Word: cantatas
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...Nirvana Symphonie (Time Records). A 1958 composition in which avant-garde Japanese Composer Mayuzumi mixes orchestra and male chorus with purely electronic beeps, whistles and growls as a means of "creating my own musical Nirvana." Whatever he created (he also refers to the piece as "a sort of Buddhistic cantata"), the music is fascinating-full of swelling sonorities and eerie spatial sounds...
Preposterous as the story is, it gives Ronnefeld a fine chance to exercise his talent for musical satire; the score glitters with echoes of half a dozen com posers, from Berg to Bartok. Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana is brilliantly parodied by an offstage male chorus singing a salty Latin text on the mating habits of ants; acidulous Stravinskyan brasses turn up in Act III. The real wonder is that despite the borrowing Composer Ronnefeld's score has a character of its own brash, melodramatic, full of rhythmic fire...
...Radio Warsaw disk jockey obviously did not know the score. Thoughtlessly he played a cantata by Soviet Composer Aram Khachaturian written in praise of Joseph Stalin. Last week the square deejay lost his job. > In Russia, a soccer match between Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) and Tiflis, capital of Stalin's native Georgia, was called off by officials who feared that pro-Stalin Tiflis fans would riot at the sight of Volgograd jerseys...
...second half of the evening added the redoubtable and often noisy Roger Voisin to the orchestra for a performance of J.S. Bach's Cantata 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen. But under the severe direction of Mr. Woodworth, and before the marvel that is Miss Addison's voice, even Mr. Voisin's trumpet was subdued and melodious...
...Woodworth distinguishes two separate moods in Cantata 51: the gladsome rejoicing of the first aria and the concluding Allelujal, and the quiet, more personal reflections of the second aria and chorale. Accordingly, the orchestra was made to dwindle to the bare continuo in this more intimate section, and Mr. Woodworth himself retired quietly to a vacant chair--somewhat disconcerting abdication in any other concert perhaps, but with Miss Addison as soloist (she who can quell Roger Voisin), there is no discontinuity. She moved from joy to introspection with assurance: and both halves of this bisected cantata joined smoothly into...