Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...near his house in Giverny -- their slender, stately trunks along the banks of the Epte reflected in the water and forming an almost abstract palisade, the S shape of their bushed-out tops strung along like a festive garland -- pays homage to French rococo, Fragonard in particular. Like his lyric images of a stretch of the Seine from 1896 to 1897, the paintings show how unrelentingly conscious Monet was of the abstract basis of design, even when painting the mistiest veils of color...
...voice is a lyric soprano with an unusual coloratura, capable of unearthly runs, trills and ornaments, but with a bigger, lusher sound than most. Anderson commands the bel canto repertory, whose heroines tend to be, as she puts it, "girls who are sad, mad or dead." She herself is a larger-than- life heroine with a bravura temperament to match her voice. If critics see her as a young Joan Sutherland, opera fans compare her with Maria Callas. Like la Callas, Anderson stirs things...
...Lyric Opera of Chicago has asked him to undertake Frank Norris' McTeague. Bolcom recalls that in his student days he improvised at the piano during a silent-movie showing of Greed, Erich von Stroheim's classic film version of McTeague. "I was bowled over. I thought, 'Jesus, this is an opera.' " The libretto is almost done, and the composer already has a fat folder full of musical sketches. "It is about sex and violence, passions and emotions," Bolcom says gleefully. And he notes, just as gleefully, that the story is set in the ragtime...
...That lyric, with its cross-cultural elisions and unsprung rhythms stashed inside orchestrations belonging more to Sondheim than Springsteen, is from Tokyo Rose, an elfin but savage ten-song essay on the growing misalliance of Japan and America. The record is not only big themed, it is big fun. That combination of intellectual ambition and musical serendipity can be recognized as the work of Van Dyke Parks by his legion of . . . oh, say, 782 fans. We're not talking Milli Vanilli here. But we are on the subject of someone rather terrific...