Who needs these navel gazers when we've got so much somber work to do?
Conceived with hedonistic gusto by Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy and Dave Malloy, "Three Pianos" melds music, music history, personal history and many cups of wassail into a fast, festive ode to a somber work of art.
The somber work, written in 1994 for the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado, features an arrangement of an earlier piano work Mr. Kurtag wrote as a tribute to his friend Andras Mihaly.
The saxophone, Berlioz thought, is the instrument that most closely resembles the human voice and is "the finest voice we have" for somber works.
The same program featured a selection of brief, somber works by Stravinsky, de Falla, Ravel, Bartok and Satie originally collected to honor the death of Debussy, who had borrowed from Stravinsky ("The Firebird" and "Petrushka," especially) in piano works like "En Blanc et Noir".
Given the quality of the Rowling books, it doesn't seem so crazy that the movie may do some justice to this tradition despite the fact that, unlike some of the somber works named above, it is not a film for adults about children but a film for children about children.
In it she explores her Polish roots; it is a somber, mysterious work that hints at ritual.
There are moments in this somber, affecting work when Mr. Lennon's research into the hardship and hazard of raising sheep stands on its own, as if the story were secondary.
Arguably, these record-breaking runs demonstrate that there is pent-up demand for somber dramatic works by 20th-century playwrights.
That somber, almost classical work is such a staple of early feminist art that it's strange to discover, in this exhibition, that it was just one of her many theatrical and provocative self-transformations.
The moral quandary of whether to medicate a child with severe behavioral problems has been addressed in the theater before, notably in Kia Corthron's "Seeking the Genesis" (1996), a somber and lyrical work about a hyperkinetic, violence-prone African-American child.
