Word: sonorama
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...sitting in the fourth row center. Even in the 1920s, Die Tote Stadt was an anachronism. Korngold was to Richard Strauss what Engelbert Humperdinck (Hansel und Gretel) was to Wagner-a brilliant but minor follower. The style of Die Tote Stadt is a lush, clamorous, occasionally schmaltzy orchestral sonorama that lies somewhere between Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra, with special added effects from Puccini, Debussy, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov. The best of its vocal moments, like the taunting Marietta's Lied, sound like pure Franz Lehár, the master of popular Viennese operetta...
...voiced in sound. The words of its text are employed as much for their acoustic qualities as for their semantic meaning. The result is a kind of anti-opera in which verbal and musical ideas constantly dissolve into one another, yet are finally apotheosized into a grand, compelling musical sonorama...
...trapped men and events while they are still alive, and sheltered them from the passage of time." So said Claude Claude-Maxe in Paris last week, as he launched the first periodical in history to appeal more to the ear than to the eye. The first issue of his Sonorama, which he plans to publish monthly, has 16 pages of pictures and text bound in with six flexible-as-paper phonograph records on translucent plastic...
...earful, the Sonorama listener-reader merely folds back the issue on its plastic hinges, slips it on the turntable spindle through a ready-made hole in the center of the magazine. Wide-ranging and middle-browed, the first issue opens with a pretentious foreword ("In the beginning was the word"), plods through some humdrum popular singing, purrs with the coquetry of Cinemorsel Brigitte Bardot as she chats about Boy Friend Sacha Distel ("I'm at the end of the world with Sacha"). Sonorama comes close to justifying Editor Claude-Maxe's lofty claims with two superb records...
...Parisians began to give Sonorama a whirl, Claude-Maxe was sure he had sold himself a good idea. He confidently printed 60,000 copies of the first issue, saw 20,000 snapped off the stands in four days, ordered another 40,000. Next month he plans to print 150,000 (with scenes and recordings from the life of Pope Pius XII), and he thinks he can hear a circulation...
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