Word: buffa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scripts. Gurney has been for the stage what Cheever was for fiction: the foremost chronicler of the foibles and angst of the Wasp upper middle class. The adaptation succeeded. But it also pointed up a significant difference between Cheever's striving suburbia and Gurney's blue- blood Buffa- lo: while many of Cheever's bedeviled characters are avidly accumulating, almost all of Gurney's etiolated aristocrats are watching the family fortune fade away...
...read as portents. The deck is soon crowded with Serbian refugees, some of them revolutionaries, and their presence brings down upon the Gloria N. an Austro-Hungarian battleship and a noisy climax to what can best be described as an exercise in, perhaps even a parody of, the opera buffa...
...recent Pennsylvania Opera Theater production of Orlando Paladino, a work that alternates buffa elements with more serious moments, showed the best reason for giving Haydn's operas a hearing: their scores. To the lovesick knight Orlando (Tenor John Gilmore), crazed by a passion for Angelica, the Queen of Cathay, Haydn gave a stirring entrance that suggests the depths of the mad paladin's emotion. On Angelica (Soprano Randi Marrazzo), he lavished arias in each act that shimmer with dazzling coloratura and touching pathos. And for the finale, he composed a high-spirited, catchy septet that reconciles the conflicting...
...hints, but no real answer, as the Met staged its first new production of a season shortened by labor disputes. It was a trio of French works, with the umbrella title of Parade. The idea of presenting Satie's slight ballet Parade, Poulenc's absurdist opera buffa Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges came from Met Production Adviser John Dexter. The common theme was not World War I (though with effort all the pieces can be connected to it) but the devices of British Artist David...