Word: generality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...General Manager: Barbara M. Mrkonic...
Anyone who wonders what is wrong with American opera in general and the Metropolitan Opera in particular need look no further than Manhattan's Lincoln Center, where the Met last week uncrated its elephantine new production of Verdi's Aida. Can the nation's leading opera house really be serious about offering this animated comic book as art? While not a disaster on the order of last season's catastrophic Il Trovatore, the new Aida represents all that ails the company these days...
...evening is not for the singers -- Leona Mitchell as the eponymous Ethiopian slave girl, Placido Domingo as her hapless Egyptian lover Radames -- but for towering sets and slick stage machinery, then the era of content-free opera is at hand. Under the artistic direction of James Levine and departing general manager Bruce Crawford, the Met has ( suffered from a hardening of its arteries, offering up one lumbering spectacle after another without much apparent thought as to whether they make artistic sense...
...problem is that no one is in charge, and not just of Aida. Crawford, the former chairman of BBDO International, who became general manager just three years ago, stunned the opera world last month when he announced he would return to his first love, the ad game, in April. Levine, 45, has been at the Met practically since puberty and lately has been making valedictory noises; it is no secret that he wishes to expand his European activities and that Herbert von Karajan's twin jobs as head of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival would suit him just...
...refugees as pawns to seize land in Kampuchea as Vietnamese troops carry out their phased withdrawal from the country, due to be complete by 1990. Last week, responding to international pressure, Thailand promised to boost security around the permanent Khmer Rouge camps to halt the forced relocations and general thuggery...