Word: figaro
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...Geneva Conference. Even though Cairo and Jerusalem are seemingly closer in their views on the topics for the next stage of negotiations, it will take delicate diplomacy by the Secretary to bring them together. Israeli Premier Rabin last week, in an interview with the Paris daily Le Figaro, announced that he was willing to return the strategic Mitla and Giddi passes in Sinai to Egypt-in return for a peace treaty. Israel has also indicated that if alternative oil supplies can be guaranteed by the U.S., it will hand back the Abu Rudeis oilfields along the Gulf of Suez. Egypt...
...create new parks, older buildings will have to be torn down-and the residents relocated elsewhere in the housing-short city. Indeed, Maurice Cazaux, urban expert for Le Figaro, fears that Paris could become a "dead, museum city." But Giscard has thought of that too. His program for Paris calls for mixing a large amount of gray construction concrete in with his green plans. Just how that can be done without casting further shadows on the City of Light remains to be seen...
Despite its high quality, the Summer School's New Opera Company doesn't really fill the need--its version of The Marriage of Figaro is a concert one, with no recitatives, few choruses, and singers standing up in tails. Much of the comedy inevitably gets lost. Beaumarchais's original version, first produced just five years before the French Revolution, was regarded as dangerously subversive because it concerned a valet's just victory over his adultery-minded master...
...rebuke to the Count, a relief to the Countess--when Susanna comes out of the closet in the second-act finale. And director Earl Kim's simple conducting and quiet, steady beat make it easier to see why the citizens of Prague, wiser than the Vienna court which accorded Figaro only a moderate success, adapted its tunes for popular dances...
...since most of this Figaro's singers are fine--particularly Judith Hubbell as Susanna and David Arnold as Figaro--the opera seems more complete than it might, even with the drama truncated. A concert version is certainly better than nothing: like the post-Watergate era, Mozart's music balances a multitude of sins...