Word: somber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...build a formidable reputation as a Chopin specialist. This is his twelfth recording of the great Romantic composer, and he compares favorably with the late Dinu Li-patti, particularly in the slower etudes. Vasary seems to have absorbed Chopin's dreamy melancholy. He etches long, unhurried lines of somber melody, but when the music calls for it, he can be a rousing bravura player as well. Opuses 10 and 25 contain some of Chopin's most familiar writing, but in Vasary's hands, one never hears the quotation marks around the tunes...
...engulfed by a roar of emotion everywhere he went. For Paul, the acclaim was a tonic. After months of agonizing over his encyclical on birth control, then weeks of widespread and often bitter criticism, here was simple, uncomplicated, old-fashioned affection. The papal presence transformed Colombia's somber capital, insulated 8,355 ft. high on a plateau between two Andean ranges, into a scene of sheer, uninhibited joy. Shoulder to shoulder, an estimated 500,000 bogotanos lined the eight-mile route to town, straining for a glimpse of their spiritual leader, who rode in an open-topped Lincoln Continental...
Anguish to Joy. Continuing in its tradition of skillful, venturesome productions, the Santa Fe company last week gave the U.S. premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's dark, somber statement of musical theosophy, Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder). Schoenberg wrote it in 1917 as an oratorio, but left it unfinished at his death in 1951. Santa Fe presented it as a visually cool, shadow-filled, dreamlike mystery play. In the final scene, the Dying Person (Soprano Patricia Wise) is led up a silver-covered staircase as she approaches death; then she begins to realize that she has gone through many...
CHAUSSON: SYMPHONY IN B FLAT MAJOR; FRANCK: LES EOLIDES (London). Ernest Chausson was a slow, self-doubting composer who shunned large undertakings, and is best known for his minor songs. The symphony form, he complained, caused him endless anxiety: "It is lively but not very much so, being somber and weighty too." His B Flat Major displays none of these characteristics. It is instead a pleasant, supple work, replete with gracefully phrased suggestions and intuitions, rather like prettified Wagner. Ernst Ansermet leads the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in an appropriately understated performance. Chausson was one of Cesar Franck...
Into this somber setting comes Isabel (Bujold), a girl passing unsteadily into womanhood. Returning to the family's 200-year-old farmhouse for the funeral of her mother, she reluctantly stays on to tend her aged uncle (Gerard Parkes), a walking reflection of her long-gone relatives, who stare down eerily from faded photographs on the wall. With the spring thaw come the chills: the specter of her dead brother looming in the doorway, a face glowing in the darkened pantry, a bloody, headless chicken twitching in the melting snow...