This performance, one of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's series celebrating the Mendelssohn connection with their principal guest conductor Edward Gardner, swept away any notion of this as a stodgy, ponderous work.
And why would such an overly exposed audience embrace a work of such heft, especially as almost every edition carries the added weight of ponderous academic commentary?
Part of the Next Wave Festival and directed by D. J. Mendel, it is the peppiest and least ponderous of the three works, mercifully free of the self-conscious austerity of "One Loss Plus" (2007) and the overwrought complexity of "Darwin's Meditation for the People of Lincoln" (2008).
Culled from ponderous volumes of collected works or private collections, these engaging and unabridged letters were assembled to allow readers to discover for themselves Benjamin Franklin's vigorous personality, his humanity, and his penetrating intelligence.
The neōteroi deplored the excesses of alliteration and onomatopoeia and the ponderous metres that characterized the epics and didactic works of the Latin Ennian tradition.
Instead of coming to life, the work is imprisoned there in the ponderous person of the author, who typically speaks in a kind of embarrassed monotone, afraid to inflect or dramatize too much.
It has been more than two years since Jonathan P. Stern published his ponderous but indispensable work "The Future of Russian Gas and Gazprom" (Oxford, $125), which shows that Russia's gas monster is compelled to take global market considerations into account.
Ms. Wearing's work is also important as an exception to the ponderous profundities of what might be called video humanism.
Morton went on to work with a New York rock group called the Pigeons who specialised in lengthy, ponderous versions of recent hits.
That accounts for the sometimes ponderous nature of the art, although I made a mental list of a dozen works I would love to live with before I stopped counting.
