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Show 1 The Salt Laky Tritrane, Sunday, Apr 3 2 Visual artists for fest 9, 1978 Musical message is greatness of Mahler Eighth ContHMHl from Page E-- l Symphony, says of the work, There is a reason why the Symphony of a Thousand is so big. It is important to realize, I think, the expansion of the concert orchestra at the beginning of the century. (Gustav Mahler completed the composition in 1907.) Abravanel said that the reason for expansion of the orchestra is the resulting power, the strength of the tone. "The forte of music is really the communicating of spiritual, of mental, of subconscious things that are much easier to communicate with music with its element of strength and weakness, of big sound and little sound. "You know, I try to find some sense in things 1 dont particularly like such as rock music. When 1 ask kids, What do you see in it? they always tell me that it hits you like a wave. But this is exactly what composers have tried to do for 100 or 200 years by accelerating or having more sound, and symphony composers, having more music musicians. But this is only one side of the story of the Mahler Eighth. The main side of course is something entirely different. It is with the constant search for communication. He wanted something, really, to speak to all mankind. In other words, for Mahler it was definitely not a matter of doing something bigger than anybody else. Rather, he wanted to have the means to communicate what he wanted to communicate. He wanted to express something, something very important to him, which could not be expressed with words. Thats why he took away the subtitles for the movements of his symphonies which he had in the beginning. He took them away, all of them, because he found that those subtitles, those specific things, took the hearer far away from what he was really saying with his music. (The subtitles) occupied the listeners mind with specific things while the very things that Mahler expressed could not be described in words. Now Mahler started with songs, the human voice. Then he wrote the First Symphony which is purely instrumental but with a very much enlarged orchestra. The Second, Third and Fourth symphonies incorporated songs that sounded like folk songs, but he had written them himself. All three symphonies, they are called the Wunderhorn symphonies because he used songs from the Magic Horn Cycle, were inspired by a poetry cvcle. Then he discarded specific words entirely in his purely instrumental symphonies. Five, Six and Seven. They went to a greater depth, I would say, because in those he tried and succeeded in expressing what he wanted to express without the crutch of words. But, they were missing the human voice. And so he came to the Eighth Symphony which is a very strange case of conception, mixing the first part, which is in Latin, with the second part, which is in German. (The entire work is a choral symphony which also utilizes seven vocal soloists.) "At first he wanted to translate the first part, the Latin hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus, into German for the unity of the work because he had decided on the last scene of Goethes Faust for the text of the second part. He looked for a good translation of the Latin text, but he didnt find one, and he decided to leave it that way, to have that first part in Latin, the second part in German. The Veni, Creato Spiritus (Come, Holy Spirit) is an incredibly intense and enthusiastic prayer. He wanted something to speak to ail mankind Mind you, Beethoven wanted to speak to all mankind, and when he was feeling that urge the strongest, he also called on the human voice, the choir, in his Ninth Symphony. So, the greatness of the Mahler Eighth is really not because of its numbers. It is because of its Pulitzer poet to read Friday Pulitzer prize winning poet Maxine Kumin will precent a poetry reading Friday at 8 p.m. in Mark Greene Hall, College of Business, on the University of Utah campus. Currently a resident of Warner, N. H., Kumin has published five books of poetry, four novels, twenty juvenile books and several short stories and critical pieces. She received the Pulitzer in 1973 for her volume of poems Up Country. Born in Philadelphia in 1925, she received her A B. degree from Radcliffe in 1946 and her A M. in 1948. and was a Radcliffe Institute Scholar from 1961 to 1963. She has taught at Brandeis, Columbia, Tufts and Princeton. As a child she wanted to be both a poet and an Olympic swimmer, ambitions that dismayed her middle class parents. ' Her mother wanted her to be a beautiful, radiant, snazzy dresser who was terribly Instead, she says, she was an