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Tag: Oscar

Barbara Stanwyck/Gary Cooper‏ – “Ball of Fire”

Barbara Stanwyck has never been for me
a favourite, more testosterone mostly than
her leading men, but when a cousin asked
about a New Year’s Eve gift recommendation
for his wife, for whom she is a favourite, how
could I resist 
 
this perfect little treasure, Ball of Fire“, is
what I found, with Gary Cooper no less, who’s
always had testerone enough indeed for
everybody, even as an academic and
milquetoast grammarian
 
 she is a gangster’s moll  
 
the script is scintillating, he corrects someone’s
split infintives, not once but several times, how
could I not love it 
 
she was nominated for an Oscar in what appears
to have been, for its display of female icons, a tight
year, but for this movie Gary Cooper wasn’t even
mentioned  
 
he won the Oscar that year instead for Sergeant
York“, indisputably probably deserving it 
 
 
incidentally, Ball of Fire is a riff on Snow White 
and the Seven Dwarfs“, these reorganizations in
art are not uncommon nor unusual, fairy tales and
Biblical references for instance resound always
especially profoundly in reinvented updates
 
here Prince Charming is already living with the
dwarves, Snow White is at the very least scarlet,
but it all ends up the same, of course, utterly ever
charming 
 
 
have a happy, and prosperous, new year 
 
Richard
 
 
 

Franz Lizst – Hungarian Rhapsody no 2‏

any one of the following outstanding interpretations
of Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody no 2, even individually,
will make your day, I promise, together, they’ll have
you rocking for surely a week 
 
Hanna and Barbera’s The Cat Concerto, with Tom
and Jerry, won the Oscar in 1947, Best Short Subject,
Cartoons 
 
the Rhapsody itself is of course not a concerto, it 
was written for piano only, it’s been proven to be 
incontrovertibly enough, but was given an orchestral
backdrop by the studio for the film, henceThe Cat
Concerto, I’ll leave the portion about the cat in the
title undiscussed  
 
Liszt also rearranged himself, incidentally, his
immensely successful work for solo piano, adding
a superfluous, in my opinion, orchestra, any virtuoso
who could play this would leave his backup surely,
inexorably, in the dust
 
but I might be wrong
 
 
Victor Borge is an absolute comic genius in a
performance you’re not likely to soon forget 
 
 
Marc-André Hamelin, a French Canadian, is in my
estimation unmatched in the world today, he’ll
blow your socks off, you will be dazzled 
 
the unfamiliar part near the end of his interpretation, 
the part you’ve never heard before, is of Hamelin‘s 
own invention, a cadenza, an option fully granted in
bravura compositons by composers, allowing any
pianist to strut his, her, individual stuff, foreshadowing,
by the way, improvisation, jazz 
 
you’ll find Marc-André Hamelin in his extrapolation
to be nothing short of extraordinary 
 
 
Richard