But Act III, which contains Grimes's delirium scene, worked powerfully, especially when angry choral cries of "Peter Grimes!" resounded in the cold night air, and when Peter, following advice of his one friend, Captain Balstrode, pushes his boat toward the sea for one final, fatal voyage.
As the strings rocked to and fro in the closing moments, taking the music beyond our hearing without it seeming actually to finish, the impact of this angry work hit quietly, powerfully home.
Composed in 1993 as a memorial to Holliger's teacher Sándor Veress, the work is a powerfully sustained 15-minute elegy, driven by a writhing, angry melodic line that sometimes unravels into multiple voices or becomes suffocated by decorative detail, heaves itself up to a huge climax, and finally evaporates in constellations of harmonics.
Tonight she and her band powerfully transform "I'm Wrong" into the night's angriest song, finger-picked guitar morphing into the droning post-rock of Mogwai, the sound distorted and bowed aggressively.
In the last weeks I have been watching some pretty fascinating documentaries that demonstrate powerfully what isn't working, what we could all get really angry about.
An unpremeditated angry declaration of a simple truth has struck a chord that is resonating powerfully with the public.
Robinson distinguishes Conrad best, reveals his tender and angry core, in her depictions of his relationships with his sister and brother, with his former classmates and, most powerfully, with his girlfriend, as they painfully circle each other, trying to reassemble, reinvent, reimagine how it might be possible to have a life together.
Powerfully mysterious, too.
So powerfully about opposites.
