Word: lyrical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Novelist Styron's first book, Lie Down in Darkness, was a Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher story about a decaying Southern family, and its lyric, doom-haunted evocation of the Southern landscape made the author the bright hope of U.S. fiction among some critics, as well as the hero of a lively minor cult on college campuses. Much of his new and far inferior book takes place in Italy, south of Rome, but the characters and attitudes are standard sub-Mason-Dixon. The two central figures are Mason Flagg, a rich neurotic dilettante, and Cass Kinsolving, an alcoholic...
Died. Lucrezia Bori, 72, Spanish-born (as Lucrecia Borjay Gonzalez de Riancho) Metropolitan Opera lyric soprano who began her Met career singing with Caruso, gave tender feeling to the roles of Mimi and Violetta, was a Met favorite for 24 years before retiring in 1936 while at her peak ("I want to finish while I am still at my best"); of a cerebral hemorrhage; in Manhattan...
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...