Word: fortissimo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that the legitimately rhetorical is not allowed to burgeon (or "escalate," to use up-to-date terminology) into the bombastic. It is all too easy for Julius Caesar, in performance, to turn into one long shouting match. The present production is not sufficiently free of this tendency. Fortissimo speech is not this troupe's strongpoint; and some of its playing goes so far out of control as to be totally unintelligible. Its actors need to learn that forcefulness is not necessarily directly proportional to loudness...
...little legs and lots of pictures on it. 'My mother. Queen Mary, arranged that,' the Duke said. I saw I couldn't do much with the piano, so I decided to play a Chopin Polonaise, invariably an effective piece for an unmusical person. When I struck the first big fortissimo chord, the entire piano collapsed at my feet. That was the end of the concert...
Many voices are impressive at one dynamic level and not at another. But here was a voice of supreme quality throughout all gradations, from full-bodied fortissimo down to a barely audible pianissimo. My evaluation was hardly unique, and Price's performance won him the Theatre World Award. (Unfortunately, the recording of the show was a limited special edition and is not commercially available...
...descends upon. It has its share of clever lines; but the show's great virtue is the transcendentally brilliant performance by young Diana Sands. Hitherto mainly admired for her power in serious drama, she shows here that comedy is just as much her forte. Or, in this case, fortissimo--for she bulldozes her way right through the show with an incredible display of dynamic vigor and histrionic virtuosity. She can take a run-of-the-mill phrase or line and make you double over. What a gall Alan Alda makes up the rest of this tandem tantrum...
There are 136 pyramidal ceiling reflectors for sound, but no one is eager to tinker with them. At its opening, Scharoun's new hall seemed acoustically excellent as Von Karajan filled its angular spaces with squiggles of sound from softest pianissimo to heftiest fortissimo, leading his firstchair men through a delicate movement of a Haydn string quartet and then the full orchestra through Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Critics breathed sighs of relief over the splendid sound-function, it seemed, had not been betrayed by revolutionary form...