Word: bravura
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...December, when millions of shrieking teens watched Drew Barrymore try to guess the original killer in Friday the 13th and, ahem, choose incorrectly. Cannily crammed with the likes of Neve, Courteney and Skeet (if these names seem meaningless, you're just in an obsolete demographic) and directed with twisted bravura by the incomparable Wes Craven, Scream became the highest grossing horror movie ever, reviving the moribund slasher genre and lifting its author into Hollywood's screenwriting elite. When the Williamson-scripted I Know What You Did Last Summer (starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle...
...Carlton Hotel; in Double Bay, Australia. Formed in 1977 as the Farriss Brothers (a reference to three of the five members), the Aussie band later opted for INXS--much hipper and better suited to Hutchence's hard-driving, sinewy appeal. The hit What You Need was topped by the bravura album Kick in 1987. Hutchence dabbled in film but stayed loyal to the band, which had been preparing for its 20th anniversary tour...
Finally, for all the undergraduates who ever left Common Casting because the parts offered were too small, Nosal's performance should be required viewing. Performances, actually. In two brief appearances as Joe's mother, she achieves brutality without being broad. Her bravura work, though, is in her single scene as Henry, Roy Cohn's doctor. "You can call [the disease] whatever you want," she tells Roy, telegraphing to the audience both how accustomed Cohn is to getting what he "wants" and how little chance he stands against this final enemy...
This is not to say Pollini was at all lacking in his fabled lyricism. With no prizes left to win and therefore little left to prove, the aging artist had no incentive to subsume beauty of tone to mere bravura. His performance of the Berceuse in D flat, nestled between the two Ballades and the muscular Op. 39 Scherzo, was a pearl--though he glided so rapidly through the right-hand runs that it didn't end up sounding all that much like a cradle song. Like the rest of the program, this piece benefited from the pianist's indescribably...
...Brahms' Op. 119, three intermezzi and a rhapsody. The first of the set, the intermezzo in B minor, is the thing of devastating beauty. Though Goode's tempi were excessively free, his princely touch and his formidable intellectual grasp of the music overwhelmed all objections. His performance of the bravura E-flat minor rhapsody was the best of the four, demonstrating superior voicing and clealiness of fingerwork...