Word: britten
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Four years ago, the BBC found it no easy job getting Benjamin Britten to accept a commission for a TV opera. He was still unhappy about the 1952 NBC Opera production of his Billy Budd, and remained skeptical about the compatibility of TV and opera. But accept Britten did, and began looking for a story that would show individuals reacting to each other and events of a "personal, private kind, rather than big and public, which a big stage obviously needs...
...military family who rejects a soldiering career on principle, finds himself rejected by his family, and finally meets a mysterious death in a haunted room. But Owen Wingrave's* opportunities for face-to-face confrontation seemed virtually limitless. Beyond that, it offered themes that have preoccupied Britten in much of his work: innocence betrayed, antimilitarism, the struggle of the individual against the group...
Snares and Trumpets. The result, a two-act, two-hour TV opera, was broadcast jointly last weekend by the BBC and America's NET. As it turned out, Owen Wingrave was something less than Britten's best. Though carefully modulated for the home listener, the vocal writing showed little warmth or melodic appeal. The score, for a busy 46-piece orchestra, with snares and trumpets to underline the military motif and bright, chiming, exotic percussive passages more suggestive of Bali than Victorian England, rarely conveyed resonances of gothic mystery...
...fine cast of acting singers, headed by Janet Baker, Peter Pears, Sylvia Fisher and Benjamin Luxon in the title role, could not quite breathe passionate life into dialogue that often consisted of abstract arguments for war or peace. Britten, moreover, chose not to set to music the one scene that might have brought the story to a dramatic focus-a furious confrontation in which Owen is first berated then disinherited by his old-warrior grandfather...
...each of his reproductive cells. Even so, the cells of such relatively primitive animals as salamanders, lungfish and even certain one-celled algae contain far more DNA than man's. Does this mean that such lowly beasts have a richer genetic capacity than man? The Carnegie Institution's Roy Britten and David Kohne, after much painstaking investigation, may have found the answer to that embarrassing question. A few years ago they discovered that in the DNA of higher organisms many genes seem to be repeated. In calf cells, they calculated, up to 40% of the DNA consists of segments that...