Word: rhythmical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Arlen score, despite good rhythmic effects, never really gets its beat off the ground. The two or three times the dancing turns lively suggest a last two or three rounds of ammunition desperately fired at the advancing battalions of boredom. Carol Lawrence and Howard Keel are agreeable leads, but to little avail. With none of the succulence of a great big old-fashioned dinner, Saratoga induces all of the somnolence...
...major difficulties of this score is that it depends for its effect almost entirely on subtle variations of volume and orchestration for its effect. Moreover, it is written without much care for the capacities of the individual instruments and makes enormous, almost unattainable, demands on the rhythmic accuracy of the players. It is certainly not an aggressively unpleasant work and some piquant arrangements of the brass sonorities were intriguing. Yet, the work seems not, even after several hearings, to have justification for its length or most of its peculiar characteristics. The performance suggested that Mr. Senturia had steered the group...
...flail away with both wool and rubber-tipped mallets, Marimbist Chenoweth proved herself a virtuoso. Scampering from one end of the instrument to the other, she produced flurries of bell-like tones in a surprising dynamic range. As for the piece itself, it proved to be tuneful, crisply rhythmic, shot through with jazz echoes and a spirit of jaunty sophistication. It proved again that Composer Kurka had one of the most promising original talents in U.S. music...
...Handel-was studded with wrong notes and blurred acrobatics. But it also had the kind of galvanizing effects that only a first-rate musical mind and heart can convey to an audience. Richter-Haaser's approach, particularly in the "Appassionata," was heroic, his tone boldly ringing, his rhythmic drive irresistible. In the Stravinsky piece, he may have lacked the proper corky bite, but his Brahms had a propulsive, thunderous intensity that swept his audience into a roar of applause...
John Cage: Indeterminacy (Music by David Tudor; Folkways, 2 LPs). In a search for a "new aspect of form," Composer Cage has glued 90 spasmodically rhythmic anecdotes (on such random subjects as a mushroom exhibition in Paris, a bridge-playing composer in "the loony bin") to the piano and electronic music of Fellow-Composer Tudor. The result is new, all right, and even engaging in spots, but for the most part it will remind the first listeners of a dyspeptic after dinner speaker talking through an electrical storm into a TV set with a faulty tube...