Word: obbligatoed
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Joining her for the first part of the recital was violinist David Hurwitz. After a nicely balanced performance of a Bach aria with obbligato, they presented Gustav Holst's Four Songs for Voice and Violin. Holst wrote these to please a friend who said she liked to sing as she fiddled, but on presenting them to her the composer was told, "I can only hum when I play." As long as two performers are necessary, Holst could have wished none better than Hurwitz and Miss Smith to present his simple, modal settings...
Although Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso for Strings and Piano Obbligato is a modern masterwork, it showed off the Orchestra's weakest section, the strings, and the performance was uneven. Bloch's incisive rhythms give the work an excitement and a tension that make it a perfect piece to try out on people who "don't like modern music." The final fugue, especially, builds and builds until only the most blase listener can remain unmoved...
Kirke Mechem's Rules for Behaviour (1955), with piano obbligato, bore up well on second hearing. Written in a crisp, clean Irving Fine manner, it took its text from some amusing rules for children found in a 1787 church in Williamsburg, Virginia. The concert, like the telecast, ended with Vaughan Williams' robust and lusty antiphon Let all the World in Every Corner Sing...
...19th century hussy, whose beauty and calculated hysteria drove strong men mad -particularly King Ludwig I of Bavaria. * During her life, women were oddly immune to her power. The victims were the gentlemen of Berlin, Paris, London and New York whose heaving breasts and creaking shirt fronts provided the obbligato for her "abandoned" dancing. But now that Lola is safely buried these 94 years in Brooklyn, the ladies, especially the lady writers, have been taken over...
...Love Is a Many Splendored Thing took place in a many-splendored pastoral scene (with a dismounted Gisele Mackenzie in riding clothes). Love and Marriage was in an abstract setting of sky and bliss, concluding with a wedding procession. The Shifting, Whispering Sands had Snooky Lanson looking like an obbligato against a film showing "the beauty and terror of the desert." Moments to Remember (a comedy number) went to Africa, where a couple of big-game hunters were popped into stew pots by cannibals, and were seen singing before they became supper (Tarzan finally swung in on a vine...