Word: mozartism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Obese Orchestras. Thereafter, everybody got into the act. From Mozart to obscure professors, composers reorchestrated and rearranged The Messiah. Since everybody wanted to sing it too, the choruses became enormous, and orchestras swelled proportionately. On the theory that if Handel had had a big orchestra he would have used it, a series of uncalled-for instruments puffed Handel's clean, baroque textures into plodding Victorian obesity. This musical elephantiasis reached some sort of a climax in 1959, when Sir Thomas Beecham recorded a Messiah that sounded a bit like Richard Strauss's Elektra: with cymbals, bells, triangles...
...Mozart: Idomeneo (Philips). Like most opera seria, this one depends on gods, a sea monster, women pretending to be men and an unusual ability on the part of the audience to take the whole thing seriously. But the music is Mozart at his best, requiring only a great conductor and a great cast to do it justice. It gets just that. Colin Davis fans the music to a fierce, steady glow. Highpoints: George Shirley's rocketlike traversal of Fuor del mar-a crippling catalogue of coloratura devices -and Elettra's two arias sung by Pauline Tinsley, a British...
...which gives every indication of expiring into another seven months of unremittingly harsh and indifferent prosecutions of emulsified, vindictively pasteurized programs gleaming with lambent somnolence. Kirchner does not specialize in conducting twentieth century music, although he has performed Stravinsky stunningly, but responds with equal sensitivity to Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. His programs of Bruckner, Varese, Handel, Stravinsky, and Beethoven exemplified this catholicism...
Haynsworth married the former Dorothy Merry Barkley, who had had two sons by a previous marriage. (The couple have no children of their own.) Haynsworth raises prize camellias in the greenhouse behind his $100,000 Greenville mansion, and in the evenings likes to listen to Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Mozart. An Episcopalian, he attends Greenville's Christ Church "as often as I can." He walks for exercise...
...that lies within his vocal range. He is also willing to learn the most complicated role in - by old-fashioned standards - nothing flat. This summer at Santa Fe, he is doing two American premieres (The Devils and Gian Carlo Menotti's Help! Help! The Globolinks) as well as Mozart's Cosí Fan Tutte and Puccini's Tosca...