Word: bartok
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...year-old stage number that was long too hot for Europe got its U.S. premiere in Manhattan last week, and hardly anybody raised an eyebrow. The work: a nightmarish ballet fantasy entitled The Miraculous Mandarin, set to the 1919 music of Hungarian Bela Bartok. Its main characters: a prostitute and a Chinese mandarin whose love for her is stronger than death...
Because of the theme and its lurid treatment, Bartok's own Budapest banned Mandarin until 1946. Manhattan's City Ballet Company was under no such inhibition. City Center cast sinewy Melissa Hayden as the streetwalker, picked Veteran Dancer Hugh Laing as the mandarin, and called in the public...
Ballerina Hayden's violent wanton was a triumph; Hugh Laing played the mandarin with implacable simplicity. Without Bartok's superb score, Mandarin might have been merely a mediocre and rather crass affair, but the crashing, nervous music had kept the emotional pitch high and tight. As a result, the audience was too preoccupied to worry much about a few tag ends of murky symbolism that Choreographer Todd Bolender had worked in, e.g., a blind girl who wanders fitfully about the stage for most of the final scene...
...York Philharmonic-Symphony is used to being called one of the "great" orchestras of the world-whether it chooses to play Bach, Beethoven or Bartok. The British verdict on the Philharmonic last week, after two Edinburgh Festival performances: good, with reservations...
...contemporary." Technically, it calls for improvisation so personal that each musician plays his own carefree melody in his own key, in his own rhythm, developing his own harmonies. In ensemble, the results strike most ears as plain noise, but the devoted are reminded of such comparatively restrained innovators as Bartok and Schoenberg...