Word: elektra
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What the audience saw last week was a far cry from either Salome or Elektra. As one watching expert, Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, described it, Capriccio is "a musician's opera, composed for the musical gourmet. It has the quality of an old, old sweet wine and contains everything that Strauss knew about music and opera...
...York Philharmonic (Sun. 3 p.m., CBS). Richard Strauss's Elektra...
...under the influence of Mozart and Brahms. But after about 1885, Strauss's contemporaries called his work "psychopathic music." They railed against the brazen dissonances in his huge, Wagnerian tone poems (Don Quixote, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, etc.), the savage horrors of his operas Salome and Elektra, his general lack of taste in composition. But no one could overlook his genius: his unique gifts as an orchestrator, his penetrating power for illuminating character and for describing anything from the zany antics of Don Quixote to the bestiality of Salome...
Punch & Power. Peter Grimes is more than a new opera; for the Met it is a new kind of opera. Dissonance has been heard in the Met's hallowed halls before-in Strauss's Elektra and Salome. Bernard Rogers' The Warrior, which was flashed on & off last year, was nonsensically dissonant. Britten's music runs from perky jigs in the woodwinds to forceful, discordant barkings in the brass. The Met's soggy chorus would need a shot in the arm to handle some of the rounds, which sound like sea chanties and are as complex...
...thrown a little money around, but he had built the orchestra again into a first-rate symphony, using the same old hands (only the piano player and the first horn were new). He had given Chicagoans the finest opera they had heard in years: a concert version of Elektra with Marjorie Lawrence, and Tristan und Isolde with Kirsten Flagstad. He had given the musicians some rough treatment at rehearsals -but no conductor was ever fired for that, so long as he produced good music...