Word: tonalities
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They made a surprisingly fine exhibition, and one that proved that subjective moderns need not be stultified by the task of painting theme pictures. The French, it appeared, were still champs: no U.S. entry could match the tonal subtlety of the winter landscapes by France's Christian Caillard and Roger Chapelain-Midy, or the sophistication of Oscar Dominguez' half-abstract Christmas tree, with its candles that cast pointed black shadows from each glowing wick, or the wit of Gustave Singier's bright blue abstraction, Noel Provencal, which looked as mindlessly gay and involved as a game...
...performance was concerned if not musical excellence was probably Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Suite. Here both the orchestra and the conductor were in their element. A completely impressionistic work such as this requires deep understanding, and the orchestra, which has been seated differently to create a different tonal effect, certainly gave it that...
...Touching Image. In some ways, Strauss the man mirrored the strengths and weaknesses of his music. Even to the late admiring critic, Lawrence Gilman, he was a composer who could "mold a beautiful or touching or heroic tonal image, and then distort it by scrawling a bad joke somewhere on its surface." He was a man who composed a great symphonic poem about his own sometimes mean and usually money-grabbing life and called it Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life...
...brass and woodwinds as a music reviewer. For 30 years, in covering his "strange dichotomy," first for the Guardian and now for the Kemsley newspapers (the Sunday Times, the Sunday Chronicle), Cardus has played a deft prose symphony of his own that weaves through both his fields the tonal majesty of one, the rhythmic action of the other. The result bewitches more readers than it baffles...
...four of the pianists do the arranging. Each keeps in mind the special talents of the other three. Russian-born Vladimir ("Vee") Padwa, who filled a vacancy in the Quartet in 1942, is the trill expert; Garner likes to handle special tonal colors; Edson is famed for what the others call his "light delicate touch." Viennese Frank Mittler, who looks like a concert version of Actor Frank Fay, quips: "I do the 'dramatic pauses...