Word: choraler
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...Handel oratorio is almost too much fun; it's just so easy to bellow out that "good old Handel," the louder the better, and let artistry go hang. It takes work to make a concert performance of Handel significantly more than an exercise in sight-reading. The Glee Club, Choral Society, and Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra supplied the necessary work last night. They made things "happen" in Israel in Egypt; conductor Elliot Forbes took good advantage of the vocal discipline which the choruses maintained...
...after praising the choruses so, I should add that the oratorio has been done better, notably by Paul Callaway at the Washington Cathedral. A sniveling thing to do, perhaps, but it is an important qualification. The Choral Society, for one thing, was too frail when its parts were exposed. Yet what in some ways limited the Glee Club's performance helped in others: at times its resonant sound became dull--particularly in the opening narrative--but elsewhere created awesome solidity. Yet, because the oratorio's greatest asset is its power and not its drama, the Glee Club's distinctive sound...
Sept Répons was one more reminder that Poulenc's genius lay more with choral music and songs than with instrumental music. His lyrical sensitivity to poetry led his songs into fragile moods that passed subtly from laughter into grief. "J'aime la voix humaine," he would say. and no composer of the century knew better how to write for it; Frenchmen now call him their Schubert, their Puccini. From the Mouvements Perpétuels he wrote at 19, through his days with the anti-impressionist Groupe des Six, on through all the rest of his career...
Bruckner: Mass No. 3 in F Minor (Berlin Symphony, St. Hedwig's Cathedral Choir, Karl Forster conducting; Pilar Lorengar, soprano, Christa Ludwig, alto, Josef Traxel, tenor, Walter Berry, bass; Angel) is a majestic work. Forster matches the full voice of his orchestra to the choral glories of the Mass, and only Soprano Lorengar's obvious struggling brings him down to earth again...
...profundity of the drama; by the last scene the sections in more obvious liturgical setting have become annoyingly irrelevant. The two writers are not, of course, alone in this abuse. The same pretentious archaism afflicts, for instance, the Verses from the Book of Ruth of Claudio Spies which the Choral Society sang last spring and Le Mystere de la Nativite of Frank Martin which appeared here this Christmas...