As with "Please Please Me," Martin had afforded "From Me to You" with a more commercial sound by virtue of a few tiny, but vastly significant alterations.
I realize that this sounds like virtue signaling, a self-congratulation about diversity as a status symbol.
For a man who describes himself as one of the least interesting people on the planet, he makes the old virtues sound surprisingly sexy.
The reviewer in Punch, by contrast, wrote, "I consulted a Russian, who is very much alive, and received the opinion that, if Mr. Walpole has not succeeded in drawing the real average Russian, he has given us a type whose faults and virtues sound the keynote of the situation as it is to-day".
However tricksy it may sound, the abiding virtue of this unclassifiable debut is sincerity.
The discontinuity between the two is made to sound like a virtue.
That may sound like a virtue, but it's really a way of repudiating ambiguity and complexity.
In the theater, as critics and opera buffs consistently reported, he drew listeners in, never forcing his sound, making a virtue of subtlety.
Perhaps Romney was worried that all those even-keeled virtues sounded too much like Barack Obama, because he veered off into an attack on the current administration's foreign policy failures.
One item fewer might have made this a more convincing evening, but one always asks whether Mr. Botstein's programs are chronically overloaded or whether they sound long by virtue of the performances.
This strategy's edge over other bottom-fishing forays is that these are financially sound companies by virtue of the fact that they pay high cash dividends and thus have the wherewithal to ride out a tough economy or turn operations around.
