Word: bravura
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...reveals his last name, other personal details seep into his story. He is a New Yorker, born in the Bronx during the Depression. He has written for the movies, enjoys women, music and bird watching and keeps up on the latest theories of the cosmologists. After setting down a bravura description of the Big Bang, Everett adds, "In fact if God is involved in this matter, these elemental facts, these apparent concepts, He is so fearsome as to be beyond any human entreaty for our solace, or comfort, or the redemption that would come of our being brought into...
...savagely surface. The trouble with the movie is its style, all handheld shots and short, jagged cuts. They're supposed to represent the barely controlled anarchy of the sport (and to let Stone touch on far too many narrative points). But almost three hours of this jitter deteriorates from bravura filmmaking to annoying mannerism, and Any Given Sunday ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts...
...author. Shorn of the somewhat overbearing I-am-woman-hear-me-roar vibes of the celebrity-studded version, its strengths as a one-woman show become apparent. Sitting on a stool with only a few lighting effects for embellishment, Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights (giving a bravura impression of every type of orgiastic moan) or move us with quiet compassion (a woman in her 70s describes the embarrassing episode as a teenager that all but ended her relationship with the place "down there...
...instance, of a man with a pen whose drawn nib is drawing himself. To Steinberg, each drawing remade its author. It was both a mask and a card of identity, and a proof of existence as well. Never an expressionist, he liked, he said, "to make a parody of bravura. I wish to create a fiction of skill in the same sense that my writing is an imitation of calligraphy: fine flourishes that can't be deciphered, official stamps no one can read." What he didn't know about the semantics of style wasn't worth knowing...
Take, for instance, the cadenza in the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. Other pianists too often drift from the Classical period provenance of the concerto, when cadenzas were improvised, and play the cadenza with a near seamless bravura that is more suited to the concertos of the Romantic composers, thereby losing its sense of extemporaneous drama--and obscuring many of Beethoven's boldest, and funniest, inspirations. Not Brendel, whose subtle emphases, infinitesimal pauses and canny modulations of tempo, color and dynamics create an air of spontaneous adventure. He reclaims the cadenza's magnificent audacity and evokes...