Word: tympani
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With Bach's Cantata No. 15 we were transported two days ahead to Easter Sunday. Trumpet, tympani fanfares and the gay laughter of one of the vocal ensembles are typical of this buoyant celebration of the Resurrection...
Listeners used to the blood & thunder accompaniments of Verdi, for instance, found Vivaldi's music often "lively as gunfire," but hardly theatrical. Holofernes got his head lopped off in a few bars of refined fiddling-where Verdi would have unleashed all the brass and tympani in the pit. And Judith was always genteel, a decapitator in old lace. Sung in Latin, the vocal lines were always elegant, sometimes floridly difficult...
While the orchestra tuned up, "kids swarmed over the stage, inspecting everything from tubas to tympani. But when husky Conductor Ben Swalin rapped his baton for attention, they scrambled to their free seats, got set to listen. Swalin gave them excerpts from Schumann's "Spring" Symphony (No. 1), a Mozart rondo, a serving of Vaughan Williams and Berlioz and a chicken-reel. Before each number, the musicians held up the instruments to be featured so the kids could see them. And when the last chicken was reeled the youngsters hollered for more. So did the grownups at a second...
...Some people think it is the most important work Stravinsky ever wrote," Professor Fine went on, The opera, which was originally a ballet, calls for a mixed chorus of 60 voices with outside soloists plus four pianos and a percussion section which includes a tympani, bass drum, xylophone, chimes, gong, wood block cymbals, bell, side and snare drums and tamburines...
Money was as scarce as music was abundant, and Robert went to work as a percussionist in the Opéra-Comique; he rang the bells for Lakmé. Tympani took him through his Conservatory days, and then he went into the army. During his military career he solemnly rataplanned the drums at Versailles as Woodrow Wilson marched by with Clemenceau...