Word: celli
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...composed as incidental music to the Maeterlinck dramatic poem. Biss achieved a good variety of sonorities in the four richly orchestrated movements. In the Prelude the orchestra sounded rich and as one unit; at other times, as in the second movement, subdued violins contrasted sharply with pizzicati in the celli and wood-wind solos. The dance-like quality attained in the third movement was excellent. The music lost direction, however, in the Marche Funebre, when Biss had to struggle to keep the dotted rhythms under control...
...very beginning in bare outline, and goes on to restate it endlessly with only unimaginative variations. In Limbo, Adam and Eve sing above the theme, which appears in the oboe and strings. On Earth, the Virgin Mary sings the theme against a pedal tone in the celli, and again above a solo violin. At the end of Part I, the inital treatment of the theme returns in the parts of Elizabeth and the large choir. The theme dogs the listener for the remaining two parts, along with other simpler, but equally tiresome, motives. For example, Martin delights in mock marches...
Schenck cannot be blamed for the worst performed number, Bach's Sixth Brandenburg Concerto; it was led by Bentley Layton, next year's conductor of the orchestra. Bach scored the Sixth Brandenburg for a chamber orchestra: two violas, two gambas (played by 'celli), a solo cello, continuo and bass. In the first movement, all the instruments except continuo and bass supposedly take turns as soloists, and thereafter only the 'cello and violas play the solo lines. This distribution threw the heaviest burden on the performers in the ensemble least able to hear it. The 'cellos and violas had to struggle...
Gunther Schuller: Music for Brass Quintet and Fantasy Quartet for Four Celli (Composers Recordings Inc.). Composer Schuller, a onetime first-chair hornist for the Metropolitan Opera, explores the potential of brasses in a fragmented Quintet that is by turns haunted, anguished or raucously jeering. The fine Fantasy Quartet, with its dynamic rhythms and attenuated lines, finds the composer in a less ruffled but consistently moving frame of mind...
...Concerto Grosso, Senturia teamed up six bass viols, eight 'celli, and a harpsichord, with a large sized crew of string and wind players. It was a semi-Stokowski reading of Handel, with much contrast between the fervid string group and the more restrained, less impassioned woodwind ensemble. The solo passages occasionally caused problems, as did the corps of basses which mainly served to muddy the sound...