Word: floridity
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...Cassidy was read mostly for her attacks. Her reviews were often florid, sometimes shockingly inaccurate-she once confused Haydn with Prokofiev-but rarely dull. After seeing Olivia de Havilland in Candida, she wrote: "A pallid, one-dimensional heroine in a kind of comic-strip Shaw. When she enters, she is an interruption, nothing more." She dismissed Conductor Rafael Kubelik: "The symphony was as shapeless as his curious beat, being distorted by arms stiff as driving pistons or limp as boiled spaghetti...
...richly varied, stylishly photographed settings that effuse the florid flavor of the period, the writing-directing team of Festa Campanile and Massimo Franciosa brings to the foreground an impoverished layabout named Meo (Paolo Ferrari). Meo bungles his way into the Vatican vocal conservatory that separates the boys from the men, bribes the surgeon not to operate on him, but somehow manages to retain a passable falsetto. Later favored by the nobility, the false capon cuckolds his patrons. He reveals his secret to one elegant lady (Anouk Aimée) while he helps her undress. Another (Barbara Steele) learns the truth...
Newscaster's Diction. Though Semiramide is musically the most brilliant of Rossini's 35 operas, it has not been staged in the U.S. since 1906. Written in 1823 as a florid showcase for the human voice, Semiramide is among the most fiendishly difficult of all operas to sing, a kind of vocal decathlon that requires a range and stylistic flexibility that few if any modern-day singers would or could tackle-that is, until Horne and Sutherland came along. But both their husbands decided that not even Rossini's musical scrollwork was adequate to display the full...
Reviewing the legal precedents for a decision in either direction, Macaulay decided Fanny Hill "goes far beyond and substantially beyond customary limits of candor and makes persistent appeals to shameful and morbid interests in prolonged, detailed and florid descriptions of sexual activities;" he also asserted his agreement with the dissent in the 4-3 New York Court of Appeals decision that the book is protected by the First Amendment...
Brezhnev, a florid, clever politician who so far, however, has mostly performed ceremonial functions, inherited the more powerful of Khrushchev's jobs and the one that has been traditionally the key to Soviet power: the secretaryship of the Communist Party. Kosygin, a trained economist and business-minded technician who has had little political experience but may just be the smarter and deeper of the two, inherited the premiership. Both had been known as Khrushchev's prot...