Word: britten
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Levy, 34, the son of a Passaic, N.J., candy-store owner, seems to be a composer in search of a style; the opera, his first full-length effort, has some swatches of straight classical writing, some Webern, some Stravinsky, some Britten. As a result, the operatic version of Mourning emerges as a compelling drama with polished incidental music. Last week, after two Mourning performances, Levy was busy cutting the three-hour opera by about 20 minutes. It will take more than emergency surgery and fine stagecraft to save a score that was dead to begin with...
When Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten's dour saga of a doomed fisherman, was first produced at the Metropolitan Opera in 1948, one patron was so outraged that he spat through the box-office window. Badly sung, unimaginatively staged, poorly conducted, the opera sank with barely a ripple...
Underlying Waves. No glamour boy on the podium, Davis guided the Met orchestra through Britten's surging score with the firm and unerring hand of a ship's captain riding out a sou'wester. His precise baton gave full play to the music's quick, dramatic climaxes, while deftly sustaining the rhythms of wind and waves. His beat was decisive, his attack well balanced and logical...
...BRITTEN: SINFONIETTA, OPUS 1 and HINDEMITH: OCTET (1957-58) (London). Very early Britten-facile and mannered-before he methodically stripped his musical imagination down to its sparest, starkest forms. It is charming, almost pretty music, and vastly different from the sophisticated complexities of the Hindemith, in which key themes are introduced, transposed in various ways, and then replayed in reverse order. Handled with elan by members of the Vienna Octet...
...schedule for the upcoming season: in addition to Antony and Cleopatra, it includes an unprecedented nine new productions, including such contemporary operas as Britten's Peter Grimes and the world premiere of Marvin Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra...