Word: chorus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only Dr. Johnson could have been in the Colorado Rockies last week. The Aspen Music Festival put on an exotic and deliberately irrational entertainment in which clowns, jugglers and acrobats capered across the stage. Flames shot up from nowhere. Flowers sprouted suddenly in a spittoon. A chorus stalked the aisles chanting a pitch for patent medicine. The hero was played by no less than three performers-a singer, a dancer and a magician. Before a note was even heard, the magician was hanging by his feet high over the stage, wriggling free of a straitjacket...
Schat's score calls for a sizable chorus and a huge orchestra, heavy on brass and percussion (including steel drums). Stylistically he is what might be called a postserialist. Having explored the twelve-tone system in earlier compositions, he now works in a freely eclectic vein, yielding at times to the "tonal nostalgia" that Robert Craft pointed out in Alban Berg's music, at other times borrowing the jazzy strains of theater music. At Aspen, his pounding rhythms generated a powerful momentum and his thickly massed sonoraties built to sharp climaxes, especially in the big choral scenes...
...Houdini's mother, John Brandstetter as his manager and Viviane Thomas as Bess. Conductor Richard Dufallo, who heads Aspen's annual Conference on Contemporary Music (at which Schat is one of this year's composers-in-residence), had the work firmly in hand. His youthful chorus and orchestra managed most of the score's difficulties, though without making them sound any less difficult...
Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Bass Dimiter Petkov, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich conductor, Angel; 3 LPs). Soviet critics thought they heard a masterpiece when this, Shostakovich's second opera, was premiered in 1934. Then Stalin walked out of a performance and they listened again. This time they heard "din, gnash and screech" (Pravda). The work was withdrawn, and Shostakovich pursued more orthodox ways. A sanitized version, unveiled in 1963, found its way to the West on records, but this is the first recording of the original score. Harsh, erotic...
Benjamin Britten: Spring Symphony (Soprano Sheila Armstrong, Mezzo Janet Baker, Tenor Robert Tear, St. Clement Danes School Boys' Choir, London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Andre Previn conductor, Angel). Berlin born and Hollywood bred, Previn continues to show a surprising flair for English music. Here he leads a zesty performance of a piece that, like so much English music, makes a strength of its provincialism: it has medieval and folk echoes, strikes a resolutely winsome and pastoral note, and is steeped in native literature (with settings of verses by poets from Herrick and Blake to Auden). Britten composed it when...