Word: oratorio
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Handel's L'Allegro and II Penseroso was written only a short time before the Messiah, but the guileless artifice of his musical imitations of Miltonic imagery, and the prankish innocence of its harmonies sound only distantly related to the Christmas oratorio. For this easy good humor, Miss Addison's most musical and least melancholy voice is eminently suited; not once did she encumber the music with leaden emotions foreign to its spirit, or dirty it with less than perfect phrasing and dynamics. Her coloratura in the incomparable "Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly" was remarkable...
...concerned the work of the late Arnold Schoenberg, a Viennese composer whose atonal music still stirs controversy ten years after his death. This time the argument started at Vienna's famed Konzerthaus after the world première of a little-remembered Schoenberg work-a fragmentary, 45-minute oratorio, Jacob's Ladder. Schoenberg wrote the text for his oratorio in 1915, started to write the music but was interrupted by World War I service in the Austrian army. He abandoned the score for more than 20 years, returned to it in 1945 but never finished...
...oratorio is based on the Biblical story of Jacob's dream of a wondrous ladder on which angels moved between heaven and earth. In Schoenberg's vision, the bottom of the ladder is occupied by earthbound souls-the cowards, skeptics, cynics, journalists and unclean ones. The top of the ladder is filled with geniuses, gods and angels. The ascending and descending figures represented for Schoenberg the reincarnation that keeps human events in motion. The Ladder's lesson: "Learn to pray: he who prays is become one with...
Stravinsky created a unique form in Odeipus Rex, for its drama has neither opera's action nor the oratorio's formal units. Yet the music is crammed with references to this style or that, to Handel and Verdi, little touches that jar the listener at first but later seem almost ironical...
...Eagle Stirred (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). World premiere of a dramatic oratorio that seeks modern meaning in the Biblical Exodus. Composed by Ezra Laderman...