Word: tonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cast impressively succeeds in dealing with the extreme emotional and tonal shifts of the play. Every character is believable in any given scene, whether the character’s arc is logical or not. Faatin Chaudhury, as Sahar’s mother, especially hits the right mixture of wisdom and stubbornness, allowing her to be the play’s stable center, even though most of her appearances are on a landing to one side of the stage...
...show of his dutiful subservience to her, Donna Anna’s betrothed Don Ottavio (professional actor Philippe Pierce) does not reveal his vocal ability until an aria in Act II. After Donna Elvira (professional Krista Wilhelmsen) finds her “tonal center,” the three sing together powerfully about their hatred of the conniving Don Giovanni...
...Atlantic accent that the actress would use from then on. What didn't change was the flatness. She had a deep alto voice, with a cello's rich knowing, melancholy, but it was a monotone; it didn't climb or fall with the musicality most actors adopt. Her tonal range was one of the narrowest in talking pictures, and that limited her emotional range. She rarely giggled or shrieked; her voice suggested that she was either disdainful or incapable of severe highs and lows. She wasn't one to spit out rapid-fire dialogue, a vocal reticence that would have...
...some very bizarre laptop electronica and trance that seemed centered around atonal passages matched with thumping bass and punchy drum loops. The dissonance of the act became more pronounced as time went on. It would have been cool if the RPL had decided to create a sort of general tonal dynamic with their stage time, building from a low point to a crescendo, but they instead kept their loops and beats relatively flat and constant. As a result, their “tunes” quickly started to sound derivative and increasingly redundant. Even those beats that were at first...
Something about the unadulterated energy and joy of live recordings always appeals to me. Maybe it’s the interaction between performer and audience, or just the unfinished tonal dynamics that make the recording seem so much more authentic in this Pro Tools-obsessed age, but some of the most revered albums of this century have been live performances: for example, The Who’s Live at Leeds or The Allman Brothers quintessential Live at the Fillmore East. Following in this storied tradition is Neko Case’s latest release, The Tigers Have Spoken, an album that...