The Midsummer Marriage

SKU: HL.49002518

ISBN 9790220120466. UPC: 073999913347. 9.0x12.0x1.015 inches. English.

Like few other theatre worksThe Magic Flute, A Midsummer Night's DreamTippett's first opera creates a wholly other place, one where human actions can be seen as in a tilted mirror. Since this is indeed an opera, the place, or dreamspace, is conjured by music: by luminescent music that, in its flowing abundance, radiant harmonies and evocative wind colourings, represents the natural world within which the characters have to integrate themselves. The central couple, those whose marriage is at first subverted and then gloriously celebrated, are Mark and Jenifer: he a young man of the earth and the senses, she a young woman of lofty spirituality. Each is only half a person, and before they can be united they have to be made whole, have to find within themselves an understanding of the other. Overseeing their mythic initiation and psychic healing are two Ancients, votaries of a temple on a wooded hilltop.As in the Mozart precedent, which the composer certainly had in mind, there is also a more workaday couple, Jack and Bella. The other principals are Jenifer's businessman father King Fisher, who wants to stop the wedding for reasons of his own, and an Erda-like seer. There is also a dancer, Strephon, leading the exuberant ballet in which the orchestra completes the story of enlightenment and passion. It is ultimately a victory of love and, before love, self-knowledge.(Paul Griffiths).

SKU: HL.49008139

ISBN 9783795703349. German.

Elgar, Britten und Tippett sind die bekanntesten englischen Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts.Als Kunstler, der bis ins hohe Alter schopferisch tatig ist, und als wacher Zeitzeuge kommentiert Michael Tippett in dieser Auswahl seiner Schriften ebenso kenntnisreich wie nachdenklich die Musik der Gegenwart, aussert sich uber Komponisten-Kollegen wie Strawinsky, Hindemith oder Ives, reflektiert uber die Asthetik der Kunst und die moralische Verantwortung des Kunstlers in unserer Zeit und wagt einen Ausblick auf die Rolle des Komponisten im kommenden Jahrhundert. Erlauterungen seines eigenen Schaffens und Hinweise zur Interpretation und Auffuhrungspraxis vor allem seiner musikdramatischen Werke machen diese Ausgabe zu einer unentbehrlichen Lekture fur alle, die sich mit der Musik und der Kunstanschauung dieses bedeutenden britischen Komponisten beschaftigen wollen.

SKU: HL.49002726

ISBN 9781495076602. UPC: 073999930863. 8.75x11.5x1.128 inches. English - German.

Splintered and rich in reference as Tippett's operas are in their music and in their text, they carry at their heart a glowing confidence in the power ofhuman beings to find a centre and, from that centre, to sing. In The Ice Break that confidence has a global reach. The settings are anonymous: an airportlounge, a hospital, the street. For the first time since The Midsummer Marriage, Tippett uses a chorus, here to represent the mass of humanity, whose divisions are pointed in the central cast: divisions between generations, between sexes, between races, between exile and native. Lev arrives in a new world to join his wife Nadia, who had emigrated with their baby son, Yuri. Also at the airport are Yuri's girlfriend Gayle and her friend Hannah, there to meet the black 'champion', Olympion together with his fans. Out of a series of violent tensions, individual and collective, there develops a riot in which Olympion and Gayle are killed and Yuri is near-fatally wounded. Nadia dies peacefully. During an interlude in which a group attempts a psychadelic 'trip', the messenger, Astron, is mistaken for God - a claim he dismisses ironically. Yuri is operated on by Luke, a young doctor, and, released from the cracking plaster, he finds reconciliation with his father.(Paul Griffiths)

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