Word: oratorio
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...apart, Bach and Handel make an odd couple. Handel, whose 300th birthday was last month, was the son of a Halle barber- surgeon who wanted his boy to study law. A well-traveled cosmopolitan, he settled in London, anglicized his name from Handel, and became the dominant operatic and oratorio composer of his day. When he died, a bachelor at 74, he was buried with great ceremony in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. By contrast, Bach, whose birthday falls this week, came from a long line of musicians and spent almost his entire life in what is now East...
...York Philharmonic, while across the East River, the Brooklyn Philharmonic presented the first indoor performance of Tobias Picker's frisky Keys to the City, written in 1983 to celebrate the Brooklyn Bridge's centenary. And Pittsburgh got the first hearing of Ned Rorem's rawboned An American Oratorio, performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Mendelssohn Choir...
Rorem's new oratorio, based on texts by Poe, Longfellow, Twain, Crane, Melville, Whitman, Emma Lazarus and Sidney Lanier, is one of four premieres this season for the prolific composer, and it too treads familiar ground. Best known for his art songs and his candid, elegantly written diaries recounting his life and loves in Paris, New York and elsewhere, the composer, 61, has long been a conservative voice in American music. He speaks in a basically breezy 1940s tonality, which is leavened by a few more recent technical advances. In An American Oratorio, Rorem's style works effectively with gentle...
Dohnányi's strength lies in warm but unsentimentalized interpretations of an essentially Central European repertoire. His love of contemporary music is already clear in his Cleveland programming: on a U.S. tour last month, he offered a ravishing performance of Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished atonal oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder), and an impassioned reading of Alban Berg's twelve-tone Violin Concerto, with Soloist Itzhak Perlman. The most recent Severance Hall program featured the late-Romantic composer Hans Pfitzner's Violin Concerto, a work rarely heard outside Germany. Yet Dohnanyi is also strong...
...little as possible," he says, and "I don't pay much attention to television." So no one was more surprised than Morris at the furor that ensued in March 1982 after British Actress Vanessa Redgrave was hired to narrate the B.S.O.'s planned production of the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. Redgrave, as anyone who does read the newspapers should know, is a Trotskyite and ardent supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and her selection immediately inspired an outcry. Faced with protests from musicians, threats of violent disruption, and possible withdrawal of funds by Jewish orchestra patrons, Morris canceled...