popular. overweight, cross-eye- d frump for years and years and years. She married Victor Kumin, an engineer, and they are the parents of three children: Jane, a lawyer, Judith, a law school student and Daniel, a composer and bassoonist. Her closest friend for 18 years was the late poet Anne Sexton. Her poetry is inspired by the land and its creatures she and her husband live on a 200-acr- Poet Maxine Kumin says theres a new renaissance taking place in poetry today I for one applaud it. that's exciting e of Fine Arts at Rowland Hall-St- . Ave., will present a studio sale and exhibit of blown glass by Steven Rosenblatt and paintings by Earl Jones, Friday from 7 to 10 p.m. The exhibit will continue Saturday and Sunday The Department Marks School, Idaho and Wyoming. He has received first place prizes in numerous juried exhibits. (April 16) from 1 until 5 p.m. Jones, a graduate of the University of Utah, has exhibited widely including one-ma- n shows in Utah, Rosenblatt has studied glassblowing with Steve Connell, Joel Myres and Dave Chihuiy. He is the of Millcreek Glass Corporation, 1975 and is an instructor in glassblowing at the University of Utah. st Music (tik js Salt iakr eribunr it is. I have always been suspicious of music that is very complicated. Abravanel allowed that this statement does not apply to the complex Bach Fugues. The Bach Fugues are overwhelming immediately, directly. You dont have to know all the makings of a fugue. They are great not because all the makings of a fugue are there. They are great because they are great. Mahler, while being way ahead of his time in his philosophy, his thinking, in what he wanted to convey, was very simple in his musical materials marches, songs, dances. The material is very simple. The sum total is very profound. I love that combination. Abravanels involvement with the music of Gustav Mahler spans more than half a century. I happened to arrive in Berlin as a young student just during the week of the first performance in that city of the Mahler Eighth. Naturally, I went to hear that performance. But what impressed me much more was a performance very soon after by Mendelberg of Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) "That impressed me very, very deeply and I went and bought the scores of Mahler. That was early in 1922. 1 was 19 years old. I started reading those scores and going through them. Then I heard performances by Bruno Walter. Walter had been engaged by Mahler when the composer was the general director of the Vienna State Opera. Walter was very close to Mahler. Quite often Mahler would play symphonies at the piano for him. They were very great friends. Walter was the first man to perform Das Lied von der Erde : and the Ninth Symphony after Mahler died (in 1911). So Walter was usually acknowledged as the most authentic Mahler conductor. I went to hi.; rehearsals many times in Berlin and later in New York. I was very close to Walter. When I started conducting Mahler, he invited me to come to his place in Beverly Hills and he would go through the score with me. He even lent me his score for the Mahler Eighth for the performance here (in 1963), his personal score. So I learned a lot from Bruno Walter. I had a lot of strange encounters with Mahlers music that gave me some kind of personal feeling about it. I was conductor in Kassel (Germany) when I was 26. That was in 1929. Kassel was the opera where Mahler had been choral director and conductor in about 1885. One day I was seated in the library looking at some old score and the librarian brought a file and threw it on the table, saying, You might be interested in that. It was the Gustav Mahler file, the file that management had kept on Gustav Mahler when he was there for two years. There were incredible documents. That impressed me very deeply. Also, even before that in Altenburg my boss was the same man, Dr. Georg Gohler, whom Mahler mentioned in a letter in the Mahler file), saying that of the choirs for the first performance of the Eighth Symphony (which Mahler conducted), the one by far best prepared was prepared by a very talented young man by the name of Georg Gohler. He was my boss just 15 years later. Unlike many other Mahler works, the Eighth Symphony received immediate public approval and acclaim following its first performance. However, it received few performances thereafter. It was considered such an enormous undertaking that it was done very rarely. It was difficult to get all those forces together. Stokows'd of course did it. I think he was the first to play it here in the U S. Abravanel decided to both perform and record the work in 1963. I dare say that even my best friends and supporters thought that now I had really