Word: requiems
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SHOSTAKOVICH: QUARTETS 4 AND 8 (Mercury). Shostakovich's late chamber works are better than his late symphonies. The eighth quartet, a secular requiem for the victims of Fascism, was written in 1960 and is daringly monochromatic: three of the five movements are largo, and the often-repeated main theme changes only from a moan into a sigh. Even the joyful sections seem to shift into a remembrance of gaiety long past. A subtle performance by the Borodin String Quartet, which the U.S.S.R. will send on a first visit to the U.S. in October...
...Military Chaplains Association for his "tireless, unselfish efforts" to bring "warmth and cheer by personal visits" to U.S. servicemen; Composer Benjamin Britten, 50, winner of the New York Music Critics' Circle awards in two categories-operatic (for A Midsummer Night's Dream) and choral (War Requiem); Thomas J. Watson Jr., 50, chairman of International Business Machines Corp., elected president of the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America (he joined his first troop in Short Hills, N.J., on the day in 1927 that Lindbergh flew the Atlantic); Playwright Lillian Hellman, 58, and Artist Ben Shahn, 65, honored...
...Shutter's Creak. The Plague is neither as sustained nor complex as Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, but it invites comparison to that modern masterwork in its personal comment on a desperate universal theme. A Spanish exile who lives in near hermitry outside Cambridge, Gerhard spent more than a year fashioning his brilliantly distilled-libretto from Stuart Gilbert's translation of the novel, then found the music for his words in six more months. The score has only the merest wisps of melody, but the music achieves some deeply stirring and unnerving moments -as when an orchestral...
...REQUIEM MASS IN D MINOR (RCA Victor) was left unfinished when Mozart died at 35, and Conductor Erich Leinsdorf chose it as a symbolic tribute to the late President John F. Kennedy. This superb recording was made by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with a 180-voice choir and the extraordinary, majestic drawl of Richard Cardinal Gushing, in a solemn pontifical requiem Mass in Boston's Holy Cross Cathedral. Proceeds from the record sale will go to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library fund...
...available: a recording of the Solemn Requiem Mass in Kennedy's honor, another entitled His Finest Hour...