Word: saracenic
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...wake of a spectacular bombing earlier in the week that left five soldiers dead near McCreesh's home village of Camlough in Armagh County. The 1,000-lb. device, planted by the I.R.A. in a culvert and detonated by remote control, pulverized a passing ten-ton Saracen armored car, scattering fragments and bodies around a 300-yd. radius...
...only two weeks." The genius was George Frideric Handel, then 26. The opera was Rinaldo, conceived, composed and staged for London's Haymarket Theater in 1711. Based on an epic about the Crusades by Torquato Tasso, the opera tells the story of the Christian general Rinaldo and the Saracen queen Armida. It is a spectacular mixture of pagan magic, military pomp, vocal fireworks and other trappings of the Italian Baroque operatic style, then the rage in London. During the "Bird Song" of Almirena, Rinaldo's true beloved, a flock of sparrows was let loose. The waspish essayist Joseph...
...other hand, the cumbersome romantic story involves what might be best described as a severe credibility gap. Briefly put, it tells of a countess in medieval Hungary who is torn between love for her betrothed, a dashing crusader named Jean de Brienne, and an earthier affection for a fiery Saracen knight, Abdul-Rakhman. Nureyev, who frequently danced in Raymonda when he was with Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, has staged the work for A.B.T. with such taste and delicacy that it is hard to tell where his choreography begins and Petipa's ends. In a valiant effort to make...
...stylistic evocations of folk dance and rousing ensemble displays that it is rather like a 19-course meal devised by an overeager master chef. There are almost too many delights to absorb. One of them, certainly, is a revitalized Erik Bruhn, who brings to the secondary role of the Saracen his magisterial elegance of line, as well as a Tartar-like ferocity surprising in a dancer noted for ethereal courtliness. Hampered by an ankle injury, Nureyev as Jean de Brienne performed his four demanding solo variations with visible strain; the unmistakable élan and animal dynamism were there...
...life that might have been, had not the 16 month-old baby been shot in the head, had not the gardener-husband been blown to smithereens by a bomb, had not the teenage girl who liked boys and James Taylor and Melanie been run over by an Army Saracen on the way home from a dance. Bernadette Devlin talks for a long time sitting on the beach where she used to go as a child. She cannot go there any more because there are more urgent things to take care of in Derry and Parliament, and because...