Word: britten
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...London's Covent Garden last week, the curtain opened on an intriguing pair of firsts: the first all-British full-length ballet, for which Benjamin Britten had composed his first ballet score. It was written especially for Ballerina Svetlana Beriosova, rising young (23) star of the Sadler's Wells Ballet...
...Prince of the Pagodas was a mixed bag of occasionally singing melody and frequently turgid choreography. For at least two acts, Britten's music was sonorous and strong, enriched by a variety of percussion effects and deft syncopation. Less successful was the work of Choreographer John Cranko, who all too frequently allowed the story to lose its way in symbolic labyrinths. The fantastic plot describes the betrayal of a Lear-like king by his wicked daughter, and the eventual restoration of the king's realm by the intervention of his faithful and beautiful younger daughter...
Boston Symphony, scarcely letting us recover from last week's magnificent bombast, will pit two Englishmen--Britten and Walton--against a German, Beethoven, who has written a Pastoral Symphony. Gregor Piatigorsky, cello soloist. At 2:15 p.m. today, 8:30 p.m. tomorrow...
Under a governmental austerity ruling that cut back their budget 30%, officials of Venice's famed International Festival of Contemporary Music had canceled the prestigious operatic premiéres of earlier years (e.g., Stravinsky's own 1951 Rake's Progress, Britten's 1954 Turn of the Screw, Prokofiev's 1955 Flaming Angel), pinned all their hopes and a large part of their remaining budget on the world premiére of Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (Canticle to Honor the Name of St. Mark...
...pleasant musical oddities, but forsome pianists they became necessities. In World War I a Viennese pianist named Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm, but stubbornly refused to abandon his virtuoso career. He commissioned and performed Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand, two works by Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten's Diversions on a Theme. Wittgenstein (now 68 and a teacher in Manhattan) also commissioned-but never understood or played-the Prokofiev concerto that was premièred last week by Siegfried Rapp, a musician with a story similar...