Word: wozzeck
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...recent years as the Hieronymus. Bosch of contemporary music. Here, in his first opera, he examines the nightmarish moods surrounding the torture and execution (at the stake) of a falsely accused 17th century French provincial priest. Penderecki's lurid vision of hell on earth rivals Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu. Splendidly performed by the Hamburg State Opera, Devils is clearly the operatic record of the year, though not for the easy listener...
...first and foremost a singers' house, or what the managers on 57th Street like to call a bella voce theater. Its basic operating premise is that what counts is glorious singing. The only trouble is that no amount of fine vocalizing will make an opera like Otello or Wozzeck work without a steady, compelling baton on the podium. Yet it is difficult to get, let alone keep, good conductors in a house where singing stars have virtual veto power over their maestros. As a result, good conducting has been almost as elusive at the Met as good ballet...
...about marshmallowed meatballs in a much remarked Alka-Seltzer commercial. She grew up-or at least to 4 ft. 10½ in.-in Brooklyn's Flatbush and in Queens. Dance classes at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School led, at the age of eleven, to a singing role in Wozzeck, a solo curtain call and a New York Times review commending the "crushing irony and pathos" of her performance. At twelve, she was on Broadway in Gypsy. Then followed Oliver...
...that belies their tight structure) reflects his individuality. An acknowledged egotist ("And you can be sure, as I grow older I will become even more so"), Boulez possesses a blazing aphoristic gift for denouncing all those who do not agree with him. On everyone who writes opera today: "Since Wozzeck and Lulu, no opera worth discussing has been composed." On the Paris Opera: "Full of dust and dung." On the French musical community, which he left in 1959 to settle in Germany: "There is more stupidity there than anywhere else." On the verbiage of conductors who talk too much: "Sheer...
...life. They expressed this in a new voice of polychromatic sounds of momentary durations. The fluid immediacy of impresssonism and the starker psychology of expressionism began to lose their distinctiveness and prove permeable and complementary. The last magnificent statements of the musical expressionistic esthetic were Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935), and his Violin Concerto (1935), an elegy written upon the death on Mahler's daughter Manon. The neurasthenic romanticism of Mahler was transmuted in these works to a testament and a valedictory. The plasticity of musical idioms was clearly responding to a mellower comprehension of what...