Word: cantatas
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DIED. Carl Orff, 86, German composer who turned his back on complex modern styles to fashion a highly personal idiom of folklike melodies and elemental rhythms; in Munich. In Carmina Burana, a 1936 cantata based on writings collected by a 13th century Benedictine monk, Orff used simple, vigorous tunes and choral chants to celebrate the joys of food, drink and love. He pared down to an even more stylized primitivism in his Antigonae (1947-48) and Oedipus der Tyrann...
P.D.Q. Bach: Black Forest Bluegrass (Vanguard). Composer Peter Schickele's latest burlesque features Blaues Gras, a hilarious collision between a stately 18th century cantata and some mean pickin' and strummin'. It just shows what Spike Jones could have done if he had gone to Juilliard...
...longest work, the haunting Cantata No. 2 for voices, choir and orchestra (1943), takes scarcely a quarter of an hour to perform. The shortest of his Three Small Pieces for Cello and Piano (1914) consists of nine measures. His Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913) go by in an average of 40 seconds each-expressing, in the words of his mentor Arnold Schoenberg, ''a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath...
Still, it was the ardent, intelligent music making of Musica Sacra that provided the festival's best moments. They came in the final choral sections of the Magnificat; in the orchestral Suite No. 3 and the Cantata No. 4 ("Christ lag in Todes-banden") under Westenburg; and above all, in resplendent, moving performances of the Mass in B-Minor that Westenburg conducted on opening and closing nights...
...John Passion--Cantata Singers, Sanders Theater...