Word: tonally
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Tonal beauty in every section forms the outstanding feature of the orchestra. The winds have always been strong; but now the strings are demonstrating a richness and, at times, even a brilliance. There is very little to complain of in the technical aspect of their present level of performance...
...synthesis of such a diversity of subjective and objective elements, however, is only partially successful. The rhythm and consistently gaunt imagery give the poem a great amount of tonal unity, but there is little development toward the identity of the artist with his environment that the last stanza professes him to have achieved. Granted the painter may have felt this identity, but it is still up to the poem to help the reader partake of the process. But it's too static and remains as a whole nebulous and gray. Despite its other virtues, there is little light and color...
With its abundant symbolism, the story operates on two levels, plot and metaphor, and needs a more carefully worked out and comprehensive dominant metaphor into which the particulars can fit. Kozol seems to have tried using the seasons this way but never fully develops them. A consequent lack of tonal unity limits the story's achievements, outside of passages taken in isolation, to its shock value. But unified or not, it is almost always funny or slightly frightening...
...could perhaps ask for a little more articulation and more sparing use of the damper pedal in the Scarlatti, but both sonatas--seldom played items--were performed with grace and elegance, and showed to advantage the many tonal colors at the pianist's disposal...
Climax of the birthday celebration was a Los Angeles performance of his latest work, a ballet score titled Agon (to be given in New York next fall). Agon shows just how far he has gone with tonal-row composition. A 20-minute work, it is scored for "twelve dancers and twelve notes," calls for the largest orchestra since Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945). The fast, heavily percussioned score is cast in patterns of enormous rhythmic complexity. In its sheer harmonic and rhythmic invention, its virility, its brilliance of orchestration, the work is among the most dazzling music...