1.48. Benjamin britten

Learn some information about one of the most famous British composer and find out when his carreer began.

Benjamin Britten was an outstanding English compo­ser of our time. He was born in England in 1913. He was in fact, a remarkable child. At the age of five he began to compose. Soon it became evident enough that his musical gifts would have to be taken very seriously indeed.

His earliest compositions were inspired by his daily adventures. Everything from a storm at sea to a storm in the family teacup, was grist to his mill.' For the youthful Britten it was a normal thing to express himself in music as in ordinary everyday speech. By the time he was fourteen he had written ten sonatas, six string quartets, an oratoria, and a number of songs and piano pieces. His Simple Symphony; though written in 1934, is based on ideas from the music of his childhood.

His career as a professional composer began in 1934. He began to produce the works that were to bring him the first taste of fame. The set of choral variations A Boy Was Born, which received its first performance in a BBC broadcast early in 1934, advanced his reputation as a composer of serious intent. There was a special feature of Britten's genius: the capacity to write charming and effective music that is within the reach of amateur performers.

He loved children and wrote many works for them. A book of songs Friday Afternoons, his children's opera Let's Make an Opera are simple and very nice.

B. Britten followed the musical traditions of realism. Two of his most important compositions are the opera Peter Grimes and the War Requiem.

Benjamin Britten often appeared as conductor and pianist in England and abroad. He was a good friend of our country and often came to the USSR.

Notes:

¹ ...was grist to his mill—зд. помогало ему в его сочинениях ' in earnest—по-настоящему, всерьез

Exercise

Choose the right ending:

1. Britten was a a/ British composer.

b/ German composer.

c/ French composer.

2. He began to compose a/ at the age of 6.

b/ at the age of 8.

c/ at the age of 5.

3. Britten wrote music a/ only for children.

b/ only for adults.

c/ for both.

4. Britten a/ was in the USSR once.

b/ never visited our country.

c/ visited it several times.

1. 49. Al pacino

Read the text about the famous actor and find out what kind of boy he was when a child.

It’s those coal-black eyes, glistening with absolute conviction and malicious intent. Glaring out from millions of film-posters on millions of bedroom walls, they have at some point given us all the shivers. Because, cinematically speaking, we all know what those eyes have seen, we all know what terrors their owner has perpe­trated. And we realize why the man is an undeniable and deserved screen icon. Getting there wasn't easy. Alfredo James Pacino was born to a family of Italian immigrants in East Harlem, New York, on the 25th of April, 1940, his grandparents having crossed the Atlan­tic from Sicily. His father, Salvatore, was an insurance agent who split from Alfredo's mother Rose when the boy was just two - mother and child moving with her parents in a dirt-poor area near the Bronx zoo.

As an only child, he was jealously pro­tected by his grandparents, hardly leav­ing the house till the age of seven. Shy and insular, he'd impress his school­mates with a fictional past he'd invent­ed for himself, claiming for instance that he'd been raised in Texas. Thankfully, his teachers spotted his tal­ent and cast him in school plays. He en­joyed this but did not consider acting as a profession till, at age 14, he saw Chekov's The Seagull performed at the Elsmere Theatre in the South Bronx. This led to him enrolling at the presti­gious High School of the Performing Arts but, flunking everything but En­glish, he eventually, at 17, dropped out. Yet Pacino, like many of the characters he'd later play, was remorseless in his ambition. He worked to finance his fur­ther studies, toiling as a messenger-boy, a movie-usher, an apartment superintendent and as a mail-deliverer. He attended acting classes and gained experience in basement plays. Off-Broadway, he wrote, directed and act­ed, kept moving, and finally and crucially, in 1966, he came to the Ac­tor's Studio to study the Method under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg. Now, at last, he was on Broadway.

1969 was the breakthrough year, seeing him pick up a Tony award for his role as a psychotic junkie in Does The Tiger Wear A Necktie? Indeed, it was his ability to convincingly portray addiction. His movie debut came in 1969's Me, Natalie but it was the 1971 film The Panic in Needle Park, in which he played a heroin addict, that would showcase his talents and bring him to the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola.

Pacino's rise to fame came after por­traying Michael Corleone in Coppola's blockbuster 1972 Mafia film The God­father and Frank Serpico in the epony­mous 1972 movie. Although numerous established actors, including Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and a then un­known Robert De Niro, were trying to portray Michael Corleone, Coppola se­lected the relatively unknown Pacino. His performance earned him an Acade­my Award nomination for Best Support­ing Actor and, by the end of the 1970s he would have three more nominations, all for Best Actor. Despite further nomi­nations, it wasn't until 1992 that Pacino would win an Oscar.

.Pacino's career took a downturn in the early 1980s and his appearances in the controversial Cruising and the comedy-drama Author! Author! saw him critically panned. 1983's Scar f ace proved to be both a career highlight and a defining role, earning Pacino a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as a blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in Martin Brest's Scent of a Woman (a remake of a 1975 Italian movie).

That year, he was also up for the sup­porting award for his role in Glengarry Glen Ross, making Pacino the first male actor ever to receive two acting nominations for two different movies in the same year.

However, 1985's Revolution was a commercial and a critical dud, and Pacino returned to stage work for four years. He mounted workshop productions of Crystal Clear, National Anthems and other plays; appeared in Julius Caesar in 1988 for producer Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival; and worked on his most personal project, The Local Stigmatic, a play he had starred in Off Broadway in 1969 then re-mounted in 1985 with director David Wheeler and the Theater Company of Boston in order to film a 50-minute movie version that remains unreleased.

Pacino re-surfaced in film in 1989's Sea of Love, which was to signal a return to form. The next year, in 1990, he received an Oscar nomination as Big Boy Caprice in the box office hit Dick Tracy. Pacino has turned in excellent performances in such crime thrillers as Carlito's Way, Heat, and Insomnia, the crime documentary drama , the supernatural drama The Devil's Advocate, and others.

In 1996 Pacino was set to play General Manuel Noriega in a major biographical motion picture when director Oliver Stone pulled the plug on production to focus on the movie Nixon. The quality of Pacino's performances, as well as his larger-than-life onscreen presence (in reality he's 5 ft 6 in), have established him as one of the world's major actors. Pacino still performs theater work and has also dabbled in direction.

Although he has never been married, Pacino has three children. The first, Julie Marie, is his daughter with acting coach Jan Tarrant. He also has twins, Anton and Olivia, with ex-girlfriend Beverly D'Angelo.

Words:

vie-usher - билетер в кино

drug lord - наркобарон

malicious -злой

eponymous - одноименный

punctuated - прерываемый

shiver - дрожь, трепет

established - признанный

perpetrate -совершать

automatic rifle - автомат

insular - замкнутый

be up for-выдвигаться (на премию)

downturn - спад

messenger-boy-мальчик на посылках

highligh- вершина

Exercise

Find the dates in the text. What films did Al Pacino play in those years? What other important things happened in his life and when?