Word: armida
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...turning up in the theater as well. La Vera Costanza (True Constancy) was given its American premiere in 1967 in Cleveland; L'incontro Improvviso (The Unforeseen Encounter), an "abduction" opera set in Cairo, was performed in concert version by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic in 1973. Armida, an opera seria set during the Crusades, was produced in New Hampshire last summer with the action updated to the Viet Nam War. Just a fortnight ago another major work, Orlando Paladino, was staged in Philadelphia...
...weeks." The genius was George Frideric Handel, then 26. The opera was Rinaldo, conceived, composed and staged for London's Haymarket Theater in 1711. Based on an epic about the Crusades by Torquato Tasso, the opera tells the story of the Christian general Rinaldo and the Saracen queen Armida. It is a spectacular mixture of pagan magic, military pomp, vocal fireworks and other trappings of the Italian Baroque operatic style, then the rage in London. During the "Bird Song" of Almirena, Rinaldo's true beloved, a flock of sparrows was let loose. The waspish essayist Joseph Addison...
...Machine. The work is true grand opera. Baroque audiences loved a good show. Handel gave it to them, and in Houston so did Director Frank Corsaro. Armida, a kind of ancestor of the Queen of the Night, arrives in a cloud of darkness and swirling smoke, surrounded by a small zoo of reptiles and other phantasmagoric creatures played by dancers. The staging of the final battle between the Christians and the Saracens is a novel affair that can only be called aero-choreography: dancers and acrobats pirouette, somersault, tumble and flip high above the stage in stylized but effective combat...
...early 18th century audiences, and it still sounds good today. With a chamber orchestra drawn from the Houston Symphony, Conductor Lawrence Foster, the symphony's regular leader since 1972, makes his players key members of the drama. He cannot draw from Sopranos Evelyn Mandac (Almirena) and Noelle Rogers (Armida) the Baroque bravura he gets from Home, but Mandac is an especially lovely singer with a bright future. In Samuel Ramey (Argante), Foster has a bass baritone of extraordinary dramatic and lyric gifts, and it is easy to see why Ramey is fast filling the shoes and cape...
...pursuing foreign commissions and coming back with the seeds of foreign taste sticking to them like burrs. As a result, the range of the period was astonishing; it ran from Magnasco's turbid compositions of raggedy monks to the grandeur and sun-washed transparency of Tiepolo's Armida Abandoned by Rinaldo, from Pier-Leone Ghezzi's wry grotesqueries and exact social observation to the flaccid but competent imitations of French classical landscape turned out by such artists as Orizzonte. For the first time, Italian artists had to face the fact that they were not living...