Word: brisking
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...chilling scenario -- and one that was averted only because commandos of the French gendarmerie stormed the Air France jetliner last week on the tarmac of Marseilles' Marignane Airport, killing the four hijackers in a brisk firefight and freeing the plane's 173 passengers and crew. Miraculously, none of the rescuers or hostages perished during the assault. Thirteen passengers, three crew members and nine policemen were wounded, only one seriously, in one of the most successful antiterrorist operations in aviation history...
Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies (Archiv). What did Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies sound like in Beethoven's day? John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique try to show us by using gut-stringed fiddles, valveless horns and other period instruments, and by adopting brisk tempos. To listen to this electrifying set is to rediscover these revolutionary compositions in all their terror and wonder...
...must be said that director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Paul Attanasio are great guys to waste time with. As he's proved with Quiz Show, the latter has a real flair for writing strong, confrontational scenes -- brisk, needling, well shaped -- and the former stages them with coolly concentrated intensity. And the cast is terrific. Douglas, with Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct behind him, knows all about playing male victimization without total loss of amour propre. Moore's ferocity is totally unredeemed, therefore totally riveting. Donald Sutherland as their boss is computer-like: he has an almost-human brain...
...with teddy bear dancers as sugar plum fairies, Arabian houris and Chinese pandas, is delicate, funny, winning. The climactic Nativity tableau -- teeming with camels, sheep, donkeys and some robust piety -- is bold enough to remind the audience who the real star of Christmas is. And, yes, there's a brisk, fanciful version of the Scrooge story -- in 12 minutes...
Another result of the modernization of instruments is that tempos have become slower than Beethoven intended. The strings of his time simply could not sustain chords as long as the instruments of today can. Gardiner takes Beethoven's metronome markings -- once scorned as impossibly brisk -- at face value. The performances are therefore far nimbler than is typical, but such is the virtuosity of Gardiner's 60-piece orchestra that the music never seems rushed or scrambled. Listen, for example, to the famous finale of the Ninth / Symphony. The "Turkish march" usually sounds like an inappropriately comic intrusion in an otherwise...