Word: giovanni
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such a ripe age, Stravinsky wrote his own requiem. This week his body was to be flown to Venice for burial in the Russian corner of the cemetery of San Michele. His Requiem Canticles (1966) were to be sung at a final service in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. All this is in accordance with the composer's own devout wishes. Still, even Stravinsky himself might have liked the additional jaunty note of the epitaph he tossed off nine years ago, before leaving for an African conducting tour: "If a lion eats me, you will hear...
...places like Greenland, Labrador and finally the rest of North America. The familiar names are here: Leif Ericsson, discovering his mysterious Vinland around 1000 (Morison would like to believe it was Newfoundland); John Cabot, who sought a short cut to the Indies and ended up at Newfoundland in 1497; Giovanni da Verrazzano, the gentleman-explorer from Florence, who found offshore New York "a very pleasant place" to visit in 1524. There are unfamiliar names, too, like St. Brendan the Navigator, who in the 6th century took to sea, Morison speculates, in search of guaranteed chastity. After all, even a monastery...
They were easy to break. They held only about four minutes of music per side. They were so heavy that a complete Don Giovanni ran to 23 records and weighed in at a shelf-sagging 14 pounds. Most people in the late 1940s were glad to see the old 78-r.p.m. disks being phased out in favor of lightweight, long-playing, superior-sounding microgroove records. Now, though, those old 78s may be coming back again...
...setting of his story is Parma; had it been Verona the parody of Shakespeare's account of ill-starred lovers in Romeo and Juliet would have been too painfully obvious. Ford's Romeo is called Giovanni and he is played by an actor named Stan Nevin who has half of Leonard Whiting's credentials-a good physique-while lacking a strong or even passable voice for Ford's verse. Giovanni loves his sister Annabella, whose combination of wraithlike charm and physicality Lucinda Winslow succeeds very well in conveying. (Lucy Winslow, Loebgoers will remember, was superb in Dirty Hands. ) The worm...
...staggering power of the scene in which Giovanni stabs his sister Annabella is due to a vaulting funnel effect achieved through intense turquoise lighting of the higher recesses of the set above her bed. Shades of rose, violet and pale turquoise give way in the lighting of the last scenes to the wild-set and dark-set of hues. If Ford's themes foreshadow Sade, Poe and Nabokov, the combined effect of Colacecchia's set and Jonathan Miller's lighting evokes the same sense of demented, striving sensuality found in the eighteenth-century etchings of Piranesi...