Word: aida
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...strange quality of simultaneously seeming totally invented, yet completely natural." Its reds and lemon yellows, its blackened viridians and fiercely luminous blues, its swoony Whistlerian grays are like no other color in modern painting. They give his work a perverse to-and-fro between the intimate and the operatic--Aida done in a marionette theater. Such color isn't just showy. It can be extremely tender, intelligently seductive, in the way that art has every right to be. It also insists on distinction--the need to feel one thing at a time, and to remember not what it looked like...
WHAT WONDERFUL NEWS TO HEAR THAT songwriter Elton John will follow the success of The Lion King [Pop Music, March 13] by writing music for a new version of Aida. Maybe now we'll see updates of Carmen, Don Giovanni and Lohengrin, or even new rap versions of Hamlet and King Lear! John E. Brow Chicago Richard Corliss's frank portrayal of John's bad times' being eclipsed by his new, improved, better times was, I hope, the start of the media's casting a more respectful eye toward this funny, brave, phenomenal performer. Leslie Ludwig Cheshire, Connecticut
...pungent, coherent, brimming with good tunes. This month John resumes his smash series of concerts with Billy Joel. Twelve of his old albums are about to be issued in remastered editions, with previously unreleased songs. He and Rice will soon begin writing the score for a new version of Aida, which Disney is planning to bring to Broadway. And he's working on an animated film version of Belfast, a haunting and hopeful song about the Irish troubles that is the high point of his new album...
...somber judgment scene from Aida unfolds. Portraying the Egyptian princess Amneris is a singer identified in the program as ``Carmelita Della Vaca- Browne,'' a burly Puerto Rican ex-soprano whose voice (since giving birth to triplets) has darkened to a take-no-prisoners mezzo. In the role of the doomed warrior Radames, all-American tenor ``Tex Stolto'' can't seem to resist handing out glossy photos of himself. And as Ramfis, the high priest, Russian bass ``Boris Pistoff'' doffs his headdress to reveal himself as a Conehead...
...This is Aida? Well, yes--as staged by a New York-based all-male company called La Gran Scena. This rare--and rarefied--troupe recognizes that opera thrives on the tension between the sublime and the silly. After all, when a 90-kg soprano trips down the castle steps trilling like a half-kilo canary in the mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor, should one weep at her character's insanity or howl at the absurdity? La Gran Scena's answer is: both. As they see it, loving opera and laughing at it are one and the same thing...