Word: copland
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...shopworn lace, to shelter three possible excuses for a picture: music, dancing and bullfighting. The bullring sequences get along without picadors or coups de grace, and apparently the same old company bull is photographed again & again. More stirring is Johnny (Body & Soul) Green's rearrangement of Aaron Copland's El Salon Mexico. Bits of the dancing (by Mexican Star Ricardo Montalban and Cyd Charisse) are more tense and percussive than the brand generally seen north of the border...
...Expatriate Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, and Swiss Composer Arthur Honegger's Third ("Liturgique") Symphony. He considers Stravinsky and Gershwin the best U.S. composers (he likes Porgy and Bess particularly because "it is expressive of a people"). What did he think of U.S. Composer Aaron Copland's Third Symphony, which he also heard for the first time? Said he: "I like his other works, but I was not impressed with this symphony. ... I had a feeling that ... it was influenced too much by Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Stravinsky...
...occasion. These were, in the order of their performance: a "Last Judgement" by Paul Hindemith; a set of excerpts from Virgil's "Georgies", set to music under the title of "La Terra" by Gian-Francesco Malipiero; and the Genesis account of creation, entitled by its composer, Aaron Copland, "In the Beginning." All three were performed to a miraculous perfection by New York's Collegiate Chorale, under the direction of Robert Shaw. Nell Tangeman sang with all vocal beauty the extended and difficult solo passages of the Copland work. Mary Crowley accompanied the Malipiero piece on the organ, and a brass...
...Aaron Copland's "In the Beginning" was the most warmly received of the three commissioned works. It is a simple piece, consisting largely of recitative choral chant and of solos in arioso form. Some of the more extended choral passages are in two widely-spaced parts only. A few are more compact. The English declamation, though utterly clear, is not rhythmically idiomatic. It resembles rather Gregorian chant as sung by the Benedictine monks at Solesmes, except that the melodic intervals are neither proximate nor melismatic, lying chiefly between the fourth and the ninth. This constant skipping around is not unpleasant...
...three composers would seem to have chosen texts that are somewhat over-weighty both by their antiquity and by their abundance of imagery. In all three cases, less text and more music would have produced works better equilibrated. Copland's is the least ambitious expressively of the three pieces. It is modest and thin of substance. Hindemith's is more pretentious and more complex but not a whit more expressive. Malipicro's is the richest of them, matches most nearly with music the grandeur of its verbal text. It might seem even more adequately Virgilian than it does if, orchestral...