Word: virtuosos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Puryear's work has the exact American-grain quality -- if not the episodic fussiness -- of that earlier virtuoso of the dovetail and the lamination, the sculptor H.C. Westermann. It also has some of Westermann's laconic humor. Sanctuary, 1982, is one such piece: a cubical box of thick wood mounted on two raw branches with the bark still on them, which turn out to be "legs," pedaling a wooden wheel -- a sort of absurd unicycle, designed for flight...
...media-bashing "Sex Sells," or the music industry-bashing "Sold Your Soul (for Rock and Roll)," you'll quickly get the feeling that this indignant band has a lot of bashing to do. Luckily, they do their best bashing on their instruments, providing rock-solid beats and virtuoso basslines beneath a swarm of tasteful synth vamps, groovalistic rhythm guitars, and athletic vocals...
...interlocutors of Vox -- Abby and Jim (the pedestrian names somehow don't do them justice) -- are virtuoso talkers. They are not merely poets of sexuality (an eroticized George and Gracie) but acute lyricists of everyday life. Listen to Abby's riff on pop songs that end with fade-outs ("this attempt to imply that oh yeah, we're a bunch of endlessly creative folks who jam all night"); while Jim explains why he doesn't bother to buy such records ("you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music...
...directorship of the New York Philharmonic with a CBS recording contract and his own magnetism to translate a deep personal identification into an enduring Mahler revival. In 1985 Bernstein undertook to re-record the nine symphonies, plus the Adagio from the unfinished 10th, live for Deutsche Grammophon, using three virtuoso orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw. Result: this definitive 13-disc boxed set. Bernstein finds the universal in Mahler's exquisite, often tortured, self-consciousness; the metaphysical beneath the moody, vivid surfaces. In struggling to understand fate, Mahler found despair, strength, ineffable loss...
RACHMANINOFF, 24 PRELUDES (Arabesque Recordings). Though usually performed in small groupings or as encores, these two dozen pieces -- covering each of the major and minor keys -- become sovereign microworlds in the hands of piano virtuoso Ian Hobson...