Word: cantatas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...kohn, a teaching fellow in Music, who has thus auspiciously introduced himself as a performer, will he seen as a composer at the end of this month when the glee Club introduces his new cantata...
...bass. These failings actually enhanced the plain chant Te Lucis, but consistently spoiled the music of later composers. Even Charpentier's lovely Magnificat almost became an insipid bore--despite the excellence of violinists John Goodkind and John Barson, and Harvard cellist Stephen McGhee. After a mediocre Schubert cantata, the visitors offered a Bacchanals from Offenbach's La Belle Helene. At its close, Mr. Ludington did a little dance and several singers made Chevaliertype faces. The mugging was almost as amusing as their French...
...Carl Orff's first major work (he destroyed all his previous manuscripts), the piece he calls his "snowplow" because it clears a path with listeners for acceptance of his others, e.g., musical plays based on Grimm fairy tales, poems by Catullus, Greek tragedy. He called it a "dramatic cantata," and meant it to be performed as a theater piece. At 59, still living near his native Munich, Orff no longer writes for the concert hall. Says he: "Melody and speech belong together. I reject the idea of a pure music...
Inclusion of a solo cantata in Sunday's program provided excellent contrast to the choral sound. Above all, Rameau's Le Berger Fidele requires style to sustain the text's nonsense. Fortunately the soloist was Jean Lunn, whose lovely voice is not yet tired from a heavy concert schedule. Her phrasing, diction, and impeccable vocal ornamentation placed the cantata's fluffiness in a proper musical perspective...
...Lieberson has won a reputation for adventurous programming. Soon after his arrival, Columbia released such radical items as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Bartok's Contrasts, and continued to rack up first recordings of modern masterpieces, e.g., Berg's Violin Concerto, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky cantata. Gradually, Columbia built a stable of its own name artists (Pianist Rudolf Serkin, Violinist Joseph Szigeti), and created a new source of fine music as a major underwriter of the first Casals Festival. By the time Columbia introduced LP (1948), most of its classical catalogue was Lieberson-produced...