Word: oratorio
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...Handel oratorio is almost too much fun; it's just so easy to bellow out that "good old Handel," the louder the better, and let artistry go hang. It takes work to make a concert performance of Handel significantly more than an exercise in sight-reading. The Glee Club, Choral Society, and Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra supplied the necessary work last night. They made things "happen" in Israel in Egypt; conductor Elliot Forbes took good advantage of the vocal discipline which the choruses maintained...
Directions '63 (ABC, 2-3 p.m.). "The Passion and Resurrection," Part 4 of Franz Liszt's oratorio, Christus...
...worth buying. Sir Adrian chose Miss Joan Sutherland as his soprano soloist, and it was a noble choice, but, unfortunately, Sir Adrian is a man who thinks that Miss Sutherland can only sing well when she is singing Puccini (a palpable falsehood). Consequently, Sir A. has ripped Handel's oratorio untimely from its century, making it as operatic Victorian as he possibly can. The result is an orchestra sprawling and unkempt, singers bawling and dyspeptic, and tempi crawling and inept. (London A-4357--you'll recognize the album by the ugly crucifix on its cover...
...with the rhythms of new music, and five years later made contact with Schoenberg's 12-tone techniques. It was an elastic collision: "I may say that, while I came under Schoenberg's influence, I opposed him with all my musical sensibility." Thus, in Le Vin Herbe, a dramatic oratorio on the Tristram legend first performed in 1942, he combined 12-tone series with chordal sequences, and in his passion oratorio Golgotha, he decomposed a basic 12-note series into harmonically related, sequential sections...
...production-which resembles an oratorio in form-ran into trouble only be cause its diverse elements-orchestral music, song, narration, mime and dance-never quite had the chance to demonstrate their virtues in a massive production crammed into 21 minutes. One result was that musical ideas could not be fully developed with Stravinsky's twelve-tone technique. His music, the production's foundation, occasionally sounded like a collection of vignettes. Brilliant as it was, Balanchine's choreography was also bothered by limitations of space and time...