Word: bellowings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
American Composer Leon Kirchner, 58, began the work, based on Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King, 18 years ago and finished it just before its première last week at the New York City Opera. The rather surprising title -the name of Henderson's second wife -came about because United Artists owns the rights to Bellow's title, and Kirchner feared a lawsuit. That is one problem avoided, but only...
...come alive as an operatic hero. Possibly he is too rambling, too widely split a character to be captured in the broad terms that opera thrives on. Certainly Kirchner, who conducted the première, has come up with nothing musical to match the rich flow of language in Bellow's novel. Instead, he has given Henderson a kind of Sprechgesang (the style of half song, half speech developed by Arnold Schoenberg) in which to rant and rave...
...Bellow's Henderson is a man of vast comic incongruity. Kirchner's hero (even though splendidly performed by Bass Ara Berberian) is a one-dimensional klutz. The pity is that there is so much good music in Lily - the Bartokian orchestral evocation of the jungle, the sweet, pristine chants of the natives, the often amusing coloratura chirping of Lily (Susan Belling...
...Rappacini. He seems to have been set out to graze in his garden, talking to his vegetative creations with no sharp sinisterness. Even if he cares for his daughter, he's supposed to be a man who is imperious if not self-deifying. Fink improves at the end to bellow like the God of Genesis at his New Adam and Eve in their garden of evil...
...SAUL BELLOW...