Word: fantasias
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...dream sequences, the score rarely pretends to be anything other than expert incidental music. But that is enough for Composer-Critic Taylor, who began his career as a piano-roll puncher, vaudeville entertainer and poster artist, is not embarrassed to recall that he narrated Walt Disney's Fantasia, and thinks that U.S. music needs more corn to replace the "dry, squeezed lemon" of modernism. At 74 turning again to composition, Taylor says of Ibbetson: "I'd forgotten how good...
...Busoni: Fantasia Contrappuntistica (Egon Petri; Westminster, mono). In this stylistic tour de force, Italian Pianist-Composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) started with a chorale prelude and then, using subjects from an unfinished fugue by Bach, spun out four three-part fugues, one of them built on the name and the four notes B-A-C-H.* Throughout, Busoni gradually modernized his musical vocabulary, ending with a style marked by thick, dissonant clusters of notes. The effect, as presented by Dutch Pianist Petri, is a little like watching a nature film in which plants miraculously blossom and grow before the viewer...
...money ($4.98 list price, $1 more for stereo) the frustrated conductor gets some bandshell marshmallows-Richard Rodgers' Victory at Sea, Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, Fantasia on "Greensleeves"-preconducted for him by Arthur Fiedler, Morton Gould, Robert Russell Bennett. (Any armchair connoisseur of the Viennese repertory will find Conductor Fiedler's tempi in the Fledermaus waltzes aggravatingly slow, but Gould's version of Mexican Hat Dance is so inspiring that it may result in dislocated shoulders...
Also on the program were Mozart's Fantasia in F-minor, K. 608; and Handel's Concerto No. 2 in B-flat, in which Biggs failed to interpret properly the "French style" of the first movement. The best playing of the evening came in the sole modern work. Litanies, by Jehan Alain, tragically killed at 29 during the second World...
Garden of Eden. Last week the most grandiose plan of them all, Frank Lloyd Wright's Grand Opera and Civic Auditorium, was unveiled. It is a fantasia right out of the Arabian Nights, and Wright, 88, a self-confessed Arabian Nighter since boyhood, meant it to be that way. "If we are able to understand and interpret our ancestors," Wright intoned, "there is no need to copy them. Nor need Baghdad adopt the materialistic structures called 'modern' now barging in from the West upon the East...