Word: protean
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HAYDN: SYMPHONIES NOS. 1, 2 and 3 (Odyssey). The late Max Goberman was a protean figure on the New York musical scene. He was pit conductor for West Side Story, and his ambition was to record all 104 symphonies of Haydn. This record is the elegant overture to the unfinished project-a crisp, clear reading that points up Haydn's melodic questions and answers, the asides and one-liners that crowd his scores...
...times terrifying, 20th century Minotaur. To guide viewers, Paris newspapers were running floor plans, and a TV program highlighted the "100 hinges," or turning points, in Picasso's career. Critics could have doubled that number; yet the overwhelming impression was that, for all of Picasso's protean changes, what is essentially Picasso is now well known...
...when the pace is fastest, and it moves like the Marx Brothers whenever Steve Kaplan, Arthur Friedman, Robert Bush, (or any combination of them), are on stage. Kaplan is the funniest Roman of them all, and he plays the conniving lead, Pseudolus, with deadly timing, a rubber face, a protean voice, and a Stoic endurance of pratfalls. His is a virtuoso performance, and at one point his delivery of a line stops the show cold. When he sings, there is Merman in his voice, or Rudy Vallee, or whatever will milk a laugh from a lyric. What...
STRAVINSKY: FOUR ETUDES & LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS (Nonesuch). Pierre Boulez is a protean figure in postwar French music -a first-rate conductor and composer whose creative roots are in the music of Debussy and Stravinsky and the poetry of Baudelaire. No wonder, then, that his rendering of these classics has an almost uncomfortable intensity and excitement-almost as if they were being composed before the listener's ear. Boulez' musical aim is to expose "the naked flesh of feeling," and he does...
...fine loony beginning for a high comedy in period style, but the flashbacks that follow bring Lady L to a spotty end. Her confession story, plucked from Romain Gary's novel by protean Writer-Director Peter Ustinov (who also spills out of a minor role as an addled Bavarian prince), describes how a scrumptious Parisian laundress rises to greatness as the wife of David Niven, one of England's most debonair lords. En route to her destiny. Sophia is delayed briefly in a bordello, which has chambers designed for train buffs or Arabian Knights. There she meets Paul...