Word: caved
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pact -- if its real intent is to free itself from international oversight while it pursues its nuclear dream. North Korea may have temporized to forestall U.N. economic sanctions that loomed if it became the first member to quit the treaty. But most observers are pessimistic that Kim will really cave in to political or economic pressure. "We're not dealing with rational people but with an unreconstructedly Stalinist regime," says a top British diplomat. "They don't believe in compromise but in maximum advantage...
...shredded, sliced, diced, pureed by a live vocal quartet and set to the implied, inherent music of his speech rhythms and intonation, accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. In works such as the 1912 Pierrot lunaire, Arnold Schoenberg invented the device of sprechstimme, or speech-song; in The Cave Reich has perfected the principle and built an entire work upon...
Hardly a conventional subject for an opera, but then Steve Reich's new music-theater piece, The Cave, which premiered last week at the Vienna Festival, is hardly a conventional opera. Based on videotaped interviews with Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem, and with Americans in New York City and Austin, Texas, it is a three-act, multimedia, audiovisual collaboration between the pioneering minimalist composer and his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot. By turns fascinating and frustrating, The Cave, which will have other performances this year in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Brooklyn, Paris and Brussels, stands...
Reich has long heard music in the inflections of the human voice; indeed, his earliest works, such as the tape-looped Come Out (1967), were constructed entirely of speech fragments. The Cave -- the title refers to the cave of Machpelah where Abraham and his family are supposedly buried -- is Come Out come out. Projected on five huge video screens, the interviews -- all in answer to the question, Who is Abraham? -- are treated both as the opera's text and as its musical raw material, from which Reich draws every element of his score...
Whether what amounts to a one-trick pony, musically speaking, can sustain a nearly three-hour opera, however, is another matter, and it is here that Korot's visual contribution is critical. What gives The Cave its real dramatic power is the raw material of Jewish, Arab and American perspectives on one of history's Ur-tragedies...