Word: lyric
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Penderecki has written two operas on religious subjects: The Devils of Loudun (1969) and Paradise Lost (1978), which the composer has called a Sacra Rappresentazione rather than a conventional opera. Paradise Lost, commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, was the victim of a turgid production that obscured the work's many beauties. Messiaen's Saint François-which resembles no other work in the operatic literature as much as it resembles Paradise Lost in its static, quasi-oratorio quality- is more fortunate all around...
...subclass of their own. They are incomplete notes. Who could deduce from Hockney's brisk studies for the mechanical bird in Le Rossignol, for instance, the surprise of its actual intrusion on the stage of the Met, a blazing vermilion-and-gilt apparition in that gauzy, lyric ambiance of K'ang-Hsi porcelain blue? The drawing just looks like a canary on a toy red cart. Yet ingenuity can bridge many gaps, and Hockney is nothing if not ingenious...
Literature that yearns toward the condition of music provides a more promising line of inquiry. Burgess explores lyric verse, the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the verbal polyphony of James Joyce. He envisions quasimusical novels built on principles of "structuralism, a liberation from marketplace meanings," and offers two of his own, M/Fand Napoleon Symphony, as exhibits...
...last week's performance, the audience was sparing with its applause. It was in the second act that Nureev-Fonteyn captured their audience. Nureev put on a breath-catching display of classic male dancing, lifted Fonteyn effortlessly aloft, spurred her on to a performance full of fluency and lyric ardor. At the ballet's climax, when Fonteyn cradled Nureev's head in her arms as he lay on the point of death, there was a quick intake of breath audible through the entire house...
...their early music had exuberance and an occasional oasis of unexpected harmony, but otherwise blended monotonously into the parched badlands of rock. I Want to Hold Your Hand, the Beatles' biggest hit single-it has sold 5,000,000 copies since 1963-was a cliché boy-girl lyric and a simple tune hammered onto the regulation aaba pop-song structure. But the boys found their conventional sound and juvenile verses stultifying. Says Paul McCartney: "We didn't like the idea of people going onstage and being very un real and doing sickly songs. We felt that people...