Word: oratorio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...season's brightest records from oratorio to disco...
Haydn: The Seasons (Soprano Ileana Cotrubas, Tenor Werner Krenn, Bass Hans Sotin, Brighton Festival Chorus, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Antal Dorati conductor, London; 3 LPs). This is Haydn's other major oratorio, structurally less cohesive and dramatically less powerful than The Creation, but a work in which the aging composer set out to demonstrate all that he could do in a wide range of styles and forms. In other words, a compendium of glories. The text, from James Thomson's panoramic poem written in 1730, inspires passages of musical landscape painting, evocations of the hunt, human scenes of yeomen...
...less individualistic than Tippett's style is his fidelity to the notion that composers should deal with big social and philosophical issues. From his anti-Nazi -oratorio, A Child of Our Time (1941), through such an instrumental-cwra-vocal work as his Symphony No. 3 (1972), he has charted the precarious survival of humanistic values in a violent, technological age. This concern has been central to his operas. The Midsummer Marriage (1952) plumbed myth and folklore in search of Jungian archetypes of spiritual wholeness...
...cast and crew have to accomodate themselves to a significantly smaller set than the dismantled Dudley House version, but the show itself is incredibly difficult to stage in any theater. It is, after all, not a musical, or even a rock "opera;" it most closely approximates an oratorio. The Who's lyrics barely outline plot and characters; the music gives them their force...
...this secular age, God is not very popular among composers. One notable exception is Krzysztof Penderecki, 45, a Polish Roman Catholic. He has written a St. Luke's Passion (1966), Dies Irae, an oratorio for the victims at Auschwitz (1967) and a Magnificat (1974). For the past four years, Penderecki (pronounced Pen-de-ret-ski) has labored on a huge, lofty project: recasting Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, into an opera. But last week, in its world premiere at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Penderecki's huge effort failed to justify the ways...