Word: premi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Performers still shy away from his difficult music (at least one famed violinist flatly refused to play the première of his Violin Concerto), and most audiences still listen to him with polite perplexity. But Sessions would have it no other way. "A composer," says he, "doesn't sit down at his desk and say, 'I'm going to communicate this morning...
...première in Paris, advance publicity whetted popular interest in Romeo and Juliet, and for once a new work by Berlioz became an overnight success. ("Come, dears," wrote a society columnist. "You will hear wonderful things.") But there were grumblings even then that Romeo and Juliet was a curious hybrid-neither symphony nor oratorio nor opera. What Berlioz was aiming for was a new amalgam of symphony and opera in which vocal solos, choral and instrumental passages were mixed in loosely linked episodes. In Berlioz' musical shorthand, some moments of highest passion-the passages between Romeo and Juliet...
Then Gleason recalled the post-première celebration and the victorious return to his hotel ("I opened the window to look out and see if it was still snowing, and they had the nets up"). His conclusion: "This isn't a requiem for a heavyweight. I'm coming back next week. I don't know what we're going to do, but tune in on the next chapter, because this might be the greatest soapless soap opera you've ever seen...
...pages of the world's worst trilogy," he quit his last odd job-Western Union messenger-three years ago to become a playwright. His first effort, The Zoo Story, an affecting work about the failure of communication between a lonely outcast and a smug square, had its première in Berlin, where it was hailed as "the Götterdämmerung of the gutter." Albee has since turned out four more one-act works, is currently working up from one-acters toward full-length drama by writing a two-act play that seems unlikely ever to appear...
...Gunther Schuller, 35, stepped into the pit at Manhattan's City Center to conduct the première of his Modern Jazz: Variants, a score for a George Balanchine ballet. Onstage were the white-tied-and-tailed members of the Modern Jazz Quartet and around them, in predominantly green and purple practice clothes, moved the members of the New York City Ballet company, including Soloists Diana Adams, Melissa Hayden, John Jones, Arthur Mitchell. The dancing for the most part was sinuous and tentative, borrowing some of its movements from the Lindy Hop, but on the whole avoiding the Lindy...