Word: premis
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...season's first spectaculars and a barrage of premières fell on TV screens last week like a soggy September drizzle. In Bretaigne Windust's The Lord Don't Play Favorites on NBC's Producers' Showcase, a Kansas hick town was caught in a drought. A bankrupt circus only made matters worse by praying for a dry track on which to run its trick horse. The Lord let it rain and the horse won anyway, but as musical theater the whole carnival romp was a washout. Recording Artist Kay Starr's anvil voice...
...week's only other 90-minute production was the season première of Wide, Wide World (NBC), which began by asking viewers: "Will history be made this afternoon?" and then tried to bring in TV's first live pickup from abroad. For 15 minutes viewers looked at a desolate Long Island shanty with an enormous receiving aerial and a posse of NBC monitors inside widdling their dials. But only a BBC voice and some foggy images made it across the sea. (NBC will try again next week.) Elsewhere, World fared better, e.g., a noisy jazz session...
Under a governmental austerity ruling that cut back their budget 30%, officials of Venice's famed International Festival of Contemporary Music had canceled the prestigious operatic premiéres of earlier years (e.g., Stravinsky's own 1951 Rake's Progress, Britten's 1954 Turn of the Screw, Prokofiev's 1955 Flaming Angel), pinned all their hopes and a large part of their remaining budget on the world premiére of Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (Canticle to Honor the Name of St. Mark...
...abandon his virtuoso career. He commissioned and performed Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand, two works by Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten's Diversions on a Theme. Wittgenstein (now 68 and a teacher in Manhattan) also commissioned-but never understood or played-the Prokofiev concerto that was premièred last week by Siegfried Rapp, a musician with a story similar...
...Vienna never cares much for premières of new music. The new composition on the Vienna Symphony concert program one night last week was included not as a première, but as a novelty. It was Piano Concerto No. 1 by Los Angeles' young (32) Benjamin Lees, neatly played by Alexander Jenner and the Konzerthaus audience liked it better than anything else on the program. It sounded well-padded and fluent, comfortably conservative in its rhythmic patterns. It was often reminiscent of Prokofiev, had a satisfying amount of orchestral razzle-dazzle...