Word: rusticities
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...just four years ago, The Winter Olympics were a setting for scandal and controversy and tabloid headlines, all Nancy and Tonya, catty remarks and vainglorious ambition. What a difference an Olympiad makes. Now, in a near rustic city in Japan, the Games beckon once again as a refuge from the snares of the world, where the tawdry can be banished (alas, except for commercial logos) and where the most compelling mysteries involve the intricacies of quad jumps, clap skates, luge weight and curling. For Nagano is robed in that symbol of purity: snow, unsullied and ready for the pursuit...
...trudged through. The ringing intensity of Chang's playing was not at all suited to the delicate and almost childlike sonata. Chang's high notes blossomed in this piece as in all the others, but the low notes were swallowed up in the thick vibrato--and the simple, rustic melodies assumed a sinister face. Chang did not play as if she loved the music: her movements, even her facial expressions, seemed too programmed and felt too forced--probably not because Chang is a universally negative performer, but because her style is not suited to Mozart...
There's a slant to the door in Bob Crowley's set for The Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh's play at the Royal National's Lyttelton Theatre, that might suggest rustic simplicity or rustic imprecision or perhaps the way in which even the most robust structures can shift and settle with time. It's not that the door doesn't work perfectly well, opening and closing to let in and out characters like Johnnypateenmike, the village gossip, and Billy Claven, the eponymous hero, who wants Babbybobby the ferryman to sail him over to the next island where the great...
...blanch the irony out of St. Paul's question "O Death, where is thy sting?" Death comes in several varieties. It can be incongruously vibrant like "Yellow Mama," the electric chair in Alabama used last week for the execution of ex-Klansman Henry Hays. Or death can have the rustic decrepitude of the gallows in Delaware, which remains in operation. But on every chamber hang the words inscribed in Dante's Inferno: "Abandon all hope you who enter here...
When the curtain went up on the Boston Lyric Opera's "L'Elisir d'Amore," everyone was amazed. The lighting evoked Bellini's "The Feast of the Gods," or the video to "Losing My Religion." Aggressively rustic patchwork dresses and apple baskets, along with a frail red wooden ladder, made certain that this Donizetti comedy would not suffer from any absurd modern setting. The simple but handsome picture frame around the luscious stage set was a perfect touch. Anything so beautiful as all this, one thought, promises to be entertaining...