Word: mendelssohn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Early in the evening came the world premiere of David Del Tredici's Happy Voices. The composer may have intended a bravura show for the orchestra, but his garish, repetitive work was more like a Richard Strauss waltz heard in a nightmare. When Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No.1, with Rudolf Serkin as soloist, followed, the listener was prepared for old-fashioned piano busting. Instead, the instrument could scarcely be heard except in solo passages and in a lyrical dialogue between the cellos and the piano...
...lanes of traffic, none of them moving. At Trenton, we tried to switch to a train. Impossible. A storm blew up. We couldn't even phone ahead. When we arrived at the hall it was 9:30 p.m., and there were 30 people left. We played the Mendelssohn D-Minor Trio and told them we'd come back...
Foremost among these is Epstein's appropriation of Henry Purcell's score for The Fairy Queen, with chorus, soloists and instruments of the Banchetto Musicale, as a means both to lengthen and to enrich Shakespeare's play. The backhanded slap at Mendelssohn's romantic score, with its pianissimo fairies and ebullient wedding march, makes clear even before the lights go up the director's vision of A Midsummer Night's Dream: counterpoint over harmony. If the music doesn't bring that message home, Epstein has added a brief masque to accompany the overture: before a Paolo Uccello-like tapestry...
...superhuman ways and says more with it than most performers manage with the help of Shakespeare's verse; the quartet of fairies in her train--dressed in skintight body suits, adorned with tails and extended fingers--is menacingly inhuman. Their lullaby for the sleeping queen, miles distant from both Mendelssohn and Purcell, sounds exactly like a chorus of watchful insects...
...already alienated society. They search for a middle-aged male orphan whose memory they plan to deprogram, and then convince him that his mother was a spaceship who dropped him on earth from an advanced civilization where humans are made the way we make toasters. One Simon Mendelssohn becomes their victim, an untenured professor of psychology who is slightly off the deep end already...