Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Koussevitzky's interpretation may be subject to personal criticism, but it is a warm, lyric approach that does full justice to the cyclical construction and almost earthy quality of the music. For, despite name, the Requiem is not sorrowful or morbid, but confident and reassuring. Particularly fine were the male voices in the great fortissimo, "Behold, all flesh . . . ," and Radcliffe attained equal stature in the flowing fourth section and the final fugue. The impassioned soprano solos of Miss Frances Yeend lent the note of high personal achievement needed to round out a very satisfying concert...
Back a number of years two successful songwriters known as Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, propelled by the conviction that the typical popular song could be classified as somewhere between ridiculous and ghastly, put out a book of songs burlesquing the lyric and melodic conventions of Tin Pan Alley. This collection included such masterpieces of lyric vacuity as the following lines...
Despite its lyric title and a preface by T. S. Eliot, there is nothing poetic about this book. It is the harrowing story of Polish citizens nabbed by Soviet secret police in 1939-41 and packed off as prisoners to the dark side of the moon-i.e., forced labor in Soviet Asia...
...nine pieces by six Frenchmen. In his first Manhattan appearance last week, critics panned his Ravel and Debussy (they thought he overdid them), but cheered the first U.S. performance of French Dissonantist Arthur Honegger's Third (Liturgique) Symphony. It clanked through a violent first movement, settled into a lyric, prayer-like second movement and after an explosive climax in the third concluded with a wispy, ethereal melody. Said Conductor Munch: "It is horizontal music, rather stern and unsentimental, and as such, an expression of our times...
...rest of the evening was spent in uneasy warfare between those who wanted to stop the show every time Tagliavini sang a note, and those who wanted to get on with the proceedings. Critics generally found Tagliavini a very good, if not yet great, tenor who used his lyric voice with natural grace and showed a warm feeling for character. Even the Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson, usually the Met's sharpest critic, was impressed. He wrote: "He sings high and loud [and] does not gulp or gasp or gargle salt tears. . . . Not in a very long time...