Glóin the Dark

142/10?

It's not over till the that lady sings.

That's too bad.

Is this allowed?

They could at least have compromised and played only the repeat.

I will, because it's not too long since I listened to a performance of that only to find the fourth movement butchered... I'm probably not competent to do that, but I can at least explain why it's necessary for me: without it, the final rendition of the fanfare theme feels premature and hence anticlimactic, and the movement consequently somewhat insipid.

The sitcom and novel comparisons that you've made don't work, because the suggested repetition is not part of the actual work, but rather a modification made by the viewer/reader. An appropriate analogy would be, for example, a film in which the film-maker had included a repeated scene but the distributor cut it out without authorisation. If the composer of a symphony included a repeat of the exposition, then the repeat is a part of the piece; it's not for me to decide whether it really is or not. If repeating the exposition was not expected, the composer may have structured the movement differently in the first place. Performing a piece is not a matter of delivering a batch of information to the listener (in which case resending a given segment could be redundant) but of providing a particular experience, and we're in agreement that excising the repetition alters the experience. You may well prefer the altered experience to the intended one, but I think you're thoroughly mistaken in judging the repetitions in the intended version to be "stupid". I certainly don't want conductors making that decision on my behalf, and I think that performances and recordings in which the repetition is cut should be clearly labelled as edited versions.

Why is listening to an intended exposition repeat boring and a waste of time when (presumably) listening to an entire symphony that you've heard before isn't?

Walked into that one…

How would you describe what constitutes substance?

What sort of things are these?

I don’t think that having no score is a “safe” choice, in general. Besides, cinema is a medium with several different aspects, and I think we should embrace the prerogative of film-makers to utilise different combinations of them, and with differing priorities. Variety is good!

A film can be great even without a score. If the film has a score then, of course, the quality of the score will affect that of the film, but that doesn’t mean that the score has to be great in order for the film to be so (or vice versa). In the case of Seven, I think that the score is great (as far as film scores go) and that it is a key part of the film’s brilliance. I can imagine the film being brilliant with a different score, but can also imagine it falling short. I’m inclined to vote for it (over The Silence of the Lambs), on account of its scintillating, single-minded intensity.

10/10

As the old saying goes: never ascribe to insanity that which can adequately be explained by differences of taste!