But the score is wondrous, a mosaic of infectious dances, glorious arias, ebullient choruses, elegant recitative and vivid pictorial music that evokes nature, thunder and icy winds.
They evoke the thundering herds of long-ago Westerns.
The music, by Ernst von Dohnányi, and the choreography evoke the thundering sweep of a juicily exhilarating ballet class.
Characteristically, the elegiac, transparent tone of Mr. Savall's performances evokes candlelight, contemplation, distant thunder.
The assistant superintendent's nickname is Gunpowder, a detail that evokes the boom of thunder as well as the Petersburg Church of Elijah, which stood at the gunpowder factory.
Their most frequent use on this instrument was to evoke the sound of thunder, but also to portray sounds of battle, storms at sea, earthquakes, and Biblical scenes such as the fall of the walls of Jericho and visions of the apocalypse.
After living for a short time in Manhattan, Mr. Still, in 1961, moved to Westminster, Md., where he continued to paint bold, dramatically colored, textured canvases evoking stone precipices, jagged mountain ridges and thundering cascades.
Even if it were possible to deliver all that elusive thunder and lightning, the communal ecstasies that the movie's talking heads evoke can probably be tasted only by plunging into the full experience.
Elizabeth Rhodes's understated sound design offers textures like distant thunder, the faint din of a passing train and the quiet patter of rain, vividly evoking a sultry, breezy Florida evening on the verge of a tropical storm.
His trumpet sound on ballads often had the low purr of a flugelhorn, and there were some transfixing unaccompanied passages from Virelles, whose solos were frequently full of dense trills and thundering chords that evoked an African drum ensemble.
"Thundering, but unlike thunder.
