Word: choir
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, the U.S. got its first chance to hear Honegger's giant-sized theatrical score. It ran for 75 minutes with no intermission, and put a considerable dent in the New York Philharmonic-Symphony's budget. Besides an augmented orchestra, it employed the 185-voice Westminster Choir and a group of soloists which included Metropolitan Opera Sopranos Nadine Conner and Jarmila Novotna, and two actors-Ballerina Vera Zorina, dressed in a white gown, as Joan, and Raymond Gerome (in tails) as Brother Dominic...
...contemporary Composer Paul Creston, who has arranged works especially for them. Critics gave them good marks for diction, blending of voices and clarity of line, and for a welcome versatility of material which the Don Cossack choruses lack. Wrote the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson: "[This choir] could, without half trying, raise the whole level of our current taste in semi-popular music. It is that good." Columbia Concerts, Inc., which thought so too, has signed the boys to a 140-concert tour of the U.S. and Canada...
...York Philharmonic (Sun. 3 p.m., CBS). Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher, by Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel; with Vera Zorina, Jarmila Novotna, Nadine Conner, and the Westminster Choir...
...Campus and Battle Hymn of the Republic for Waring in New York. On the side, he trained a glee club for Broadway's Billy Rose, set the swimmers' strokes to music at Billy's World's Fair Aquacade. He also took on the choir at Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church, and organized what is now the Collegiate Chorale...
Flunk in Theory. To his singers, he is a tough taskmaster who insists on clarity of line instead of overwhelming masses of sound. Says he: "It is the performer's business to get out of the way of the music." He picks his "varsity" choir first for knowledge of musical theory, then for ability to sight-read and lastly for voice. When most of his best singers flunked the theory test, he got his own teacher, Juilliard's Julius Herford, to teach them in one-night-a-week classes...