Word: chorused
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mammoth sets-e.g., a Copenhagen square complete with shops, canal, bridge, market and opera house. It has four lavish ballets, among them the 17-minute-long Little Mermaid number, danced by lively, poodle-topped French Ballerina Jeanmaire, Choreographer Roland Petit of the Ballets de Paris, and a chorus of mermaids among $400,000 worth of underwater caves, fish netting, giant shells, ship spars and Technicolored jetsam. Frank (Guys and Dolls) Loesser has written eight catchy songs, among them three based on Andersen tales, Little Thumbelina, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Ugly Duckling...
...Mind Music." Stravinsky used only five instruments-two flutes, an oboe, English horn and cello. A chorus of eight women and two soloists. Mezzo-Soprano Marni Nixon and Tenor Hughes Cuenod, were the only voices. Stravinsky conducted in his usual jerky, graceless style, looking, with his prominent eyes and waving tailcoat, rather like a dapper little Beatrix Potter frog...
...chorus sang A Lyke-Wake Dirge before, between and after the solos. It was slow music, in close harmony and mildly dissonant, not a dirge of despair but rather "contemplative," as one listener put it. The soprano solo, The Maidens Came, was sparse, austere, reminded some in spirit of Italian primitive painting of an even earlier era than Stravinsky's models. The tenor solo, Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, was a singer's nightmare of half tones and difficult intervals. Most everybody was relieved when the duet, Westron Winde, came breezing in with a cheerfully dissonant allegro...
From then until Davison's resignation in 1934 the club received almost uninterrupted rave notices. The Boston Transcript's headlines of the spring of 1933, however, were a glaring exception: "Dr. Davison makes the best of the present material in the soft, mild-mannered Harvard chorus." It was true, that Davison accepted practically all-comers in the club, "provided they can make a human sound and don't have a file-like voice . . ." He was content with a "homogeneous mediocrity of tone...
...hearing the Club's performance of Brahm's "Requiem" Serge Koussevitsky said, "Harvard has the best-trained chorus I have ever heard in any country of the world...