Word: poignant
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Pope Benedict XVI's triumphant return to his Bavarian hometown of Marktl am Inn four years ago - his first since becoming Pontiff - was made all the more poignant by the presence of his older brother, Georg Ratzinger. Five decades after they'd entered seminary together, the new Pontiff and the retired church-choir director stepped with the same soft gait and wavy white hair into the town's tiny riverside chapel. Praying silently side by side, they might just as well have been an aging pair of humble village priests...
...song finds Mercer’s piercing voice singing a refrain with just the right amount of poeticism—“Cause they know and so do I / The high road is hard to find”—over an adroitly robotic synth melody. A poignant piano and bass bridge takes the song into a saccharine folk outro that sounds like it could have been lifted directly from a Shins album...
...Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 in F major. Cortese skillfully guided the interplay of violins, cellos, French horn, and oboe through the thick harmonies of the first and second movements. The highlight of the evening’s performance was undoubtedly the third movement, with a hauntingly poignant melody that does not easily leave memory. Driven by the orchestra’s momentum, Cortese led the fourth movement to the evening’s positively triumphant conclusion...
...change or novelty. Anything new in movies seems less like progress and more like a renunciation of the artistic standards they were nurtured on. Consider that in 1942, the Academy gave its top awards, Best Picture and Director, to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a poignant evocation of a Welsh mining town. Fine, honorable, fully worthy. The film it beat: Citizen Kane. Who needs all those low-angle shots, the deep-focus cinematography, the oblique, multifaceted view of a powerful publisher? Those aren't innovations; they're ostentations - cinematic showing off. Thus the Academy blew its chance...
...prodigious, and perhaps unexpected, ability to incorporate outside influences into her own style. “Occident,” the twelfth track, evokes Regina Spektor. Weighty piano chords, mirrored by the full-bodied quality of Newsom’s vocals, recall Spektor’s characteristically poignant, minimalistic ballads. Despite the mark of external influence, however, “Occident” ultimately bears Newsom’s personal stamp. Newsom’s characteristically inscrutable lyrics shine (“Smoke-heart, curb your taste / Smoke me out of my hiding place”) and her voice maintains...