Word: schoenberger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mind-numbing combination of skills is required of the performers who wear those costumes: ballet, acrobatics, pantomime, acting, singing, and, I believe, some knowledge of martial arts. The music is played by an orchestra of Chinese instruments in the wings and at first sounds as strange and forbidding as Schoenberg does to Tschaikovsky lovers (interestingly, some of the singing sounds rather like Schoenbergian speech-singing...
...whom she may have killed), then finds his corpse (or imagines she has found it). The score, composed in 1909, broke down harmony until it had no real key, fragmented melody into an apparently unrelated succession of motifs and dissolved all structure by avoiding repetitions. It was as though Schoenberg felt a need to reduce and purify all the musical elements before seeking some new form that they could take...
Erwartung's nightmare ambiguities can have a haunting power. The Santa Fe production makes them rather tame, except in the astringent sonorities arising from the orchestra pit. Soprano Nancy Shade, as the woman, has command of Schoenberg's difficult idiom, but her voice lacks the dramatic weight for a role that, as Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers describes it, is essentially "Isolde in nervous disintegration...
...surprise of the evening is Von Heute auf Morgen (From Today Until To morrow), a one-act comic opera being given its U.S. stage premiere. Schoenberg had consolidated his epochal twelve-tone system by 1923, supplanting the traditional seven-note scale with all twelve chromatic tones, which, in various intricate arrangements, became a new basis for melody and harmony. Von Heute, composed in 1929, qualifies as the first twelve-tone opera. It shows off the range of effects that are possible within such a seemingly rigid system: singable lines, comic punctuation in the orchestra, a brief pastiche of Italian lyricism...
...husband who becomes enamored of a swinging, unmarried friend of his wife's. Domesticity triumphs when the wife changes costumes, wigs and personalities to deflate the husband's romantic notions. Director Bliss Hebert wittily stages the action with an array of modish accouterments undreamed of by Schoenberg, including Visa cards and telephones with TV monitors; Maxine Willi Klein's sleek set looks like a sci-fi Better Homes and Gardens; and the cast, especially Soprano Mary Shearer as the wife, delivers a slyly spirited performance. Slight as it is, this is the kind of production that Schoenberg...