Word: plinking
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...mixture of comedy, acrobatics, music and mime that really has no Western equivalent-and popular Chinese dances-they put one pleasantly in mind of Radio City Music Hall choreography -are embedded in an evening in which an earnest soprano hymns the joys of revolutionary struggle, and musicians tootle and plink away on strange-sounding instruments. Nor does the dull excerpt from a revolutionary ballet showing a young woman abused by the minions of a wicked landowner particularly offend, though a little of this kind of thing goes a long way. Rather it is the air of detachment, abstraction that hangs...
Pears, at 63, is fading of voice, but nevertheless holds the stage for virtually the entire opera. It is a remarkable feat of endurance. In white suit and panama, he unifies the performance completely, whether in recitatives of improvised rhythm chanted to the plink of a single piano or sitting silently in a canvas chair as an observer. Gone are the Pears-shaped tones of the young lyric tenor. In their place now emerge dramatic powers of characterization. As a noted German author captivated by a winsome Polish boy in Venice, Pears' body seems literally to disintegrate with frustration...
...McCarthy." The intervening years have polished Nixon and made him well-to-do, but they have not simplified him. He can still sound like the high-minded statesman and act like the cunning politico. He can talk eloquently of ideals and yet seem always preoccupied with tactics. He can plink out Let Me Call You Sweetheart for reporters on a piano or rib himself on television talk shows, but the grin never seems quite at home on his strong, heavy face. The almost mysterious quality about Richard Nixon is that he is a man of exceptional abilities and solid virtues...
After his final pizzicato plink, he walked over to shake hands with the bassists in the orchestra. But Karr the revolutionary was hardly making peace with the old guard. "In ten years, orchestral bassists will really hate me," he says cheerfully, "and I hope they will. It's the only way they'll change...
Giggling, he takes the uke from its old cardigan wrapper. Plink-a-plank-aplink. His thin, reedy tones soar into an unearthly falsetto, the vibrato voice quavering like a hummingbird's wings: "Come tiptoe through the tulips with me . . ." In the audience, as at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium last week, his listeners are rapt, incredulous, amused-everything but indifferent...