A Buddhist altar is tucked away in a dark tower of Bayon; outside, rocks thought to create curses if removed are piled in small, thoughtful arrangements.
(Allan Kozinn) Ebène Quartet (Sunday) This young quartet plays classical works with energy and freshness, and typically enlivens its programs with thoughtful arrangements of jazz, pop and film music.
The other tracks have wit, emotional force, delicate melodies, droll rhymes ("a girl I know who gets hallucinogens / From a pair of hooligans") and sprightly, thoughtful arrangements.
For them, there will be nothing fluffy or impromptu about their plan: the day is an opportunity to make thoughtful arrangements.
Fortunately, there is nothing obscure about the music itself; there were warm, personable themes, attractive melodies in thoughtful arrangements and plenty of rhythmical excitement.
But even when mom and dad have made thoughtful arrangements to accommodate and anticipate their relatives' preferences, life -- and family -- reserve the right to surprise us.
The music got the familial treatment: vocal camaraderie with a constantly changing cast of harmonizers, and thoughtful, homespun arrangements that alluded to bygone styles and always had a clarinet or a banjo on hand when needed.
Still, there hasn't been a more sublimely lyrical gesture in his 20-year recording career than "Walking Shadows" (Nonesuch), an album that sets his tenor and soprano against a string orchestra, in tremulous but thoughtful new arrangements.
At the end, too, the ovation went on and on, and he was called back for six encores, beginning with a thoughtful and fanciful arrangement of his own that repossessed a baroque melody from Stravinsky's "Pulcinella," and finishing with one of Prokofiev's "Sarcasms," perhaps as a signal that he really could not go on all night.
I say "as if" because, of course, these gleaming nacelles are no more the product of careful arrangement, or thoughtful dispensation, than the up-thrust finials and melting buttresses of a termite heap.
