Word: tonal
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...contemporary music, and is mammoth both in length and in conception. The four movements, or rather, intellectual portraits of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau, are linked only by two brief themes, which are often interwoven into unrecognizable form. While the latter half of the sonata is more tonal and thus more accessible, the work presents an extreme challenge both to the listener and the performer...
...what used to be called a petit-maitre. He has staked out a small and somewhat predictable area of visual sensation, a narrow range of images, ideas and colors, and worked it so thoroughly as to exclude all followers. Some memorable works have resulted. The close and beautifully exact tonal painting of a landscape like Brown Swiss (1957)-"I wanted it to be almost like the tawny brown pelt of a Brown Swiss bull," he tells Met Director Thomas Hoving in the catalogue text-is not the work of small talent; and there are few American portraits that display such...
...sheaves of cloud studies, done from observations on Hampstead Heath. He did not use the broken col ors and blue shadows which, after a century of impressionism, we still imagine as necessary for telling a truth about light. A work like Dedham Lock and Mill, c. 1819, is straight tonal painting...
Millet sought an enduring and stoic language based on large shapes, resolute drawing, deep tonal contrasts. The result was a classical gravity, "a Homeric idyll, in patois," as one admirer put it. From such an angle, the decorative side of impressionism would have seemed pointless, and perhaps it is only as the taste for pretties like Renoir recedes that Millet's achievement becomes once more apparent...
...romanticist, Solti works easily within the huge design of the Eroica. He treats the long first movement almost as an extended phrase. If he lacks something of the rhythmic intensity of Toscanini, Solti nevertheless fuses the conflicting elements of the symphony into a coherent whole with no sacrifice of tonal beauty. The sad serenity of the adagio of the Ninth Symphony surges to the famed choral movement with stunning emotional impact. Partisans will want to stick with some of the classic interpretations: Toscanini's Seventh, for instance, or the Erich Kleiber/Amsterdam Concertgebouw Fifth. But for consistent clarity, warmth...