Word: virtuoso
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Forced Labor. It proved to be a blooded group, fully capable of stirring up a roomful of excitement while its players maintained a kind of Gallic detachment. In a program of modern French music, they gave a virtuoso performance, rippling through the runs with the clear articulation of woodwinds, melting into the passionate sections with sharply contrasting warmth. The players neatly sorted out the intricacies of Martinet's twelve-tone Variations and romped through Milhaud's dancy, polytonal Quartet No. 13. They spectacularly dramatized Martinon's Quartet, Op. 43, with its melodramatic outbursts, its massed tonal tumbles...
...symbolism of separate tables-of the awful aloneness, the need for others, of the down-at-heel and down-at-heart. But otherwise, there is a sharp contrast between two lives badly lived and two not lived at all, and a glorious opportunity, on the stars' part, for virtuoso acting. Actor Portman changes as brilliantly from an enraged but powerless bull to a neatly clipped but bleating, lamb as does Actress Leighton from a hard, sick, glossy siren to a sick, quivering dowd. And, as staged by Peter Glenville, both productions are consistently adroit theater, full of gaudy character...
...Western Europe. At one level their conversion of Renaissance ideals into an academic package of rules and theories merely opened the door wide to the host of imitators that to this day grinds out tearful madonnas or resurrected Christs borne heavenward by muscular angels and simpering cherubim. But their virtuoso talents, turning back from the feverish mental imagery of the mannerists, also served as a transmission belt between the Renaissance and the three new paths Western art was to follow in the next two centuries. The ennobling gestures and grand manner were picked up by Rubens when he visited Rome...
...sylph's little wings drop off and, faltering as if blind, she dies. When, amid all this fabulizing, they get a chance to dance, the Danes are light on their toes-as if the stage were covered with foam rubber-and their movements are graceful rather than virtuoso. Everything they do onstage helps the drama, and so there are no star dancers, nor is there much pause for applause. Nevertheless there were gasps of approval at the powerful male leaps...
...manager of the New York Philharmonic (since 1946 with Bruno Zirato, once Enrico Caruso's secretary), Judson saw the orchestra through its greatest days, when Arturo Toscanini was principal conductor (1927-36), and made virtuoso conductors into star attractions, e.g., Willem Mengelberg, Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter. Operating on Judson's well-developed business instincts, the Philharmonic swallowed up rival orchestras (including the old New York Symphony...