Word: oratorio
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...into a full-fledged community, with its own church and chapter house and a program for giving food and shelter to pilgrims. During the Jubilee Year of 1575, according to contemporary accounts, the Oratory opened its doors to 144,913 visitors and served 365,132 meals. The musical form, oratorio, derives its name from Philip's community, where it was partly developed by Florentine Composer Giovanni Animuccia. Palestrina's successor as choir master at St. Peter...
Despite such simplicity of design, stage movements throughout most of The Ring were so statuesque that they suggested oratorio rather than opera. Realism was often ludicrously mixed with abstraction; when Mime helped to fashion a sword for Siegfried out of a magic potion, he matter-of-factly cracked two eggs into the potion as if following a recipe by Gayelord Hauser. Worst of all was the lighting, which was so murky that it came close to achieving Richard Wagner's stated ideal: "Now that I have created the in visible orchestra,* I would like to invent the invisible stage...
...rich, the diction faultless, the rhythm and phrasing reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald. To a casual record store browser it might signify the most exciting new popular singing talent to come along in years. But the voice is not new. It belongs to a great lieder singer, a standout oratorio performer (Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Handel's Messiah), and a star of such operas as La Gioconda and Medea. The singer: Eileen Farrell. probably the finest dramatic soprano in the U.S., who will make her Met debut next season in Gluck's Alceste...
...only Eastern European festival as lavish as its Western counterparts. Highlights of its month-long program: Mikhail Glinka's Russian and Ludmilla, a less well-known but far better work than Glinka's only other opera, A Life for the Tsar, Gustav Mahler's massive oratorio, Das Lied von der Erde. to be played in the ancient Gothic St. Vitus Cathedral; the first performance outside Russia of Dmitry Shostakovich's new Concerto lor Violoncello...
...Venice (Sept. 12-27). New works by Italian composers plus the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's 15-minute religious oratorio Gesualdo Monumentum, a work inspired by the writings of 16th century Madrigal Composer Don Carlo Gesualdo (who evidently used his music to sublimate his personal troubles; he had his wife and her lover murdered, suffocated one of his children...