Word: handelian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fine English translation of the libretto did not help Elisabeth Phinney as Donna Elvira. Her diction in arias was mediocre. She was perfectly clear through the recitative so the problem is obviously not insoluble. She was at her best in Ah, Fuggi il Traditor, a Handelian rage aria complete with dotted rhythms, large interval leaps, and distinct bass line. In the peasant-girl Zerlina's role, Lisbeth Brittain was properly ingenuous and sang with a bright, light soprano voice...
...elegant touch to the evening was a revival of an old Handelian custom, the playing of a keyboard concerto during intermission. It was no accident that the canny old Hanoverian preferred the great volume of the organ to the harpsichord's thin tone at those intermissions. Fortunately, the Sanders audience quieted down in very un-eighteenth century fashion to hear a distinctly unemotional performance by Harriet Wingreen at the harpsichord...
...about than ever. Sir Newman Flower's revised edition of his scholarly George Frideric Handel, His Personality and His Times had just been published in the U.S. (Scribner; $6); the late Romain Rolland's Essays on Music (Allen, Towne & Heath; $5) had a fat chapter on him. Handelian Robert Manson Myers had written a book-Handel's Messiah, a Touchstone of Taste (Macmillan; $5), out next week-on his greatest oratorio. Handel was not always so well treated...
...story of the mythical lovers, somewhat perverted to Restoration conventions, is told with only three chief characters and only three or four main episodes, yet one cannot mistake the genuineness of its humor or the poignancy of its emotion. It touches true music-drama much closer than does the Handelian form. Unlike operas of the type of Acis and Galatea, Venus and Adonis is unmarred by the intrusion of spoken dialogue. Blow has managed to weld its short airs with the recitatives to produce a work of extreme simplicity, the very opposite of Handel's elaborate de capo arias which...
...from him. Evidently it is not only one of Poulenc's best works, getting away to a certain extent from the narrowness of Les Six and the ragtime of the twenties, but it is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of music as well. It starts out with a pompous Handelian little theme, which is quickly broken down, so my informant says, into a vein of jocosity, busy chattering strings, and short reiterated little figures, (a trick used very successfully by Strawinsky in his recent symphony), And throughout the work there is a good deal of musical wisecracking--banal tunes, whizzing themes...