Word: virtuoso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Scarlatti Romp. If contemporary jazz has a new cynosure, it is Pianist Keith Jarrett, 31. A virtuoso performer who was trained in the classics, Jarrett is a flawless, controlled technician who scales melodic altitudes that recall the late piano genius Art Tatum. Jarrett's great gift is improvisation, which he weaves effortlessly for as much as 25 minutes at a sitting. His textures are densely contrapuntal, his melodies sometimes Chopinesque. At one moment he can sound like a Latin band on the march, at another like Copland playing variations on Elliott Carter, at still another like Scarlatti in a rhythm...
...With a gritty, grappling brand of opinionation (and largely because of it), her review slot at the New Yorker has often produced sparkling minor masterpieces. She's become the Chopin of the pan. When she lights into "Lost Horizon," the multi-million dollar clunker in Reeling, it's a virtuoso performance. "To lambast a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge," she writes. "He is to movies what Liberace is to music, and once, on a television talk show, I saw them both. . .and the two unctuous smiles came together. Mr. Bland and Mr. Bland...
...begins to sell it to the reader; she seems to ladle on superlatives for the publicists to lap up. About Tango, she writes, miscalculating badly, that "this is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies." Shampoo is called "the most virtuoso example of sophisticated, kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with." And we've seen the praise heaped on Nashville, in her estimation "the funniestepic vision of America ever to reach the scree." Yet she's not selling out--the real problem goes beyond simple over-enthusiasm...
Died. Robert Leo (Bobby) Hackett, 61, American jazz virtuoso; of a heart attack; in West Chatham, Mass. Young Bobby left school in Providence, R.I., at 14 to play guitar gigs in local restaurants, and later moved on to the cornet, the trumpet and fame with Glenn Miller and other titans of the prewar Big Band era. More recently, Hackett had been paying his bills by performing anonymously in treacly mood-music albums released under Jackie Gleason's name, but his reputation seems secure -almost as hot, cool and craftsmanlike on the horn in pieces like String of Pearls...
Sipping from a Scotch-and-water on the table before him, the party chief fielded questions from the audience for three solid hours. It was a virtuoso political performance if only for its stamina. "Cultural expression must be guaranteed absolutely," he told a high school teacher who asked him how the party felt about intellectual freedom. Answering questions from an actress, a magistrate, several soldiers, and representatives of minor political parties, Berlinguer ran the gamut of the Communists' positions. Repeatedly, he stressed their new proposal for a government of "broad democratic unity...