Word: berges
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...more unlikely mountaineer could be imagined. Slight, sedentary, intensely fastidious, bored by hiking, Anton Webern nevertheless trudged determinedly up the alpine slopes of his native Austria. ''From time to time,'' he explained to his friend Alban Berg, ''I must breathe this air. Transparent, clear, pure-the heights...
...full-length Lulu is being given its first U.S. performances by the venturesome Santa Fe Opera. Some of the vocal panache and soaring emotion of the Paris production may be missing, but little else is. The Santa Feans have staged the work with unusual care and intelligence. This time Berg the librettist is as well served as Berg the composer...
...Jacobs' translation). The mysterious Lulu is a dancer, an amoral enchantress, perhaps a force of nature. She first rises through society, then falls disastrously, as lovers contend for her elusive soul and all too accessible body. Throughout the opera, a large portrait of her hangs onstage-one of Berg's many specifications that were sometimes ignored in the past...
Michael Tilson Thomas' conducting matches the urgent pace of the staging without blurring the transparent intricacies of Berg's twelve-tone score. As Lulu, Soprano Nancy Shade sings her precipitous vocal lines strongly and accurately, which is more of an achievement than it may sound. But she only acts out bewitching allure; she does not embody it. During rehearsals, the cast screened Louise Brooks' Lulu in the 1928 silent film of Wedekind's Pandora's Box- which may partly account for Shade's tendency to play the role as a jazz-age vamp...
...central drama of worldly power and rationality being ravaged by the primal erotic instinct. Among other solid supporting performances, Bass-Baritone Andrew Foldi is funny and touching as Schigolch, the old man who may be Lulu's father and who is as good a key as any to Berg's newly retrieved third act. Schigolch is the none too comforting image of what is left after passion and violence are spent: a scrabbling, wheezy, lecherous rag bag of a survivor...