Word: tonal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tradition with its small scale, ambiguities of space and geometric calibration. What he wanted, and had found by 1947, was a much simpler, grander and more declarative kind of structure: opaque, ragged planes of color rearing up the surface, emphatic in their brush-work-none of the characteristic cubist tonal flicker-and engulfing in their sheer size. If cubism was the art of hypothesis, Still would contradict it with an art of crushing visual fact. In doing so he hoped to make a clean leap out of modernist history into images "not proven by a continuum," as he wrote...
...interesting. The early ones are of ravishing delicacy; they have a subtlety of discrimination, a continuity of surface tone that are essentially lyric. But by middle age, Adams' work began to shift. In the darkroom, he was conducting from the negative's score?pushing the image to its tonal limit, infusing it with a Wagnerian moodiness. The late prints are public declamations, cast in an epic mode. To Adams, change is simply a matter of knowing more. The later the print, in his eyes, the better. "I like my prints full of beans now," he says. "I guess...
...score calls for a sizable chorus and a huge orchestra, heavy on brass and percussion (including steel drums). Stylistically he is what might be called a postserialist. Having explored the twelve-tone system in earlier compositions, he now works in a freely eclectic vein, yielding at times to the "tonal nostalgia" that Robert Craft pointed out in Alban Berg's music, at other times borrowing the jazzy strains of theater music. At Aspen, his pounding rhythms generated a powerful momentum and his thickly massed sonoraties built to sharp climaxes, especially in the big choral scenes. His solo vocal passages...
...these crystallizations of the baroque sonata style (Oistrakh, Menuhin, Laredo), but none can beat the suave brilliance of this set. Szeryng plays with an impassioned aristocrat's clarity, grace and brio. Walcha, a virtuoso in his own right, is appropriately brought to the fore by Philips' bright tonal presence...
Haydn: String Quartets, Opus 20, Nos. 1-6 (Juilliard Quartet, Columbia; 3 LPs). Propulsive rhythms, a biting attack, hard tonal sheen - these are the qualities listeners have come to expect from the Juilliard, and they are not necessarily the best qualities for Haydn. But the surprise of this set is the mellowness and suppleness, the emotional inwardness of the performances. All to the good, since these are pivotal works. In them the 40-year-old Haydn deepened the content of his lightly ingratiating early quartets, incorporating folk tunes into a more tightly woven texture and often finishing off with...