Word: alban
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...more unlikely mountaineer could be imagined. Slight, sedentary, intensely fastidious, bored by hiking, Anton Webern nevertheless trudged determinedly up the alpine slopes of his native Austria. ''From time to time,'' he explained to his friend Alban Berg, ''I must breathe this air. Transparent, clear, pure-the heights...
...huge orchestra, heavy on brass and percussion (including steel drums). Stylistically he is what might be called a postserialist. Having explored the twelve-tone system in earlier compositions, he now works in a freely eclectic vein, yielding at times to the "tonal nostalgia" that Robert Craft pointed out in Alban Berg's music, at other times borrowing the jazzy strains of theater music. At Aspen, his pounding rhythms generated a powerful momentum and his thickly massed sonoraties built to sharp climaxes, especially in the big choral scenes. His solo vocal passages and more lyrical moments, however, seemed to lack...
When the Paris Opéra presented the world premiere of Alban Berg's complete Lulu in February, one of the masterpieces of 20th century opera stood revealed at last. Or did it? Berg left the orchestration of the third and final act unfinished at his death in 1935. For years the work had to be performed in truncated form. In Paris, Conductor Pierre Boulez unveiled the full score as completed by Viennese Composer Friedrich Cerha. But Director Patrice Chéreau's eccentric staging reflected as much Chéreau as Berg, and many of the composer...
Three of opera's "great progressivists," Igor Stravinsky once declared, were Gluck, Wagner-and the Viennese modernist Alban Berg. Stravinsky was not being merely provocative. As the years go by, Berg's claim to belong in such illustrious company looks more and more secure. It rests on two complex, powerful works, Wozzeck and Lulu, that in effect brought opera into the 20th century. Lulu, in particular, packed traditional operatic emotion and drama into the most advanced of forms, the twelve-tone system devised by Berg's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg...
Before he was stricken, Paul seemed to sense, somehow, that his life was nearing its end. Four weeks ago, as he left the Vatican for his annual summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo in the nearby Alban Hills, he told an aide: "We do not know if we will return and how we will return." On the first day of August, the theme recurred. Driven to the wine-making hamlet of Frattocchio to visit the grave of an old friend, he said to a knot of onlookers: "We hope to meet him after death, which for us cannot be far away...