Word: coventionalism
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...launch deals like the one with Covent Garden, Gergiev has very little help. Surrounded by old-school functionaries, he must train a staff that can do business with the West. He seems to proceed on instinct, with more than a little of the old Diaghilev in him. Often he will end a long evening on the podium with a couple of hours of nuts-and-bolts negotiating...
...Kirov -- both the opera and dance divisions -- have busily signed Western contracts. The ballet will perform The Nutcracker in Tokyo each year for the next decade. The opera, besides a major contract with Philips Records, has co-production deals going with Covent Garden and La Scala, among others. But it will not return to the U.S. until 1995: Gergiev is wisely wary of overexposure...
...third opera shows a new direction. It is Prokofiev's little known The Fiery Angel, an overwrought vision of possession and sexual hysteria. A co- production with Covent Garden, it was directed as an arresting theater piece by British experimental director David Freeman. Freeman uses gymnasts as the devils who torment the heroine, having rehearsed them in concentrated, mesmerizing animal movements that quickly steal the spotlight from the singers. Trendy? Possibly. But the production maintains its musical balance as well...
...will not lack work opportunities anytime soon. Covent Garden is on the telephone, pleading that she not cancel a new La Sonnambula because the agreed-upon director has just withdrawn. Italian maestro Riccardo Chailly, who is on her very short list of preferred conductors, wants her for Rossini's The Turk in Italy, not exactly on opera's hit parade, but that does not matter to Anderson. Major new productions have been lined up in Chicago (finally, perhaps, a satisfying Lucia) and San Francisco (La Sonnambula), as well as a new Semiramide next season...
Moreover, Jones was adaptable. When he was designing the piazza of Covent Garden with its integrated church of St. Paul, the Earl of Bedford (who was paying for it) told Jones he wanted the church to be "not much better than a barn." "Well, then! You shall have the handsomest barn in England," Jones answered, and produced it. He never delegated a design or failed to transform what he copied. He thought -- and drew -- in terms of large volumes, generous spaces, exalted plainness relieved by lucid, ingenious detailing. Later Georgian architects would owe him an immense debt...