Word: torpid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...brass in the familiar opening "Promenade" and "Gnomus" effectively blurted out the image of the exhibition and the composer's ambling from picture to picture. But until near the final "Hut on Fowl's Leg" and "Great Gate of Kiev," the performance seemed a bit weighted down and torpid in parts. The quick changes of mood in the "Promenades," with the horn, winds and violins heralding a new picture, were well enough evoked. But in certain spots, such as the high-pitched "Il Vecchio Castello," the Orchestra seemed tame...
...Torpid Crawl. That was as far as he got. At the A.B.A.'s 99th annual meeting in Atlanta last week, Spann won by a lopsided 260-to-59 vote in the governing House of Delegates.* But the Jeffers insurgency was a signal that recent efforts to move the A.B.A. onto a moderately activist course may have slowed to a torpid snail's crawl. Reported TIME Correspondent David Beckwith: "It was almost as if the bar was withdrawing from its leadership role in public discussion of today's issues." Delegates sidetracked a resolution opposing restrictions on abortion...
...Moscow. There low-calorie diets and drug treatments produce pain and suffering as acute as more physical methods of repression. One dissenter, Cybernetics Specialist Leonid Plyushch, now living in Paris, testified that he was kept in the Dnepropetrovsk Special Hospital for 30 months after getting a spurious diagnosis of "torpid schizophrenia" with "reform-making illusions." Plyushch saw beatings applied to other patients. He himself received insulin and heavy doses of sulfur which caused "discomfort so intense that all you could do was endlessly search for a new position...
...Puritani contains scarcely any drama at all. What plot it has concerns two noble lovers who are temporarily made unhappy by conflicting allegiances to Cavaliers and Roundheads in 17th century England. The opera unfolds like a torpid, benign Lucia di Lammermoor: it has a hero who prefers politics to love, a heroine who goes mad. By the time all turns out for the best, it is hard to remember what went wrong: three scenes contain no action of any kind...
...matter how many car crashes or family arrests occur, the atmosphere in Fernwood is torpid. Many of the laughs stem from people's misunderstandings of the simplest things. The real threats come from family and close friends. Mary's kitchen telephone is an instrument of bedevilment. The wonder is that she still picks it up; she has rarely heard any good or even neutral news over it. Many lines, especially in the kitchen scenes, can seem funny and pathetic at once. Informed by a caller of yet another crisis, Mary replies, "I can't talk...