Word: oratorio
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...cover, Nov. 8, 1954) decided to cut down on performing and devote more time to composing. Last week he sat in the Wilton, Conn., glass-and-stone house that he built four years ago, tinkering with final revisions on the first fruits of his lei sure-a 63-minute oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness, an impressively imaginative step into the realm of large-scale serious composition...
...Turkey. Even with reduced scoring at the Chapel Hill performance, Brubeck's oratorio attested the composer's solid training as a serious musician, mostly under the eye of the French master Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. In twelve extensive, complex vocal movements, it traces a series of meditations on the universality of faith, with textual fragments drawn by Brubeck and his wife lola from the Gospels and Psalms. What little jazz there is in the score is far removed from the usual Brubeck sophistication: it is a more primitive, elemental sort, blended with folk overtones...
Threatening Traps. "After you've been in the business a few years," explains Chad Stuart, who is now working on an "oratorio" to be called The Election, "you get cured of the lust for money and you want to produce something-well, heavy." Other experimental rock composers seem motivated more by a restlessness to burst out of conventional molds. San Francisco's Steve Miller, who is writing a suite that will combine Stockhausen-influenced elec tronic music with rhythm-and-blues, says simply: "I don't dig three-minute sections." Classical and Jazz Composer Bill Russo, director...
Most record companies fill their preholiday releases with seasonal sounds: Christmas carols, a Handel oratorio or two. This fall the sounds from Columbia seem to be designed for Christmas 2067. In one batch last month, on its three constituent labels, the company issued as its entire "classical" release no fewer than 17 recordings of contemporary music, most of it on the farthest fringes...
After sitting in on rehearsals last week for the U.S. premiere of his two-hour oratorio, the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, Polish Composer Krzysztof Penderecki was exuberant. The conductor, he said, "is excellent. He understands modern music-he has composed it himself. I have complete trust in him." Penderecki was talking about the musical director of the Minneapolis Symphony, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, 44. Later in the week, Skrowaczewski returned the compliment by leading his orchestra, soloists and local choristers in two austerely jolting performances of the Passion at Minneapolis' Northrup Auditorium...