Word: cosiness
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...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...
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...
...when it comes to exercising them: the likes of Leontyne Price and Anna Moffo had to go to European houses to learn how to sing with professional skill. A major exception to that failing is Soprano Phyllis Curtin, who made an immensely successful Metropolitan Opera debut this season in Cosi fan Tutte. Soprano Curtin was also a smash in Europe before she came to the Met, but her European success merely topped off a career patiently built in America. Last week, as she followed a superbly rousing performance of Strauss's Salome at the Vienna Staatsoper with another performance...
...most of America's expatriate singers are unknown at home, many of them have built up sizable European reputations. New York-born Claire Watson, 33, was one of the hits of last summer's Munich Festival, where she appeared as the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier and Fiordiligi in Cosi Fan Tutte. Brooklyn's Evelyn Lear, 31, of West Berlin's State Opera created a sensation at the Vienna Festival in Alban Berg's Lulu. Her Texas-born husband, Baritone Thomas Stewart, 31, was a surprise success as Amfortas in last summer's Parsifal at Bayreuth...