Word: stravinskian
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Henze's score displays the composer's familiar mastery of a variety of musical idioms, from a seductive rooftop serenade to a dry Stravinskian neoclassicism that accompanies the cat's pompous posturings. The delightful storybook production by Charles Ludlam, founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, turns the opera into a tragicomedy in the vein of a 19th century melodrama, but one with a pointed moral. In a season that also includes Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld and Strauss's neglected Die Liebe der Danae, Santa Fe has proved once again that...
...between them is slickly accomplished, especially in the final scene, when Moran picks up Glass's folk- style setting of the bird's lament and brings the opera to a peaceful close. Musical collaborations historically have not been very successful, but Glass's hypnotic arpeggios and Moran's dry Stravinskian syncopations are harmoniously soldered in a chamber opera that should prove practical and durable. The Juniper Tree represents the triumph of experience over youth...
DIED. Roger Sessions, 88, influential, uncompromising composer of reconditely complex orchestral, chamber and vocal works; in Princeton, N.J. Revered by fellow musicians, Sessions adapted such modernist techniques as Stravinskian neoclassicism and Schoenbergian serialism to his individual style, allowing lyricism and emotional color to come through the bursts and layers of sound. Almost all his works, however, are dense, dissonant and difficult both to perform and to listen to, with the result that some compositions waited years for premieres; among his best-known and least inaccessible works were his score for The Black Maskers (1923) and Symphony...
...factor in Stravinsky's conversion to serialism was the arrival within his household of Schoenberg's former research assistant, the young American conductor Rober Craft. In addition to becoming Stravinsky's rehearsal conductor, literary collaborator, companion and surrogate son, Craft was the unofficial custodian of the Stravinskian image. In this role especially through a series of remarkable "conversations with" books, he enabled a wide audience to savor the composer's pungent personality...
...Italy as something of a cultural exile. "I was eager to leave the growing materialism and persisting narrowness of my motherland," he says. His music, though, remains German in its contrapuntal structure, and it is still played mostly in die Heimat. But respectful German critics readily grant Henze his Stravinskian legacy and the Italianate influences in his music. Says H. H. Stuckenschmidt, one of the most distinguished German critics: "He is the least bourgeois and the least Teutonic German composer...