Diana Vishneva, a Kirov ballerina who also appears with American Ballet Theater, did a fine job of conveying the encounter with death — she is not afraid to let ugliness creep into the occasionally frantic beating-of-wings movements — without arousing any real pathos until her final upward glance suggested a last, desperate look at life.
With a fierce beating of wings, the butterfly has finally escaped her chrysalis and taken flight.
But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death.
Some of the bolder birds sat on her arms, on her shoulders, even on her hat, and the strenuous beating of wings all around her, nearly obliterating her small figure, caused her to cry out with delight.
But the dead only fed the living, and each morning when the people woke it was to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight of the curious and gentle faces of those creatures.
"Red Garuda," in which a giant bird of Hindu and Buddhist legend is portrayed with flexing metal feathers and a sonorous beating of wings, is the second of Mr. Lieberson's two piano concertos and something like the eighth work he has written for Mr. Serkin, who played it last season at its Boston Symphony premiere and then at the Tanglewood Festival this summer.
Amongst the avians, high levels of M-HCD (200 250 mmol/kg dm) are found in glycolytic pectoral muscle of pheasants, chickens and turkeys (Abe 2000; Jones 2011), where rapid beating of wings for short periods enables short periods of flight for escape.
I listen to the beat of grasshopper wings, and strain to spot blight on the far side of the bottoms.
In one particularly memorable piece, "Composition 1960 55," Young released a flock of butterflies on the audience and they listened to the beat of their wings.
