Word: touche
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...concerto is Menotti's best instrumental work to date (though he himself still prefers his 1945 Piano Concerto in F). It has humor and a touch of drama, and a striking contrast of light & dark textures (major & minor) unifies the whole piece. Its weakness is formal: the main line of progress is too full of pleasant but unrelated detours into puckish humor and free-flown fancy...
...popping, jet-black eyes are all pupil and ought to be sharp at night, but even in daylight they are dim and dull. Only its hearing is keen (its thin ears curl over to keep out insects during sleep), and its bristling whiskers have a superfine sense of touch. On his short legs, the possum meanders in a slow, aimless shuffle. As a climber he shows his greatest skill, using his strong, ratlike tail and the opposing "thumb" on his hind feet to scrabble after autumn persimmons. He cannot hang by his tail as long as legend would have...
David Beyer, a comparative newcomer in Harvard music circles, gave a piano recital Sunday afternoon that was, in nearly every respect, competent and satisfying. His touch was sufficiently heavy and sold for the more somber passages of Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Handel, but he could also produce the light, fragile tones so necessary for his group of Scarlatti sonatas...
Arriving in Nairobi last week to inspect Kenya's "security services," strapping Sir Percy Sillitoe, 64-year-old chief of Britain's famed M.I.5 (Secret Service), theorized that Red undercover agents keep in touch with the Mau Mau through a big Russian hospital in Addis Ababa. African patients get free medical treatment, courtesy of the Kremlin; afterwards, they have a curious habit of turning up in trouble spots all over Africa. Sir Percy's theory, if true, could plausibly explain the fact that Mau Mau agents have been caught infiltrating along the lower slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro...
...They brought him back to camp four summers in a row-carefully salted and sugared his food at mess table, described to him what went on at campfire, patiently taught him (by touch) to row a boat and chop a log." Eventually, Alan Wylie passed all his tests. "The last time I saw [him] was the night a representative of the National Council presented him with the Scout Life Guard emblem. The boy's . . . face was transfigured, and the rest of us felt somehow transfigured...