Word: berlioz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years, European travelers have raved about two operas almost never performed in the U.S.: Hector Berlioz's Les Troy ens (The Trojans) and Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust. The latter is staged mainly in Germany, where its intellectual depth and murky symbolism are much admired. The Berlioz has been visible in France, Italy and Britain, usually in truncated form, for it was thought too sprawling for stage presentation in one evening. Only parts of Les Troyens have been commercially recorded. Only orchestral bits from Doktor Faust had ever been recorded...
...five disks, $29.90) Les Troyens turns out to be better than even its most extravagant admirers have claimed. Nor does it seem all that long: uncut, it runs a bit under four hours, shorter than either Die Meistersinger or Parsifal, roughly the length of Tristan und Isolde. It is Berlioz's greatest work, epic in scale, richness and power...
...incomprehensible that Les Troyens had to wait 112 years to be heard as Berlioz had written it. If it were not for the superlative skill and dogged determination of Conductor Colin Davis it might not have happened at all. For over a century, the French publishing house of Choudens owned the score but refused to release it. At one point, English Musicologists Cecil Gray and W.J. Turner even tried to hire the Parisian underworld to burglarize Choudens. The attempt failed. Fortunately, the Bibliotheque Nationale owned Berlioz's manuscripts. British Musicologist Hugh MacDonald began the immense job of deciphering them...
...experiment, Volumina recalls the way Cage and Henry Cowell, in the 1930s, used to beat the prepared piano with their fists and elbows for new sonority. Like Cage and Cowell, the "Zacher school" seems as fond of grotesquerie as grace. And even grotesquerie has its place. It was Berlioz, after all, who ordered the violinists to rap on their strings with the wood of their bows in the Symphonie Fantastique, a very avant-garde thing...