Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...honor of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) decided to give the people of Boston a present: the production of Carmen on the Common. Over the past year, the BLO has spent over a million dollars on Carmen, and its employees have poured an equal amount of energy into the project. Some could imagine, however, that even the most resourceful of BLO employees were overwhelmed upon discovering that the Boston Common sprinklers had soaked all of the costumes the day of the dress rehearsal...
Judging from the crowd and the applause, one may safely conclude that the Boston Lyric Opera’s outreach to the people of the greater Boston area was a definite success...
...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...
...joined by a foreground tapping (presumably the rim of the snare drum), as if someone is keeping time on the mike with his buck teeth. In the bridge, Jerry Lee's left hand rumbles menacingly up to the break, when four-note poundings heighten the melodrama of the lyric: "You're fine, so kind/ Got to tell this world that you're mine mine mine mine!" Back to the verse, with more rumblings and eruptions - "C'mon, baby, ya drive me crazy" - and on to the two instrumental sections...
...sounds a little flat in the upper registers. Then JLL races into his vocal. This is a 12-bar blues with a difference: the breaks come not in the first two lines (as in, say, Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally") but in the fourth and sixth, giving the lyric room to build to a natural dramatic climax and the pianist room to paint his sound-portrait. Of course there's a slew of arpeggios (eight, to the all-time record 11 in "Great Balls") and the satyr-singer's invocation of the magic moment "when your hips start rockin...