Word: cantata
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Testing the amphitheater's loudspeaker system with a Bach cantata recently, audio engineers got a big surprise: when they turned it off, residents complained about losing "all the nice music." As a result they now hear Bach and other classical composers nightly...
...Edison Denisov, 37, from Siberia, teaches orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory. His cantata, The Suns of the Incas, which was performed in Darmstadt and Paris last year, combines elements of both twelve-tone and chance (improvisational) music. Named by his electronics professor father for Thomas Edison, Denisov is regarded as the most important and adventuresome of the new voices in Russian music...
...Prince Mikhail Volkonsky, studied in Paris, later at the Moscow Conservatory. A performance of one of his compositions in Leningrad in 1960 caused such an intramural scandal that no new work of his was played for five years. The silence was ended last spring with the premiere of a cantata, The Laments of Shchaza. Volkonsky composes in the twelve-tone style, but he is also a first-rate concert harpsichordist and a leader in the revival of baroque music in Russia...
CALDARA: IL GIUOCO DEL QUADRIGLIO (Nonesuch). Quadriglio, perhaps the best-known work of the Venetian composer Antonio Caldara (1670-1736), is a showpiece cantata for four sopranos. It was commissioned by Archduchess Maria Theresa (later Empress of Austria) and performed at court by her and her sisters. The ladies must have minded their singing master to negotiate the runs and trills that ornament this gay, witty music about four bored young damsels desultorily playing cards and wishing that both their hands and their suitors were more exciting. The soloists and orchestra of the Societàa Cameristica di Lugano have...
...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...