Word: cleopatras
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...Kennedy and Senior Editor Jesse Birnbaum both had separate talks with Bing, took an exhaustive tour of the new house from the Top-of-the-Met restaurant to the basement practice rooms eight floors below, and saw rehearsals of the opening work, Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra...
...christen the offspring, Bing had scheduled the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. Never was a musical event launched in such a tide of pageantry and publicity...
...McNamaras, the Henry Fords, the John Drexels, the Alfred Vanderbilts, the William Fulbrights, the Kennedy brothers, and rafts of diplomats and fashion plates, the audience of 3,800 first-nighters provided a show-stopping spectacle of animated finery. The total weight in diamonds and emeralds alone could have sunk Cleopatra's barge, and the gold lame could have papered the Met walls. On the whole, the fashion was strictly haute, although here and there a kooky costume or two dazed the 3,000 or so beholders who checked over the operagoers as they arrived. The wife of Met Tenor...
...Playing Cleopatra, Soprano Leontyne Price was so heavily costumed in bolts of sparkling cloth that she looked like a junior-sized pyramid herself; it was a wonder that she eould sing at all, though sing she did, and her burnished voice never sounded better. At the top of their form, too, were Basso Justino Diaz as Antony and Tenor Thomas as Caesar. Composer Barber's setting for Shakespeare's text was notable chiefly for an orchestration built of conflict ing clouds of moody, often eerie thun-derbursts of sound, punctuated with enough jutting exclamations of dissonance to label...
...weeks preceding the debut of Antony and Cleopatra, Bing worked a 16-hour day instead of his usual 14. He usually started his days with an assault on a pyramid of mail, meanwhile giving orders over his intercom system and fielding rapid-fire phone calls: "Hello. Yes. No. Tomorrow. Fine. Goodbye." Then, dictating memos over his shoulder, he would go off on his rounds, turning up onstage to admonish a stagehand ("Don't smoke on our stage, please"), switching off the lights in sub-basement storage rooms, climbing into the uppermost rafters to check on a special staging effect...