It shimmers from the far side of an immaculate, perfectly geometrical lawn.
There the reef was coral and perfectly straight, making an immaculate wave, and the water was warm — the island where the wave broke straddled the equator, a hundred miles west of Sumatra — but the last section before the channel there also wrapped around luxuriously, inviting a sharp last maneuver, although on a larger scale.
It's a dreamy, sentimental song (Benjamin Gibbard sings, "I am thinking it's a sign/ That the freckles in our eyes are mirror images and when we kiss they're perfectly aligned"), but the immaculate video emphasizes the precision of the producer Jimmy Tamborello's electronic beat.
But the mixture of improvisation with immaculate planning is perfectly exemplified by James Corden's brilliant Francis.
The camera followed them through their palace, through their immaculate gardens with perfectly manicured trees and automatic sprinklers to water the lawns.
He was on magnificent, noble form – his diction immaculate, every phrase perfectly shaped, the singing of the farewell more beautiful than that of any other Wotan I've ever heard.
The performance respects that restraint, and never pries too far beneath the immaculate veneers; all perfectly pleasant, but this is music to sample piecemeal rather than in large helpings.
Until just before his death, Mr. Tormé was in complete command of a formidable pop-jazz technique in which every tone was a perfectly formed pearl in an immaculate necklace of polished musical phrases.
Even with some of the greatest Wagner singers of the present day onstage here, it was the orchestral playing that regularly demanded the attention, whether it was the effortless depth of tone in the strings, the sheer solidity and easy assertiveness of the brass, the perfectly defined pianissimos or the immaculate articulation of every solo detail.
