The two-and-a-half-hour show at Purchase's Performing Arts Center combines elaborate choreography, original compositions, ornate costumes, fanciful props and animated backdrops in about 20 vignettes that range from solo performances to full ensemble acts.
Among his more than 400 original compositions and ornate transcriptions of older vocal and instrumental works are many that exploited his formidable dexterity but at the same time remain musically conservative.
Instead of celebrating the neo-classical glory of the facade, his composition featured the ornate railings running down the side of Montague Street.
The crowding of the canvas with naked, buxom female forms, the carnival masks, in this case mostly marine in reference, the ornate busy-ness of the composition -- and, too, the darker side of the baroque vision, the spikes, fork tines and hooks, the satanic tails and barbs that contrast the exuberant celebration of lively sensuality with the adumbration of sinfulness, damnation, and death.
A side door was always kept unlocked for her, and in the ornate parlor she sometimes played her own compositions on the piano.
The Count Basie Orchestra, which opened the evening, delivered a short vigorous set whose high points were two Neal Hefti compositions, "Lil Darlin' " and "Whirlybird". The pianist Peter Nero, who immediately preceded Mr. Sinatra, offered ornate arrangements for piano and orchestra that blended pop, jazz and classical styles into flashy kitsch.
On Monday evening in the Manhattan Center's ornate Grand Ballroom, Lincoln Center's White Light Festival presented the American premiere of this 2010 work, which won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for 2013.
