Orchestrator

Father of modern orchestration was an excitable red-headed Frenchman named Hector Berlioz, who lived in the middle 19th Century. From him such romantic composers as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, such impressionists as Claude Debussy, learned many a trick of the trade. Erratic but forceful, Composer Berlioz, an original in his day, was insatiably concerned with orchestral instruments. He studied them all, speculated on their possibilities, wrote a book about them, dreamed of gigantic orchestras with platoons of trumpets and battalions of violins. When he composed he often wrote for large combinations of instruments. One such work is his Requiem, which demands a tremendous orchestra and a large chorus, not to mention four brass bands distributed in the four corners of the concert hall. In the Requiem's orchestra are 16 kettledrums played by ten players. When Composer Berlioz' Requiem was first performed, one man in the audience fainted, and critics pronounced it the biggest noise ever heard in Paris.

Because it requires so many performers, the Requiem is seldom performed. But last week a large audience flocked to Rochester's Eastman Theatre and listened spellbound while an enormous aggregation of players and singers thundered it out under the baton of Conductor Herman H. Genhart. No one swooned. The performance of Composer Berlioz' barbaric, brooding score was acclaimed as one of the most important events, and certainly the loudest, in Rochester's musical history.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.