Word: freyer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...turns out, that was the easy part. Night has fallen, and we are going to find another set of checkpoints in the dark. This time I behave more maturely. My Schwab partners are Dan Hubbard and Rob Sinclaire, a service-enhancement senior manager. Our Presidio guide is Eddie Freyer, a longtime FBI agent and director of SWAT-team programs. We stride along enjoying the cool, moonlit night. Rob and I discuss our mutual fondness for Tony Hillerman's novels, even imagining we are helping Joe Leaphorn track a killer out there in the darkness. This time I focus and, encouraged...
Each of the three operas, brilliantly staged by German director and designer Achim Freyer, offers a penetrating portrait of a man whose life changed the ways in which humanity looks at the world: Einstein, the scientist and amateur musician; Gandhi, the inspirational political leader (Satyagraha was the term for his nonviolent resistance movement); and Akhnaten, the putatively monotheistic Pharaoh. Each work is linked musically as well, with motifs from Einstein popping up in the later operas...
...Freyer's is a largely bleak view of the operas' worlds. The evil courtiers who overthrow Akhnaten are costumed as devils and bestial thugs; Gandhi's followers, beaten by police near the opera's close, look like refugees from Night of the Living Dead. Yet there are stage pictures of surpassing beauty too, as when Akhnaten's domestic life is represented by a giant suspended wheel in which sit, friezelike, the Pharaoh and his six identical daughters. Almost unfailingly, Freyer has found an image to match the mood of the music, and it is in such audio-visual synthesis that...
...years ago, at the Akhnaten premiere, half the audience booed vociferously. This time all three operas were greeted with prolonged ovations. The spectators were cheering Glass, Freyer and the performers, of course, particularly Paul Esswood's radiant Akhnaten and Leo Goeke's heroic Gandhi. But even more, they were cheering the triumph of a style that, only a few years ago, was bitterly controversial. And perhaps bidding it goodbye as well...