Word: angelically
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Blue Angel (20th Century-Fox). "Could a man have a better reason for throwing his life away?" ask the big ads for this glossy U.S. remake of a 1930 German classic. The answer the admen clearly expect from every red-blooded male is: No, not when the "reason" is long-limbed May (rhymes with thigh) Britt, Hollywood's newest sex goddess. This is not the answer they are likely to get from anyone who saw Marlene Dietrich in the original Blue Angel...
Frans Hals has been called a wife-beater, a tosspot, a congenital bankrupt and an angel with a brush. The first three charges rest on the petty court records of Haarlem, Holland, the last on about 300 paintings scattered throughout the world. The court records show a sorry existence, the paintings a radiant one. Hals's life was both. He fathered 14 children, often went cold and hungry with his brood, died penniless (in 1666) at the age of 86. In good times he would march off to the club, being fond of music, beer and jolly company...
Beethoven: Overture and Incidental Music to "The Ruins of Athens" (Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel, mono and stereo). In 1811 Beethoven hurriedly scribbled incidental music to accompany August von Kotzebue's festival play celebrating the opening of a theater in Pest (later part of Budapest). The music is mostly as neglected as the play itself-a fantasy about Minerva awakening after 2,000 years to find Athens in ruins and the last vestiges of culture preserved in Hungary. The work unfolds in a pleasant but innocuously declamatory style that only occasionally echoes Beethoven...
Based on a novel by Russian Symbolist Poet Valery Bryusov (1873-1924), the opera unfolds the story of a demon-haunted doxy named Renata, who grows up in 16th century Germany in the company of an angel, but loses her impulse to sainthood when she decides that she wants to be his mate. The angel disappears in an angry burst of flame, and Renata keeps looking for him until she at last runs afoul of the Inquisition and is sentenced to death at the stake. Part of the fascination of this murky Gothic tale is that most of it exists...
Star of the Spoleto performance was brilliant Turkish Soprano Leyla Gencer, who in the role of Renata demonstrated one reason why Flaming Angel (now available in a Westminster recording) is so rarely produced: the heroine, onstage and singing almost constantly, is required to deliver some of her most memorable lines while crawling on the floor or hopping in hysterical convulsions. Said Director Frank Corsaro plaintively about the work: "I want to move it to New York, but nobody wants...