Word: beethovens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...works, simply because the Latin biblical and liturgical texts with their unity of feeling, their rich variety of emotional colors, and their singable sonority have always inspired the best composers to their best choral writing. This year, Koussevitsky has chosen two magnificent old ticket-sellers for his program, the Beethoven Ninth or "Choral" symphony, which is religious in feeling even though it uses Schiller's "Ode to Joy" as a text, and the Bach "Magnificat...
...anything in praise of the Ninth would be impossible without dragging out our hackneyed friend, the Hollywood adjective. Beethoven, already deaf but still in his prime, planned this symphony on a scale that transcends in power and breadth of conception anything written in this form before or since, but yet cast it all in good sonata form. He might be said to have transcended mere structure to have given structure its highest significance. As a matter of fact, when faced with the originality of the ideas in the Ninth and the splendor of their execution, discussions of "form" tend...
Brahms: Symphony No. 2 (London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Felix Weingartner; Columbia; 10 sides). Brahms's soaring architecture traced with unerring mastery by the famed conductor, who is now the first to have recorded all the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies...
...Orchestra (Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski; Columbia; 6 sides). The Show Boat tunes, some of the bravest in U.S. operetta, were dressed up last year by their composer in symphonic finery at the persuasion of Conductor Rodzinski. The resulting potpourri is lush, places Jerome Kern no whit nearer Beethoven as a symphonist, but Rodzinski's silky performance makes even more apparent Kern's Schubertian gift for melody...
...second movement of Beethoven's Ninth is just the right rhythm for polishing the 'furniture; the second movement of his Fifth is a mopping-the-kitchen-floor rhythm. Siegfried Idyll makes picking mud up from the children's boots not irksome in the least...