Word: sparest
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...Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. In London in 1980 and a year later on Broadway, David Edgar's 8½hour adaptation of the Dickens novel met with a rapturous reception. In a time when many serious playwrights are hell-bent on reducing life's dilemmas to their sparest parts, panhandling for quiddity, Edgar and Directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird served up a copious celebration of life in all its wickedness and wonder. Led by Roger Rees as the callow, rigorous hero, 39 R.S.C. actors played 150 parts; they set the scene and moved the scenery; they patrolled...
BRITTEN: SINFONIETTA, OPUS 1 and HINDEMITH: OCTET (1957-58) (London). Very early Britten-facile and mannered-before he methodically stripped his musical imagination down to its sparest, starkest forms. It is charming, almost pretty music, and vastly different from the sophisticated complexities of the Hindemith, in which key themes are introduced, transposed in various ways, and then replayed in reverse order. Handled with elan by members of the Vienna Octet...
...demonstrated again her remarkable capacity to seize and hold an audience with the sparest of motions. Under the glaring lights of the orchestra shell, her face, with its thrusting nose and red-gashed mouth, looked in repose like a mask of quiet despair. Her voice is untrained-she does not read music-and she has a limited range ("I have no high, only low, lower, lowest"). But she sang with a smoky, wistful quality that transformed the ballad Pirate Jenny into a shivering mixture of dreaminess and hate...
Munch's baton technique is perhaps his most unique characteristic. One moment he may be beating time with the sparest possible motion, left hand by his side, and the next he literally whips up the orchestra with violent arm movements. He conducts not only with his arms but with his entire body. During the performance of a choral work here recently, he was conducting four separate elements of the orchestra with different parts of his body, all the while singing the French words along with the chorus and carefully exaggerating his lip movements of assist the singers in pronunciation...