Word: counterpoint
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...without an actor of Ian Richardson's scope and power. His voice is like the trumpet of the Lord at the Second Coming. He can insinuate like a violin, wheedle like a clarinet and thunder anathemas like a great bass drum. And alongside that, Richardson maintains a physical counterpoint of impish comic invention, which is an equally essential element of the Shavian rhetoric...
...heightened the farce and added intrigue to personalities by setting each character to a modern musical rhythm with lyrics to match, in idioms such as Motown, salsa or samba. He collaborates well with his predecessor. There's a different kind of earthiness in each of them, and a lively counterpoint develops between the out-front 20th-century numbers and the Shakespearean run-around of the spoken parts...
...tune emerges, though, as Iggy's musical and emotional salvation. The love song, "China Girl," shows off the richness and flexibility he can achieve. A tinny xylophone riff wraps around the lead guitar in beautiful counterpoint, and the use of electronic media is sensitive and restrained. Carefully punctuated, many-layered, "China Girl" unfolds to a solo guitar fadeout which mimics the beginning theme, in the most cohesive track on the album. As the China Girl soothes him at the end of the song, I began to wonder if she had the secret that Iggy, in the dum dum daze...
Lancelot tells another hurricane story as an emblem of his apocalyptic intentions and in counterpoint to the movie and all it represents. A moment of brilliant clarity hit a middle-aged couple in the face of the hurricane: they realized and said out loud how bored they were with their lives and each other, made terrific love during the storm, and "took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce." Lancelot's and Percy's hurricanes are meant to sweep out the artificial hurricane of false elation and superficial radicalism that...
Vinnette Carroll, who wrote and staged Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, was responsible a few seasons back for a similar hit, Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope. She seems to have a feeling for the counterpoint of spirituality and sensuality that is characteristic of the temperament and life-style of many U.S. blacks...