Word: britten
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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...
...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...
...BRITTEN: CURLEW RIVER (London). On a sojourn to the Orient in 1956, the composer was delighted by Japanese No plays, and one of them, Sumidagawa, is the inspiration for this one-act opera. It tells of a madwoman searching for her son, and her encounter with a boatman who explains his tragic death and shows her where he is buried. Scored for five male soloists, a chorus of nine and an orchestra of seven, Curlew River is a fragile work indeed, more tone poem than opera. Yet in a sedate, masquelike way, it has considerable melodic charm...
...first of the orchestra's 16 concerts in Peabody Auditorium attracted a glittering audience in formal dress, with a scattering of flowered sports shirts, slacks and sandals. Colin Davis, the brilliant 39-year-old British conductor, led off the all-British program with a rousing performance of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, a kind of teaser course for the uninitiated, moved on to headier stuff by Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius and William Walton. The orchestra more than lived up to its reputation as one of the world's finest ensembles. Bolstered...