Fortunately, Kidman delivers... her performance is muted but reliably intense, hinting at wounded depths beneath Franklin's implacably chilly exterior... Grandage's production is a worthy effort, but a little passionless, inherently limited in dramatic force by its subject matter.
Stradella's own operas have not figured prominently in the Baroque revival of our time, but if they are comparable in dramatic force to the oratorio "San Giovanni Battista," performed Sunday afternoon in the "Music Before 1800" series at Corpus Christi Church, they ought to be investigated.
The targets of her lust seem so pretty and callow that they can't be serious rivals, and the film's last third, during which the couple's luck turns bad, is so predictable and lacking in dramatic force that not even the glories of the Acropolis at dusk or the shimmering lights of the Bosphorus can save the movie.
The duet "Je frémis", says Dean, has clear hints of Verdi's, and the fiery chorus "Dès que le soleil" is reminiscent of a Mendelssohn scherzo, but otherwise the final act's music is weak and lacking in dramatic force.
But the payoff in the dramatic force of playing up the rivalry is no doubt worth the twisting of the truth.
Luther had quietly commandeered the folksongs of his day, transforming them into congregational hymns, turning what was a basic and easily approachable musical form into an enduring doctrinal tool, never more so than in his Easter hymn, "Christ lag in Todesbanden", which Bach clothed in music of unforgettable dramatic force in his cantata of that title.
Puccini: Messa di Gloria; Preludio Sinfonico; Crisantemi Palombi/Lundberg/ HungarianOpera Orch and Radio Choir/Morandi (Naxos) *** £4.99 Written in his early 20s but unearthed only in the 1950s, Puccini's Messa di Gloria points forward to his operatic style in colour and dramatic force.
With stage performance specifically in mind, Ah1 renders Seneca's dramatic force in a modern idiom and style that move easily between formality and colloquialism as the text demands, and he strives to reproduce the richness of the original Latin, to retain the poetic form, images, wordplays, enigmas, paradoxes, and dark humor of Seneca's tragedies.
Whips and hammers are introduced into the orchestration of this trilogy, a work of great dramatic force, in which the chorus is required to groan, whistle, and shriek.
Blasco Ibáñez' early work, composed mainly of regional novels such as Flor de mayo (1895; Mayflower, 1921), La barraca (1898; The Cabin, 1917), and Cañas y barro (1902; Reeds and Mud, 1966), is marked by a vigorous and intense realism and considerable dramatic force in the depiction of the life of Valencia.
In the landmark 1971 book "The Classical Style," Charles Rosen wrote that Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata (Op. 47) "has a first movement unequaled in formal clarity, grandeur and dramatic force by anything that Beethoven had yet written".
