Word: coppelius
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...avis in Lucia Valentini Terrani. She really has too hefty a look for an ideal Cinderella, but her voice was lusciously bronze and agile. The production is by France's Jean-Pierre Ponnelle; within a delightful children's cutout house, he manipulates his characters like a swinging Coppelius. How, for example, Soprano Margherita Guglielmi (Half Sister Clorinda) can make her hoopskirt behave like a Hula-Hoop and still sing is her secret and Ponnelle's. But it is immense fun to watch...
Capobianco has accomplished this first of all with some visual (but never spoken) additions to the plot that enable not just Lindorf but Coppelius, Dappertutto and Dr. Miracle as well -all played by Treigle-to win the girls that Hoffmann loses. The first act, for example, usually ends with Coppelius seeming to dismantle the doll Olympia before Hoffmann's horrified eyes. He does so in the new production, but then Coppelius and a happy flesh-and-blood Olympia (Soprano Beverly Sills) are seen embracing behind a curtain. Obviously the girl is part poltergeist, too, and in league with Lucifer...
Treigle, 45, is one of the best acting basses in the business. Till now he has been best known for his near-definitive interpretation of Boito's Meftstofele. In Hoffmann, he imbues Coppelius with the grace of ballet, which he studied to equip himself for opera. Treigle's Dappertutto is all bluster and crafty swagger, perhaps reflecting the lessons he once took from a Mexican matador. His Dr. Miracle demonstrates the hypnotic effect of the most stylistic, crafty and flexible set of arms and legs in all opera. As to his voice, a huge cannon's roar...
...chiefly of short interludes, beautifully danced by Moira Shearer, Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina, Robert Helpmann, and the Sadler's Wells Chorus. Miss Shearer's best work is shown in the "Dragonfly Ballet" of the prologue, and in the automaton's dance of Act I. Helpmann appears successively as Lindorf, Coppelius, Dappertutto, and Dr. Miracle--Hoffmann's magnificently sinister enemy. He turns up unexpectedly with such insistency that the film might well be called "Tales of Helpmann...
...seemed he could do no wrong. He had sung his first Mephistopheles in Faust, his first Escamillo in Carmen, his first Prince Galitsky in Prince Igor to bravos from the galleries and raves from the critics. When he sang the four baritone roles of Lindorf, Coppelius, Dappertutto and Doctor Miracle in Tales of Hoffman, there was a ten-minute ovation. Cracked one Austrian, as two Red army officers walked briskly from the opera house: "They're hurrying out to cable Moscow to quick send a singer...
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