Word: altmans
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LIBRETTISTS: ARNOLD WEINSTEIN AND ROBERT ALTMAN...
...contrast to the cinematically luxurious Greed, the libretto of McTeague -- by Bolcom's longtime collaborator Arnold Weinstein and director Robert Altman -- relates the action in spare, simple prose. McTeague (tenor Ben Heppner), a powerful brute who has set up shop as an unlicensed dentist in San Francisco, falls in love with his best friend Marcus Schouler's girl, Trina (soprano Catherine Malfitano, in a marvelously sensual performance). After Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery -- and McTeague's practice is ruined when the jealous Marcus (baritone Timothy Nolen) reports him to the authorities -- the relationship sinks slowly into a morass...
...Altman, whose only previous operatic staging was a 1983 Rake's Progress at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, proves to be an ideal directorial choice. Especially noteworthy is Trina's erotic soliloquy as she lies in bed showered with her gold pieces, a latter-day Danae. And surely the opening scene of Act II, in which the maid Maria (mezzo Emily Golden) hymns the joy of wealth while experiencing the joy of sex up against a fence, is an operatic first...
...history they hardly even had electricity. Hence the Russian artists satisfy our nostalgia for that lost phoenix of Modernist desire, an art that was both experimental and politically effective. To this day, one can't look at the Constructivist designs for agitprop events -- the red panels of Natan Altman's bold transformation of the huge Palace Square in Leningrad for the first birthday of the October Revolution, or the steel-truss tribune designed by Lissitzky to carry Lenin forward like a high diver over the heads of a crowd -- without a feeling of exhilaration: this, not the bureaucratic and murderous...
...ALTMAN: We have rationing today, de facto rationing...