Word: belshazzar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Play of Daniel is a twelfth century musical drama about the life of the prophet Daniel. With music, song, and narration it tells the story of the writing on the wall, the lion's den, and the fall of Belshazzar. The Lowell House Music Society's production at St. Paul's Catholic Church is replete with processionals, swinging censers, and echoing trumpets. Backed by the cavernous marble nave, the play is infused with a sense of the ancient and the divine. Although the beautiful voice and lovely, archaic music are enough to make the program a success, there are faults...
...tone, his voice alone sets him apart from the plotting counselors and sacreligious king. The contract is especially effective in the scene where Daniel is called to the palace by the prince and courtiers. Their voices are heavy, earthbound and secular, and Daniel's divinely sweet and pure. As Belshazzar John Howell's voice is rough and dull, as it should be; and when Daniel reads him the prophecy of doom his voice quavers and almost cracks with fear. The one female in the production, Sandra Robbins, plays both Belshazzar's queen and the angel. Her soprano voice rings clearly...
...other important drawback is that the faces of the singers seem inappropriate. Most of them look much too young, like choir boys instead of aged kings and prophets. Daniel and Belshazzar both have beards, but they are scraggly and youthful, not long and hoary. The only person whose face fits the drama is the lute player, who has a very full, dark, biblical beard. Furthermore, the singers are not consistent in their facial expressions; some of them never show any expression at all, while others come up with some amateurish miming. When the queen hears the fatal prophecy a worried...
...majority have to hold other, daytime jobs (aircraft engineer, longshoreman, school bus driver) to supplement their $2,000 pay; many teach music. Above all, Katims introduced 75 works never before played in Seattle, e.g., Orff's Carmina Burana, Mahler's monumental Resurrection Symphony, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast...
...Evening Hymn, done in 1835, was Washington Allston's personal hymn to Italy, where he had spent happy years as a student. The mature Allston wasted most of his talent on huge Biblical canvases hopelessly designed to shake the world, e.g., his unfinished Belshazzar's Feast. Trapped in the cheerful, chilly Boston of the transcendentalists, the wellsprings of his art running dry, he looked back longingly to the Mediterranean world that he had always been too much of a Puritan to grasp...