Word: cantata
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Wednesday night Miss Wilsen presented a recital for soprano remarkable for its originality. Instead of the usual chronological sequence of song groups by Schubert, Schumann, Faure, Wolf, Debussy, and so on, her program was divided between Cantata No. 51 of J.S. Bach ("Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen"), setting by various composers of Goethe's "Rastlose Liebe" and Paul Verlaine's "Clair de lune," along with the cycle On This Island by Benjamin Britten to poetry of W. H. Auden...
...Kirchner has been awarded a Pulitzer prize for a work that combines sounds produced electronically with those of a string quartet; as teacher of courses for music concentrators, he is tireless in his efforts to spread the gospel according to Schoenberg. Yet Friday night there he was, conducting the Cantata Singers and an ensemble of Boston-area professionals in a program consisting solely of music by J. S. Bach...
...Cantata Singers are a good example of how a small, well-trained chorus can have fuller body and greater impact than one larger but less precisely controlled. Like all human performers, the group had its moments of weakness: sloppy ensemble, faulty intonation, a tendency (especially among the men) to expend force at the beginning of a phrase and then be unable to carry it through to the end. But Bach's voice writing, though beautiful, is quite impossible to perform, and the group has to be admired for its accomplishment. The performance was neither too fussily "authentic" nor embarrassingly emotive...
IRINA ARKHIPOVA: RUSSIAN OPERA & CANTATA ARIAS (Melodiya/Angel). The dark passion of good Russian music is welcome to even the most jaded ears, and this collection of arias is particularly affecting. While most of the composers (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev) are familiar, the excerpts are less so. Among the most intriguing is from Not Love Alone, an opera about the love life on a collective farm by Rodion Shchedrin. The youngest composer represented on the album (and husband of Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya), Shchedrin finds room for originality within conventional Soviet Realism-which means late, late, late Romanticism. However superficial, his melodies...
...heart of the cantata is an amorous dialogue between Jesus and a Soul, portrayed in two soprano-bass duets and a bass recitative. On the whole, the long and intricate duets received the meticulous dovetailing of voices that they demand. Unfortunately, Hester often overpowered soprano Marsha Vleck; at times she was almost inaudible. In the recitative Hester provided the most moving moment of the evening, molding the angular phrases into a lyrical declaration of love...