Word: bravura
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...committed horrible crimes," he confesses before he goes, "but the worst crime of all is me." Possibly, but next to Actor Harvey-who acts with the strutting, stagy bravura of Early Barrymore -come the screenwriter (Ben Maddow), the director (Charles Walters), and the author's agent who made the deal in the first place...
Janis' playing, as a result, tends to be taut and full of nervous energy. In the coolly classic moods of a composer like Mozart, his performances can be erratic, but few pianists have Janis' flair for the big bravura pieces of Tchaikovsky or Liszt. Last week's concert, studded with thunderous chords and octaves, Zipperlike runs and occasionally a singing, tenoresque line, proved to be a wrist-breaking tour de force. When he came out to take a bow, looking as frail as Liszt himself, Pianist Janis seemed the least exhausted man in the house...
Brahms' Symphony No. 3 in F, Donald Francis Tovey has demonstrated, is not only the composer's most romantic and picturesque work, but also his most technically challenging one. That the HRO even attempted to play the piece shows to my mind considerable bravura; that they also performed it--and performed it well--is really quite phenomenal...
Brief, well-structured and without bravura effects, Wallant's novel compresses whole chapters about the sorrowing man and his marriage into a few sentences. Plumber Joe Berman, the hero, packs a quarter-century into a single moment of nostalgia as he daydreams about his wife on their 25th anniversary: "He knew the little collapses of her body, the age-ugly folds and wrinkles, and he loved and revered her all the more for the neat, attractive exterior she was still capable of. He was her proud ally in the public appearance...
...Beethoven sonatas, to which Richter added works by Schubert, Schumann and Chopin as encores. Swaying, gyrating, twisting his face into gargoyle grimaces, Richter at times lowered his jutting jaw until it almost touched the keys, at other times threw his head back in a kind of trancelike reverie. His bravura passages had a grandeur with no hint of pounding, his pianissimos a feather lightness, and his crescendos or decrescendos were so tightly controlled that they seemed to swell and diminish like the modulations of a well-trained voice...