I wasn't sorrowful, but I just contemplated.
The concert wasn't sorrowful; in fact the band played with more vigor than usual, and Jon Faddis, its music director, moved the program along swiftly, playing his trademark, ear-drilling high-note trumpet solos as often as possible.
"The day I quit, I'm sure I'll not be sorrowful, but instead I'll be starting the rest of my life," she said.
The video suggests that three parents who lost their children were not sufficiently sorrowful, and that Gene Rosen, the resident quoted in so many news reports, was a "crisis actor".
These first-person narratives are not the sorrowful takes of the women left behind, but the voices of the dead combatants, reminding us – and we need constant reminders – that war is hell.
Now, however, it is not a sorrowful lament that is popular, but instead vocal support for a divisive "be on you own" charter school policy.
The scherzo had clarity and deftness; the funeral march was subdued and genuinely sorrowful, not menacing; and the presto finale had point, shape and purpose.
Nino doesn't have her best friend Lila's "capacity to make everything fascinating," Elena observes coolly, but he is well informed, and when he discusses issues like poverty, he sounds less like a teen-ager than a man, speaking "not generically, in sorrowful accents... but concretely, impersonally, citing precise facts".
And this is probably the generic result of seeing the famine not as a sorrowful tragedy, but as a matter of criminal constitutional negligence, with colonial rulers creating a serf class of disenfranchised tenant farmers, whose product was exported and who were made dependent for subsistence on a single, blight-vulnerable strain of potato.
It's a not-quite-sincere exercise in wish fulfillment -- the members deliver the words they think their female listeners want to hear -- and the singers' close harmony makes it sound as if the plea is being delivered not by a sorrowful lover but by an R & B robot.
