Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Menotti: The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore (Chorus and instrumental ensemble conducted by Thomas Schippers in cooperation with the New York City Ballet; Angel). Menotti's bittersweet madrigal fable of a lonely poet's struggle with "the indifferent killers of the Poet's dreams" seems almost as effective in recording as it did on the stage (TIME, Nov. 5). The libretto, in clearest English, is thorny with barbed wit, and the music is alternately exuberant and shadowed with the gentle melancholy the poet-hero feels as he slowly dies, surrounded by "the pain-wrought children...
Climax of the birthday celebration was a Los Angeles performance of his latest work, a ballet score titled Agon (to be given in New York next fall). Agon shows just how far he has gone with tonal-row composition. A 20-minute work, it is scored for "twelve dancers and twelve notes," calls for the largest orchestra since Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945). The fast, heavily percussioned score is cast in patterns of enormous rhythmic complexity. In its sheer harmonic and rhythmic invention, its virility, its brilliance of orchestration, the work is among the most dazzling music...
...flies, 50 singers, an extra conductor, five harpists and 15 brass instrumentalists waited tensely for musical cues relayed to them on monitor screens from a TV camera focused on Conductor Kubelik's baton.* On the teeming stage below were the principal singers plus 100 in the chorus and ballet, plus 48 supers. "It's all so huge," said harassed Director Gielgud, "it's like trooping the colors...
Dame Ninette de Valois, director of Britain's Royal Ballet D.F.A...
...probably they are right," he once remarked), then in what amounted to a burlesque of classicism created such monumental figures as Mother and Child, which only superb talent saves from becoming ludicrous. In his Three Dancers he not only bade farewell to his period of stage designing with the Ballet Russe (where he met and married his one legal wife, Olga Koklova, mother of his eldest son Paul), but initiated a series of agonizing, lopsided, contorted figures whose displaced limbs and wandering eyes still boggle the public...