Word: quartet
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...MODERN JAZZ QUARTET: FOR ELLINGTON (East-West). Part homage, part re- invention, this is a ravishing tribute by one of the premier jazz groups to one of America's greatest composers. The MJQ pay the Duke the ultimate honor: they don't just respect him, they make him swing...
...fantasy Marlow is, remember, a singing detective. As he did in Pennies from Heaven, Potter scatters period songs to make ironic points. A quartet of doctors turns Fred Waring's Dry Bones into a sardonic production number; The Teddy Bears' Picnic plays over memories of a forest seduction. "No matter how sugary and banal they might be," Potter says, "old popular songs are in a direct line of descent from the Psalms. They're saying that the world is other than the thing around you -- other than age, other than sickness, other than death. These songs are chariots; they take...
...Mtsensk, Shostakovich never completed another opera, to the world's inestimable loss. Who knows what other great works went unwritten while Shostakovich was living a double life? "Tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears," he said. Moreover, at 157 minutes the film is itself guilty of some of Shostakovich's own sins, including bombast and repetitiveness...
...this central quartet of characters, a comic trio is added. Elizabeth Dibbern as the Condomines' space cadet maid affects a Cockney accent that no doubt would make Eliza Doolittle proud. Both Blake Spraggins as Dr. Bradman and Valerie Steiker as Mrs. Bradman have enviable English accents. Yet it is the timing of these actors that makes their performances so strong...
...Matisse's fauve landscapes at St.-Tropez -- amply represented in this show -- are Arcadians with spots. The pale recumbent nude among the columnar tree trunks in his Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet, 1902, whose music is joined by the howling of a giant white poodle, is a reprise of innumerable earlier pastorals. Gauguin was partly a reprise of Watteau, each in his own way imagining fugitive pleasure on a distant island, Cythera equaling Tahiti...