Word: ballo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prominent directors, each one spitballing on themes from the opera repertory. If, however, you are a connoisseur of rock videos, with their images like Day- Glo wallpaper after a food fight, you will feel right at home. Watching three of the segments (based on hit songs from Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino and Rigoletto), purists could sneer at Aria as MTV -- Movies Trash Verdi. But Producer Don Boyd and his crew want to revive the old music's passion and fun, not to mock its petrified conventions. And as often as not, the film succeeds. This...
...good stuff. Nicolas Roeg casts his wife, the exemplary Theresa Russell, as King Zog of Albania foiling a terrorist plot to the strains of Un Ballo in Maschera. Jean-Luc Godard sets Lully's Armide in a Paris gym. Body builders pump iron; two gorgeous sorceresses dust them off. Murder is in the air, and the kinetic poetry Godard can create from the way a woman's hair falls across her face. Julien Temple's witty episode -- quick gags and endless tracking shots -- plops Rigoletto into California's baroque Madonna Inn. A movie producer philanders in a room decorated...
...mentor since 1973. "All voices differ, and there are lots of beautiful voices, but hers has a unique personality and a unique timbre." Others echo Levine's praise. Kurt Herbert Adler, former general director of the San Francisco Opera, cast Battle as Oscar the page in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera in 1977. Remembers Adler: "After we auditioned her, I wrote in my notes: 'bombshell...
...Ashley reached the perihelion when Balanchine choreographed the first of two ballets for her, Ballo della Regina. She recalls that the steps were "like loose change in his pocket." Robert Maiorano's book, written with Valerie Brooks, is an attempt to organize and explain those fabulous coins. A former soloist at City Ballet, Maiorano watched Mozartiana (1981), the choreographer's last substantial work, take shape in the rehearsal studio. As an effort to analyze creation, the book is not really successful. Maiorano cannot bring steps to life in words; nor are there photo sequences, such as the ones in Ashley...
...startling reinterpretation of Verdi's first masterpiece was the talk of London at its premiere in 1982, but it aroused the ire of some Italian Americans after the tour was announced; they objected to the implied Mafia motif. Yet this Rigoletto no more defames Italians than, say, Un Ballo in Maschera does Bostonians. Rather, it recasts the familiar work in a light that forces audiences to rethink it and savor it anew. Renaissance vendettas can seem remote, "operatic," unreal, but transplanted to Mulberry Street in the 1950s, they take on a grimy, visceral immediacy. In the major roles, John...