Word: cantata
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...second premiere, performed by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Thomas Schippers, was another matter. It was a cantata called Sept Répons des Ténèbres, and it impressively proved that Poulenc's last year, like his other 45 as a composer, was blessed with exalted days. In Sept Répons, Poulenc resolved the devotional strain that runs through much of his music; the composition is a hymn for Holy Week that, as a French critic said after Poulenc's death, "springs from a soul taken by an ideal...
Quirky Themes. Commissioned by the city of Mainz to celebrate its 2,000th anniversary, Hindemith's new cantata is scored for three vocal soloists, a chorus and orchestra, and is based on the Fastnacht, or pre-Lenten festival, for which Mainz is famous. The text, partly by Hindemith and partly by Playwright Carl Zuckmayer, has the soprano and tenor soloists singing only in Mainzer dialect while the baritone sings in high German. Soprano and tenor are supposed to be watching an imaginary Fastnacht procession passing before them as they face the audience, and in the roles of low comics...
...composer's inspiration was five poems by young Soviet Poet Evgeny Evtushenko (TIME cover, April 13). Less a symphony than a symphonic cantata, the work evolves in a five-movement cycle, alternating choral recitations with interpretive orchestral comments, building in emotional power until it returns on the wings of ardor to the theme that set it going...
From this indictment, I would except Laudes de Saint Antoine de Padoue by Francis Poulenc, Repleti Segne Euch from Bach's Cantata 196. Harvard sang the first with an admirable attention to pitch (except for an occasional flattening in the tenors) and ended up particularly well with a vigorous Gloria Patri. Yale used a semi-chorus in the balcony in its clean and well-paced rendition of the Handl. And both groups merged to perform the Bach in a competent, if not inspiring, manner...
...chief offering was the entire set of six Schubler Chorales, very rarely performed at one sitting. Written toward the end of Bach's life, they were transcriptions of six cantata movements (and one of only three sets of pieces to get into print during the composer's lifetime). All the same, they are, entrusted to the proper facile fingers and fleet feet, magnificently suited to the organ--Schweitzer notwithstanding...