Word: britten
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BILLY BUDD (London: 3 LPs). Benjamin Britten's music is filled with a mystic intensity that illuminates rather than beclouds the libretto, which was beautifully crafted by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier from Melville's tale of an innocent's execution. The album has been meticulously produced with a cast that includes Peter Glossop as Billy and Peter Pears as Captain Vere: Britten himself conducts...
...manifold contradictions of life in an decipherable moment of ineffable unity. And so, rowing Endgame on top of Presidential Power, and ling the ineluctable pull of some Taoist-Maoist dooms against my Captain Shotover-Thomist faith, I ded for Sanders to hear the Stravinsky Mass, and oral works by Britten and Dello Joio in honor of the atron saint of music...
...OTHER TWO WORKS. Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, and Dello Joio's To St. Cecilia, were surpassingly unremarkable. The only marginally interesting section of the Britten piece, which uses a problemmatical Auden text, was a Queen Mab Scherzo passage affording relief from the "flickering flames" of "Blonde Aphrodite." The unidentified soprano soloist thrilled us with another seismic performance whose beauty might be compared to an autumnal wheat field methodically bending to the breeze. Mr. Dello Joio, whose star has been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically...
...first works of Thomas Arne twenty years later. By 1710 Handel had subsumed into his Italianate idiom the brilliant scoring, deep love for the English language, and unpretentious pietism which inform the greatest English music from Byrd, Tallis, and Purcell, to Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten...
EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL (Aug. 18-Sept. 7) this year explores the compositions of Franz Schubert and Benjamin Britten. A concert version of Schubert's rarely heard opera, Alfonso und Estrella, is scheduled for Sept. 7, following a virtual Who's Who among artists, orchestras and opera companies in a generally classics-oriented program...