While he cannot come near Britten in expressing sinister erotic appeal, Mr. Berkeley is good at murky scene-setting, as in the opening low glissando figures, and at moments of exasperation, like the passage where Rochester's baritone seems to be pushed up and tightened by an insistent piccolo.
(In a television world where every other character seems to be a cop, a lawyer, a doctor or a television personality, this strikes an unusual note of reality.) The accident itself -- a flood caused by the miners' accidentally breaking through to an old mine filled with ground water -- becomes, on screen, murky scenes of rushing water and of men holding on to whatever they can for dear life.
Mr. Malhotra, who has been observing Indian politics for 60 years, said, "I have sadly to admit that never before have I witnessed a murkier scene".
Slowly, as the lighting brightens after the murky opening scene, you recognize them: Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Liberace, Charlie Chaplin, King Henry VIII, monks, suffragettes and more.
Argentina presents a murky picture.
Despite murky nightclub scenes, Schipper does not appear to have used darkness to cheat in cuts, the way Alfred Hitchcock did with his single-take movie Rope, from 1948.
Take the murky, quietly ominous opening scene of Act II of "Götterdämmerung," when we see the tormented Hagen, the son of Alberich, in a moment of isolated despair.
But in keeping with the production's eerie sensibility, the chorale first appears as murky underscoring in early scenes.
The scene became murkier when heroin became cheaply available and kids younger than me were regularly chasing the dragon wherever you went.
