Word: opus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BRITTEN: SINFONIETTA, OPUS 1 and HINDEMITH: OCTET (1957-58) (London). Very early Britten-facile and mannered-before he methodically stripped his musical imagination down to its sparest, starkest forms. It is charming, almost pretty music, and vastly different from the sophisticated complexities of the Hindemith, in which key themes are introduced, transposed in various ways, and then replayed in reverse order. Handled with elan by members of the Vienna Octet...
...Debussy Sonata in C Minor is competent interpretation, but Szigeti really excels in tenser linear works -the eclectic Ives in his only violin sonata and the neo-Baroque Honegger (Sonata No. 7), with its complex, difficult ornamentation, sound fresh and clear. The record's highlight is four pieces (Opus 7) by Anton Webern, none longer than 72 seconds, in which the stripped-down starkness of modern music and its intolerance of repetition or romance are emphasized by Szigeti's signature: a hard, almost rasping tone that is as uncompromising as the music itself...
...seemed to notice. Onstage, the pianist leaned more intently over the keyboard and subtly adjusted his tone to bring the music out over the sound of the shower. Wet or dry, it was an excellent performance of Beethoven's last and perhaps greatest piano sonata (in C minor, Opus 111), a piece that alternates between demonic fury and lyric contemplation and requires more than mere competence to bring...
...summary, it should be admitted that this is a pretty smooth album, low on outright cacaphony of the sort you get in "Tombaton" (Opus 6), or in "It's Allright, Ma" (Opus 5). To some extent this is just the problem of Blonde on Blonde is easy not to listen to, even played loud. Few lyrics are as said imposing as these reckless un-set texts...
...said in one of the manifestoes on expecting some reciprocity. "I'll die first before I decay," he told a national magazine this month. Since the turn against ideology announced in Opus 4's "My Back has been true--if nothing else--to the caution sounded on that album in "Ramons...