Word: oratorio
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...Conductor Newell Jenkins' Clarion Concerts, which for two years have made a distinguished name by searching out musical curiosa, in a Town Hall concert featured Alessandro Scarlatti's rarely performed oratorio, II Martirio di Sant' Orsola. An unpretentious work, it had little true dramatic tension but was supported by a vocal latticework of wonderful warmth, tenderness and transparency. Elsewhere on the program. Conductor Jenkins exhumed a wonderfully flourishing Trumpet Suite by 17th century English Composer Jeremiah Clarke, and played Mexican Composer Carlos Chavez' Symphony No. 5, a propulsively rhythmic work for strings that ran hard...
Actually, the critics of the Met's new Figaro were on shaky ground; there is no evidence that Mozart, whose sense of humor was bawdy and mercurial, saw in Figaro anything but superb entertainment. Director Ritchard feels that even a Mozart opera should be theater, not merely oratorio, based his interpretation on a study of the original Beaumarchais play from which Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto; Figaro, he thinks, is shot through with a kind of "Hogarthian exaggeration" too often muted by Mozart worshipers...
...Summer School Chorus is preparing for its annual concert on Thursday, August 13th. This year's program will include choruses from Handel's oratorio Solomon, motets and madrigals of the Renaissance and the Twentieth Century, the Solemn Vespers by Mozart, and the Ode to St. Cecelia by Norman Dello Joio...
...when his first opera for an English audience-Rinaldo-opened at the Queen's Theater in the Haymarket. The son of a German barber-surgeon, Handel had left his home town of Halle at 18, had spent three years in Italy schooling himself in opera and oratorio. On his first visit to England, he patched Rinaldo together in a scant two weeks. Based on the poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), the opera was derided by Addison in The Spectator for its "Painted dragons spitting wildfire, and enchanted chariots drawn by Flanders mares." But its lush melodies were just...
...almost 50 remaining years of his life, Handel (who became an English subject) turned out 39 Italianate operas, which shaped English operatic style for a generation, and almost singlehanded gave a new, dramatic shape to oratorio style. A shrewd businessman, he combed Italy for singers, scored such a success with famed Soprano Francesca Cuzzoni -described by one listener as having "a nest of nightingales in her belly"-that she sold out a benefit performance of his Ottone at a top of ?50 a seat...