Word: brittens
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...fittingly reverent fashion, began the U.S. premiere last week of Benjamin Britten's Curlew River at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, N.Y. Styled as "a parable for church performance," the hour-long piece is based on a medieval No drama, Sumidagawa. It is a simple tale of a demented mother in search of her lost child, and it unfolds like a morality play in slow motion, all the more compelling for the stark economy of its movement and action...
...male cast, headed by Tenor Andrea Velis as the madwoman, masterfully performed Britten's difficult, often eerie sing-speech style of vocal writing. The score was as delicate and intricate as a spider web, interlaced with the chatter of small untuned drums and plunking strings reminiscent of Oriental music. The most impressive achievement was that, in mixing such disparate elements as modern dissonances, a morality play and No drama, there was no clash of styles but rather a smooth melding into what is a new and wholly engaging musical form...
...Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw is an anomaly among operas. The plots of most are so banal or insignificant that opera lovers are notoriously satisfied with the often glorious music and the thrill of elegant productions; the plot becomes merely a vehicle for the rest of the work. But Britten has taken the Henry James novelette and written beautiful music which emphasizes its essential enigmatic horror. The score is absolutely perfect for the story: eerie, elusive, with a constant undertone of brooding malevolence...
Last week the Boschaps performed a rich, tastefully executed program at Manhattan's Town Hall. In Benjamin Britten's Fantasy for Oboe and Strings, the trio of strings spun delicately interlocking webs around the oboe's sober solo; Francis Poulenc's sprightly Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone was charmingly carried off like the playful banterings of back-fence gossips. The evening's major piece, Schubert's String Quintet in C, grew out of the stage like a tree of sound, alive and shapely in every line. The musicians played as it is seldom...
...BRITTEN: CANTATA MISERICORDIUM (London). Written for the 1963 centenary of the founding of the Red Cross, the cantata retells, in Latin, the parable of the good Samaritan. Shorter and less dramatic than Britten's widely performed War Requiem, it is nevertheless eloquent as performed by the London Symphony orchestra and chorus, conducted by Britten, with Peter Pears as the Samaritan and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the Jewish traveler...