Word: firebirds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Igor Stravinsky's fortunes had not kept pace with his fame. In the 37 years since he had written it, The Firebird had made a lot of money, but not for him. For one thing, as a Russian emigre, his royalties seldom caught up with him. Guided by his friend, Music Publisher Lou Levy, Stravinsky has earned $10,000 on Firebird in the past two years, simply by writing a new arrangement of it and thereby securing a U.S. copyright. But Levy wasn't through helping...
Stravinsky: Firebird Suite (Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, Igor Stravinsky conducting; Columbia, 7 sides). At 64, Stravinsky has rewritten one of his best earlier works. In this 1946 version, his third reworking, Composer Stravinsky adds incidental passages and restores the Adagio and Scherzo of the first 1910 try. The bird's plumage is a little fancier, but it flies no better. Performance: fair...
...Kalmuck peasant, who yesterday guided a primitive plough hitched to a camel, is picked up as by zhar ptitsa, the legendary firebird, and deposited for some revolutionary anniversary on this field. He knows with a naked realism sometimes denied to Europeans, with their insulating layers of sophistication, that he is in physical contact with a new magnitude of power -vlast, sovyetskaya vlast: Soviet power...
...pathetically weak. It is short on stars capable of handling the more difficult roles, and second-rate in its ensemble dancers. But the main shortcoming of the company is imagination, the kind of imagination in choreography and staging that enables the Ballet Theatre to give productions like its "Firebird" (with sets by Chagall!), "On Stage," or "Fair at Sorochinsk," efforts that the Ballet Russe perhaps through unavoidable monetary restrictions--would never even try to equal...
Stravinsky: Song of the Nightingale (DM 1041). This Symphonic Poem, once intended as a Ballet and later as an Opera, is a summation of the composer's experiments in the earlier Firebird, Petrouchka, and Rite of Spring Suites, and displays more than any of them, Stravinsky's amazing command of the symphony orchestra. Both recording and performance by the Cincinnati Symphony under Eugene Goossens are only fair...