Porter was responding to a set of grim A&E performance statistics issued on Friday by NHS England which have fuelled increasing fears that the health service is facing a winter crisis even before very cold weather has arrived.
Unlike most of the audience, to judge from the clamorous ovation afterward, this lover of Mahler's Third Symphony found precious little to love in the grim, overcontrolled performance of the work by Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall on Friday evening.
Most grim is the performance of buyout-backed IPOs from their offering dates to July 14, according to data from Thomson.
It was a grim first-quarter performance despite the small upgrade.
The RX-7 arrived in a relatively grim era for automotive performance, and it delighted the automotive press with the performance of its 100-horsepower, 1,146-cubic-centimeter engine, designated the 12A by Mazda.
At the area's blue chip companies, stock performance has turned grim as growth has slowed.
That's a bit much: she gave the kind of grim, two-level "psychological" performance that offers nothing flexible or playful, nothing that allows you to feel any intimacy with her.
But it also suggests the grim idea that the performance artist, liberated from Soviet state control, may be carrying his own culture's atavistic wish for order and repression.
The program opened with Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C Minor for strings, music inspired by the composer's discovery of Bach, in a somewhat grim and bass-heavy performance that had too much rectitude for its own good -- not the message you want to send in opening the "Great Performers" series.
