Word: ellington
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...Leonard Bernstein, 68, unveiled his high-spirited Jubilee Games. In Miami, Elliott Carter, 77, heard the Composers Quartet chart his latest passage through twelve-tone thickets in his String Quartet No. 4. And in Philadelphia, there was the premiere of Queenie Pie, a little-known "street opera" by Duke Ellington. Rarely has the breadth, diversity and achievement of American composers been in such abundant evidence during so short a period of time...
Originally envisioned as a work for television, Queenie Pie was left incomplete at Ellington's death in 1974. In putting it on the stage, the American Music Theater Festival had to play Rimsky-Korsakov to Ellington's Mussorgsky. Ellington's original libretto was recast by George C. Wolfe, the tunes were fitted with new words by George David Weiss, and the score was reworked by Conductor (and sometime Ellington collaborator) Maurice Peress under the supervision of the composer's son Mercer. The trick was to minimize the book's implausibilities while making the most of the score's seductive melodies...
...your-heels flapper dance of The Hairdo Hop, past the wild jungle dance of Stix, round the sultry, smoky bend of A Blues for Two Women and back home to Harlem for the finale, Queenie Pie is unmistakably the work of the grand Duke. In the pit, the Duke Ellington Orchestra steps through the score's uptown opulence with high style, trumpets growling and keyboards swinging, while onstage, members of Director-Choreograp her Garth Fagan's Bucket Dance Theater juke and okeydoke their way through kinetic, hyperactive routines...
...romanticized its view of a Harlem that never quite existed, Queenie Pie rings with authority. There are perhaps unconscious echoes of Porgy and Bess in characters and settings; almost the whole second act takes place on a kind of Kittiwah Island. But instead of Gershwin's "lampblack Negroisms," as Ellington aptly called them, Queenie Pie has the authentic sass and soul of black America. This is what really happened to Bess after she left Catfish Row. Following its three-week run in Philadelphia, Queenie Pie moves to Washington's Kennedy Center for a month. After that, there ought...
...college, the 33rd slot in the Great Americanstamp series. As such, the teaching elder whobequeathed his library and 800 English pounds tothe first American college will join the likes ofthe late Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black,attorney William Jennings Bryan, poet T.S. Eliot'04, jazz great Duke Ellington, and writer JackLondon on the top right corner of America'senvelopes...