Word: philomela
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Jarvis Chuff, a brainy, pacific and proletarian train robber, finds himself mysteriously sprung from the nick. His benefactors turn out to be a wealthy singer turned princess by marriage, a Church of England vicar, an ancient British major with a limp and a svelte, pneumatic upper-class bird named Philomela. Chuff (homonym for Chough, the acquisitive European jackdaw) is given the angelic name of Gabriel and soon put to work with Philomela (namesake of the poor lady who had her tongue cut out and was turned into a nightingale). Clad in dark cat suits, they pull off various nocturnal capers...
...story is occasionally soppy where Chuff and Philomela are concerned, but it cleverly explores Blake's romantic notion that men and animals are similar victims of a society that, practically from birth, puts them both in a series of cages. As he pursues his life of humanitarian crime, Chuff ponders the plight of men and animals, and very satisfactorily reflects on the loyalties and limitations of the British class system with a clear eye and an absence of rancor and cant that should delight the ghost of George Orwell...
...jubilee, 58-year-old Composer Hendrik Andriessen, director of The Hague's Royal Conservatory, had written a new score for an old drama. The grisly story, adopted by Dutch Poet Jan Engelman from one of the episodes in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, tells how pure-voiced Philomela is raped by Tereus, her brother-in-law, who cuts out her tongue to enforce her silence. The sisters get revenge by feeding Tereus the remains of his slaughtered son at a banquet. At that point the gods intervene and change all three into birds-Philomela into a nightingale, whose singing...
Composer Andriessen's score was straightforward and melodious, underlining the rising tension of the plot. And he gave his two first-rate Dutch sopranos, Louise de Vries (Philomela) and Greet Koeman (the sister) singing roles that were powerful, dramatic and sometimes rhapsodic. When the curtain came down, the jampacked audience was not quite sure whether it had seen the dawn of a "great national school." But, said one Amsterdam University professor: "This evening was very encouraging...
Tried, convicted Aicadre is taken off. Meanwhile at the "cloob" there is much irrelevant activity. But two sympathetic visitors, Nicholas and Philomela Purssord, of whose doings Authoress Harris makes a little novel in itself, come to Deux Estaings. When Aicadre is released they help break down his inhuman, crippled bitterness. When that breaks down the truth breaks out at last?Aicadre is in fact desperately in love with life, and, after Laure has ordered her tyrannous mother out of the house, with her. Moreover he was not the murderer of their child...