Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stygian Darkness. The Russian press had a proud explanation for the men's survival. Crowed Pravda: "In the exploit of the four Soviet men, like the sun in a drop of water, the features of the Soviet way of life are reflected." The youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda took lyric flight: "Through the stormy night, battling in Stygian darkness across the thundering ocean, four simple Soviet lads bore aloft the torch of bravery. Soviet people are a special alloy!" One Russian correspondent breathlessly reported that not once during their ordeal had any of the four said a harsh word...
This year Pianist Pollini was clearly ahead from the start. Playing with deep concentration, lips parted and sharply profiled face tilted slightly upward, he worked his way through a selection of Chopin etudes, preludes and mazurkas, giving each of them beautiful tone and lyric line, crystalline clarity and virtuoso technique to burn. Said a judge after he played Chopin's E-Minor Concerto in the finals: "I don't think he missed a single note." The only criticism of Pollini was that his staggering technical facility and his octave-wide span sometimes tempted him into playing...
...only Carmen in operatic history to commit suicide was an opulently constructed New Jersey girl named Gussie Seit. That was seven years ago, at the Chicago Lyric Opera, after terrible-tempered Tenor David Poleri, appearing as Don José, stalked off the stage in the final act snarling at the conductor, "Finish it yourself." Gussie finished it herself by singing Don José's part as well as her own. At the moment of truth, when Don José was to have stabbed her, she stuck her thumb in her chest and dropped on the stage...
Motion & Stillness. On last week's program the two principal pieces, both choreographed by Cunningham, were Summer-space and Antic Meet, set to music by two modernists-Morton Feldman, 35, and John Cage, 47. The first, described as "a lyric dance," was an impressionistic work evoking the shimmering heat of summer, the play of light and shade. It was danced before a pointillistic backdrop of blue and green, and the dancers wore similarly dappled costumes (the spots were sprayed on with a paint gun), which permitted them to disappear into and emerge from the scenery as if they were...
...dancing, though, is what matters, and it is magnificent. Maya Plisetskaya, the public favorite among Russia's younger ballerinas, dances the double role of Odette-Odile with a mixture of faultless precision, lyric grace and sheer animal power; Nicolai Fadeyechev as the Prince and Vladimir Levashev as the Evil Spirit are virile, commanding performers. On the other hand, the ballet itself is simply an arrant Arcadian anachronism, and Tchaikovsky's music, except for a few eddies of glorious melody, fills Swan Lake with sugar water. But along with all its faults, the picture provides U.S. ballet-goers...