Word: oratorio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Written during a hectic three-and-a-half weeks in the summer of 1741, Handel's oratorio has always been a smash. If a nearly endless succession of well-meaning popularizers have taken gross and extravagant liberties with it, Handel is partly to blame. A shrewd businessman, he ensured The Messiah's success by hiring the best and most popular singers in 18th century London to sing it. If the bass singer was not very good, Handel would turn the bass aria into a recitative, rewrite it for an alto or even a soprano. For flexible soprano voices...
...worst moments seem to fascinate Poland's avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki. In his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Dies Irae (an oratorio in memory of the dead of Auschwitz) and The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, Penderecki treated mass annihilation and murder with moving intensity, stretching the limits of orchestral and vocal range so far that he had to invent new notational symbols for his score (TIME, Oct. 14, 1966). Thus it was only appropriate that for his first opera he chose as his subject a tale of mass hysteria and political...
...LIGHT IN THE WILDERNESS (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). Dave Brubeck is featured in this performance of his original oratorio, accompanied by his combo, an organ and a 300-voice choir at Washington Cathedral...
...service of the church, Bach wrote more than 1,000 works, according to the definitive Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) catalogue. Nearly three-quarters of these were intended to be performed at Christian worship-including a Magnificat and 41 Christmas cantatas (plus six more that make up the famed Christmas oratorio). Even in the secularist atmosphere of the 20th century, his music rings with what Toronto Choral Conductor Elmer Iseler calls a positive, "D-major feeling about life." From the evidence of the 1968 holiday season, more and more listeners are trying to get into the same...
This week West Berlin's Singakade-mie performs the Christmas oratorio with members of the Radio Symphony Orchestra. In London, Composer Benjamin Britten conducts three cantatas for the BBC from St. Andrew's Church in Holborn. In Manhattan, Violinist and Conductor Alexander Schneider completes a two-concert series of cantatas and concertos at Carnegie Hall. And in New York, as in other major capitals, the coming weeks will see a performance of Bach's undoubted masterpiece, the B-Minor Mass-a work that he began as a tribute to the Catholic King of Poland, but which...