Word: cantatas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...showed greater wisdom in next essaying Bach's Coffee Cantata and Locke's masque Cupid and Death. Both are works of high quality readily stageable and technically rather easy--well within the grasp of student performers. Yet the participants adopted so cavalier and irresponsible an attitude toward preparation that the result was an insult to the audience and, uniquely in Harvard's post-War theatrical history, managed to achieve total disaster. When, near the masque's end, the principals were poised in the balcony arches above the Fogg Court, one felt a nearly unconquerable desire to yell, "Jump...
...Lexington Choral Society, supported by the Festival Orchestra, devoted its concert, under the direction of Allen Lannom, to two major works: Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem, and Orff's Carmina Burana. Acting on his premonition of World War II, Vaughan Williams wrote his cantata in 1936, in which he fashioned his text from a phrase of the Roman Mass, sizable excerpts from Walt Whitman (who is full of superlative choral texts), and bits from John Bright and the Bible. Composed with a knowing hand, it lacked only vitality in performance...
...Little Igor was not all candy. Some called him "the young Rimbaud," and he was taken up by all the "in" people. He married Nijinsky's daughter Kira (they were divorced during the war, and he is now married to an Italian princess). He wrote a cantata on a poem by Jean Cocteau, Hymnes, for orchestra, and a host of other breathlessly energetic works...
...composer, whose denunciations of the twelve-tone method used to be famous, has now written a piece derived almost entirely from on twelve-tone row. Everyone knew it was coming: the direction of the wind could be ascertained in 192, with the inversions and retrogrades of the Cantata; then real twelve-tone sections appeared in Canticum Sacrum and Agon: then came Threni ("Threnodies"), a long (for Stravinsky) setting of texts from the Vulgate Lamentations of Jeremiah. Nor was it hard to predict that this piece would sound like Stravinsky, and not like the Viennese, the young serialists, or anybody else...
...ovation from four of the U.S.'s leading practitioners of his own art: Composers Lukas Foss, 37, Aaron Copland, 59, Roger Sessions, 62, Samuel Barber, 49. Seated at four grand pianos, two on each side of the stage, the four were assembled to play Stravinsky's choreographic cantata Les Noces (The Wedding)in ritual homage to the 77-year-old composer they all call their master...