Word: rorem
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SYLVIA MARLOWE: HARPSICHORD (Decca). The eminent harpsichordist looks to the future of her archaic instrument by commissioning new pieces by the dozen. Among them are chamber works by Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter, both contrasting the tangy harpsichord with bland woodwinds. Rorem strings together short, romantic "songs without words," while Carter builds a severe, towering structure out of tiny musical blocks. Highlight of the recording is the plangent Concerto for Harpsichord, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Violin and Cello by Manuel de Falla...
SONGS OF NED ROREM (Columbia) sung by Regina Sarfaty, Phyllis Curtin and others. Since the death of Poulenc, Indiana-born, 40-year-old Ned Rorem is probably the world's best composer of art songs. Here he puts to music the slithering of Theodore Roethke's Snake, the slow flow of Paul Goodman's The Lordly...
Hudson, and Elizabeth Bishop's poem about Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the mentally ill, which becomes a chilling Baedeker of bedlam. Rorem has jettisoned tonality, but his rhythms are generally as even as pulse beats, and he lets voices rise and flow within their nat ural limits...
...Rorem's A Childhood Miracle, produced with two-piano accompaniment by Punch Opera in Manhattan, was a fragile piece of Hawthorne about two little girls whose snowman comes to life and entertains them until grownups drag him indoors and he melts to a puddle by the firelight of reality. Composer Rorem, who now lives in Paris, wields his Ravel-lian style with an almost too delicate hand. But he is, at 32, a master writer for the human voice...
Last week she sang song cycles by two great French song writers, Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen, and two songs by a 28-year-old Austrian, Gottfried von Einem, five by Paul Bowles and several by such unknown Americans as Everett B. Helm, Bela Wilda and Ned Rorem. Her voice was limited in range and occasionally harsh in the high notes, but as always, her interpretations were intelligent and distinguished by restraint...