Word: monke
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...full reach of the keyboard with a fanciful right hand and a strong and steady bass line. In improvisation, his imagination is rich to the point of bursting, and he punctuates his own ideas with ironic mockeries of the pianists he has learned something from-Fats Waller, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Art Tatum...
...best stories of an education ever told, be cause he was one of the few for whom education itself is a crucial experience. He conveys this by sketching the characters of others-a theologian talking to a poet in a pub, a dour Clydesider who became a monk, the tutor C. S. Lewis and that really odd ball of erudition, the madly neurotic Jewish poet and scholar "Eddie" Meyerstein...
...suffocating triteness and over-weaning propriety of this work result largely from Perera's failure to make his music serve any broad dramatic purposes. The lines sung by Pelagia and the monk Nonnus, her father, maintain a sickly melancholy which seems quite inappropriate to her sins, the supposed point of it all. At the same time, when she appears, surrounded by suitors, it is always to the same cheery dance tune which first accompanied the banter of the two monks. Because Perera's popular melodies and Cole's humor fail to guide the opera's ideas and dramatic progression...
Really the opera concerns itself only with the monk's search for his daughter. Pelagia's conversion seems off-stage and is dwarfed by the reunion with her father in the final scene--a disgracefully pointless ending for an experienced dramatist like Cole. The libretto's simple-minded images ("today I went wandering as a bird") and pompous archaisms (the story is "for them that have an eye to see") deaden the opera still further. The characters emerge as cute Sunday school paste...
Nothing was so amusing to French Composer Francis Poulenc as hearing his friends marvel at the quilt of contradictions that masked his music and his life. "I am half-monk, half-bounder," he would say, and his friends would add that he was also a cultured vulgarian, a moody wit, a seedy dandy-a puzzle. He wrote flippant music and sacred music, funny, jazzy profane music, and he also wrote some of the century's greatest songs. Since his death in Paris last January, the Poulenc puzzle has become his epitaph-as though his critics and colleagues would rather...