Word: bizet
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...cast arrangements, the Met has little choice but to execute them as best it can. In the opera world, production plans are made years in advance. Of most immediate concern is Gentele's project for the opening of the season on Sept. 19: a new production of Bizet's Carmen, staged by Gentele himself. Before rehearsals begin on Aug. 1, the Met needs to find a new stage director modest enough to carry out Gentele's ideas. Only a week before Gentele went to Sardinia, he wrote to Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Home, his Carmen: "The production...
...work of Columbia Producers Andrew Kazdin and Thomas Shepard, Everything is actually something less than that, a Franco-Spanish program including Chabrier's España, Ravel's Bolero, a mini-suite from Bizet's Carmen and the Malagueña of Ernesto Lecuona (only Latin in the group). Infinitely superior in sound quality and Moog mastery to the same company's alltime classical bestseller Switched-On Bach, Everything is not to be confused with the originals, nor is it to be condemned for its license. Harmless fun and easy to take, it asks the question...
Such divergence from the stereotyped passion often associated with Bizet's opera is characteristic of Choreographer John Cranko and his Stuttgart Ballet. Last week the company presented its new Carmen as part of a six-week stand in New York that will be followed by a road tour lasting until August. Cranko had sat through scores of Carmen operas, and he says "I always thought they were all wrong. If you see in Carmen nothing but a nymphomaniac who meets a tenor, seduces him, gets tired of him, then meets a bullfighter-it's a bore." Instead...
...both beautiful and forbidding at the same time. In Marcia Haydée (Carmen), Richard Cragun (the Toreador) and Egon Madsen (Don José), Cranko could field a trio whose ability to project feeling into narrative ballet can hardly be matched. What went wrong was the music. Scorning Bizet, Cranko got German Composer Wolfgang Fortner to produce a dreadful, cacophonous "Bizet collage" incapable of sustaining any nuance of emotion. Worse, the score picked up a bar or two of familiar melody, only to distort it unrecognizably or drown it in a dissonant morass...
...Covent Garden, Bizet's Carmen was performed in total darkness. In Soho, a resourceful strip-club owner issued flashlights to his patrons so that the show could go on. A TV mystery went off the air just as the detective was saying "The person we want for murder is . . ." Parliament debated, and the Queen took afternoon tea, by candlelight. Millions of homes were without heat, electricity or hot water for long periods, and whole areas of London resembled the capital during the wartime blitz. Darkness and gloom had descended on Britain because 125,000 Electrical Trades Union (E.T.U.) workers...