Word: virtuoso
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...passage of virtuoso understatement, Miss Dillard meticulously records the death of a small frog sucked dry by a giant water bug, and with eerie calm reports an afternoon she spent sitting beside a copperhead. "Evolution loves death more than it loves you and me," she quietly concludes. And as the very fecundity of this "eggy animal world" seems to hurry toward its equally profuse extinction, Miss Dillard mercilessly brings on bridge-battering floods and hemlock-bending whirlwinds. Here is not only a habitat of cruelty and "the waste of pain" but the savage and magnificent world of the Old Testament...
...facility with the technical demands of the Concerto would have been impressive in itself. Haydn was unaccustomed to writing virtuoso solo parts since he was not a virtuoso performer himself. But this concerto, written for (and perhaps with the aid of) the principal cellist of Prince Esterhazy's private orchestra, abounds with the most difficult technical feats: monstrous intervals and arpeggios, fiendish scales, and intricate double-stop passages, all of which Yo-Yo seemed to play effortlessly...
...Solomon should emphasize Azdak's sneering sardonicism less, especially in the scenes before the last, and be more simply sincere at least in his initial revulsion at mistakenly helping the grand duke escape and in his questions to the defendants he plans to acquit. But he turns in a virtuoso performance, and the most important thing shines through it: Brecht's call to action, for another Azdakian era of disorder at the end of which Azdak won't have to apologize for not being a hero or address his Ironshirted attackers as "Fellow dogs," for a dialectical revolution like...
...display here (some of which, like The Human Condition, 1935, with its painted landscape on an easel in front of a window and continuous with the "real" painted landscape seen beyond, have virtually become surrealist icons) remain unpredictable despite their familiarity. That is because Magritte was such a virtuoso of the insoluble, the contradictory, the locked. Unlike Delvaux (or for that matter Dali, Masson or Ernst), Magritte had absolutely no interest in what seemed romantic, chancy, theatrically mysterious or exotic. He called his paintings "material tokens of the freedom of thought," and materiality is of their essence...
Furthermore, fans now think that contests are spectacles and that players are entertainers. The player is being paid to perform and the ticket-holders expect a virtuoso exhibition every time. For instance, until the past few years, I never heard of players being accused of not hustling...