Word: mozartism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...saying, "This is what I want to study, devote my life to." Here, we saw, was no mere director, collaborating on scripts with other writers, but a full-service auteur. Except for The Virgin Spring, written by Ulla Isaksson, and The Magic Flute, a faithful rendition of the Mozart opera, all of Bergman's most famous film stories sprang from his own fertile, febrile brain - from childhood memories and adult adulteries, from his copious trunk of obsessions and grudges...
...Take last week, for example. My onrushing dotage has, in recent years, been salved by sudden onset Mozart-mania. Obviously, I've always admired him - and well before Amadeus. But of late he's about all I want to listen to. I come home from a screening, weary and faboobled, pop a Mozart recording in the machine - you really must get Murray Perahia's boxed set of all the piano concertos and enter into bliss. I don't know a thing about music and don't understand my Mozartian passion, but the other night I decided to see as well...
...those documentaries that tells you everything you already know about its subject. It features many talking musicological heads, falling back in insight-free awe at the composer's apparently genial genius (a refreshing exception is the crankish Jonathan Miller, who has directed many a Mozart opera). Since Mozart traveled endlessly in search of gigs - 25,000 miles all told - the director, Phil Grabsky gives us many useless out-the-window shots of his own car chugging along modern European highways as he duplicates those journeys, many sequences of contemporary citizens wandering aimlessly and inelegantly in front of buildings Mozart visited...
...example). Like it or not, Bug takes you deep into the realm of abnormal psychology. Like it or not, it is a serious movie, very possibly Friedkin's best. In any case, it almost literally itched this reviewer back to consciousness of the movies' divine and utterly essential scuzziness. Mozart is great, and can survive the indifference of inept filmmakers. Bug probably won't survive the indifference of its distributor (and, since its not teen-friendly) its lack of a neatly targeted demographic. But it may survive in a few capacious cinefile memories - right there next to the Mozart sonatas...
...many notes as his 10 fingers can reach together and then filling in the rest with arpeggios and scales. He can shift to a different key midway through a tune, without stopping. He can dip into his mental library of thousands of tunes and come up with surprising hybrids - Mozart in the style of Joplin; Culture Club's Karma Chameleon as Chopin might have played it; Handel's Water Music with a ragtime twist. "Very few musicians can do what he does," says Roger Huckle, the Emerald Ensemble's director. "It's very rare to have the flexibility...