Word: virtuoso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...image was carried out with wit and a once admired prose style. Harold Ross of The New Yorker said that he was "the most enlightened man writing today." That praise now seems a shade inconsequential-as if a potentially great pianist had squandered his digital gifts as a pinball virtuoso. In truth, Mencken worked hard at his prose but had the autodidact's fatal fondness for the fancy word. As for the flowers of wit culled by Carl Bode, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, they have wilted badly. Intended to shock rather than illuminate...
...Virtuoso Stock. Martin's patient is Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson), who lives in morbid fear of turning into a bed sitting room. He eventually does, of course. Just the way Penelope's Mum (Mona Washbourne) turns into a dresser and her Dad (Arthur Lowe) into a parrot, while Penelope herself (Rita Tushingham) takes 17 months to give birth to one baby and about 37 seconds to deliver herself of a second. All this goes on while the police (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) fly overhead in a rusted-out patrol car suspended from the end of a helium...
...look like a warm-up exercise. There has been no director of such prodigious comic invention since the halcyon days of Preston Sturges. Lester throws off sight gags and visual puns like some pyrotechnical pinwheel and molds character actors (Richardson, Roy Kinnear, the superb Michael Hordern) into a virtuoso stock company. But he also knows the value of good writing, and Charles Wood's script is a model of subdued rage and satiric precision. "I always used to say 'For Christ's sakes, drop it,'" Mum tells Dad as they reminisce about the bomb...
Pizzicato passages, stratospheric glissandi, cadenza after cadenza-the balding, blue-eyed violinist tackled each without hesitation and butchered each in turn, always about a quarter-tone off pitch. Eventually, the concertmaster mercifully took the solo play away from the wounded virtuoso. The Aspen, Colo., audience was delighted by the shenanigans. They had, after all, paid as much as $50 to see and hear Jack Benny's violin act which, like his familiar monologues, is a masterpiece of comic tim ing. Benny, 75, and his fiddle have raised well over $5,000,000 at similar benefits, and this one netted...
Even during his own lifetime, Bach long stood low on the list of important composers. His contemporaries placed both Telemann and Handle above him. They considered him primarily the virtuoso organist. The last days of church concert music left Bach with an often insurmoutable penury of players and singers. He must often have felt the decline of contemporary musicianship as he played the organ, directed the choir, and conducted the orchestra at the same time. To the end, he affirmed his dedication to the sacred music whose reign was then work on a secular fugue to write extremely religious chorale...