Word: bizet
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...emerged little the worse. Carmen, especially, has survived countless transmutations. Geraldine Farrar, Theda Bara and Rita Hayworth all vamped their way through screen versions; Bea Lillie mauled it at the Met. Maya Plisetskaya danced it to an orchestration including 47 percussion instruments. Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones gave Bizet's gypsy girl a surname and set her to work packing parachutes in the Deep South...
...rock version was inevitable. The Naked Carmen is a rock extravaganza in which Bizet's score is emotionally stripped, musically raped and symbolically incinerated in a simulated atomic blast of electronic caterwauling. Written, arranged and produced for Mercury Records by Composer John Corigliano and Record Producer David Hess, The Naked Carmen regards Carmen as a Women's Lib heroine. "Free, honest, a hippie traveling around like the gypsies in Spain," Hess explains. "But Micaela is a bitch, a real castrating female. In the opera she minces up and whines, 'Here's a kiss from your mother...
Says Corigliano: "The Naked Carmen started because Mercury wanted something that would sell a million copies. They never got over their 1812 Overture -the one with all the cannons-and they asked me to do a reorchestration of Carmen. I happen to think Bizet did it pretty well himself, so I said no. Then I met David. We got to talking about Prosper Mérimée's original Carmen story, which is tough as a documentary film. We decided to go about ten times as far as Rodion Shchedrin did in The Carmen Ballet that...
Opera singers, as everyone knows, are exotic creatures. Nowhere have they been more clearly categorized as-such than in Cincinnati, where for the past 49 years Verdi and Bizet have been performed outdoors in the city zoo-joined, and sometimes drowned, by more basic animal noises from lions, seals, bears, elephants, peacocks and other prima donnas of the animal kingdom...
...licensed real estate agent in Los Angeles 15 years ago, Shirley Verrett was pretty good at selling houses. Today, she is even better at selling them out. Mezzo-Soprano Verrett last week made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the heroine in Bizet's Carmen. Be fore the night was out, she had men smiling to themselves and women wondering how a flower might look in their teeth...