Word: fortissimo
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...close they feel to the kissee. When Sole asks her niece Paula, "What's wrong with you?" (not knowing the girl has just been forced into murder), she shrugs and replies, "I'm at a difficult age." But the real epiphanies are not comic. Cruz, in a fortissimo performance, sings (lip-synchs, actually) the flamenco song "Volver" with a passion that expresses Raimunda's indomitable peasant will. And in a lovely moment, on the first night Irene has come to live with her, Sole crawls into bed and cuddles up with the sleeping ghost of her mother...
...large choirs and eight vocal soloists. At a performance of the piece last month by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the forces were just shy of 500, more than enough to achieve the sense of grandeur that Mahler envisioned. In the finale, when the massed musicians joined in a mighty fortissimo, and the organist literally pulled out all the stops, glorious sound washed through the Esplanade concert hall like a thrilling sonic typhoon. It was a fine, acceptably idiomatic rendition of one of the most exalted masterpieces of German Romanticism?performed on an equatorial island in Southeast Asia...
...applause he?d hear would be part nostalgia, part gratitude. Ray Charles, Little Richard and Fats Domino were the collective Jackie Robinson of mid-century music. They zapped the poor, wan, white pop tunes of the day with a jolt of sex, anguish and fortissimo pianistry. A thing called soul. That?s a kind of genius, and deserves a half-century of thanks...
...Other improvements over "Whole Lotta Shakin' ": 1) Jerry Lee's pianistry was never so pertinently fortissimo. 2) The singing has a ferocious assurance, hitting preacher-like peaks. 3) And because the song is in the deranged-exclamatory mode - the lyric engorged with religio-carnal seizures ("You came along and mooooved me, honey!"), adolescent giddiness ("Kiss me, baby! Mmm-mm, feels good!"), desperate anticipation ("Hold me, baby! Well, I wants to love you like a lover should!") and obsessive-compulsive behavior ("I chew my nails and I twiddle my thumb!") - the comic intensity of JLL's glissandous vocal underlines, not undermines...
...just as willful and complex playing Arnie, the retarded boy living under a death sentence in What's Eating Gilbert Grape; as he is playing Meryl Streep's pyromaniac son Hank in Marvin's Room. Other young actors, to keep viewers on their side, would strike the sympathy key fortissimo. But DiCaprio, knowing that he had a cuddly-toy quality (a face just shy of puberty, a smile that, in his first TV spot, was used to sell milk), barely rouged the rougher aspects of his characters. Toby is a decent kid, but his stabs at '50s punkdom rasp...