Word: oratorio
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...meant in a Dantean rather than Keatonian sense) tells the story of the widowed Mother Macauley (Bonnie Koloc), whose firstborn, Marcus, has gone to war, leaving her to struggle along with her three other children. The family, though, is merely the centerpiece of a civic tableau; as staged, oratorio-style, by Director Wilford Leach, a large chorus sits facing the audience,with various performers stepping forward to portray schoolchildren, townspeople and soldiers. The hero is not an individual but the imaginary, indomitable town of Ithaca...
Early one morning in October 1969, outside the Oratorio of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, the chapel's caretaker watched in bewilderment as a cat scuttled into the sanctuary through a wide-open door. The building should have been secured against felines, and thieves as well. During the previous night, however, intruders had forced a shutter of one of the chapel windows. Once inside, they cut away the altarpiece with a razor blade and marched out the front door with their prize: an 8-ft. by 7-ft. canvas, the Nativity, painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio...
...commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, was the victim of a turgid production that obscured the work's many beauties. Messiaen's Saint François-which resembles no other work in the operatic literature as much as it resembles Paradise Lost in its static, quasi-oratorio quality- is more fortunate all around...
...fanatics ransacked an Israeli census office, claiming that counting people violated divine law. A yeshiva student walking home one evening was seriously wounded by knife-wielding youths; they were apparently retaliating against the actions of militant religious groups. At a performance of Handel's Messiah by the Utah Oratorio Society, young firebrands repeatedly interrupted the concert with shouts of "Shame!" and were hustled away by police after they stormed the stage. When Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek denounced the hooliganism at a rally, a man spit in his face and proclaimed that "God gave me the strength...
...with contemporary rhythms; of a heart attack; at his home on the island of Ischia, Italy. At 21, Walton scandalized London with his first important work, Fagade, irreverent musical parodies written to accompany poems by his patron Edith Sitwell. He later turned to more conventional forms, such as the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast and his romantic concertos for violin, viola and cello. A slow, painstaking composer who once complained, "A lot of the time music irritates me to madness, especially my own," he nonetheless wrote up to the end; a few days before his death he completed the score...