Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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George Gershwin was the archetypal American composer: a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith with high artistic aspirations. The man who set the country humming Oh, Lady, Be Good and Someone to Watch Over Me also wrote more formally complex, jazz-tinged "crossover" works like Rhapsody in Blue, three Preludes for piano, and most ambitious of all, the Concerto in F for piano and orchestra...
Gershwin was never entirely comfortable in the high-toned world of "serious" art. But Robbins is; his sense of structure-of how to hold a multimovement piece together-is stronger and surer. Against an art deco backdrop with a huge "G," Robbins enshrines the soul of Gershwin's piano in four crisply moving soloists, led by the technically dazzling, ebullient Darci Kistler. He impersonates the orchestra with a corps of 24 dancers-a dozen of each sex-and follows the episodes of the music as if he were charting a graph. Yet, where Gershwin's music ultimately degenerates...
...Fade-In. Ragtime piano, please. Former Heavyweight Champ Gene Tunney has long since hung up his Everlasts for a career in business by the time his son is born. The kid spars a bit as a youngster but eventually picks politics over pugilism, becoming California Senator John Tunney, 47. The Hook. John, now an ex-Senator, is asked to portray his late father in Sting II, the follow-up to the 1973 original, The Sting. It stars Jackie Gleason, 65, and Mac Davis, 40, in the snap-brim, wing-tipped, confidence-man roles created by Paul Newman and Robert Redford...
...terrain, but moves closer, toward this lobed and writhing emblem which suggests either body or still life: the curves of a thigh, a buttock or a breast, the petals of a flower rising on its stalk, or-in some of the drawings-the black propped lid of a grand piano. The body image is confirmed particularly in a work like Untitled #45, which is haunted by the swollen, vegetative forms of 1930s Picasso, rather than 1914 Matisse. Of course, the drawings also seem more intimate than the previous Ocean Parks simply because they are drawings-smaller and more provisional...
...honks its horn at that moment, and as Malle contrives it, it resounds within the restaurant, as if to resolve the evening's dilemma. Wally and Andre cast their parting shots amicably, and with music from the piano, the spell is ended...