Word: tone
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Stomp seems to be serious about its philosophy. In performance, it really does make startling, beautiful use of the unexpected. The opening act sets the tone for the rest of the show: A young man, wearing a scruffy work shirt and jeans splattered with paint, enters from the wings, pushing a large broom before him across the dusty floor. Evidently intrigued by the noises made by the rhythmic swish of the broom's bristles against the floor, he begins to experiment with its tempo and pressure, resulting in swishes and taps of varying pitch and loudness...
...lighthearted mood of the piece. Mozart develops his musical ideas in a straightforward way, referring only once to the music within the opera. Filling in for BSO Principal Guest Conductor Bernard Haitink, Andrew Davis carried off a fabulous execution of this overture. The orchestra achieved a beautiful, warm tone, but still managed to capture all the playfulness of the piece...
...second movement "Largo" continues the both the warmth and the darkness of tone, but with a more brooding aspect. Throughout were hints of dirrerent military sounds, jarring sorrowfully together. At times the orchestra seemed overly lugubrious, but the interesting interspersions of piano and harp added to the variety of this section...
...third movement opens with a quick, exciting string passage, and overall conveys a morehopeful tone than its preceding movements. There is a regular, bouncy rhythm echoing throughout the different sections of the orchestra--about as bouncy as Prokofiev could ever write. There is a meditative scene in the midst of this action that the orchestra portrayed very gracefully. But it quickly turns back to marching notes of stridency and urgency--and the symphony ends with a bang, not a whimper...
...appropriate in the first chapter, where Dyson speaks of "How [she] got the story and learned to love markets." Her attempts to find a vocational niche in Moscow and her participation on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties organization, require less of the conversational tone used in discussing her childhood dinners with Nobel Laureates. However, the same informal atmosphere lingers throughout her writing, even as she moves forward to discuss more global issues of content control and privacy on the Internet...