Word: sharp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Richard Rodgers' grandson, the most provocative and promising of post-Sondheim theatrical songwriters, has taken a sharp turn on the road to Broadway: his latest composition is a song cycle about love, sin, doubt and transcendence. The music is composed in an utterly personal style that blends pop, gospel and classical influences; the lyrics weave together Greek mythology and Christian hymnody to complex, unsettling effect. Persuasively performed on CD by singers such as Audra McDonald, Mandy Patinkin and Guettel, Myths & Hymns is a major event in American popular song...
...gone to sleep, I take it out of its case and prop it on my knee. That's when I write my 2 a.m. ballads, my mostly wordless, atonal compositions that require fewer than three chords. To call them "songs" would probably be too generous. They have no sharp beginning, and I stop whenever my fingers start to hurt or I get too sleepy. If you walk down Dewolfe Street late at night, listen carefully for an off-key strumming coming from a window high above you. Chances...
...Onion has a very proletarian feel about it, exposing the rulers of society as they dominate the common people, as when Woodrow Wilson promises to "make the world safe for corporate oligarchy." Even some of the most inviolable struggles and achievements of our century don't escape the sharp wits of the Onion's writers, as Jackie Robinson's integration of base-ball is preceded by Edwin Miller's becoming the first white to play in the Negro Leagues and complaining about always having to stay in nicer hotels and enter through the front door...
...first half of his program was all Chopin, beginning with the F-sharp Impromptu, Op. 36. A rich sotto voce approach was somewhat undone by an erstwhile banginess in the right hand; transparent scalar passages were a key ingredient in the strong finish. This piece reminded one of the best playing of the rude and unpredictable Vladimir Feltsman, who seems to patronize Mr. Zimerman's barber, if not vice versa...
...lifted himself off the bench. The ending, mostly reminiscent of the G minor Ballade, included a final two chords that were so well executed as to seem prophetic. The second half of the program was a Schumann sonata in which all of the details were in place. The F-sharp Minor sonata Op. 11 is a sprawling piece of juvenilia that requires a tight vision of elements that don't necessarily relate organically to each other, as is the case with the greater master-piece, the Fantasy Op. 17. Although Zimerman seemed marginally less comfortable here than in the Chopin...