Word: chorales
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...well-trod turf of Bach, Mozart or even Beethoven that Norrington's crack London Classical Players were venturing onto, but the terra incognita of Hector Berlioz, the virtuoso French composer who in the 1830s revolutionized symphonic sound in such works as the hallucinogenic Symphonie Fantastique and the blazing choral symphony Romeo et Juliette. "Our goal is to present a view of Berlioz very different from modern received opinion," Norrington told the audience before the performance. "We're not like a symphony orchestra playing notes. We only play poetry here...
...broken chords and chugging rhythms, has evolved a more flexible, conventional tonal language, fleshed out with references to past masters (Debussy, Beethoven, Richard Strauss) and even Glenn Miller, as the dramatic situation demands. There has always been a theatricality about Adams' music -- the 1981 Harmonium was a vivid choral setting of poetry by John Donne and Emily Dickinson -- and in Nixon its dramatic qualities have flowered. The figures are sharply characterized: Nixon (James Maddalena), for example, is a gruff baritone whose music is often stiff and halting, while Chairman Mao (John Duykers) is cast as a heldentenor. His body...
...tableaux are cannily staged by Sellars, doing his cleanest operatic work in years. The banquet scene in the Great Hall of the People that concludes the first act becomes a brilliantly calibrated choral scene in which toasts of comradeship are punctuated by popping flashbulbs and delirious, crashing chords. "It's like a dream," sings Nixon, and suddenly the picture freezes, as if the hold button had been pressed...
...first awful glance, Edwin Flath looks to have been consumed by AIDS. Flath, founder and musical director of the California Bach Society Choral Group, is 57 but looks 87. His body, swathed in blankets, shakes with each terrible cough. But his parchment eyelids flutter open at the thought of his music. "I'm learning a new repertoire," he says when the coughing subsides. "Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms sonatas. Life and art are inseparable -- you love it and you give it away." He rises from bed and slowly walks to his piano, sits and begins a short piece by Leos Janacek...
...Choral Society--Kresge Auditorium...