Word: munch
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Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust (Suzanne Danco, David Poleri, Martial Singher; Harvard and Radcliffe choruses; Boston Symphony conducted by Charles Munch; Victor 3 LPs). The greatest translation into music of Goethe's Faust, this score reaches heights of drama and tenderness undreamed of in Gounod's more popular version. Mephistopheles makes his entrances to portentous, brassy thunderclaps, Marguerite changes from an innocent child to a passionate woman in the toils of love, and Faust himself is almost painfully credible. The "dramatic legend" proved too big-and perhaps too tightly composed-to be a success on stage...
...chorus, building up to a breakoff point when the four brass bands join in. At the work's first performance (so Berlioz claimed), the conductor stopped at that point and had a pinch of snuff, while Berlioz himself leaped to the podium to save the performance. Conductor Munch last week took no chance on faulty entrances, had his warning arm pointing straight toward heaven four bars ahead. The brass bands broke loose (two were placed in the auditorium, giving a kind of stereophonic effect) ; they sounded for all the world like the trumps of doom...
...Morts (Requiem). That opus calls for a 210-member chorus, full symphony orchestra, four separate brass choirs (labeled according to the points of the compass), plus a battery of 16 kettledrums. Few of today's symphonies can afford to stage the work. At Tanglewood, Mass, last week, Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra undertook the task, and the result was some of the loveliest (and loudest) music that ever echoed through the Berkshire hills...
...Tanglewood's huge, open-sided Music Shed last week, before a crowd of nearly 9,000. Conductor Munch touched his knuckles in a gesture of supplication, and gave the downbeat for what Berlioz called a "musical cataclysm...
...superb Sanctus calls for a tenor solo in which, by a dazzling piece of orchestration, the single, defenseless human voice is set off against the relentless clash of cymbals; and in the sweet, concluding Agnus Dei, there are chilling traces of jagged pagan rhythms (later used by Stravinsky). Conductor Munch tenderly and forcefully drove toward the end, spinning out the Amen with a loving final touch. A cathedral hush hung beneath the bare steel rafters; then the crowd leaped up and cheered...