Word: soloistic
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...Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and the Harvard Glee Club will be coming together March 20 to perform a typically difficult and varied program: Josquin, Poulance, Handl, Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex," and the Brahms "Alto Rhapsody." The soloist for the "Rhapsody" is Mildred Miller from the Metropotitan Opera...
Grumpy Greeting. Boldly Shostakovich chose to compose his 13th symphony, basing it on Babi Yar. The 60-minute composition had five movements. Utilizing a large male chorus and a baritone soloist, Shostakovich used the complete poem for his first movement, choosing other Evtushenko verses for the remaining four. The 1962 Moscow premiere was an unequivocal public success. Government reaction was a different matter. Pravda treated the symphony with near silence-a grumpy one-line sentence to the effect that the performance had taken place. There were no reviews. The composition was withdrawn for ideological repairs. With a few lines added...
Edgar Varese's Octandre (1924), one of the two modern works, did not compare favorably with Stravinsky's pivotal Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1959), with Harvard's Luise Vosgerchian as soloist. Octandre, for seven winds and contrabass, seemed individual but not highly original, consisting of some explorations of the percussive possibilities of wind articulation, propulsive rhythms, and generally uninteresting timbres. The piece seems much less provocative than the contemporary experiments of Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Cowell. The Movements, however, a strictly twelve-tone piece, is characterized by pellucid, crystalline registration, pointillistic rhythmical control, and Stravinsky's unique unsentimental lvricism...
Dressed in a white tuxedo with black bellbottoms, Soloist Yamash'ta shuffled onto the stage, crouched behind his instruments while Ozawa unleashed a brass-heavy fanfare. After a menacing roll on the bass drum, Yamash'ta picked up speed and energy, began to ricochet from one instrument to another. Hair flopping, arms flying, he nudged, banged, tickled and teased the instruments. At one point he flailed away with both hands, simultaneously blowing onto bamboo sticks, kicking the prayer bells and rubbing his body frenziedly against the gongs. After it was all over, the audience gave him a standing...
...Later on, Stravinsky and Bartok proved that percussionists could do more interesting things than simply thump out a basic rhythm. Nowadays such avant-gardists as Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Karl-heinz Stockhausen treat the percussionist as a performer with rights (and responsibilities) equal to any other soloist...