Word: oratorio
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Opera, Choral & Oratorio...
PROKOFIEV: IVAN THE TERRIBLE (Melodiya/ Angel). Prokofiev composed this music for Sergei Eisenstein's movie Ivan the Terrible in the early 1940s, but his means (oratorio-like) and aims (monumental) hardly allow it to be described as background music. Much of it is so impressive as to provide ammunition for those who predict that the best new music will be composed expressly to serve other arts. Yet the other arts can overwhelm-as sometimes in this case, when the narrator in Ivan (theatrically intoned in lyrical Russian by Aleksander Estrin) makes the work sound to non-Russian-speaking listeners...
...Vienna critics as the highlight of the festival, Haydn's Orfeo may well have as much claim to entry in the active repertory as the better-known operatic version of the story that Christoph Gluck wrote 30 years earlier. Apparently influenced by his exposure to England's oratorio tradition, Haydn composed Orfeo for a chorus and orchestra much larger than he had previously used. The heavy dose of choral music and the numerous arias in sona ta form make much of the opera sound like an oratorio. The chorus, for example, joins in a love duet with Sutherland...
...Land of Unlikeness. He has also written three short plays collectively titled The Old Glory, and a translation of Racine's Phaedra (recently staged in Philadelphia). His new prose play Prometheus Bound, produced this month at the Yale School of Drama, is not so much drama as an oratorio streaked with images of visceral intensity, as exemplified in the paintings of his friend, Artist Sidney Nolan (see color pages). The play is a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, but Lowell has typically given it a punishing contemporaneity. A parable of human pride and torment, it becomes...
WHITSUNDAY SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). An original oratorio, Galileo, has been commissioned to commemorate the appearance of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles on this seventh Sunday after Easter. Libretto by Joe Darion, score by Ezra Laderman, and featuring Basso Ara Berberian as the troubled astronomer...