Word: cosiness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last two months fifty Harvard singers and musicians have been rehearsing Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, an opera that people who know about music insist is too difficult for undergraduates to do. Last Saturday afternoon a small group of students, some of whom were still in grade school when the last grand opera was performed here, wandered down to Leverett House to find out what makes staging a grand opera so challenging...
Isaiah (Jack) Jackson, Philip Heckscher, and Sandy Leon--three roommates from Eliot House who are, respectively, conductor, director, and assistant producer of Cosi--quickly greeted their visitors. After saying yes, they certainly could show why Mozart was so much grander than chamber opera or Gilbert and Sullivan (both of which are presented regularly and successfully at Harvard, they excused themselves temporarily and hurried off to move chairs...
...Cosi's performers expect their performance to go over well with what they term Harvard's "uneducated but intelligent" audience. Last Saturday, however, their audience was about twenty students eating lunch with their dates, and they seem more uninterested than uneducated as the chorus and orchestra trooped in for their two o'clock rehearsal. The musicians pushed tables out of the way and attached the apron to the stage. As the students finished eating, everyone in the room except a few professional singers was moving chairs...
...expect professionals to work on the set," Phil explained. "Although everyone else is painting flats tonight, professionals cause their own special problems. Jack tried to cast as many undergraduates as possible, but Cosi needs six principals. (Gilbert and Sullivan has only one or two principals.) Also, his orchestra is much more complex and much harder to hold and rehearse than a G&S orchestra. In G&S the musicians trade off, but they can't here--the parts are far too difficult. In fact, everything in the show is difficult...
Brophy's analysis of The Magic Flute lands her in a tangle of psychology and Masonic symbolism that even she has trouble resolving. (Mozart got into pretty deep water too.) But she is brilliant on Cosi Fan Tutti, the opera in which Mozart, like Jane Austen a century later, worked through the conventional comedy of mistaken identity to write daringly of two sisters competing fiercely in love...