Word: polyphemus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Without waiting for an answer, he and his fellow conspirators proceed to annihilate a classic. The epic adventures are turned into a few friezes reminiscent of a sixth grade pageant: Polyphemus, the Cyclops, bears a strong resemblance to a Sesame Street Muppet; Telemachus (Russ Thacker) might have escaped from a G-rated Disney film. The celebrated dancing and fighting is reduced to a series of galvanic gestures and deafening groans. The groans may be distinguished from the songs easily: the songs have words. Those lyrics, which act upon the mind like nepenthe, are also by Segal, a classics scholar...
...moral philosophy was a matter of passion and visual expression, not of strict archaeology and attention to sources . . . The fumes of history filled his brain, not its dry facts." When the fumes wove in harmony with the demands of visual truth, Turner became an epic dramatist-as Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus shows, with that sublime apparition of a galleon, canvas flapping and looping, escorted by Nereids through a lake of fire and vapor, under the dimly discernible, looming profile of the giant...
Librettist John Gay (of Beggar's Opera fame) drew upon an ancient Neapolitan myth: in the jealousy of the evil giant Polyphemus drives him to kill Acts, beloved shepherd of the goddess Galatea. Handel's occasionally inspired setting of the text reaches a high-point in the opening of Act Two. This chorus is beautiful and clever, true baroque artifice in a humorous double fugue...
Raymond Murcell as Polyphemus displayed a perfect combination of grotesque rage and pathetic impotence. His love aria--with an amusing piccolo obbligato solo--was especially well-ornamented and had a healthy rhythmic bounce supported by the continuo. A Scotch snap rhythm (more formally known as inverted dotting) was used for the aria. Though this is missing from some recordings of Acis, the obbligato solo clearly calls...