Word: lutes
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...What famous international spy plays the lute and the classical guitar, and likes to boast that he once sketched a portrait of President John Kennedy that his brother Bobby requested as a present? See THE WORLD, Advice to Young Spies...
...what is rapidly becoming Abel's own five-foot shelf of recollected life and works. In a recent interview published in the Russian youth magazine Smena, he describes the gracious pastimes that a KGB colonel like himself engages in during his spare time: playing Bach on the lute and the classical guitar, landscape drawing. Abel's most productive leisure hours were apparently spent in U.S. penitentiaries while serving 41 of his 30-year sentence for espionage. Here, he claims, he sketched a portrait of President Kennedy so fine that Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked Abel to make...
...years, Peking opera has been not only the most popular of all the Chinese operatic styles but practically a national pastime. The plots are familiar tales about kings and concubines, scholars and lute-playing ladies. The performers, in elaborate costumes and makeup, convey their characterizations through a series of ritualistic actions and formal gestures (the closing of a door, for example, is indicated by bringing the hands together). Although shrill and piercing to Western ears, the singing is delicately modulated and full of virtuoso flourishes, which Chinese audiences applaud with shouts of "Hao!" Realism, not Ritual. After the Communist takeover...
...room apartment in Moscow, which was dominated by a huge black and white canvas entitled The Fish Merchant and Fish. Neither merchant nor fish were in evidence-it was hardly an example of having "knuckled under" to Communist social realism. We drank tea and listened to Tallin playing a lute (made with his own hands) and singing old Russian ballads learned from blind minstrels, with whom he traveled from village to village begging alms when he was a young boy. I was told that he ran away from home at the age of nine and lived free as the wind...
...arbitrary and misconceived, such as in the third movement of the Sonata in A, where he played the basso continuo left hand on the more loudly voiced manual, and the more important right hand line (in canon with the violin) on the softer one. His frequent use of the lute and leather stops became annoying, largely because of the basic ugliness of these stops on this particular harpsichord, as well as the instrument's generally unpleasant metallic tone...