Word: violins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...spent the hellish years of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution planting rice and listening not to symphonies and concertos but to the music of village rituals. "It's more like a language than music," he recalls. "Soundwise, it's like the texture of wind." At 19, while playing violin in a Beijing opera company, he heard his first piece of Western classical music, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which opened up a whole new world of sonic possibilities. He went to New York City to study composition in 1986, and has lived there ever since. "New York is the best place...
...tremendous vitality, and he was a great dancer," Jane Knowles says. "I played the violin, and he played the piano, and we sang in all the same choruses...
...choice of Baroque music for "Laura's theme" was still more questionable; something simpler, more ethereal, and more delicate, like the fragile glass animals, would seem to be in order rather than the elaborate ornamentation of a Bach violin concerto. The lighting, on the other hand, was fairly standard, shifting from an initial dimness to "candlelight" in the crucial Laura-Jim scene, to complete darkness as Laura blows the candle out. A wise choice if not a particularly exciting one: conventionality doesn't detract from its emotional effectiveness...
...something dark lingers throughout the performance. Perhaps Prokofiev's score, which haunts even the most romantic moments at the flick of a violin bow, is partially to blame. Perhaps it's the costumes, dark navy uniform gowns for the ladies and drab tuxedoes for the men in the eerily-lit ballroom scene, also add to the mood. Perhaps the unexplained variations in the story-line, which Corder himself hopes create "a feeling of mystery and magic," cause a slightly unsettling feeling instead. Whatever the reason, Cinderella remains a delightful, if somewhat dark, performance piece...
Four numbers spotlight other band members in hard-line bluegrass, while the star saws away eloquently on her violin. But there's plenty for fans of Krauss's vocal virtuosity. Mark Simos' Find My Way Back to My Heart (whose melody echoes Paul McCartney's I've Just Seen a Face) is a lesson in hard-earned self-reliance; Happiness (lyric by Michael McDonald) has the ethereal Eire sound of Enya. The anthemic finale, There Is a Reason, begins in a string-quartet drone and escalates to a wilderness cry for salvation. These are songs in the past tense--love...