Much of that attention was lavished on Emirates' first class, where passengers travel in little suites, sleep on massaging beds and drink from personal minibars.
"Now I like to write away from the film, little suites of music, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, and adapt it to the scenes you've got in front of you".
With Smith framed by a too-big white suit, a single mic and acoustic guitar, the Academy Awards' stage seemed wholly out of scale for the singer-songwriter best known for recording little suites about drinking yourself to death.
And he did a superb job of highlighting the gently dissonant, Messiaen-like mysticism in George Crumb's "Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 198080).
The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, clean and sonorous in the concertos, provides some snappy light relief with Lutosławski's folksy, piquant Little Suite.
This weekend the Zapolski String Quartet, a guest ensemble from Denmark, returns for a second week with its own arrangement of Nielsen's "Little Suite for String Quartet".
This was a Tudor-y thing, designed by Cady, Berg & See, not really great architecture but comfy and endearing, and it formed a nice little suite with the aqueduct gatehouse and fire station next door.
The Crumb pieces – Processional and A Little Suite for Christmas – use thicker textures, drones and various extended piano techniques, with a louder presence but still retreating to hushed and fragmentary extremes.
In "Touché à Trois," Dance Times Square brought together three couples in sizzling duets: Carolina Zokalski and Diego Di Falco, Vivienne Ramsey and David Howland, and Melanie LaPatin and Tony Meredith, who also conceived this little suite.
In his interpretation of the George Crumb pieces (the noble 1983 piece Processional, the strummed strings and bell-like sounds of A Little Suite for Christmas), what comes to mind is the sumptuous grandeur of Osborne's towering 2002 recording of Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus: mystical yet grounded, muscular yet ecstatic.
A rousing response from the audience drew three encores: Dvorak's Slavonic Dance in C (Op. 46, No. 1); the "Hurra Polka" from Lutoslawski's "Little Suite"; and an ebullient rendition of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" — intended, Mr. Wit said from the stage, "to celebrate your new president, Barack Obama".
