Word: oratorio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Composer Walton, one of the smart devotees of arty London Poetess Edith Sitwell, started out in the early 19205 doing clever satirical fluff. But when, in 1931, he burst from her mother-of-pearly cell with a fire-belching oratorio called Belshazzar's Feast, the international musical world sat up and took notice. His First Symphony, which followed, got him talked about in terms of Finland's Jean Sibelius...
...important and meaty modern works for chorus and orchestra were given first U. S. hearings. The first was a smoldering, wrath-&-judgment Old-Testament oratorio, Watchman, What of the Night? by James Gutheim Heller, rabbi of Cincinnati's aged Plum Street Temple. A chorus of 600 children helped Soprano Helen Jepson sing the second: a complicated Magnificat by German-born Hermann Hans Wetzler, who once played the organ in Manhattan's Trinity Church...
Alma Swensson was the prim, capable wife of a Lutheran schoolman in the little Swedish-American town of Lindsborg, Kans. (pop. 2,004). Alma Swensson loved Handel's oratorio, The Messiah, decided that her Swedish neighbors should hear it too. So she sent for the music, gathered a chorus of young people from the surrounding towns and farms, rehearsed them and let the welkin ring. That...
...long believed that the only important function of music is to encourage revolution. In 1929, while staid London music lovers frowned and looked the other way, London's musical leftists, led by Composer Bush, drew throngs to a class-angled production of Handel's venerable sacred oratorio, Belshazzar. Handel's serene 18th-Century score was sung with traditional massiveness by a chorus of 1,800 voices. But it was so staged that the fall of Handel's Babylonians was made to represent the fall of capitalism, and the victory of Handel's Persians, the victory...
...Musical Russia Choir (Sun. 3 p. m. CBS) sings Vaughan Williams' Fantasy on Christmas Carols, Fuerst's transcription of Tchaikovsky's Legend, three carols by Peter Warlock, three chorals from Bach's Christmas Oratorio with the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra. John Barbirolli conducts the orchestra in the overture to Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's Fourth Symphony...