Word: oratorio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world may not be getting tired of Composer Arthur Honegger, but Honegger is getting pretty tired of the world. His music has often been brilliant and provocative, e.g., in his oratorio King David, at other times about as profound as movie sound tracks, of which he has written dozens. This month, at 62, Honegger sounded off to Paris' Franc-Tireur on tiis favorite subject. Excerpts...
...Music Club's Good Friday Concert, given last night in the Fogg Museum Courtyard, was superbly planned to express the spirit and significance of the religious season. The principal work was the oratorio The Seven Words of Christ on the Cross by Heinrich Schuetz, a German composer who lived a century before Bach. The opening and closing choral ensembles are an exhortation to think upon the Seven Words on this anniversary of the Crucifixion as a means of sharing the anguish of Christ. The body of the oratorio is part of the passion given in narrative and dramatic form...
Flemish Choral Music (Ghent Oratorio Society conducted by Marcel de Pauw; Esoteric). Thirteen delicately tinted songs for chorus, and two guitar interludes, all glowing with Old World warmth The 104-voice chorus sings with charm and intimacy...
...recent years, his health was poor, but he continued to write music. He was no longer the daring musical revolutionary, but his "realistic" Seventh Symphony (first performed last month) and his 1951 oratorio, On Guard for Peace, put him firmly back in the graces of the Kremlin. Last week, as Joseph Stalin lay unconscious, cerebral hemorrhage brought death to Sergei Prokofiev at 61. In a Moscow all but preoccupied with the death of the dictator, thousands filed into Composers Hall, where his body lay in state, to pay a tribute to the Soviet Union's finest composer...
...stresses the vague outlines of the phrases. Instead of using an acoustically perfect hall, he makes the recordings in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, whose stone walls most nearly duplicate the resonance of Renaisance churches. But these are not more pedantic touches. While there is very little in a Handel oratorio that requires an eighteenth century type performance, the ethereal, evasive quality of earlier religious music is completely lost if subjected to modernization...