Word: oratorio
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Normally buried beneath a mound of pencil shavings and paper clips in the recesses of a desk drawer, the little black and white pamphlet has furnished a Harvard composer with the storyline for a suitably baroque oratorio...
Austerely contemporary in sound, Penderecki's two-hour oratorio draws on a wide musical spectrum ranging from pious Gregorian chants to the dry linearity of the twelve-tone school. In a fresh departure from the Passions of Bach and Telemann, his chorus participates as well as comments, punctuating Christ's ascent to Calvary with hisses, shouts and mocking laughter, while the music quavers and sighs in sympathetic counterpoint. With the lean, clean strokes of a fencer, Penderecki slices to the heart of the Passion, revealing through the intolerance shown to one man the tragedy...
...JULIUS BAKER, 52, first flutist of the New York Philharmonic, last week played the intricate trills in Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah as casually as another man might whistle for a taxi. A plump, dapper, matter-of-fact chap who looks and acts like a prosperous dentist, Baker is short on temperament but long on technique. He is the supreme mechanic of his instrument, and he produces what is surely the most glorious tone that ever came out of a flute: big, round, cool, white, radiant as a September moon...
HAYDN: THE CREATION (2 LPs; Decca). One of the last great works of the skeptical 18th century was this triumphant affirmation of Haydn's faith. Translated from the German and sung clearly in English, the oratorio will seem especially vivid to U.S. listeners because the music so closely fits the words. One hears the tawny lion roar, the insects swarm and the tiger leap for the first time on earth. Frederic Waldman conducts the Musica Aeterna Orchestra and Chorus, and Soprano Judith Raskin, as Gabriel, sings brilliantly, at times eclipsing her more earthbound fellow archangels, Tenor John McCollum...
...Live recently presented a dramatization of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, narrated by Kurd Hatfield, and last summer had a three-part series on the changing role of modern women in church and society called The Evolution of Eve. Scheduled for spring is a CBS special-a Brecht-like oratorio on Galileo and the Inquisition by Composer Ezra Laderman and Joe Darion, lyricist of the off-Broadway hit, Man of La Mancha. NBC's Frontiers of Faith will soon undertake a twelve-part series on modern ethics-including one program called "The Manly Art of Seduction," inspired by Hugh...