Word: virtuoso
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Director Anthony Page doesn't allow McTeer's virtuoso turn to overshadow a fine supporting cast, particularly Owen Teale (who also appeared in the London production) as Torvald. He's uptight and patronizing but far from a foolish figure. When he stands alone after Nora leaves, we feel the full impact of the play's emotionally complex climax: both triumph (a woman freed) and tragedy (a family broken), a cause for cheers and for weeping. Most theatergoers will simply let out a slow exhale, after an evening that takes the breath away...
...enough pride in being a mecca for American culinary delicacies that do not happen to be delicate. The city council has never even responded to the suggestion I made years ago, for instance, that one of the Missouri River bridges be named in memory of Chicken Betty Lucas, a virtuoso of the cast-iron skillet...
...direct discourse, a play in a play already," observed Fagles. When ancient Greek rhapsodes performed dramatic recitals of epic poems from memory as their profession, the epic each time would be "performed by one person in a variety of voices." Presumably, such a virtuoso story teller could have "the talents of a ventriloquist" in playing all characters...
These shows make it clear that the once accepted view of Tiepolo was wrong. It said, in effect, that he was a slightly suspect virtuoso--the last of what had been, a fizzing Catherine wheel of talent at the end of the long display of Venetian genius that ran from the Bellinis to Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Disapproval of Tiepolo was high-toned; his work did not accord with the moralizing grandeur of a later Neoclassicism, still less with the assumptions of Realism. It was rococo, compliant, theatrical and somehow frivolous. It celebrated a city in deep decline and praised...
...four-hour whirlwind of Baroque frenzy at the Museum of Fine Arts, audience members marvelled as dishy Dutch virtuoso Pieter Wispelwey became transfixed by the power of the polyphonic magic he was creating. Sharing his emotionally raw and whimsically timed rendering of the complete cycle of suites for solo cello, he invited all present to share in his sensual interpretation of these rich and technically brutal pieces...