Word: andreyev
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ROGER SESSIONS: SUITE FROM "THE BLACK MASKERS" (Mercury). The 1923 music has a weird and unsettling effect, befitting the Leonid Andreyev drama for which it was written; the black maskers of the title are supposed to be the powerful but unfathomable forces that act on man's soul. Three other short, appealing works by Americans (Walter Piston, Howard Hanson, Alan Hovhaness) are played by Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra...
Composer Ward, who earns his living as the editor of a music publishing house, has written four symphonies, a number of songs and chamber pieces, and one other opera-He Who Gets Slapped, based on the play by Leonid Andreyev. He wrote The Crucible in one year, in the study of his 14-room house in Nyack, N.Y., and just finished in time. As curtain time approached, he was feeding the score to the singers five pages at a clip. The time is ripe for good opera, Ward believes, but he deplores the tendency-exemplified in Alban Berg...
...most immediately appealing work on the program was also one of the earliest-Suite from "The Black Maskers," written as accompaniment to Leonid Andreyev's drama when Sessions was 26, and cast as an orchestral suite five years later. A dissonant, vigorous work full of shrilly chattering string passages and raucously braying brasses, it gives the effect, as do many of Sessions' works, of the familiar tilted intriguingly out of plumb. Also included in the Northwestern program: the String Quartet No. 2 (1951), a serenely flowing, moderately dissonant work that rarely raises its voice above a grey, enervated...