Word: musicae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Gian Carlo Menotti took over the cobbled Umbrian city of Spoleto in 1958 for his first Festival of Two Worlds, the musical fringe of Manhattan's cocktail circuit followed him and introduced the martini to local opera buffs. Italian bluebloods rapidly caught on, and musica é martini dry became the order...
...rhythms and instruments were not. Scholars aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation prepared the work for a stunning performance at the Metropolitan Museum's Cloisters last December. The recording, also, comes alive, thanks to the musicality and dedication of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica (TIME, July...
Since its founding in 1952, Pro Musica has introduced a steadily growing audience to the curious delights of a long and varied line-up of forgotten composers, such as the polyphonic wizardry of Ludwig Senfl, composer to the court of Maximilian I, the mystical motets of Martin de Rivaflecha, chapelmas-ter at the Cathedral of Valencia, and the Rabelaisian merriment of Adriano Banchieri, abbot of an Olivetan monastery. Its most ambitious undertaking was The Play of Daniel, a 12th century music-drama that was unearthed in the British Museum. Elegantly staged in medieval setting and dress in a Manhattan church...
...group he formed was the New York Pro Musica. In a performance last week of Elizabethan music in honor of Shakespeare's 400th birthday at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., the six singers and four instrumentalists served eloquent notice that pre-Bach music was not to be forgotten. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries-Thomas Morley, William Byrd, Tobias Hume, John Wilbye, John Dowland-Pro Musica shook the dust off a score of Elizabethan madrigals and lute songs, embellishing the rarefied melodies with a rhythmic liveliness and delicate twining of voices and instruments to produce, in Shakespeare...
...Unearthed. Pre-Bach compositions, Greenberg insists, are "not little delicate museum pieces. This was music of an exciting time, full of violent contrasts." The Tanglewood program presented by Pro Musica ranged from the solemn Lamentations of Jeremiah to the sprightly "hey ding a ding" of It Was a Lover and His Lass, an exquisitely chiseled duologue for recorder and flute, a blatantly comic Tobacco Is Like Love, and a spirited London Street Cries, alive with the calls of street vendors and town criers...