They were carrying large books with solemn titles: "The Medieval World," "Montcalm and Wolfe," "The Jesuit Relations".
Mock-solemn titles appear on the screen ("Chapter Two, In which Grace follows Tom's plans and engages in physical labor"), and a resonantly English voice (it is John Hurt's) narrates the story in heavily ironic, neo-Henry Fielding tones.
If the proposition, as thus laid down in the cases cited, is sound in regard to the ordinary contracts of private individuals, how much more should it be observed where the attempt is to annul the grants, the patents, and other solemn evidences of title emanating from the government of the United States under its official seal.
A 75-minute piece written from 1819 to 1823, it overlapped Beethoven's composition of the Ninth Symphony and can be taken as a more austere and, as its title suggests, solemn companion work.
The presentation of "Empire Falls" -- its bulk, its title, its solemn cover painting of a red-brick factory against a gray-and-yellow sky -- promises not only local color but sublimity.
A Better Tomorrow is an unrepentantly solemn listen, but, as the title suggests, there is light at the end of the tunnel: Overcome is a shimmering, opulent tale of hope.
(Posterity has enshrined the song as Handel's "Largo"; in fact, it is a Larghetto: more lighthearted than the solemn anthem one often hears under this title).
The ominously beautiful title song by Tindersticks establishes a tone of solemn lyricism, and the film's orgiastic bloodbaths are photographed to suggest the art-film equivalent of action paintings, the blood splattered on the screen with a heroic abandon.
Performed by two excellent bands, this disc of mostly recent brass music takes its title from Robin Holloway's War Memorials, Op 50 – substantial, solemn works commemorating the first world war from the soldiers' point of view.
The title suggests a book that could easily founder in solemn academic dithering or calcified prose.
