Word: opus
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...mother's legacy and appease her own demons, author Linda Gray Sexton '75 has released her own memoirs, Searching for Mercy Street. Though Gray Sexton does not hesitate to point the proverbial finger at her mother, blaming her for a life out of a control, her cathartic opus is far from a "Mommie Dearest" for the literary set. Beneath the pile of dirty laundry lies a tale of unbounded resilience, a lesson in true independence...
...first work on the program, Beethoven's Quartet, Opus 18, No. 1, was the most impressively rendered of the pieces, Its second movement, a theme and variations set labeled "Adagio affettuoso e appassionato," was wrenchingly beautiful, the notes spun out with the refinement of silk. The piece provided a musical tour of each player's attributes, certain themes given from one to another, each adding his or her own carefully-conceived statement to the entirety of the conversation. The faster movements, while not quite as powerfully alluring, were also effectively interpreted and performed...
Johannes Brahms' String Quartet in c minor, Opus 51, No. 1, was the final and most substantial piece on the program. Unfortunately, this work sounded the least polished of all that the Quartet performed. In the first movement, "Allegro," where the texture is quite thick, the balance was not effective, the notes of the accompanying voices excessively labored and the melody not sufficiently passionate. Here also the contrasting characters displayed by the different instruments detrimentally affected the Quartet's performance; while in most places these variations added interest, the dryness of the violist's sound in the Brahms grated...
...couple year now, wowing tiny rock clubs (or at least the people who stand around in them) with an ever-varying mixture of instrumental comedy and soulfully complicated pop. They've also been releasing records, largely on the DC label Teen Beat; their latest is a multifaceted opus called Exploder. We (the columnar "we") caught up to them in their cramped yet snazzy van Sunday night...
...that's nothing compared to the "Day in the Life" style piling up of styles and timbres on this album: a smoothly anachronistic analog synth (could it be a Mellotron?) pops up in several songs, and so effectively each time that by the end of the 66-minute Exploder opus you'll probably have moved from wondering how anyone could use a Mellotron sound on a rock record at all in 1994 to wondering why that sound doesn't crop up on every new indie release. The post Pepper pileup reaches its peak on "Saturday's Cool," which...