Word: avante
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...eclectic but ultimately unsuccessful serialist opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers). First performed in Cologne in 1965, the work was given its American premiere last week by Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston. With it, an experimental tradition begun by Schoenberg, continued by Alban Berg and refined by avant-gardists of Germany's Darmstadt school of composers in the 1950s comes to a dead end. In fact, that tradition expires in a spectacular artistic auto-da-fé symbolized by the holocaust that is the opera's final scene...
...onetime avant-garde pianist who has been performing for many years. Among other new works, I introduced Bartók's Second Piano Concerto in New York City as early as 1947.1 always felt I was one step ahead of my time. Yet, I was horrified to read your glowing account of Maestro Pierre Boulez's newest "creation" that was recently performed in France [Dec. 28]. Repons is certainly not the answer to this listener's prayer. Compositions made with the aid of a computer negate everything that music stands for. Andor Foldes Herrliberg, Switzerland
...paradox of Hans Werner Henze extends from his life to his art. A member of the progressive Darmstadt circle of composers after World War II, Henze broke decisively with the avant-garde in the mid-'50s and today sneers at the "utter boredom" of doctrinaire serialism. For all his radical leftist politics, Henze's own music is on the musical right. In a way, he is the Brahms of his day, writing in forms such as symphony, concerto and oratorio, preserving the traditional structures in the ace of the avant-gardist onslaught. Henze has mixed idioms freely throughout...
...other hand. "Astral Projection," the most radical departure from traditional narrative in the volume, fails to forge its avant-garde devices--all-caps subheadings, fragmentation, floating unexplained lines of dialogue interspersed with blocks of "technical" data--into a memorable whole. It would be a shame if Domini's work (the cover says he is finishing a novel) blundered into experimental affectation, when he could follow instead the promising signposts of whimsical intuition or philosophical fantasy that Bedlam suggests. If he takes the right path, he may not be teaching Expos forever...
...Coolidge Corner, Lina Wert-mueller's Swept Away makes you wonder if part of the avant-garde hasn't decided it is too cool for feminism. A northern Italian bitch-goddess (Mariangela Melato) teases and insults a poor, swarthy crew member (Giancarlo Giannini) on her husband's yacht, and when the two of them find themselves marooned on an uninhabited island everything turns upside down. Giannini turns his former oppressor into his concubine/serf and, as in Seven Beauties, shows he can do more with his eyes than anyone this side of Marty Feldman. There is a kind of love...