Word: virtuoso
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Boris Kroyt, 72, Russian-born viola virtuoso and for 31 years a pillar of the Budapest String Quartet; of cancer; in Manhattan. Ranked with Paul Hindemith and William Primrose as one of the viola's great masters, Kroyt joined the Budapest in 1936, and two years later the brilliant foursome traveled to the U.S., where their concerts and records raised chamber music to new heights of popularity. Their repertoire ran from the classical Beethoven and Brahms to moderns like Bartók and Milhaud, all played with a passion and Toscanini-like elegance that substantiated their preeminence...
...image was carried out with wit and a once admired prose style. Harold Ross of The New Yorker said that he was "the most enlightened man writing today." That praise now seems a shade inconsequential-as if a potentially great pianist had squandered his digital gifts as a pinball virtuoso. In truth, Mencken worked hard at his prose but had the autodidact's fatal fondness for the fancy word. As for the flowers of wit culled by Carl Bode, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, they have wilted badly. Intended to shock rather than illuminate...
...Virtuoso Stock. Martin's patient is Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson), who lives in morbid fear of turning into a bed sitting room. He eventually does, of course. Just the way Penelope's Mum (Mona Washbourne) turns into a dresser and her Dad (Arthur Lowe) into a parrot, while Penelope herself (Rita Tushingham) takes 17 months to give birth to one baby and about 37 seconds to deliver herself of a second. All this goes on while the police (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) fly overhead in a rusted-out patrol car suspended from the end of a helium...
...look like a warm-up exercise. There has been no director of such prodigious comic invention since the halcyon days of Preston Sturges. Lester throws off sight gags and visual puns like some pyrotechnical pinwheel and molds character actors (Richardson, Roy Kinnear, the superb Michael Hordern) into a virtuoso stock company. But he also knows the value of good writing, and Charles Wood's script is a model of subdued rage and satiric precision. "I always used to say 'For Christ's sakes, drop it,'" Mum tells Dad as they reminisce about the bomb...
Pizzicato passages, stratospheric glissandi, cadenza after cadenza-the balding, blue-eyed violinist tackled each without hesitation and butchered each in turn, always about a quarter-tone off pitch. Eventually, the concertmaster mercifully took the solo play away from the wounded virtuoso. The Aspen, Colo., audience was delighted by the shenanigans. They had, after all, paid as much as $50 to see and hear Jack Benny's violin act which, like his familiar monologues, is a masterpiece of comic tim ing. Benny, 75, and his fiddle have raised well over $5,000,000 at similar benefits, and this one netted...