Word: dismays
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...utterance seems to suffer from the same type of self-consciously tortured text which reduced Bernstein's Kaddish symphony to almost complete rhetorical vacuousness. The performance was frenetic rather than impassioned, especially in the closing Hebrew prayer Sh'ma Yisroel, but since the work is one organized explosion of dismay suffused with the solace of Schoenberg's fund of religious faith, the somewhat overwrought vitality of the performance was understandable...
...proportionately less impressed with the Beatles as the quantity of their quality work declines. When, out of 30 songs that are clearly not setting new standards, so very few of them are worth frothing over by one's old standards, one cannot restrain a certain sense of dismay. In fact, the Beatles have provided us with such moving delights in the past that it would be unworthy of us not to be disappointed by their failure to live up to our wildest expectations...
...this crisis seemed a bad one, with no solution in sight. "Siamo pronti per i colonnelli" ("We are ready for the colonels"), cried a young Roman in disgust at the nation's squabbling politicians. Indeed, in another, less patient land, the kind of chaos and confusion, disillusion and dismay gripping Italy would long since have provoked the army to take over. But appearances are deceiving in Italy, a country with its own peculiar laws of logic. As Luigi Barzini wrote in The Italians: "They rage against their fate today as they have always done. They have been...
...songs and dances possessed ethnic veracity and virility. As it is, the bouzouki music sounds as if it was piped in by Muzak, and the lyrics are insipid. The characteristic tone of Levantine lament is scarcely heard, since music that weeps and words soaked in pain might dismay the theater-party ladies. The dances have the look of old folk dances-any old folk. Greek fire is missing. Zorba danced because words could not contain his vaulting spirit. Bernardi clodhops, while the supporting cast dances by a timetable as if it were catching a train...
...dismay of death row, the court ruled 4 to 3 last week that capital punishment is constitutional. Vainly the three dissenters argued that the death penalty should be struck down because California law offers no guidelines to help juries decide whether a convicted man should go to prison or the gas chamber. "If a civilized society cannot say why one man should be executed and another not," replied the dissenting opinion written by Justice Mathew Tobriner, "it does not rationally, logically take life. Instead, it grossly denies due process of law, inflicting death on the basis of a trial that...