Word: tautness
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...Chicago Symphony. Winner and still champion, Solti's virtuosic ensemble has been the finest in the U.S. for more than a decade, and was often close to the top under earlier music directors like Fritz Reiner (1953-62). The orchestra's strengths are its burnished brass and taut, lean, precise string section, which give its performances a crispness and vitality that are the despair of its rivals. "I have never had a better-spirited orchestra than this one," says Solti, 70. "If they have a conductor they respect, they will go through hell for him." The Chicago spirit...
...composer's message. "My function," he says, "is to be a necessary middleman, not a willful, distorting, idiosyncratic, egocentric middleman." His high performance standards are derived from three major influences: Toscanini, Soprano Maria Callas and Director Wieland Wagner. From the incandescent Toscanini, Levine learned the value of a taut, singing musical line. Callas, the indomitable spirit who assaulted her audiences with intense, molten performances, taught Levine that opera must always be convincing as drama, not simply a collection of voices gift wrapped in period costumes. Wagner, who restored Bayreuth to glory after World War II, showed him that opera...
...quickly approaching middle age. We see the tension that propels the desperate Dorsey through all his relationships. Unwilling to conform to other people's ideas, he can't take criticism and rubs his colleagues and friends the wrong way Hoffman shows Dorsey's brittle talent in every detailed highly taut motion. Basically a failure, Dorsey frantically waits tables, instructs a fledgling group of actors, and fights with an agent who can get him any acting stints. Yet glittering of charm he behind the rigid actor as he goes throughout his hectic existence...
...showdown at last week's meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna was taut and grim. At one of the long rectangular tables sat Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the elegantly groomed Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia. At another, roughhewn and tieless, was Seyyed Mohammad Gharazi of Iran. The issue before them was the control of OPEC itself. The result: a draw that deepened the most severe crisis in OPEC'S 22-year history and raised doubts about whether the organization can ever function as an effective cartel...
Roses In December (PBS). A taut documentary by Ana Carrigan and Bernard Stone about the killing of Jean Donovan, a lay missionary who worked with the Maryknoll nuns in El Salvador. An exemplary piece of humane film making that avoided political sentimentality and glib answers...