Word: favorita
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There's more pomp than circumstance in Donizetti's La Favorita. There is no onstage action in the opera, and the plot moves with godlike indolence. In the last century it was popular because of its pretty, skillfully written melodies and because 19th century audiences rather liked a long evening in the theater...
...Pavarotti to undertake such a vehicle, as he did last week at New York City's Metropolitan Opera. The commanding tenor today, he can do a great many things wonderfully well. Some of them, like spinning out a legato line or singing a high C, are displayed in La Favorita. As an actor Pavarotti can be funny or tragic (both in La Bohème), or a careless aristocrat (the Duke in Rigoletto). But with his native wit and musical intelligence, Pavarotti cannot act dumb. Unfortunately, that is required of Fernando, the hero of La Favorita...
...peak of his rambunctious form, Chairman Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries, one of the world's biggest conglomerates (1976 sales: $3.4 billion), is a curiously compulsive monologuist. Whether lolling with a weekend visitor by a sleepy lagoon outside his luxurious beach house, La Favorita, in the Dominican Republic or lecturing to an awed audience in his company's baronial headquarters suite overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, Bluhdorn fearlessly offers his forthright and often funny opinions on such disparate topics as acquisition strategy ("I want to buy things no one else wants"), American businessmen ("They have surrounded...