Word: climax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...choruses became enormous, and orchestras swelled proportionately. On the theory that if Handel had had a big orchestra he would have used it, a series of uncalled-for instruments puffed Handel's clean, baroque textures into plodding Victorian obesity. This musical elephantiasis reached some sort of a climax in 1959, when Sir Thomas Beecham recorded a Messiah that sounded a bit like Richard Strauss's Elektra: with cymbals, bells, triangles, and even a gong...
...Bobby Seale, one of the Chicago Eight, was sentenced to four years in jail for contempt last month by Judge Julius Hoffman. In the past two weeks, with bloody police raids on Panther centers in Chicago and Los Angeles, the war between police and Panthers has come to a climax. For the first time, these events brought cries of sympathy from moderate black leaders who once shied away from any identification with the Panthers...
...London in 1900-the memoirs now seem complete. In Decline and Fall, Gibbon erected his monument. In the memoirs, he composed the obituary to go with it. Then, job completed, he promptly died at the age of 57, showing to the end a fine Roman regard for classical climax...
...have otherwise led to a one-dimensional ego-trip production. There is thus no undirectional theme with all the characters a collective midwife to some zinging, overwhelming closing statement. Rather, the portrayals are loose and disjunct, and that serves finally to heighten the senselessness of the tragedy. The tragic climax is not the clear and unavoidable result of certain obvious flaws in the characters. In this sense the production, perhaps inadvertantly, denies the Greek therapy of tragic catharsis, but I think that's good because the notion that there can be "meaningful" or "uplifting" death in a non-political context...
After moments of intense despair and fear, the climax does turn out neatly and somewhat happily. But that is quite acceptable simply because the audience has been transported-not into make-believe but out of one kind of reality into another...