Word: duetting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BIZET: THE PEARL FISHERS. Carmen it isn't, but an endearing minor opera, with a crazy plot and a thrilling tenor-baritone duet. It gets a rare production from the Opera Company of Philadelphia, starring award-winning tenor Martin Thompson. March...
This album also displays their absolute mastery of the 6/8 country ballad ("If you were the woman and I was the man"--a duet with John Prine), the prison song ("Oregon Hill") and the music-industry (or meta-) song ("To Live is to Fly"). Along with these, though, are the kind of sustained big-art-songs, like the title track that I, at least, expect from the Junkies...
...From the Esultate which marks his entry in the storm-tossed first act to his dying embrace of the martyred Desdemona, Pavarotti sings with the passion of the warrior who boils with jealousy. His lyrical voice is audibly more at ease in passages such as the love duet at the end of the first act, but he doesn't shrink from the over-bearing machismo that, in Otello, explodes at various intervals...
...Kanawa is an appropriately ingenuous Desdemona and sustains the first half of the last act beautifully with the "Willow Song" and the Ave Maria. Although her performance doesn't mesh entirely with Pavarotti's careful reading of his role (especially in the first-act love duet, which comes across more as two parallel soliloquies), her characterization is admirable, and she comes into her own in the second-act scene where she is admired by the chorus of men, women and children...
...work ends on a more serious note with an idea that seems close to Tharp. The last duet, she announces, is based on the principle of isometrics, "two equal forces from opposite directions . . . that combats earthquakes and other slippage." In the end she concludes, "If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty -- and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance." That is sobering counsel for would-be participants in the sexual game, but it applies to choreographers as well. Tharp's current troupe is mostly new to her work...