difficult vocal parts, and a need for sumptuous staging...
...tone here varies from sobriety to total jest, while wit serves as condiment to an otherwise dull meal. Talk jumps from underdeveloped countries to outer space, and "How do we know we're the most developed country, anyway?" Then back to slave trade and the Barbary Pirates. Or a doubleedged solution to both farm surplus and foreign aid problems might be presented. "Just give the farmers a sabbatical every other year on the condition that they spend this time abroad." A neat panacea, but impossible...
...knows, this may not all be jest...
...splinter of 8 seats, totally wiped out of Parliament Western Canada's funny-money Social Credit movement, which held 19 seats in the old House of Commons. Surveying the wreckage of his party's national ambitions, Alberta's Social Credit Premier Ernest Manning offered a wry jest: "The voters have put all their eggs in one basket and shot...
...concerto is the handiwork of Philadelphia-born Composer Robert Parris, 33. who got the idea from his old pal and fellow student (at the Juilliard School of Music), Fred Begun, 29, currently the regular tympanist for the National Symphony. "I suggested five drums jestingly," says Begun (four drums is the usual orchestral maximum). Composer Parris. who has turned out a sizable quantity of chamber music, took the jest in earnest, sat down to write a piece which would test the "untapped melodic resources" of the drums. The technical problems, he discovered, were sizable. Examples: how to pass rapidly from...