Word: kaddish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bordering on melodrama, describes Schoenberg's raging desperateness as the Jews flee Nazist Warsaw, and his resumption of the Jewish faith in the face of this tragic modern Diaspora. This profound personal utterance seems to suffer from the same type of self-consciously tortured text which reduced Bernstein's Kaddish symphony to almost complete rhetorical vacuousness. The performance was frenetic rather than impassioned, especially in the closing Hebrew prayer Sh'ma Yisroel, but since the work is one organized explosion of dismay suffused with the solace of Schoenberg's fund of religious faith, the somewhat overwrought vitality of the performance...
Joan Fuerstman's dark yet well-focused mezzo-soprano was the highlight of the evening. Besides the Poulenc she sang Ravel's Deux chansons hebraiques, which contrasts the rhapsodically set Hebrew poetry of the "Kaddish" with the simple Yiddish wisdom of "L'Enigme eternelle." She closed the program with a performance of the Siete Canciones populares Espanoles of Manuel de Falla. Both works date from 1914 and were perfectly suited to her expressive temperament. She performed them with an unostentatious professional polish that was pleasing to hear...
Conceived during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the 50-minute oratorio based on the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is a highly personal memorial to the Nazis' victims. Scored for bass-baritone, double chorus, orchestra and string quintet, the pace in all but one of the ten movements is slow to slower. To sustain interest within such a restrictive format, the score trades on subtlety rather than splash, deftly plays the wistful mewings of the string quintet against the dense harmonies of the orchestra, intertwines exquisite vocal patterns like a kaleidoscope turning in slow motion. Brilliantly...
ALLEN GINSBERG READS "KADDISH," A 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN ECSTATIC NARRATIVE POEM (Atlantic). An unbeaten survivor of the beat generation croaks his way through one of his better-known works, a litany to his mother and to his own maturation process ("Once man disagreed with my opinion of the cosmos I was lost"). While various vignettes from a misery-filled family album are moving, overlong reels of domestic dreariness are merely that-dreary...
...joyful noise unto the Lord" calls forth a jazzy outburst. After a boy alto sings, "The Lord is my shepherd," a men's chorus, heavy with percussion, crashes in to ask "Why do the nations rage?" The 18-minute work is less tortured musically than Bernstein's Kaddish of 1963 and is well performed by the Camerata Singers and the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein conducting...