Word: superbness
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...surpassingly competent, and cool in the sort of crisis that a newsmagazine often has, with some major story tumbling in chaotically at the end of the week. Ron's professional reflexes were among the best in journalism. In both a military and an editorial sense, he was a superb officer of the line, and his death last week at the age of 58, after a long struggle with cancer, leaves us bereft. He was loved here...
...THEN REcorded, three synoptic all-Liszt programs, called "The Poet," "The Transcriber," "The Virtuoso" -- three apt descriptions for Wild himself. He's a throwback to the Golden Age pianists, exulting in the sensuality of Romanticism and the vertiginous, almost orchestral possibilities of the piano. Two CDs demonstrate his superb musicianship and rare virtuosity: Chopin: 4 Ballades -- 4 Scherzi and Earl Wild Plays His Transcriptions of Gershwin (Chesky Records). Chopin's works vary widely in mood and tempo, yet Wild sustains the long singing lines that provide their pulse and shape. That singing -- with wit, warmth and Lisztian heroics -- defines Wild...
...know Daniel Lanois at all, it's probably because you've read the credits on such superb albums as Peter Gabriel's So (1986), U2's The Joshua Tree (1987) and Achtung Baby (1991), Robbie Robertson's eponymous solo album (1987) and Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy! (1989). Lanois produced, or co-produced, all of those. But, on current evidence, he did significantly more than run levels and read meters. Those albums share an occasional brotherhood of sound -- hard, lovely, otherworldly -- but more significant, they are each rounded with a dream, part funky and part fantastic, that makes them seep...
...recent Diversity of Life. Beginning with some real-life trouble in Tahiti, this message carries explicitly through Gould's first three essays, ending with a reflection on the loss of the limpets, a snail whose shell "looks like a Chinese hat of the old caricatures." Through Gould's superb interweaving of history and biology, the limpet becomes a poor pitiable and yet complex organism, with symbolic meaning for other endangered species...
...dropout; a reclusive, self- promoting ascetic; a pianist of Horowitzian technique who, with curious exceptions like Bizet and Sibelius, usually shunned the Romantics. Sony Classical's magnificent GLENN GOULD EDITION, to be completed in 1994, presents Gould's entire recorded oeuvre (much of it previously unreleased). His Haydn is superb; his Mozart and Beethoven range from riveting to risible; his moderns dazzle. Above all, sensibility and omnipotent fingers made him a peerless contrapuntalist, who could with uncanny rhythmic acuity articulate multiple lines and transmute complex musical thought, especially Bach's, into pure and exciting expression...