Word: handels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Pierian Sodality of 1808, which this winter gave us the splendid Bach-Handel concert, concludes its season with a concert in Paine Hall Friday evening. On the program are included Mozart's Haffner Symphony, the seldom performed "Stabat Mater" of Pergolesi, and a Purcell suite arranged by Mr. Holmes from unpublished manuscripts in the British Museum...
There are very few composers, if any, who can stand beside Handel in choral writing. After centuries of evolution, music for voices as a definite expressive element reached the apex of development in his works, a peak that never again has been reached. Later masters, such as Mozart and Beethoven, studied his writings sedulously in an effort to compose as tellingly for voices as he did; yet, in net effect, his works stand unrivalled...
...Handel could incarnate his own unflagging vitality, his breadth of feeling wide as the open skies, his elemental strength, into the singers themselves, making them sing in sweeping comprehensive melodies and in intense close lines that make counterpoint quiver with life. Yet he had a perfect understanding of the capabilities and incapabilities of the singers, and never wrote beyond their capacities, so that the music never is unnatural or strained, as Beethoven so often is. Mozart, on the other hand, lacks Handel's great strength, though his delicate melodic line cannot be challenged...
...spite of Handel's absolute preeminence as a choral writer, his works are today for the most part relegated to obscurity, except for the annual Christmas revival of the Messiah. Music exists only when it is performed. No matter how great a composer's genius, it is dead until it is concretely demonstrated...
Like his good friend Painter Pablo Picasso (who invented and then threw over cubism), Igor Stravinsky soon abandoned his followers. He took to ransacking 18th-Century fugues and roundelays, writing distorted imitations of Bach and Handel. None of his later compositions created anywhere near the fuss & feathers that the Sacre did, but Stravinsky remained the greatest ballet composer of modern times, and one of the half-dozen most important symphonic composers of the 20th Century. With audiences nowadays he is popular chiefly for two early ballet scores: Petrouchka (1911) and the orchestral suite from his fairy-tale ballet The Firebird...