Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Lawrence V. Kelly, 46, prescient, uncompromising director and founder of the Dallas Civic Opera; of cancer; in Kansas City, Mo. One of the most influential and highly respected figures in American regional opera, Kelly, who also co-founded and directed the Lyric Theater of Chicago and the Performing Arts Foundation in Kansas City, shaped his companies to perform a repertory of unusual, rarely done works and to showcase fresh imported talent. Outrunning the Met, the quick impresario arranged the U.S. debuts of Joan Sutherland, Montserrat Caballé, Jon Vickers and Teresa Berganza, and in 1954 brought Manhattan-born Maria...
...novel is a sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism, and it deals with lyric poetry as a species of adolescent neurosis. The hero is an unpleasant young man named Jaromil, whose every childhood uncertainty has been marveled at by his crazed mother as evidence of an artistic soul. Out of resentment of her coarse husband, who hung his smelly socks on her beloved alabaster statuette of Apollo, this monstrous mother determined to make her infant son a poet...
Jaromil indeed becomes a poet. He tries to spy on the maid as she takes her bath, and fails, but produces a vivid poem about his "aquatic love." The genius of lyric poetry, Kundera observes, "is the genius of inexperience ... We can scoff at the poet's lack of maturity, but there is something amazing about him too. His words sparkle with droplets that come from the heart, and that gives his verse the luster of beauty. These magic dewdrops need not be stimulated by real life events. On the contrary, we suspect that the poet sometimes squeezes...
...music more indigenous to the West Indies. Music Director Igor Buketoff led a crisp, idiomatic performance that drew the most from Egk's acrobatic orchestral score and made the blues passages seem natural, less like interludes. As Jeanne, Newcomer Barbara Hendricks from Little Rock, Ark., displayed a ravishing lyric soprano voice. Karl Brock not only handled the rigorous tenor lead role of Christoph with a convincing mixture of despair and bravado but also produced a splendid English translation of Egk's German libretto...
Beecher writes work songs about mill hands who get a "shoeful of steel" when a ladle burns through, and ballads about a "Frankie and Johnny" rodeo team who almost (but not quite) kill each other. He composes a jazzy lyric for "Kid Punch" Miller, who played trumpet with Jelly Roll Morton, and a kind of epitaph for a Pueblo Indian grave robber beset by legal problems and liquor...