This year, in performances today, next Sunday and on Christmas, it offers the Baroque program, presumably including Charpentier's almost comically morose setting of the famous "folia" tune, which other Baroque composers put to riotous use, and the anonymous "Old Yeare Now Away Is Fled," "Greensleeves" by another name and in a slightly tipsy mode.
Introducing the latter, a brilliant rhythm and blues-influenced ditty about a girl putting on a pink dress for her wedding, she asks: "Am I allowed to dance in this kind of place?" This upbeat interlude in an otherwise morose set does have an edge -the reference to her 2011 Las Vegas wedding to Barry Herridge (at which she wore a pink dress) is hard to avoid.
It is his habit, once he has finished a book, to deliver it in person to Random House, and as the time for setting off cross country draws near, he becomes increasingly morose.
So she starts adding to its pages herself and the stage is set for a morose repository of creative writing, furious bitching and heartbreaking asides.
The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a salaryman Hamlet set in a morose, postwar Japanese society, is extremely fine, but the masterwork is surely Kumonosu-Jo, an eerie and suspenseful Macbeth glowering with atmosphere, and where the horror is all in the shadows.
When the newspaper strike set in, the retriever kept looking for the "Times", and in a couple of days he became morose at his failure to find it.
"Under the Sun" is set against the drab, gray background of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, with no narration and a morose, string-heavy score.
When Brendan Hansen set a world record in the 200-meter breaststroke, Gaines made the overly ebullient Scott Hamilton sound like a morose undertaker.
His image of a desolate row of petrol pumps in New Mexico; a cowboy lounging by a rubbish bin in New York; a morose, stooping lift attendant; a hunched figure by an arrow-shaped neon sign in Los Angeles: all look like amateur snapshots when set against the formal beauty and tonal range of photographs by Edward Weston, say, or Ansel Adams.
The stage is set for David to be humiliated each week by his parents' shenanigans, with timeouts for a couple of other sitcom staples, the morose sister and the childhood crush who's still in town.
The story Amal uncovers is set in motion by the widowed Anna Winterbourne's journey to Egypt in 1900, undertaken to try to restore her equilibrium after her husband's morose decline following his return from service with Kitchener's forces in the Sudan.
