The showstopper is a medley of "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star," which Oscar Hammerstein II reportedly sang to Jerome Kern on his deathbed, and an ethereal rendition of "All the Things You Are" infused with the intensity of a prayer.
The pair were on the show to promote their recent collaboration, the "quiet masterpiece" Chants of India album, but at host John Fugelsang's urging, Harrison accepted an acoustic guitar and performed a brief rendition of "All Things Must Pass".
Leng notes the irony in McCartney performing the song, while Beatles biographer Peter Doggett comments: "it wasn't hard to imagine Harrison's cynicism as McCartney led the band into a soulful rendition of 'All Things Must Pass' – one of the songs that the other Beatles had refused to take seriously in January 1969".
Oh, a curtain came down, all right — a digital approximation of one, anyway, that served as the video backdrop for a supper-clubby rendition of one of her least convincing songs, "Alejandro". Then she did the even snoozier "Teeth," of all things, a deeper cut than that German-titled song that didn't have the advantage of a melody.
In the past 12 years, I've probably sung 1,800 bedside renditions of "My Favorite Things".
Philip Steadman, an architect and the author of "Vermeer's Camera," which argues that Vermeer had photographic aims, said that Vermeer's paintings contain perfect renditions of things found in Dutch houses: chairs with lion backs, globes, paintings, Delft tiles, virginals, even the ceiling beams.
Anticipating Mr. Clinton's speech Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, Representative Paul D. Ryan predicted at a rally here that "we'll get a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s, but we're not going to hear much about how things have been the last four years".
Its power must have something to do with the rendition of things that should be impossible to depict in stone; most quirkily, the beard - so ropy and smoky, its coils given fantastic, snaking life.
