Word: pianos
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...mornings this spring I would rise before the sun to row down the Charles to Boston and back, feeling the swing of the boat cast a therapeutic rhythm back into my days. I learned to tell Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 from No. 2; I fell in love with an Austrian expressionist named Fgon Schiele; I danced so hard the earrings flew off my head at a formal in the Fogg Museum...
Thus two foreign entries were the critics' darlings and front runners for the Palme d'Or. Jane Campion's The Piano, from Australia, and Chen Kaige's Farewell to My Concubine, a co-production of China and Hong Kong, are very different types of films -- the first an intimate romance, the second a sprawling panorama -- but both are prime exemplars of the qualities Hollywood once monopolized: glamour and intensity, powerful star performances, the pleasures of narrative. Campion and Chen, imagemakers of voluptuous intelligence, have found stories to suit those images...
...1800s, Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a mute Scottish woman, lands on the isolated New Zealand shore with her chatty young daughter (Anna Paquin) and her precious piano; the crated instrument perches on the bleak beach like an exotic bird, or like a coffin holding the happy life Ada left behind. Her mail-order husband (Sam Neill) trades the piano for land with the "town freak," George Baines (Harvey Keitel), and in another plaintive transaction Baines agrees to sell the piano back to Ada, one key at a time, for increasingly audacious amorous favors. This uncorseted Brontean plot runs the gauntlet...
Kapralova's brief Dubnova Preludia Suite for piano is another strong work, dedicated to the pianist Rudolf Firkusny, who knew her in Paris before the war. In four short movements this collection of miniatures displays the Slavic influence of her teacher, Bohuslav Martinu, in its deft command of keyboard technique, sharp ear for piquant sonority and angular, accented melodies...
With five minutes left in the wildest class of the day, Banks goes back behind the piano. "Let's sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic," she says. Khalilah packs her backpack for the next class. Erik leads the song: "Glory, Glory Hallelujah, the teacher hit me with a ruler...