Word: bizet
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...handyman at the Budapest opera 40 years ago. This week he brings the Chicago into New York for two sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall, then on to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. In July he will be back in the pit at Covent Garden conducting Bizet's Carmen. He will stay on in London to record Mozart's Cost fan tutte and Puccini's La Boheme; then after a month's vacation he will return to Chicago for concerts, and begin recording more Beethoven symphonies. On it goes. His engagements already run into...
While contemporary political subjects are taboo in the arts, sex is an acceptable theme. The National Theater's current production of Bizet's Carmen must certainly rank as one of the most erotic of versions. In one scene of the opera, Carmen does a striptease, then lolls on a bed in her underwear, grabbing at Don José. Later the couple fall into bed and, through some miraculous exercise of lung power, manage to sing their love duet while they are passionately embracing...
...story line in favor of balanced and unbalanced compositions that are mod, sexy and athletic. The results were varied. The Georgians in their sunny Italianate capital, Tbilisi, responded more enthusiastically to those works than ballet-goers in Kiev and Leningrad. But more traditional Balanchine ballets like Symphony in C (Bizet) caught on at every stop. Balanchine's Who Cares? (Gershwin) was a steady crowd pleaser, though in Tbilisi and Moscow a stomach bug swept the company's ranks, forced last-minute cast changes, and prompted one dancer to dub the work Who's Left...
...killed in an automobile accident barely two weeks after taking over as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera last July, he had already established himself as an affable, informal man with thoroughgoing administrative expertise. But last week, as the Met opened its 88th season with a new production of Bizet's Carmen that Gentele had conceived and intended to stage, the question was: Could he also produce opera...
...Gentele, as well as Igesz and Bernstein, the secret was not so much in making improvements as in going back to the original. They scrapped the musical recitatives written after Bizet's death by Ernest Guiraud and restored much of the original spoken French dialogue-never before heard at the Met. Even listeners with only high school French got a better sense of the plot. Bernstein looked at the score as though he had never conducted it before -which he had not-and came up with a broad, slow but crackingly taut performance that underlined Carmen's sense...