Word: songs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...luxurious rectangular box that is the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room, a wellrounded, balding businessman in spectacles put a clarinet to his lips and once again became a famous living trademark. Behind him 13 instruments exploded in the old Goodman theme song Let's Dance, and the guests at the Empire Room's tables began to feel wonderful. A surprised young waiter nearly dropped the filet mignon Benny he was serving. "For this room-so loud!" he whispered...
...toughness. It provided a neoromantic contrast to Sessions, and for long stretches sounded as if it might have been titled "Mr. Brahms Goes to Juilliard." Composer Mennin, who has six performed symphonies to his credit, kept the orchestra mostly under wraps to make his concerto one long melodious song for Leonard Rose's fluent cello...
Underdog Snarl. Most of Weill's early opera music was the song of Berlin between the wars, the city that Christopher Isherwood wrote about in the Berlin Stories-starvation side by side with luxury, Nazi and Communist bullyboys in the streets, cynicism as heavy as the makeup on the faces of the omnipresent prostitutes. The Threepenny Opera echoed that city. Vaguely based on John Gay's 18th century original, the German libretto by Poet Bert Brecht (now a propaganda wheel in East Germany) had a vicious underdog snarl ("First fill our bellies, then talk morality") and magnificent, vulgar...
Alabama Mama. The record includes songs from other Weill musicals that are virtually unknown in the U.S., most of them close echoes of Threepenny Opera tunes. Composer Weill (who died in the U.S. in 1950) grew lyrical, sentimental and popular in such musicals as Lady in the Dark and Lost in the Stars. But in this album he is still the unreconstructed composer of gutter nihilisms. In one ditty. Singer Lenya is a bitter, jilted girl who snarls at her indifferent lover: "Take that pipe out of your kisser, you dog!" In the chilling Berlin Requiem she sings the horrifying...
...Originally called "Moritat" (literally, a murderous deed), a song style used by 17th and 18th century street-fair singers, who tearfully presented the latest atrocity in ballad form on the streets of Germany...