Word: albans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps the play's appeal has to do with the success of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck (whose title, incidentally, is a misspelling arising from an editor's error). Certainly Berg's music gives the Buechner work a substance it lacks as a play. On the other hand, the original version has a certain power about it that derives at least in part from its starkness. I have an uneasy feeling that it would be much less appealing to young directors (and audiences) had Buechner lived to finish it and polish the rough edges...
Michael Tschudin wrote the un-Alban-Bergian but thoroughly appropriate score. He played it on piano and organ, accompanied by a beautiful blonde flute player from Juilliard reputed to be his girlfriend...
...with hooray but with who says) was lured back on several occasions to direct the French National Orchestra, and was even offered the important post of director of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra. (He turned it down.) In 1963, the Paris Opera gave him a free hand in producing Alban Berg's Wozzeck: he demanded and got an unprecedented 30 rehearsals, and the opera scored a major triumph. In a six-week tour de force in Paris earlier this year, Boulez again conducted Wozzeck, helped to produce three Stravinsky ballets, gave eight concerts, performed on TV, and recorded an opera...
Complex Tapestry. Yet as opera, Don Rodrigo was something less than a torrid success. Ginastera's score, based on a twelve-tone scale and structured after the manner of Alban Berg's groundbreaking 1921 masterwork, Wozzeck, struck the ear but not the heart. It was a complex musical tapestry, flecked with startled tones of brass and wood wind and splotched with splashes of percussion. In total, the score failed to achieve the delineation of character and dramatic thrust that distinguish great opera from good. Don Rodrigo was nonetheless an adventure worthy of the underwriting (by Mrs. John...
...Alban Berg's fine scores, expressively terse and textually dense, always pose the initial problem of hearing all that is essential. In the Violin Concerto, this dilemma assumes near-fatal proportions. The solo instrument is integrated into a large Wagnerian orchestra, which it must dominate with music marked mezzo-piano (or softer) seventy-five per cent of the time! Now Berg was no fool; the orchestra's dynamics are determined accordingly. But no orchestra can or will play continually softly, and the HRO proved no exception. The resulting acoustical imbalance seriously challenged the considerable prowess of violinist Charles Castleman...