Word: altos
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...Columbia). For last summer's music festival in Chichester, England, Bernstein set to melody half a dozen Psalms, to be sung in Hebrew. The composition (TIME, July 23) is both literal and theatrical. "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord" calls forth a jazzy outburst. After a boy alto sings, "The Lord is my shepherd," a men's chorus, heavy with percussion, crashes in to ask "Why do the nations rage?" The 18-minute work is less tortured musically than Bernstein's Kaddish of 1963 and is well performed by the Camerata Singers and the New York...
With over half of the Stanford student body in on the program, the home campus at Palo Alto is ever more sophisticated. Any lecture spoken in a foreign language draws up to 400 students, and the University is considering a sociology course taught in French, political science in German, comparative literature in French. The experience has knocked most stereotypes about foreigners out of student minds. "If you ask a returning student what he thinks of the Germans," says Walker, "he'll be insulted-and tell you there are all different kinds of Germans...
ANGEL EYES (Columbia). Dave Brubeck's quartet plays Matt Dennis' songs without words, although Alto Saxophonist Paul Desmond seems to speak sweet somethings in Violets for Your Furs, and Brubeck makes some conventional but well-turned pianistic comments on The Night We Called...
...freak? Not at all, just a voice so seldom heard today as to sound strangely neuter at first hearing. But once the ear adapts to Deller's pure, vibratoless voice spiraling effortlessly up through the range of the female alto, the effect is entrancing. In two Handel arias, it floated lightly and lonely as a lark above the bustle of the orchestra. The performance had all the fresh appeal of a lost art rediscovered, which, in fact, it is. Deller is now 53, but when he first achieved recognition, he was the first virtuoso countertenor in 120 years. Almost...
...Knife. From the Renaissance through the 18th century the countertenor was the most popular singer in Europe. Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, and especially Henry Purcell, himself a countertenor, composed a wealth of lute songs, folk ballads, cantatas, hymns, operas, madrigals and carols for the male alto. The rage for the high-pitched male voice also helped give rise to the castrati singers-boy sopranos castrated before puberty. In 18th century Italy, parents received a handsome fee for each son to go under the knife. But with the dawning of the romantic era in the 19th century, the delicate voices...