The piece, however, has dead spots that are not the production's fault: awkward quasi-Romantic thrusts, clumsy texts (by the composer), and in particular, the slow and leaden start of Act I. Blitzstein's jazz-band insertions seem almost gratuitous, although they sound fine, and the progress of the piece seems almost to stop or at least to digress to allow a place for them.
That's just the latest twist in the romantic triangle that has thrust this nearly 70-year-old character, and his parent company, into the media spotlight.
W. L. Webb writes: Hotel du Lac is an elegant and fashionable, though not untroubled, comedy which deposits "a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name" among the rum guests of a lakeside Swiss hotel.
Abdominal thrusting is not romantic.
"Beethoven was the most romantic of composers," says Rudolf Buchbinder, thrusting a score at me to demonstrate exactly how and why.
The Romantic imagination had a field day with thrusting tors and quaking mires.
But though deeply romantic, the film never lets go of its central thrust - that no one has a chance in this society unless protected by the authorities or able to pay the price.
The upward thrust of the vegetation and the glorious haze give Turner's landscape a Romantic lyricism that is at the very opposite of the 17th-century master's placid Classicism.
"The Artist" (Nov. 23), set in Hollywood in 1927 and made mainly in the style of a silent film from that time, dramatizes the effect of talking pictures on a pair of actors — a romantic leading man (Jean Dujardin) whose career they threaten and an unheralded dancer (Bérénice Bejo) who is thrust into stardom.
"Shaker Loops" is written for a small string ensemble, but its febrile yearnings and rhythmic thrusts point to the rapprochement that Adams would soon make with the Romantic orchestral tradition.
