Word: bizet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BIZET: SYMPHONY IN C MAJOR; "L'ARLESIENNE" SUITE (Erato). Grace, style, panache and a certain je ne sais quoi: Bizet had it all. Just what the doctor ordered when you're sick of the three German...
...Shchedrin, favored to succeed Khrennikov someday as a culture czar, who was represented by his new opera Dead Souls. A licensed radical who sacrificed his genuine talent for the status of a pampered house pet, Shchedrin once wrote sparklers like the Carmen Suite, a vibrant 1967 gloss on Bizet that will be danced later this month by his wife Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Now, perhaps metaphorically, he writes Dead Souls...
...beguiling as she is fickle, Bizet's Gypsy Carmen is a temptress whose passions run the emotional alphabet from A to Z. Even on ice. For Debi Thomas, the accent is on P. Her Carmen is usually powerful, plucky, practical and pretty. Katarina Witt's Carmen is a study in S, at once sensuous, seductive, stylish and shrewd. But last Saturday night, when the long-awaited skate-off between the two Carmens got under way in the Olympic Saddledome, America's sweetheart proved an unexpected B: a bobbly bundle of nerves capable only of bronze...
Describing the one she could lose it to as "hard to get along with," Witt might be referring to the juicy fact that both Thomas and she will be registering at Calgary under the same assumed name: Carmen. Independently, they selected music from Bizet's opera, and naturally neither would give a thought to changing. As an archetypal character, Carmen has been interpreted in a thousand ways, but this will be the first time one of them will survive...
Director Peter Brook's work in the 1980s includes an 80-minute condensation of Bizet's Carmen and a 9 1/2-hour adaptation of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. He is probably best remembered for his 1970 A Midsummer Night's Dream, which uncovered weighty conflicts of the sexes and social classes in what had been seen as amiably airy farce. That production, gymnastic and visually abstract, signaled a revolutionary intent from the first glance. This time Brook's method is less obtrusive: though there are no sets to speak of, the costumes are in period and the air is abuzz...