WASHINGTON — After arriving with no particular buzz, then being kept on ice by the government shutdown, "Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium From Greek Collections" has finally opened at the National Gallery of Art here, and it's ambushingly resplendent, like a somber cloud with a fire inside.
As Saint-Exup? put it in his 1933 novel "Night Flight": "When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?" With "Saint-Ex," he's not the only one singing.
Also on the disc is the somber "Auspicious-Clouds Music," in which Ms. Wu imitates the sound and style of a qin (pronounced chin), an ancient Chinese seven-string zither.
While some people can celebrate -- perhaps a graduation, marriage, or birth -- there is too much somber history that clouds this time of the summer solstice.
He followed this with an in-the-pocket groove, syncopating open fifths with his left hand; another gospelish piece, silvery and sure; a devastatingly pretty miniature suffused with dreamlike tremolos; and a ballad of somber beauty, its harmony shifting like a cloud formation.
Independence Day began with a sultry, humidmorning in the New York area as temperatures hovered in the low 70's and pewter clouds massed above the harbor, giving the ships a somber elegance.
On a cloud-stacked day that threatened rain and cast a somber light over the proceedings, workers at ground zero joined parishioners at a Lower Manhattan church that has been their sanctuary for months.
Instead, he roamed Amsterdam's quays and harborfront, seething, fuming, confused, occasionally erupting with joy at things he observed: "these old, narrow, rather somber streets," "a canal lined with elm trees," "a stormy sky with big clouds reflecting in puddles on the ground," "gnarled undergrowth and the trees with their strange shapes".
A somber and surreal occasion, with an honor guard standing between a wooden coffin and a cloud-spotted blue screen, it seemed to suggest an eternal bond between Fellini and the cinematic world he forged here.
