Word: ravelling
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...months after the death of Com poser Maurice Ravel in 1937, his brother Edouard saw Disney's feature-length cartoon Snow White and decided that "this is the way L'Enfant et les Sortileges should be presented. Ravel's second and last opera had for its locale the mind of a child. In its cast are teapots as big as a man, cats who talk of love, squirrels who ruminate on redemption. It calls for 18 principals and a chorus of tree frogs, and one of its climactic solo passages by a Chinese cup (mezzo-soprano) consists...
...Ravel's opera was a critical success but a popular failure at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1926 (the love duet of the cats, with its mewing violins, enraged the audience). Nevertheless, L'Enfant contains some of Ravel's most appealing music, as a fine new Deutsche Gramophon recording conducted by Lorin Maazel-the first of the opera in stereo-again demonstrates...
...libretto was ideal for a composer who retained a lifelong longing for the "green paradise of childhood." Ravel was determined that "the vocal line should dominate," and it does, against an orchestra as luminous as any Ravel ever created. Among the opera's more effective touches: a procession of shepherds and shepherdesses to a sinuous dance theme played by reed pipes and tambourines; the dizzying dance of the digits (Mon Dieu! c'est I'arithmetique!) to raucous and leering brasses...
...program made a pass at traditional music (an opera by Prokofiev, piano works by Debussy and Ravel), but the score card was overwhelmingly modern: a sampling of contemporary Italian music played by the Milan Radio Orchestra, a concert of atonal chamber works by France's Parrenin Quartet, an opera by Germany's Werner Egk. The tone of the festival reflected Tito's promise of a free hand, but Chief Organizer Milko Keleman, 37, an instructor in composition at Zagreb Conservatory, was understandably anxious when Cultural Relations Commissar Drago Vucinic showed up for a concert of electronic works...
Although the four pieces span only a half-century in time, they contrast greatly in style. While the Mahler songs express a profound disillusionment, the Bloch and Ravel struggle to retain vitality by assimilating new elements--jazz and modality--and the Kennan by Restricting its own scope...