It has been suggested that such features would also be appropriate in Monteverdi, whose exquisite texts invite a supersubtle musical response.
Throughout her career she was concerned with contemplative, deliberately understated interpretation: what interested her was the exquisite confluence of text, timbre, tonality and timing encapsulated in the best popular songs.
But another factor, surely, was the quality of the illustrations that accompanied the texts: exquisite figures of divinities or scenes from the Buddha's life.
This production, exquisite in design and text, is the one that Ninette de Valois staged in 1977 for the Royal Ballet, which danced it until 1992.
The movie is filled with such exquisite nuances; May's text is amazingly subtle, and, with actors of the caliber of Beatty and Hoffman, she gets (apparently, through great exertion — one of the reasons for the shoot's great expense was her large number of takes) deliciously spun deliveries and illuminated, whimsical moments.
"Red Hook Summer": As ferociously skeptical as "We Have a Pope," with a pair of child actors as talented as those in "Moonrise Kingdom," a text as exquisite as that of "Damsels in Distress," and an artistic metaphor as great as in "To Rome with Love".
The rhythms and cadences of his text are exquisite, the nearest thing to a score I have come across – and in those rhythms lie much of the play's meaning, because they map out the character's unconscious self, in minute detail.
You might think that a company that has dedicated itself since 1947 to publishing exquisite editions of classic texts – everything from Beowulf to Elizabeth David's Italian Food – would be feeling glum about its chances in this new landscape.
The music, though jagged and arresting, is also well made; it almost seems an exquisite object, treating the disgusting text with dry irony.
(Michael Kimmelman) * New York Public Library: 'THE SPLENDOR OF THE WORD: MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS,' through Feb. 12. Few objects encapsulate their times like the exquisite full-service concentrations of text, image and decoration that are illuminated manuscripts, and few institutions in North America have as many great ones as New York City's favorite library.
