Word: britten
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Competing against low temperatures and a drizzle, Alfred Nash Patterson conducted a worthy semi-concert version of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, probably the finest British opera since Purcell's Dido...
...head of a mouse. After him tumbled a lion, a camel, an owl and an ass. Their capers among the tombstones scarcely drew a second glance from the local citizens, for everybody recognized them as the star performers of the Aldeburgh Festival's current star attraction: Benjamin Britten's eagerly awaited new music drama, Noye's Fludde...
...work did not tax Composer Britten's creative powers. Noye's Fludde (Noah's Flood) is a 14th century miracle play that Britten set to music by stitching in three oldtime hymns, including the Rev. John Bacchus Dykes's powerful Eternal Father, Strong to Save. The original text, retained by Britten in all its gamy Middle English splendor, closely follows the Biblical tale of Noah, with the startling exception that Mrs. Noah is portrayed as a drunken old bawd, unwilling to enter the ark without her unsavory bevy of gossips...
...into the ark caroling "Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie eleison," and the orchestra launched with a crash into cymbal-punctuated storm music that reached its climax in a beautifully descanted chorus of Eternal Father. As the storm subsided, the cast climbed back to the stage singing a four-part Britten Alleluia, filed out singing Thomas Tallis' The Spacious Firmament on High...
GIORGIO Tozzi, 35, a tall (6 ft. 1 in.), big-shouldered Chicago-born bass, made his New York debut as Tarquinius in the 1949 Broadway production of Benjamin Britten's Rape of Lucretia, but after the short-lived Rape closed, Tozzi wound up a penniless student in Italy (he recalls being so weak from hunger that he could climb to his third-floor room only once a day). Since then, he has sung widely in Europe, last summer toured as Emile de Becque with Mary Martin in South Pacific. A onetime baritone, Tozzi has a deep, warm voice...