Word: pablo
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Within the century's first two decades, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky and James Joyce--the advance squadron of modernism--created works that broke dramatically with the past, tearing apart traditional artistic structures and reassembling them in startling new ways. The convulsion of World War I only reinforced the modernists' conviction that the West's moral and cultural heritage had collapsed. All that remained, in T.S. Eliot's vision, was a Waste Land crying out for creative renewal. To Virginia Woolf, what had happened was more fundamental even than geopolitics or culture. Looking back in 1924, she concluded that...
...that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work...
...Cranford Glimp, the timing was never right. And the location was usually off as well. Early in the century, when young talent such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Gene Kelly flocked to Paris, making it the world capital of artistic ferment, Glimp set up his atelier in Helsinki. "The rent's cheap" was his cryptic explanation to friends and admirers who for years vainly urged him to relocate. By the time he did, Paris turned out to be occupied by the Nazis and all the cafes had switched from vin rouge to beer and spaetzle...
...this what it means to be an elite classical musician in the age of Clinton? One has a hard time picturing Mstislav Rostropovich pulling off his pants in front of reporters. Nor, for that matter, can one picture Pablo Casals recording albums with jazz singers or Texas fiddlers or Argentine tango musicians as Ma has done. Or either cellist initiating, as Ma has, an ambitious series of six hour-long films inspired by Bach's six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, involving collaborators as diverse as movie director Atom Egoyan, modern-dance choreographer Mark Morris, ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher...
...natural to wonder how Ma stacks up next to his most celebrated predecessors, Pablo Casals and Mstislav Rostropovich (both of whose complete sets are currently available on EMI). Casals' classic performances, originally recorded between 1936 and 1939, have a sober grandeur that continues to seize and hold the ear six decades later; the Rostropovich set, recorded in 1991, is a larger-than-life exercise in musical oratory that bears the same relationship to "normal" cello playing that one of Chuck Close's jumbo portraits does to a black-and-white snapshot. Ma's strong, sensitive playing falls somewhere between these...