Word: requiems
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...mood of his plays is traumatic loss, a vestigial memory of the expulsion from Eden. With elegiac melancholy, Beckett intones a Kyrie eleison without God. Godot is hope's requiem. The two tramps are waiting for Godot in vain. In Endgame, the lid is lifted on a character who is dying in an ashcan, and it is disclosed that "he's crying." "Then he's living," says another. The only sort of affirmation lies in Beckett's very act of communicating the darkness of his vision. As Eric Bentley puts it: "If one truly had lost...
...years," recalls Keenan. "He'd say, 'Oh, I couldn't do that to my public.' And I said, 'What public?' " That did it. At 70, Wynn began a new career. He played a beat-up old fight trainer in TV's Requiem for a Heavyweight, soon was getting calls for films. He was an aging broadcasting executive in The Great Man, the old dentist in Anne Frank, and Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins...
...VERDI: REQUIEM (RCA Victor). The virtues of this new recording are the soloists. Carlo Bergonzi is good enough to make the listener forget Jussi Bjoerling's masterly reading of the Ingemisco. Birgit Nilsson is all fire; Lili Chookasian and Ezio Flagello both have big, warm voices. The difficulties stem from Erich Leins-dorf's conducting of the Boston Symphony. The pace is much too slow. The long, dramatic Otello-like lines enshroud the listener rather than move him. Tullio Serafin's interpretation of the Requiem (Angel) is still the best...
...decadent "half nun and half prostitute," she nevertheless wrote such finely chiseled, romantic and often mystical verse on love and faith that the Kremlin allowed her to publish again in the '50s and granted her the almost unheard-of privilege of a religious funeral though, as reflected in Requiem (1963), she had never forgiven the harsh Stalin era, when "only dead men smiled, glad to be at rest...
BRITTEN: CANTATA MISERICORDIUM (London). Written for the 1963 centenary of the founding of the Red Cross, the cantata retells, in Latin, the parable of the good Samaritan. Shorter and less dramatic than Britten's widely performed War Requiem, it is nevertheless eloquent as performed by the London Symphony orchestra and chorus, conducted by Britten, with Peter Pears as the Samaritan and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the Jewish traveler...