Word: cantata
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lehrman to take a new look at Brecht's 1948 didactic play about the Paris Commune-or, more precisely, Blitzstein with an interpretational gloss thrown on his work by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein in 1940 presented a production at Sanders of Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. Bernstein adopted a "cantata form, from the piano." Lehrman, himself the director of a 1969 Cradle Will Rock production, explained in a 1970 essay about Blitzstein. This is "exactly the way I plan to stage my own adaptation and translation of Brecht and Eisler's Days of the Commune for the 100th anniversary...
...them transformed into papier-mâché puppets eight to ten feet tall. Picture these puppets moving as if they were in some prehistoric slow-motion silent film. This is hierophantic theater, as old as time, as young as the infancy of man. To see The Grey Lady Cantata as performed by the Bread and Puppet Theater is rather like waiting in the mystic whispering groves of Delphi to hear the oracle speak. Despite the primordial trappings, this virtual dumb show is as contemporary as tomorrow's bombing raid. It is a cantata of death, an immensely...
...idea of how to spend a little under an hour in the theater, but for anyone who wants to seek out and comprehend the deepest wellsprings of drama, it is an hour well spent. Within the past two weeks, Joseph Papp's Public Theater, where The Grey Lady Cantata is housed, has offered playgoers: Subject to Fits (a free-form fantasy based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot), Slag (claustrophobic feminine hysteria in a decaying British girls' school) and Here Are Ladies (see below). The handsome landmark building on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan carries the exciting...
...just "free music"-as his romantic biographers put it-but the creative ego and id of every composer who followed. Prior to Beethoven, music in general never moved too far from the everyday interests of its patrons, be they commoners or royalty; this was true of a Bach cantata or a Mozart serenade. Beethoven changed that. As the father of musical romanticism, he made music an expressive function of himself. Later composers carried the cult of music for music's sake too far, and divorced "serious" composition from the interests of large audiences. One reason that every year...
...Cantata No. 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, is one of the most consistently popular of the sacred cantatas. The purity of its vocal settings, when performed by an adequate soprano, places it among the most starkly beautiful of Bach's vocal works. Benita Valente, Monday night's soloist, is a perfect Bach soprano. She has a clear, pure voice, without any of the excess floridity or overblown style which is fatal in a Bach performance. Miss Valente and the orchestra gave a highly correct interpretation of the work, yet no one devoid of feeling. The work, originally composed...