Word: shrill
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...lumbering plane that is nonetheless the hottest thing Laotian pilots can handle. They flew them north into the Communist-held countryside, wildly firing .30-cal. machine guns and 5-in. rockets toward any clump of trees where they thought the enemy might be hiding. Soviet commentators instantly broke into shrill cries of alarm, declared it was just like "the grim days of the 1930s, when fascist birds of prey barbarously bombed Spanish towns...
Fidel Castro's gift last week was another shrill speech, in which he threatened the entire world with economic aggression if the U.S. does not buy Cuban sugar. If other suppliers fill the gap in the U.S., cried Castro, he will wreck the trade by dumping sugar. If he meant what he said, he would also wreck the economy of Cuba, the world's largest exporter...
...midst of all this. Soprano Farrell proved only a partial blessing. In the middle range her voice is still gloriously warm, rich and powerful, as moving as any voice heard in opera today. But in the upper registers it was strained and at times shrill. Once past the strenuous milestone of a Met debut, Farrell is now eagerly awaiting La Gioconda, her other Met starring role this season. "Gioconda," she says confidently. "That's a role you can really sink your teeth into...
...economies, has unmistakably opted for the U.S. way rather than the Russian way of organizing society and producing goods. In most of the free world, the popular appeal of Communism as an alternative way of life has shrunk to nearly zero, and once-strong Communist parties have dwindled to shrill slivers. U.S. styles of living have spread around the world; even behind the Iron Curtain, teen-agers imitate their U.S. counterparts in dress and musical tastes...
...contrast, The Sentence, by Giacomo Manzoni, 28, was a shrill, spare twelve-tone work that made fiendishly difficult demands on the singers and left the orchestra pit littered, in the words of one critic, with "the murdered bodies of the instruments." Set in China in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation, the opera told of a wife who betrays her husband to the enemy, is tried by the village council and dismissed with the existentialist in junction: "We neither condemn nor absolve you. You alone can decide whether you were right or wrong, and your soul throughout eternity will...