Word: splendids
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...simple tragedy-and-triumph movie. It means there are still heroes in the land. They may be frightened boys-or grown men who see righteous revenge achieved for the boys they once were. A&E might have shown a little of that courage to honor them and this splendid film...
Wojtyla is another mountaineer, from the Carpathian foothills near Cracow. This splendid medieval and Renaissance city, with its ancient Jagiellonian University -- which Wojtyla attended -- was the center of his youthful universe. Warsaw, the modern capital of Poland, meant little to him, and the summit of his clerical ambition was reached when he became Cardinal-Archbishop of Cracow. As Pope, he is a Pole, as Roncalli was an Italian. But both men, as instinctive regionalists, have repudiated modern nationalism and have tended to see Europe as an amalgam of historic regions -- a microcosm of a world of peoples rather than...
...Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike (Knopf). Again, elder writesman Updike proves his durability by turning out yet another splendid collection of elegant short stories about -- no, no, stay with him -- Wasp geezers who golf. Now and then, unblocked metaphors rise up shrieking: one duffer is resigned "to a golfing mediocrity that would poke its way down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude to the level green of death." Fore? Sure, but Lord, how that senior citizen can write...
Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4 (Sony). Krzysztof Penderecki may be better known, but Lutoslawski, a composer of uncompromising integrity, was the dean of contemporary Polish composers. He died in February, but his work lives on in these splendid readings by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Particularly noteworthy is the Fourth Symphony, Lutoslawski's last and most moving orchestral essay...
...their splendid new recording of Beethoven's nine symphonies on the Archiv label, English conductor John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire & et Romantique aim to recreate the music of Beethoven as his audience experienced it. The brilliant and incisive Gardiner stands in the forefront of the original-instruments movement, whose adherents employ period instruments (originals and replicas) and the latest textual scholarship in order to play music as closely as possible to the way it was first heard. Having begun with the Baroque era, the movement has progressed to the 19th century. Gardiner already has a revelatory version...