Word: premi
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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...
Henry Cowell, 63, turned up in Kansas City for the première of his 22-minute Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra. Using 64 percussion instruments, the concerto featured five percussion "soloists," whose duties proved so complex that they had to dart about the stage. Among the instruments employed: Chinese gongs, temple blocks, tom-toms, marimbas, vibraphones, Pyrex mixing bowls, a xylophone, a celesta, a glockenspiel. For all its fearsome instrumentation, the concerto proved to be one of Cowell's more immediately appealing works - alternately delicate and boisterous, crosshatched with curiously shifting rhythms. Less stark than the works...
...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...
...slow up even the indefatigable Casals, who just turned 84. In the course of his birthday celebrations, the composer bowed to the inevitable: in Acapulco, at the climax of a two-week Mexican Casals festival that ended last week, he mounted the podium to give El Presebre its world premi...
...wife, one evening last week, left their home in a working-class neighborhood of East Los Angeles, crossed town and stepped into the glare of a Hollywood premiére. After 13 years of a shadow career filled with aliases and under-the-desk assignments, Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was also stepping into the open. He had written the picture, Exodus, under his own name; and on the blacklist that had featured him for so long, the print was quickly fading...