Word: oratorio
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Directions 62 (ABC, 2:30-3:30 p.m.). ABC has commissioned Pianist-Composer Earl Wild to do an Easter oratorio, based on the visions of St. John the Divine, incorporating dance, music, song and stage production...
...composer is Louise Talma, 55, a longtime teacher of composition at New York City's Hunter College, who is well regarded for her small body of works (including two piano sonatas, a string quartet, Toccata for orchestra, the oratorio The Divine Flame). Chances are that Music Lover Wilder would never have collaborated with her had he not heard her Alleluia in form of Toccata at a piano recital in New Haven more than ten years ago. Later, when Talma heard Wilder read his Alcestiad at a private party, she "began to hear the music of the opera even while...
...appear on the stage until the blanket denazifications of 1946. About the same time, she was signed to a recording contract by Record Impresario Walter Legge, whom she later married. Now she is virtually alone among big-time singers in trying to divide her time equally between opera, oratorio and lieder, a happy balance, she thinks, "vocally, stylistically and emotionally...
...insist on it. Some of his other opinions are equally unfashionable: there is no reason, says Harris, why symphonic music should not try to express specific, literal themes. Now that he has finally put St. Francis on paper, he plans to finish a symphony on Walt Whitman and an oratorio on the life of Christ...
Igor Stravinsky's attempt to describe his Persephone was not too illuminating: "A nose," he said, "is not manufactured; a nose just is. Thus, too, my art." In the case of Persephone, the nose is neither ballet nor oratorio nor melodrama. A curiously hybrid work, it was first performed by the dancer Ida Rubinstein in 1934 and calls for a tenor, a chorus and full orchestra, and a leading lady who declaims a French text by André Gide while she dances. Persephone's score ranks with Stravinsky's most tautly constructed music-in his best neoclassic...