Word: tone
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...result sounds a bit like a Broadway show, but one composed by a pop-culture channel surfer on uppers. Jackie is a sweet-toned lyric soprano; Ari, a bass-baritone, is a smarmy lounge lizard (one of his big arias is marked in the score, "Freely sung, a la Dean Martin"). The music they sing jumps joltingly from folk rock to Motown to big-band jazz, all kaleidoscopically orchestrated for a 19-piece pit band with two percussionists. And although the tone is mostly light and lively, an unexpectedly affecting streak of melancholy surfaces whenever Jackie sings of her lost...
...sing hymns. It's a boring place, or a silly myth, or something people invent in order to make themselves feel better, or all of the above." Had Russell spoken these words a decade ago, it would surely have been in something close to despair. His tone today, however, can only be called cheerful...
Indeed February conjures perfectly the dull, grey tone that glazes the whole novel. The tone is diffuse, though, due to Clark's heavy use of metaphors. Every character's gesture and description of setting evokes a precise image in Clark's mind that he can capture only in reference to another. While these images are exacting and often beautiful, they are confusing. In the words of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which Clark was reading while he was writing his novel, "we get our thoughts entangled in metaphors...
...Anna and grandson Douglas, and Anna's lover Charles Norden. The book opens as Richard is riding in a train to retrieve the body of his brother James who had just been killed in a hunting accident. "Perhaps the world was a wound..." the novel begins, and the despairing tone grows ever more hopeless from there. Later in the chapter, a grieving Richard sorts through James' belongings and discovers a letter that leads him to believe that his wife Sarah had an affair with James. Unable to confront his own shock, let alone Sarah, Richard becomes more and more detached...
Munroe started off well with the first of two delightful arias about the fickleness of women and hit peak form in the famous love-aria at the beginning of Act Three, combining expressive phrasing and a smooth, full richness of tone that impressed even this Pavarotti fan. But he faded a bit in the other favorite, "La donna e mobile" (in this translation, "Woman's fidelity") and went slightly hoarse in the lilting, flirtatious duet with Madalena. Nevertheless, he brought a professional polish and pleasing musicality to the role immortalized by Luciano...