Word: bellini
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Because Lotto was away from Venice in the first 20 years of the 16th century, he missed the "painterly" pictorial revolution that was going on there, which is why his work can look a bit liny and (relatively) old-fashioned, closer to Giovanni Bellini than to young Titian. Drawing creates more of his pictorial structure than color does; yet he was a marvelous colorist, suave, moody at times, and capable of a mysterious lyricism that reminds you of Giorgione, his senior by only a few years. Except that the color goes to extremes: icing-green, purple, sky blue and orange...
When the curtain went up on the Boston Lyric Opera's "L'Elisir d'Amore," everyone was amazed. The lighting evoked Bellini's "The Feast of the Gods," or the video to "Losing My Religion." Aggressively rustic patchwork dresses and apple baskets, along with a frail red wooden ladder, made certain that this Donizetti comedy would not suffer from any absurd modern setting. The simple but handsome picture frame around the luscious stage set was a perfect touch. Anything so beautiful as all this, one thought, promises to be entertaining...
This seems likely even though Beckmann himself believed that "every form of significant art from Bellini to Henri Rousseau has ultimately been abstract." But Beckmann was always a contradictor, a towering imagination that made no concessions to the fashions or political pressures of his time. And in the Guggenheim's show one sees the very peak of his work: seven of the nine triptychs (three-panel paintings, based on the format of church altarpieces) that he painted immediately before and during his exile...
...memoir Marilyn: An Untold Story, concentrates on Norma Jean's notorious love life, tracing her downward spiral to a drug- induced death in 1962. Soprano Kathryn Gamberoni gives a breakthrough performance as Monroe: after this, companies should be lining up to offer her femmes fatales from Bellini's Norma to Berg's Lulu. The opera, however, is as much of a mess as Marilyn was. Rosten's lines (Marilyn to her half-sister: "How's your little dog Lollie, the one with six toes?") are frequently ludicrous, especially when sung to Laderman's plodding, semitonal noodlings. And the decision...
...panelist on the Metropolitan Opera radio quiz -- with a huge record collection: "I could never play it all in my lifetime." From this fascination came his higher- than-camp opera fantasia, The Lisbon Traviata (1985), and a play in the works, L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age), about Bellini's relationship with sisters who are rival divas...