Word: agonizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rhythms, and generally uninteresting timbres. The piece seems much less provocative than the contemporary experiments of Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Cowell. The Movements, however, a strictly twelve-tone piece, is characterized by pellucid, crystalline registration, pointillistic rhythmical control, and Stravinsky's unique unsentimental lvricism. This work linked Threni and Agon (1956), a supreme masterpiece, to the later Sermon, Narrative and a Prayer and The Flood, Movements makes clear once for all that serial composition is not necessarily a constricting system available to uninspired journeymen, but a pregnant and energizing compositional discipline in the hands of a master such as Schoenberg...
...using themes from the first movement once more. This complexity of image and response reappears in every succeeding symphony: the Resurrection, for example, is a vast poem of death, vision of refracted horrors, moments of vernal consolation, primeval light, and a personal belief in redemption. Each symphony is an agon, so to speak, involving malaise and piety, desolation and transfiguration, the spectral and the immaculate, almost always ending in the reassertion of the nobility of the human spirit and the inextinguishable beauty of nature. Mahler felt everything and felt in with an intensity forever incomprehensible to people like ourselves...
Stravinsky himself, as well as the other non avant-garde master, Bela Bartok, was able to come to intellectual terms with the esthetic crisis of post-romantic music. Each one of Stravinsky's works, especially Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Symphony of Psalms, Agon, and the new Requiem Canticles, represents a new solution in considerably more traditional terms to the problems of contemporary musical speech. If the avant -garde chooses to ignore his principle, if it is possible to ignore it, then renewal will have become chaotic...
...which the Danish swashbucklers made Douglas Fairbanks look like a party poop. Later, he enlivened and internationalized his programs with Afternoon of a Faun by America's Jerome Robbins, Card Game by South Africa's John Cranko, Aimez-vous Bach by Canada's Brian MacDonald, and Agon by Denmark's First Eske Holm, a Flindt protege. Brash, bristling with energy, Flindt has reorganized the training methods of the company and its dance school, initiated open auditions and, for the first time, hired non-Danish dancers. ("Five million Danes are not enough to draw from," he says...
...dancing to music is entertaining alone," he says. Parisians greeted New York dancing as "le style Frigidaire," but Balanchine's ballets are now being performed frequently by more than a dozen major companies. With 110 ballets to his credit since he left Russia-including such masterpieces as Serenade, Agon, Apollo, The Four Temperaments, Concerto Barocco and Symphony in C-he has no rival as a choreographer, but it is his special genius to convey his thoughts to his dancers. He is, they say, the world's greatest teacher...