Word: cocteau
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...three years between their debut album Reading, Writing & Arithmetic (1989) and their sophomore release Blind (1992), the Sundays must have been compared with every rock and roll act from Joni Mitchell to The Cure. Music critics praised the quartet's lyrical "atmosphere," paralleling it with the Cocteau Twins' vocal texture, 10,000 Maniacs' ethereal instrumentation and The Smiths' all-around indie dynamism. When The Sundays accompanied Belly on their 1990-91 tour of the UK, the two female vocalists naturally became the focus of similar scrutiny: whereas Belly's frontwoman Tanya Donelly balanced her more direct and powerful voice against...
...were a highly literate and sophisticated bunch just waiting to graduate to Europe, where none of us had been--but thinking of James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Josephine Baker and Bricktop, we knew we had to have a Paris sequence in our lives. AIDS was not here yet so the possibilities seemed endless...
...enabling Glass and Marshall to illustrate various aspects of their personalities simultaneously. Indeed, Marshall's fluid, shifting, molting steps stand in marked contrast to Glass's crystalline music, scored for three electronic keyboards and recalling the textures, if not the melodies, of Igor Stravinsky's Les Noces. The collaborators--Cocteau obviously excepted--call their work a dance-opera spectacle. But Les Enfants Terribles is neither grandiose nor grand, merely the work of three artists, whether quick or dead, at the top of their form...
This unlikely partnership between the modern American minimalist and the chain-smoking Gallic dandy has resulted in 1993's Orphee, 1994's La Belle et la Bete and now Les Enfants Terribles, each based on a film of the same name by Cocteau. Distinguished not only by Glass's familiar, artful brand of minimalist music but also by Cocteau's impish, erotic sensibility, the operas are nevertheless quite different from one another. Orphee was a conventional opera that followed the script of the original film. With La Belle, Glass went a step further, stripping the film of its sound track...
...contrast, Les Enfants Terribles (subtitled Children of the Game)--which premiered last spring at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, and was staged last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City--uses the medium of dance to make its point. Cocteau's 1929 novel, which he transformed into a 1950 movie, was a typically neurasthenic tale of the unhealthy relationship of Paul and Lise, siblings whose excessive attachment to each other eventually destroys them. At once precious and oblique, the story could easily seem ridiculous today...