Word: themes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rochberg's Symphony No. 2, as performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, was a thickly textured, darkly intense work that moved in a riptide of conflicting rhythms and clashing dissonances. It opened with an impassioned theme in the strings and horns, unfolded into a busy, brusque scherzo touched with jazz. The finale built to a rushing climax, then subsided in a resigned, dramatically simple theme played by strings and woodwinds. The audience could summon up only polite applause. But Cleveland's Composer-Critic Herbert Elwell found Rochberg's mastery of the tone row remarkable...
...Oedipus complex about Alma Mater has long nourished English letters. From the days of Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown's Schooldays), almost the first things heard out of an English writer are usually the half-strangulated noises of one noosed in an old school tie. As an obsessive theme the Old School has no counterpart in U.S. fiction, unless it is the Home Town and the shouts of the boys who cry Wolfe...
...only serve to indicate that Pirandello is in doubt about the difference between a profundity and a platitude. But the Stepfather's long speech, to the effect that the Characters are more real than the "real" actors, is subtle and intriguing, and so is the dramatic embodiment of this theme in a great entanglement of paradoxes: the Characters are really actors who pretend to be characters demanding to be acted, the Actors are really pretending to be other actors pretending to be characters, and so on. Confusing, yes, but Pirandello seems to prefer true confusion to false certainly--a defensible...
Starting with a modest budget, little equipment, and no experience, Satyajit Ray has proceduced an imaginative and technically impressive film. Encouraged by the success of Pather Panchali, he is expanding his theme into a trilogy. If the others are as good, the project will become a classic...
...glimpse of possible happiness, and she resolves to explore "the strange land of love where tomorrow' is not always a frightening word." Cluttered with romantic folderol. Sigh nonetheless says something about man's inhumanity to man and fleetingly embodies the Simone Weil text it takes for its theme: "At the bottom of the heart of every human being . . . there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience . . . that good and not evil will be done...