Word: bela
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Into Budapest streamed delegates from the Communist musical world to honor Hungary's late great Bela Bartok, once dismissed as a decadent "formalist," but restored to Red favor two years ago. The hit performers of last week's festival turned out to be not Communist musicians but a clutch of wandering Americans: Violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the men of the Juilliard String Quartet...
...Suchon, who also worked on the libretto, fleshed the bare bones of his plot with some moving psychological insights. The libretto was admirably supplemented by Suchon's muscular score, which reminded the enthusiastic audience of the music of Czechoslovakia's Leos (Jenufa) Janacek and Hungary's Bela Bartok. Strongly rhythmic, it combined rich Slovakian folk flavor with pungently powerful orchestration. In Katrena's lament over her fate, strikingly sung by Soprano Anny Schlemm, and in Ondrej's affecting admission of guilt, Suchon provided crowd-rousing vocal high points that might well place The Vortex...
Died. Imre Horvath, 57, Hungary's Foreign Minister, longtime (since 1918) Communist, onetime gun-toting activist (in Bela Kun's post-World War I Red rebellion) and Minister to the U.S. (1949-51), who saw his own son Imre and his nephew Alexander turn freedom fighters in the 1956 revolt, then flee to Austria; after a gallstone operation; in Budapest...
...musicals, adult westerns), lower even than the swarming, unswept streets of cinematic commerce (cops-and-robbers films, childish westerns), lies a dank catacomb, for years the lair of wound-up scientists, unwound mummies, vampires, hyperpituitary apes, cat men, spacemen and skirt-chasing tyrannosaurs. Here budgets are low, actors obscure (Bela Lugosi is dead and Boris Karloff has graduated to TV) and taglines visceral: The Man Who Turned to Stone ("Incredible revelations from the blackest annals of medicine!"), Zombies of Mora Tau ("A tide of terror!''), Half Human ("Half-man, half-beast, but ALL MONSTER...
Mostly, the Poles stamped for the same old warhorses the Clevelanders had played elsewhere-Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Strauss's Don Juan, excerpts from a Ravel Daphnis and Chloö suite. There was little stamping-only applause-for newer works (by Wallingford Riegger, Samuel Barber, Paul Creston, Bela Bartok). Said Dziennik Polski: "The Cleveland Orchestra plays like one magnificent soloist . . . A thing like yesterday's concert was never before seen or heard here...