Word: kurka
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Orchestra of America, founded two years ago to perform nothing but American music, presented the world premiere of Robert Kurka's Concerto for Marimba. Composer Kurka, Chicago-born son of Czech parents, went to work on his 22-minute concerto in 1956 at the suggestion of Marimbist Vida Chenoweth. completed the piece a year before his death of leukemia in 1957 at 35. Last week's performance, conducted by Richard Korn, featured Marimbist Chenoweth as soloist. A small woman (5 ft. 2 in.), she seemed dwarfed by her instrument-a 6-ft. tablelike frame supporting a graduated series...
...this picaresque libretto, Composer Kurka composed an astringent score for brasses, wind instruments and percussion only, omitting the strings. Strongly rhythmic, shot through with jazz influences, it occasionally offered a wry commentary on the action, provided at least two moments of moving lyricism: Schweik's apostrophe on war ("Who will go to the war when it comes?") and the Chorus of Wounded Soldiers ("Wait for the ragged soldiers") in the final scene. But overall, the music was too fragmented to be effective, or to redeem the curiously Panglossed-over view that marred the libretto : the apparent belief that Schweik...
...during World War I. Cheerful Sad-Sack Schweik first turned up back in the 1920s in Czech Novelist Jaroslav Hasek's antimilitary satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. Last week he popped up on the stage of Manhattan's City Center in the premiere of the late Robert Kurka's operatic version and won a warm welcome from audiences in the New York City Opera's spring season of contemporary American works...
...Composer Kurka, Chicago-born son of Czech parents, started on the project with Librettist Lewis Allan three years ago, finished the vocal score and 350 pages of orchestration before his death of leukemia last December at the age of 35. His good friend Hershy Kay completed the orchestration from Kurka's red-penciled notes. Loose-jointed and episodic, the opera introduces Schweik (Tenor Norman Kelley) as he is being arrested for "high treason," traces his progress through a scurvy prison and a madhouse, follows him into the army as an orderly. At the end he wanders away from...