Word: duchesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...common with its award-winning and much-beloved predecessor. Chief among these are intelligence and taste. The series is as handsomely produced, the Edwardian settings and costumes as lush and authentic, as any devotee of 165 Eaton Place could possibly wish. But Louisa Leyton, the heroine of The Duchess of Duke Street, would never pass muster with Hudson or Mrs. Bridges. She is impertinent, aggressive, and, worst of all, neither keeps her peace nor knows her place...
After these high, fast steps, The Duchess of Duke Street hits its stride. The hotel provides a center for succeeding episodes, and a staff of regular characters assembles. There is Mary (Victoria Plucknett), Louisa's adoring assistant, and Major Smith-Barton (Richard Vernon), a guest at the hotel who becomes his landlady's sidekick and confidant. Comic relief appears with Merriman (John Welsh), a teetering old headwaiter, and Starr (John Cater), the imperturbable hall porter. Asked by Louisa during his job interview whether he fought in the Boer War, Starr gazes at her evenly and pauses. "Very possibly," he finally...
...centuries, opera librettists snubbed The Duchess of Malfi. The cut was unkind, since her tragic tale is the very stuff of grand opera. John Webster's play, published in 1623, is admirably lurid and complicated. There is the Duchess's secret and forbidden marriage to her steward Antonio. There are her two evil brothers: Ferdinand, who is driven mad by incestuous passion for her; and the Cardinal, who schemes to be Pope. After her marriage is discovered, the Duchess is imprisoned and tormented by madmen. At the end, everyone dies violently...
...opera has embraced Webster's gory drama in a big way, with not just one Duchess of Malfi but two. The Santa Fe Opera company, which has presented 20 American and world premieres in its 22 seasons, has just produced the American premiere of The Duchess of Malfi by British Composer and Librettist Stephen Oliver, 28. A second Duchess has simultaneously been staged at Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts, outside of Washington, D.C., this one a world premiere by American Composer Stephen Douglas Burton, 35, and Librettist-Conductor Christopher Keene, 31. Strikingly different?one discordant, the other...
Illuminating this lurid world is equally unsettling music. Oliver, who studied electronic music at Oxford, composed his Duchess for an undergraduate production in 1971 and revised it last year. The opera opens with a blaring cacophony of brasses and winds. Voice and orchestra lines seem to begin and end with little regard for each other. Only once, in the final act, does Oliver use a straightforward melodic passage. A chorus of madmen, a ghoulish group in feathers and rags, sings an elegant baroque masque to the imprisoned Duchess (Soprano Pamela Myers). The contrast between stately chords and hideous faces...