Word: berlioz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
Grappling with Goethe. What they saw was a flawed masterpiece. Composers from Berlioz to Richard Adler and Jerry Ross have grappled with the Faust legend-the extent of their genius measurable by the magnitude of their failure. Boito, at least, approaches Goethe as an equal, his Prologue and Epilogue conjuring up infinities of space, time and the magnitude of Heaven...
...Susannah he sang Reverend Blitch, a man of God who fell through lust into destruction; his Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust is demon masquerading as man; to round off his demonic repertory, New York City Opera General Director Julius Rudel is toying with the idea of producing Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust (in which Treigle would play yet another Mephistopheles) and Busoni's Doktor Faust (in which Treigle would switch roles and appear as Faust, leaving Mephisto to some diabolic tenor...
...stereo at first suggests mainly gimmicky possibilities-tap dancers banging their way across the living room and out into the kitchen; Valkyries swooping about the house like big-bosomed mosquitoes. Yet it has serious potential in recording. Certain kinds of music can be adequately heard no other way: the Berlioz Requiem, for instance, with its four brass bands in opposite corners, or the antiphonal music of Gabrieli...