become completely mad, not only to want to perform it, but also to record it. I was a little nervous about that enormous apparatus that we would need, you know, those enormous forces, and so I wanted to have a record of all the performances it had received elsewhere to justify our venture. To my great sorrow the publisher told me that he had a record of only about six performances in the United States from 1910 to 1963. Well, you couldnt find the scores. After the war everything had been disrupted. The publisher had to have people look in retail music shops all over Europe, in Italy and Switzerland, to find the few piano-vocscores that we needed for rehearsal purposes. And of course I had not the slightest idea where I would find all those soloists. Abravanel solved the problem of soloists by contacting officials of the Metropolitan Opera Studio, the forerunner of the Mets auditions program, and selecting young singers to come to Salt Lake City for the recording and Tabernacle performance. In December, 1963, the recording was made. It was the first studio recording of the work produced anywhere in the world. Now you have a recording of the Symphony of a Thousand, made in Salt Lake City by the Utah Symphony. What does that mean? It means that any number of orchestras felt in 1963, Look, if they can do that in Salt Lake, why cant we? And so we were deluged with letters from conductors, from managers, asking what the Work entailed exactly and how many people we really had and how many rehearsals we needed. Now the Eighth Symphony is a repertoir piece. I dare say that the recording definitely has helped disseminate the Eighth Symphony. Saturdays performance will marshall 375 voices in three choruses comprised of the Utah Chorale, the combined choruses of the University of Utah, the Utah Boys Chorus and the Womens Chorus from South High School. Dr. Newell B. Weight of the U. of U. Music Department and the director of the choruses there, is preparing the singers for the concert. Richard Torgerson is director of the boys chorus and the high school chorus. Soloists will include JoAnn Ottley, soprano, Jean Hieronymi, soprano, Mariana Paunova, contralto, Nina Hinson, contralto, Louis Welcher, tenor, Hervy Hicks, baritone, and John Trout, bass. The orchestra will be augmented to include 100 players. al Application forms are now available for visual artists to participate in the Salt Lake Festival of the Arts, which will be on Main held June Street. Application forms may be picked up at the City and County Building, room 312. Out of state applications will also be accepted this year. Along with completed application forms, artists and craftsmen must submit slides typical of their work to the festival committee by May 5 at 5 p.m. The application forms and slides can be mailed or hand delivered to the above mentioned City and County Building office or the Salt Lake Art Center, Reservoir Park and Finch Lane. 14-1- 8 Musical tryouts Tryouts for Elders and Sisters, a musical by Orson Scott Card, will be held Monday at Ed Crane Dance Studio, 55 E. 4th South, from 6 to 9 p.m. Based on the book Elders and Sisters by Gladys Clark Farmer, there will be eight wompn and eight men in the cast. Parts for three women and five men between the ages of 18 and 30 are available. Ages for the rest of the cast are from 30 to 60 years old. & $23.95 NOW Ssnw s& aHmupnimg 2261 East 4800 Sooth 278-49- 31 Holladay 1084 East Fort Union Blvd. 1 Midvale Ionia ipemmaDdlellniini SAME 20 to 40 off on fine furniture from our fifth floor. Fantastic values on quality sofas, chairs, sleepers, summer furniture, occasional tables, lamps, accessories and more. nrnnHlv nrpeonte p- 33 - Mil 1 Open 9:00 e.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday thru Friday Saturday til 1 :00 p.m. 37 West 1st South 795 123 East 2nd South 3 Phone Salt Lake City, Utah 84110 IMimwaDaDdley9 ffflaDODii0 1 (ReuecY) farm and she is an avid horsewoman and she describes her work as very simple, very direct. If I had to classify myself I wouldnt mind being classified as a confessional poet. Her reading Friday is sponsored by the University of Utah department of English. Studio sale, exhibit at Rowland Hall Friday 205-l- message, of the directness of the musical language, and the greatness of both the text of the old Latin hymn and of Goethes Faust lines. I love very much music that is moving, that is profound, but also that can speak the first time it is sounded. In other words, for me a Schubert song or Mozart is about the highest that music can be because the layman can be moved by it. You dont need long study to realize how beautiful Park-Fre- e in the Kearns Auditorium or Sett Pataca Parking Lota. |