Word: oratorio
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...with a greying Vandyke beard strode on stage at Manhattan's Town Hall last week. An imposing figure in white tie and tails, he waited as the 27-piece Esterhazy Orchestra played the first lilting strains of Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Then, clasping his hands, Alfred Deller began to sing. The contrast was startling: out of this burly frame poured the extraordinarily high, bell-clear voice of that rarest of all male singers, the countertenor...
LAMP UNTO MY FEET (CBS, 10-10:30 a.m.). Television premiere of William Bergsma's oratorio. Confrontation from the Book...
Topical Relevance. In a dual salute to his own work and the reopening of an enlarged, acoustically sharpened Royal Festival Hall, Tippett last week conducted the London Philharmonic in a performance of his most celebrated oratorio, the 23-year-old A Child of Our Times. The libretto, based on the savage pogrom with which Hitler avenged the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish boy in 1938, poignantly plumbs the agonies of the persecuted. What gives the theme a wider, painfully topical relevance is Tippett's skillful weaving into the score of five Negro spirituals, after the style...
...late summer of 1741, Composer George Frederick Handel, plagued by ill health and spurned by a once-adoring public, isolated himself in his London house to work on a new oratorio. Falling into an almost trancelike state, he slaved feverishly day and night with little food or sleep. At one point a servant found him at his desk, tears streaming down his face. "I did think I did see all Heaven before me," Handel cried, "and the great God himself!" After 23 days Handel emerged with his monumental Messiah, the profoundly moving testament of Christian faith that has be come...
Nowhere is the Messiah tradition more cherished than in Boston, where the Handel and Haydn Society, the oldest active choral group in the U.S., has sung the oratorio every Christmas for the past 146 years. This season's uncut performance at Symphony Hall was sold out, attracting a devoted cross section of Bostonians to whom the Messiah is as integral a part of Christmas as the Beacon Hill bell ringers or the oyster stuffing for the turkey...