Word: bravura
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...late-show watchers remember Spencer Tracy's bravura portrayal of Clarence Darrow and Fredric March's performance as William Jennings Bryan in the movie Inherit the Wind, a reenactment of the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial." That classic courtroom confrontation seemed to come from another era, a benighted past when a 24-year-old substitute biology teacher named John T. Scopes was actually indicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee schoolroom. But that era was not so distant after...
...Vesperae was much more exciting and slightly less well-done. The major problem was the grim Carl Orff assault which soprano Donna Newman made on the sacred coloratura aria Laudate Dominum: all the notes were there, too many of them flat, all of them invested with a Donizettian apocalyptic bravura, Mozart may have been only one year away from great operatic achievement in Idomeneo, but at the moment he was still close by the altar. Miss Curtis seemed intimidated by this Salome-like display but still bettered her prosaic performance in the Schutz. The two male soloists sang adequately, Robert...
...great Romantic composer, and he compares favorably with the late Dinu Li-patti, particularly in the slower etudes. Vasary seems to have absorbed Chopin's dreamy melancholy. He etches long, unhurried lines of somber melody, but when the music calls for it, he can be a rousing bravura player as well. Opuses 10 and 25 contain some of Chopin's most familiar writing, but in Vasary's hands, one never hears the quotation marks around the tunes...
...Time, fall 1966; place, Lincoln Center. In her dressing room at the new home of the New York City Opera, Beverly is following the operatic custom of recalling events too numerous and complex to fit dramatically into a single scene. In the dazzling aria di bravura, Wasn't It Operatic?, she sings of her successful debut in Die Fledermaus in 1955, and of her subsequent leading roles in Faust, Don Giovanni and The Ballad of Baby Doe. A quartet of music critics, bearing bouquets of flowery superlatives, utters the rousing paean, These Tired Ears Lo at Long Last Rejoice...
...knowledge of and empathy with the master's style. Mozart's most essential and yet most elusive quality is balance, the result of his unique musical genius. Though it can be emulated, it can never be reproduced. Notwithstanding certain lapses of taste--e.g., a modicum of Beethovenian bravura at the conclusion of the cadenza--and lack of classical proportion, the prodigiousness of the feat was unquestionable...