Word: masterworks
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Complex Tapestry. Yet as opera, Don Rodrigo was something less than a torrid success. Ginastera's score, based on a twelve-tone scale and structured after the manner of Alban Berg's groundbreaking 1921 masterwork, Wozzeck, struck the ear but not the heart. It was a complex musical tapestry, flecked with startled tones of brass and wood wind and splotched with splashes of percussion. In total, the score failed to achieve the delineation of character and dramatic thrust that distinguish great opera from good. Don Rodrigo was nonetheless an adventure worthy of the underwriting (by Mrs. John...
...Polish Director Andrzej Munk, who died in a 1961 auto crash, reaches the U.S. with a reputation as a classic. But Munk's film stands up less well than Ozu's under the glare of posthumous appraisal. It looks like a roughing out of the masterwork that it was meant to be-one angry young Pole's bitter, blackly comic jeer at wartime myths of courage and honor...
...while the existentialists speak dramatically enough about the condition of man in novels and plays, their philosophical writing is so dense that Brandeis' Henry Aiken complains: "Reading Heidegger is like trying to swim through wet sand." One typical passage of Heidegger's alleged masterwork, Being and Time, reads: "If the Being of everyday Being-with-one-another is already different in principle from pure presence-at-hand-in spite of the fact that it is seemingly close to it ontologically-still less can the Being of the authentic Self be conceived as presence-at-hand...
...Came In from the Cold. More than 5,000,000 readers have been hooked and held by pseudonymous Author John le Carré's downbeat spy thriller, which scores espionage as a grubby, ulcer-making career at best. The movie version is a masterwork in a minor key. Avoiding formula excitement, Producer-Director Martin Ritt (Hud) achieves something far superior-a climate of still, absolute insecurity that conveys menace mainly through undertones. And Richard Burton, playing the chief pawn in an involuted cold-war plot, will be measured from now on against his full, corrosive performance here. To have...
...Educational TV? A documentary on aeronautics? No, just a two-minute spot plugging Eastern Airlines' flight to Miami. In any year it would have been a tasteful, artful job of the soft sell, but in this, television's slackest season, the Eastern Airlines commercial looked like a masterwork...