Word: oratorio
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...today sneers at the "utter boredom" of doctrinaire serialism. For all his radical leftist politics, Henze's own music is on the musical right. In a way, he is the Brahms of his day, writing in forms such as symphony, concerto and oratorio, preserving the traditional structures in the ace of the avant-gardist onslaught. Henze has mixed idioms freely throughout his career: harshly dissonant modernism, soaring lyricism and frankly tonal conservatism. But the glue that holds his work together is its humanism. Henze's music is meant to be played and listened to by people, not computers...
Whereas Mosè is a nearly static drama-Rossini at times referred to it as an oratorio-La Donna del Lago (The Lady of the Lake) is an atmospheric treatment of Sir Walter Scott's poem. It is a bucolic score, with harps and hunting horns highlighting the composer's landscape painting. Donna, full of infectious melodies, is closer in spirit to the great comedies...
...play Amadeus recently won five Tony Awards. Mozart last year led all composers in the number of new listings in the Schwann record catalogue, and record companies are assiduously exploring the nooks and crannies of the composer's output in search of further repertory-the oratorio La Betulia Liberata, for example, or the opera Mitridate, Re di Ponto, both written when Mozart was an adolescent. In addition, music of the classical period has become the frontier of performance scholarship; original-instrument versions of Mozart are now appearing, led by the Academy of Ancient Music's formidable project...
Schoenberg: Gurrelieder (Philips, 2 LPs). Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony perform up to the Berliozian dimensions of this modern oratorio...
...Jakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder) is a portion of a grandiose, uncompleted oratorio. A chorus of souls in limbo shuffles about the stage, awaiting reincarnation. Their doubts and frustrations are chastened by the Archangel Gabriel, effectively sung by Bass-Baritone William Dooley. The music, first sketched around World War I and completed later, has more lateromantic intelligibility than Erwartung, but it is so somber and static that one eventually wants to cry out with the chorus: "Is it really to go on like this forever?" Yet there is a moving finale. Soprano Janet Northway, as a soul who is dying...