Word: ops
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Often the meaning of the centuries-old silk tapestries is obscure. The Mystic Spiral, intended for monastic meditation, is a vision whose precise symbolism is known only to a few learned lamas. To the Western viewer, its concentric circles, drawing him into a dizzying infinity, are startlingly like contemporary op and psychedelic art. The God of 1,000 Eyes, though menacing in appearance with his tiger skin and collar of snakes, is actually a protective deity in which the eye, symbol of wisdom and knowledge, appears even on his fingertips. Set against a threatening backdrop of flames and darkness...
...program opened and closed with two "heavies" from choral literature. Brahms' Schick-salslied, Op. 54, is one of those perrenial favorites of college glee clubs, not terribly difficult to put together and always effective. The singers also made the most of Holderlin's Weltschmerz. Accompanist Robert Kopelson's two-piano arrangement was the best thing next to a full orchestra. He and Lowell Lindgren played it admirably, managing to succeed in spite of Prof. Schmidt's inconquerable compulsion to conduct even them...
...final work of the concert, and thus the final work of the entire Monday night series, was Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire Op 21, (1912). Set to rather morbid poetry by Albert Giraud, the work exerted a curious kind of fascination on the audience--except those Philistines who apparently could not take it and left in the middle. The work's success owes in no small part to the performers, particularly conductor Jacques-Louis Monod, who made eminent sense out of music that is all too easily incomprehensible, and "narrator" Bethany Beardslee whose negotiation of all the weirdities of Schoenberg...
...cares if Leon Kirchner did not phrase the last movement of the Mozart Eb major piano quartet as if it began on an upbeat? And what if Jaime Laredo did force a bit in the suite from Stravinsky's L'histoire du Soldat? And if the Schoenberg Suite Op. 29 is a little hard to take on first hearing, for petesake go listen to it again...
...world of string chamber music, it takes works of great individuality to prevent the subtleties and arcanities of the medium from melting into homogeneity. The String Trio Op. 45 of Arnold Schoenberg is much like the Sessions in outward appearance: three sections of alternating mood written in a deceptively similar atonal style...