Word: poulence
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DUNSTER HOUSE LIBRARY. Chamber music. Mozart: Flute Quarter in D; Poulenc: Sextet. April...
...common complaint against chamber music, on the other side of the volume scale from nineteenth century masses, is that it is difficult to understand to the uninitiated. At Dunster House this week is an excellent chance to hear attractive, lighter works by Mozart and Poulenc. The players are some of the very best around Cambridge, among them Kathy Flanders (flute), John Eisenhart (horn), and Jay Gottlief (piano...
Thirty years later Francis Poulenc made Tiresias into a strange but beautiful opera. The characters think it is set in Zanzibar though it really takes place in France, the whole cast marches grandly across the stage from time to time to remind the audience of the moral--"Make babies now!" --and audiences actually laugh at the opera's jokes. Last weekend the Lowell House Opera Society brought it to Boston with style and grace...
...Doing Poulenc perfectly requires voices of absolute clarity, but the acting of Lowell House's singers--nearly all Harvard students--and Edith Marshall's superb directing were more than enough compensation. It would have been hard to improve on Kerry McCarthy as the title feminist, Therese (when she changes her sex she becomes Tiresias), staring in astonishment as her breasts turned into green and blue balloons and floated away. Thomas Fuller matched her as her husband, demanding his dinner ("he only thinks about love," she observed) or showing off the 40,049 babies he had made by himself...
...Poulenc's score is more comic and lyrical still, and Gerald Moshell and his orchestra played it right, slipping unnoticeably into ancient waltzes and nostalgia-laden dancehall tunes, sounding the melancholy beneath the jokes, mixing, in fact, memory and desire...