Word: alban
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Manhattan's Victorian, red-and-gilt Metropolitan Opera House was transformed one night last week into a nightmarish, shriekingly demented world of sight and sound. The occasion: the Met's long overdue production of Wozzeck, by the late, famed atonalist, Alban Berg. It was one of the great nights in Met history...
...wonder of this sordid and symbolic tale is that it is suffused with compassion, heightened by the remarkable music Alban Berg wrote for it. The score, set in the tilted frame of nontonality, is carefully cast in a variety of classical musical forms: suite, passacaglia, sonata, fanatasie and fugue; scherzo, etc. The huge (113 instruments) orchestra sometimes bellows in brassy rages, sometimes shrieks in lines of shrill angularity, sometimes surprises with passages of softly breathing lyricism. The stark horror of the murder is conveyed in a howling, brassy crescendo in the orchestra that gives way abruptly to the tinselly tinkle...
...must be made. The three divas' pet dogs advance on him. Zinka's spitz, Nickie, growls; Maria's poodle, Toy, nips at his ankles; and Renata's poodle, New, crouches to jump. "Choose, choose, choose!" sing the divas, to some nightmare melody that sounds like Alban Berg played backwards...
Canada's Christopher Plummer, a talented actor (Broadway's The Lark, TV's Little Moon of Alban), arrives in turn-of-the-century Miami, where he harkens to tales about Cottonmouth (Burl Ives), a red-bearded snake charmer off in the Everglades whose band of swamp angels (including such old Thespians as ex-Pug Tony Galento, Clown Emmett Kelly, Jockey Sammy Renick) pick off the wildlife like hungry dogs in a horsemeat factory. Modern hunters would do well to study their technique: every bird they shoot falls within 2 ft. of their boats...
...Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein : "If it is all a total failure, the festival will nevertheless have been justified because it occasioned the first performance of Andrew Imbrie's Violin Concerto. It impressed me as being the most important composition of its kind since the Violin Concerto of Alban Berg...