Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...next performed the world premiere of conductor James Yannatos' Prieres dans L'Arche, a setting of four poems by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, scored for a small orchestra and soprano. In each poem an animal characterizes himself in a prayer ending with "Ainsi soit-il." Yannatos does not portray the animals, but the attitudes they represent. The animals' feelings are summarized by their way of saying amen, and the score provides the interpretation which the printed page leaves to the reader. For instance, the cat, aided by a marvellously meowing orchestra, says amen in smug anticipation of God's curse...
Yannatos' score, especially as interpreted by soprano Chloe Owen, exhibits perfect understanding of every line of the poem and an ability to transform this understanding into music. The audience stopped looking at the translation of the text during the first poem, but it continued to respond, with comprehension and laughter, to the music itself. The work is humorously, but thoughtfully, refreshing...
Then there was David Borden's aria for soprano and orchestra on Dylan Thomas's Force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age. There was no clear relationship between the music and the words. The poem invokes a myriad of very different images: plant metabolism, evaporation, the action of tide and wind, and time, the dripping of blood and the hanging of a man. The music pounded along its atonal course without proper variation in color for the different verses. Borden did demonstrate his sensitivity to the poem, once, with his treatment of the reiterated...
Fitzgerald consoled the rejected Io yesterday with a special poem in her honor...
...late at night to strum and hum folksongs, the two embrace all of a troubled generation's inchoate longings in one full, quiet moment. At such moments Nobody Waved Good-Bye conquers its simple ideas and tangled verbiage with cool cinematic assurance, turning a problem play into a poem...