Word: superbeings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...forsaken Scots girl in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Sutherland was in superb voice. Authoritative conducting was provided by her husband Richard Bonynge, and there was an authentic touch of the Scottish highlands in the sets and luxurious costumes. Result was 33 curtain calls. As La Stupenda plucked sprays from Cooktown orchids for the supporting cast and kissed her husband, enthusiastic galleryites stamped so loudly that a nervous opera buff sitting below wondered: "How long can the theater stand the strain of a Sutherland tour...
...Virgin Mary. It should be a supremely happy occasion, but as Romanino portrays it, the scene is singularly lacking in heavenly joy. The skies are threatening, the nuns troubled, the Virgin sad, the Infant petulant. Miraculously wedding deep Venetian hues, Lombardian realism and Gothic expressionism, the painting seems a superb summation of that place and that moment when the brusque Angst-filled winds from the north began to cool the warmth of Italy's golden age. The high Renaissance was poised before a modern world. Romanino knew...
...modern spirit, Dante Alighieri lived his turbulent life. His mother died when he was five or six, and when he was 17 he lost his father, a member of the petty nobility. "By nature impressionable and eager," as he remarks in La Commedia, the boy somehow acquired a superb intellectual education. At an early age his appearance was forceful-hook nose, big jaw, protruding lower lip-and his disposition thorny. "He was somewhat presumptuous, disdainful and haughty," according to a contemporary, "and knew not well how to bear himself with common people...
...this book bears very obviously the signs of its hasty authorship. Far more than its predecessor it appears to have been rushed to the presses virtually unedited, and to have been written with little time for retrospection. Some of-this-the rough writing("There is no word less than superb to describe the performance of Lyndon Baines Johnson as he became President of the United States") can be eliminated and no doubt will be in later editions. It will be less easy to eliminate some of the deeper flaws, for they stem from the nature of the campaign itself...
BEETHOVEN: QUARTET IN A MINOR OPUS 132 (RCA Victor). This intricate work was written 25 years after the septet and sounds a world apart, especially in this crisp, exact performance by the Juilliard String Quartet. Technically, the Juilliard is superb; the pianissimo passages, for example, are feather-light and still warm, but the third movement, the "song of thanksgiving offered to the divinity by a convalescent," sounds curiously reserved...