Word: rite
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...appears in the title role of Paul Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice, with silent gusto steals the bearded sorcerer's magic cap. commands the broom to fetch water, forgets how to stop it, nearly drowns in the deluge that follows. To Igor Stravinsky's rip-roaring Rite of Spring, a primeval world, complete with dinosaurs, bubbles up, parades by, dies down. To Mussorgsky's spooky Night on Bald Mountain, hobgoblins and beldams ride their brooms. To Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, centaurs and centaurettes, Pegasus, Mrs. Pegasus and a nestful of little Pegasi gambol...
...Pierian well water of Johann Sebastian Bach to the violet-bordered stream of Schubert's Ave Maria, Fantasia is a long succession of very large orders. Some of these orders (the flower, fish and mushroom dances of the Nutcracker Suite, the hulking, saurian epic of Stravinsky's Rite, the eerie, fantastic Night on Bald Mountain) are so beautifully filled that they may leave callous critics whispering incredulously to themselves. Others (Mickey's Sorcerer's Apprentice, the hilarious ostrich and hippopotamus ballets) set a new high in Disney animal muggery. Others (the wave and cloud sequences...
...never been to a concert in their lives listened to 35 to 710 performances of each composition, ended up whistling Bach. Beethoven and even Stravinsky at breakfast. Idea men, working on the dulcet strains of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, winced at the bedlam of Stravinsky's Rite which other technicians were playing next door. (The Rite finally had to be quarantined in a special corner of the lot, where its boom-lay-booms could be studied without disturbing the whole studio...
...dunking is not only good promotion but a symbol of democracy, almost a patriotic rite...
Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (Igor Stravinsky conducting the New York Philharmonic-Symphony; Columbia: 8 sides). The spine-tingling bumps & bleats, grumps & groans of Stravinsky's ballet of pagan Russian rituals caused a near-riot in Paris in 1913. Stravinsky, ordinarily an indifferent conductor of his own works, had an off-night in Manhattan last spring, went to town with the Philharmonic and Le Sacre. Here he repeats the performance, with well-recorded results...