Word: alleluias
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...wind ensemble has become a standard medium in this century. Its instruments offer a limited range of tone color, but the fullness and buoyancy of their sounds are ideal materials for manipulating sonority. The most successful piece in this regard was Howard Hanson's Chorale and Alleluia. Its combinations of woodwinds and brass were quite exhilarating, and all the more so because James A. Walker, the band's new conductor, shrewdly separated parts of each choir at various points on the stage. As throughout the evening, entrances were not uniformly clean, but the dissonant sonorities were well executed...
...American choral composers today, Professor Randall Thompson '20 certainly ranks among the most popular. His Alleluia, written in 1940, and The Last Words of David (1949) have together sold about two million copies. Thompson's fame is not limited to America; his works are performed all over the world. He has just been asked by a group in Seoul if they may substitute the names of Korean holidays for the corresponding American dates in his Testament of Freedom when they perform it later this year. And Thompson is being asked for new works all the time. His future plans include...
...into the ark caroling "Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie eleison," and the orchestra launched with a crash into cymbal-punctuated storm music that reached its climax in a beautifully descanted chorus of Eternal Father. As the storm subsided, the cast climbed back to the stage singing a four-part Britten Alleluia, filed out singing Thomas Tallis' The Spacious Firmament on High...
...mass, together with the famous Alleluia, is one of the most important records issued this year. Quite aside from its other merits, it is a considerable tour-de-force, in that it solves a serious problem for American composers: an English text can often make the most exalted choral music sound like Gilbert and Sullivan, or worse. Some of the best of Handel and Purcell sounds more than a little ridiculous because of this...
Randall Thompson avoided the language problem in the Alleluia, as Woodworth observes in his notes, by using only the single word of the title. But he met it squarely in setting his mass to an English text, and he emerges triumphant. Except for an excessive diminuendo on "invisible," every word is perfectly set forth in the music, especially in the Gloria and the Credo, while each of the various parts is uniquely treated, the mass remains a unified and very beautiful whole...