Word: chorus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Time: Christmas 1975. Place: a comfortable apartment on Manhattan's West Side. The members of a New York chorus and orchestra, having failed to raise money for expenses, have had to cancel their planned performance of Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall. After a potluck supper, the singers and some of the instrumentalists squeeze into their conductor's dining room to perform the work for themselves and a few friends...
...rejected. "That's fine for a genius like Karajan," he says. "I wanted people to be able to sample various ways of looking at Bach." So he brought in Rosalyn Tureck for an intensely wrought solo recital on harpsichord and piano. Margaret Hillis, director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, led a sometimes wayward program of vocal and orchestral works that ended solidly on the Magnificat. Harpsichordist Anthony Newman "and friends" sped their dazzling, often unorthodox way through an evening of chamber pieces...
...when Simone says, "My mom keeps telling me to go ahead and live with my father. She couldn't insult me more." When a new girl explains that she learned of "her" divorce when her father put a debt-disclaiming ad in the paper, they all chorus: "Oh." "Ugh." "Yuck." "But so typical." Julie says, "My mother had this man living in the house. I felt as if I was in the way. She would agree with him about things she would object to if it were just us. Mothers don't want to rock the boat with...
Despite the success stories, doctoring is often not enough. Composer Jule Styne believes that great hits-My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line-were great from the start and only needed polishing. "Ninety percent of plays that call in a new writer and director fail," says Styne. "Sometimes the best you can do is to convince them to close," adds Joseph Stein, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof and has doctored such plays as Irene and Raisin. "If you're lucky, the show will be mediocre...
...strength of Tippett's conception comes through despite such flaws, es pecially in the visionary final scenes. After the racial violence, an astral spirit speaks to a chorus of tripped-out hippies in the words of Jung and Shakespeare; but when they hail the spirit as a savior, he sneers, "You must be joking." No comforting re ceived wisdom for Tippett. Lev's dying wife Nadia recalls from her Russian childhood the sound of ice breaking on the rivers in springtime. As Lev and Yuri achieve a provisional reconciliation, the orchestra sounds the ice-break motif, suggesting...