Word: modern
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Critics have been railing at the Metropolitan Opera for ages countless for not putting on worth while modern works, but in their attacks they have failed to consider a potent question: is the Met fit to present any opera except the 19th century warhorses on which it concentrates? To this opera-goer, anyway, the current production of "The Medium" answers that question with a strong negative...
...talents. "The Medium" is by no means revolutionary or even experimental in form like "Four Saints" or "Mother of Us All," but the music is exactly right-no more nor less-for its frightening story. Menotti is a composer who can be described only as appealing; his music uses modern devices, manages to attract the listener without letting him out-of the grip of the opera in toto. He uses chiefly a semirecitative style, but he proves conclusively his ability to write an aria with an exceptionally lovely song which he gives the daughter near the close of the first...
...President. The modern forester behind all this is John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr., 48, greying grandson of the company's founder. Last week Phil Weyerhaeuser was elected president of Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., top company of the sprawling family interests which include sawmills, pulp mills and ocean-going steamers (President H. H. Irvine died last winter). A Yale graduate and a member of the Yale battery during World War I, he went to work for the company in 1920, concentrated on conservation measures. He started the firm on selective cutting of trees, later got it to branch out into research...
Died. Jesse Wilford Reno, 85, inventor in 1892 of the inclined elevator (a forerunner of the modern Escalator), son of Civil War General Jesse Lee Reno, who gave his name to Nevada's notorious "Biggest Little City in the World"; after long illness; in Pelham Manor...
...Narcissus, shows how heady a wine the English language may be for a foreign writer of parts who has thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce's) and yet is distinctly his own: rapid, brilliantly metaphorical...