Word: fortissimos
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...Iowa. The avant-garde composition began "as an English dance rhapsody and developed into a symphony more or less against my will," explained Burgess. Its finale is "corny, full of schmalz, with a mandolin tinkling away in the background," and at the end "the orchestra plays a single fortissimo chord of C major and everybody goes off for a drink." The music's mystery may be rooted in its unusual creation. Burgess, 58, wrote at least half of his symphony while on a lecture tour of the U.S. earlier this year. "The score was sent to [Conductor] James Dixon...
...takes extreme care to shape and mold the large sections. Last summer he did some work on Beethoven's Eighth Syphony with the Summer School Orchestra. The first movement of this piece is a big shout of excitement, energetic and very loud for the most part, with many fortissimo markings. However, at the beginning of the recapitulation, there is the only fortississimo marked, a distinction that is not easy to make and is usually left unobserved. But Chen made sure to gradate the whole movement so that that triple forte would be the supreme climactic moment. The result...
...became the expressionist weapon on behalf of the masses-"those individual people," as Martin Buber wrote, "naked under their clothes, blood coursing under their skins, all of whose exposed heartbeats together would drown out the united voices of the machines." The pictorial result was a labored and rather masochistic fortissimo, executed in the belief that feeling was all: jagged lines, dissonant and fulgid colors, heavy gloom. The level of sophistication, except in Klee, Feininger, Schiele and occasionally Beckmann, was close to zero. Expressionism was a young man's movement, the creation (like Dadaism) of people in their...
...gray walls, view of the White House, and medallions, statuettes and busts of Herschensohn's heroes: Nixon (several), Lincoln (two), Churchill, Washington, Moshe Dayan, Beethoven and a miniature Mt. Rushmore. If he can, Herschensohn takes his delegations first to the Cabinet Room. The moment is profound, rising to fortissimo on Nixon's blue and gold oval rug with the woven Presidential Seal...
Composed when Beethoven, never a particularly graceful vocal composer, had long been deaf, the Missa Solemnis reflects its composer's implacable unwillingness to make allowances for performers' limitations. The soprano part, abounds with sustained Forte. As and B flats. Often called upon to sing Fortissimo for long passages, Adams's choir coped with their hard-to-negotiate vocal lines courageously, and by and large, successfully. The balance was usually fairly good, with the men tending to outweigh the women at times. A large measure of the success of this performance was due to the sensitivity with which the choir responded...