Word: brittens
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...working mother who gets up when she'd rather sleep, goes to work when she'd rather be with her son and makes ends meet somehow, someway. And she does it with little complaining, keeping her wits about her so she can make it through one more day. RHONDA BRITTEN Encino, California...
They also played Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, a recent addition, and two entirely new pieces, Leonard Bernstein's Overture to Candide and Darius Milhaud's La Creation du Monde...
...freshest production is a real oddball: one of the few stagings ever done of Benjamin Britten's first opera, Paul Bunyan. Written to a libretto by W.H. Auden shortly after the composer and poet came to America as pacifists in the late 1930s, the work was conceived as a comic-populist valentine to their new country, one that would be suitable for school productions. Singable it is: the stream of songs and choruses exploits and gently parodies everything from American folksiness to Broadway jazziness, from Italian opera to Victorian ballads...
Dramatic it almost is. Having decided that the title character was too big for the stage, Britten and Auden reduced the mythic giant logger to a booming invisible voice, sounding like a cross between Walter Cronkite and Big Brother, that directs the taming of the wilderness. His minions include a creatively frustrated egghead, a hot-tempered muscleman, a pair of winsome young lovers and all manner of ax-swinging loggers and their "wimmin." Inexplicably absent is Babe the Blue...
...Britten that followed effectively saved the day. Trampler, clearly more comfortable with a familiar piece and his fabled gigantic viola, brought conviction and more strength (though even more couldn't have hurt) to the dominating solo part...