Word: piquant
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...talents Hollywood star and nymphomaniac. When Veronica's boy friend shows up with a knife, Shaw stirs up enough plot to feed parts to an army of extras, expertly guides readers through a movie-colonist's Rome, febrile with sex and chicanery. He sauces his book with piquant if dubious notions, e.g., that the Sistine Chapel proves that Michelangelo's only God was Michelangelo. But like children tottering with grown-up luggage, his characters never seem large enough for the emotions they are forced to carry...
...almost entirely on subtle variations of volume and orchestration for its effect. Moreover, it is written without much care for the capacities of the individual instruments and makes enormous, almost unattainable, demands on the rhythmic accuracy of the players. It is certainly not an aggressively unpleasant work and some piquant arrangements of the brass sonorities were intriguing. Yet, the work seems not, even after several hearings, to have justification for its length or most of its peculiar characteristics. The performance suggested that Mr. Senturia had steered the group well through the score's most complicated sections. Only a lovely oboe...
...music concerns contemporary sophistication. "Despite the heroic attempts for sublimity in the Berg Concerto, contemporary idioms in general lend themselves only with great difficulty to anything approaching the sublime. After all, though a tinkle-tinkle here and there in a Webern score may satiate one's thirst for the piquant and highly flavored, it does not quench the far more important thirst of the soul. Elevated feeling in the human spirit is generally ignored by modern composers, but it is an important response to the musical art. Any thinking person who made a list of the ten greatest compositions would...
Then there was the problem of casting. Rattigan's writing, clever as it was, seemed to Broadway audiences no more than piquant sauce at a histrionic banquet for two of the theater's most exquisitely mannered scenery chewers: Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman, who played all four of the show's principal parts (TIME, Nov. 5, 1956). Obviously, the movie people could not hope to match that, so they set out to do better-by providing their picture with one of the screen's most gifted young directors, Delbert (Bachelor Party) Mann, and with what...
Perhaps the imaginations of actor and author are not perfectly harmonious. Genet has directed that his dialogue be pronounced "with the characteristic deformations that go with the accent of the slums." Perhaps he would prefer the Hoboken accents affected by Morrow and Maharis to the not incongruous, but certainly piquant and different, pronunciation that Scott employs. On the other hand, Hoboken English is ugly, as perhaps the accent of the French slums is not. Certainly the former seems unworthy of the vivid vigor of Genet's purple passages: "Snowball's a well-built guy. If you like...