Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DELIUS: SUMMER EVENING and PRELUDE TO IRMELIN (Seraphim). Sir Thomas Beecham again, magically confecting these drifting, dreaming selections by the blind composer whose works he espoused. Sir Thomas also conducts the tone poem Tapiola by Sibelius, a masterly evocation of the forest god Tapio and his mysterious Finnish woodlands...
YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO, BABII YAR AND OTHER POEMS (Caedmon). Russia's most prominent licensed nonconformist renders his role as rebellious poet in wax, and the impression is not flattering. A listener with no knowledge of Russian can have only an approximate sense of the quality of the original language in Yevtushenko's reading. The contents of the verses, however, can be judged in Alan Bates's English translation, and they do not seem to burn with artistic flame-they itch like inflammations. Except for the famous piece Babii Yar, which is more an emphatic speech than a poem...
ALLEN GINSBERG READS "KADDISH," A 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN ECSTATIC NARRATIVE POEM (Atlantic). An unbeaten survivor of the beat generation croaks his way through one of his better-known works, a litany to his mother and to his own maturation process ("Once man disagreed with my opinion of the cosmos I was lost"). While various vignettes from a misery-filled family album are moving, overlong reels of domestic dreariness are merely that-dreary...
...tells of a madwoman searching for her son, and her encounter with a boatman who explains his tragic death and shows her where he is buried. Scored for five male soloists, a chorus of nine and an orchestra of seven, Curlew River is a fragile work indeed, more tone poem than opera. Yet in a sedate, masquelike way, it has considerable melodic charm, and all its grace is underscored by the brilliant singing of Peter Pears and John Shirley-Quirk as the Madwoman and the Ferryman...
...classes, Mrs. Finley starts by having her students read a haiku together, clapping in unison with the syllables, and then individually describe the images the poem conveys. To set them off on their own haiku, she gives them the first two lines, asks them to supply a third. The responses often reflect the down-to-earth quality of children's imaginations. Once, for example, she gave her daughter the lines