Word: ops
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...major orchestral works, they face the tremendous problem of developing within the bounds of an idiom whose orchestrational possibilities are very limited. As a result, Beethoven sometimes demands more of the string quartet than can be done with the instruments at hand. His Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, however, carefully skirts any such fault. Ideally played, it demonstrates true virtuoso quartet playing, combining a great technical difficulty with the exceedingly delicate job of transmitting to the audience a sense of the total structure of the piece...
Also on the program were the Concertina for String Quartet by Stravinsky and the Beethoven C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op. 131. The Stravinsky, written in 1920, is a little-heard work that was also scored for wind ensemble. It shows the influence of Russian folk-music, but its construction focuses on an effort to draw a rough, guttural sound from the instruments, and it demands a great deal of technical competence of the players. The Guarneri Quartet measured up in every way to its challenges, and provided a startling contrast to the Romanticism of the Brahms...
Winding up the concert was the big, tired old Beethoven Op. 131. This seven movement work is the sort of piece that helped get under way the esthetic tradition that produced the Albert and Victoria monstrosities. To be played without any break between the section, it has a tremendous capacity for becoming a longwinded, disorganized barrage of pomposity, sentimentality, and self-conscious melodrama. For the first four movements there was a sense of heaviness, as if the music could not build up any motive force of its own and got from one measure to the next only through the brute...
...lawns illuminated by 40 globular lights perched like tiny moons on four concrete runways. With its peaked roofs and long supporting beams, the building has the lines of a super circus tent. Inside, the most imposing feature is an acoustical canopy jutting 50 feet from the stage like some op-art gargoyle...
...anything-goes brand of moviemaking), Terence Stamp plays a knife-wielding thug who first appears abed with a dark-skinned trollop, throws a shiv after her as she dresses and steals away. Modesty's archfoe is Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde), a faggoty Edwardian fop who flounces around an op-art seaside castle that looks rather like marzipan. Under a lavender parasol, he sips bluish liquids from a huge goblet with a goldfish swimming in its depths, keeps languorous boys and a sadistic lady psychopath on the premises. "I am the villain of the piece, and I have to condemn...