Word: matchless
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What Beverly has shown since 1966 is that an American singer can take up where Maria Callas left off. Callas, now virtually retired, had a soaring, flexible voice that projected a matchless dramatic intensity. In the 1950s, among other roles, she almost singlehanded revived the ornate bel canto repertory of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. (Bel canto, literally "beautiful singing," more properly applies to the whole vocal art of making the fiendishly difficult sound easy.) It is this repertory that Beverly and her chief coloratura rival, Joan Sutherland (see box, page 81), have since then mastered. Beverly comes...
...clings to it, Sir Basil Liddell Hart's last work is magisterial. On active duty in World War I, he rose only to the rank of captain in the British army before being gassed in 1916; yet, as his country's foremost military historian, he became a matchless armchair general and indeed, as pioneer advocate of fast-moving armored columns, a teacher of generals. Liddell Hart worked on this history for a quarter-century; he died last year while correcting proofs. Quite literally, it is his epitaph, and an appropriate one. For along with a crisp style, skill...
...officially released a commercial studio recording after 1924. In May 1935, however, when he was still at peak form, Hofmann made some test recordings for Victor, now released for the first time. The sound is uneven, but the first movement of Chopin's B-Minor Sonata is a matchless example of the controlled give and take he brought to large-scale works. The Chopin-Liszt Maiden's Wish shows how delicate he could be at painting musical miniatures...
...York's Joffrey Ballet is often matchless for sheer glitter and sensuous invention. But virtuosity pursued for its own sake can be a vice, and showmanship pushed too far becomes a snare and a collusion. Of three new Joffrey offerings this spring, two, Confetti and Solarwind, are depressing cases in point...
...even more occasionally felt as a silent questioner, prodding Sartre into continuous revision. Only after he died, and his writings began to appear in translation, did it become widely known that we had lost in Merleau-Ponty one of the best minds of the age-and a man of matchless integrity...