Word: godunov
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During the Gorbachev era, political life in Moscow crackled with all the raw power of a performance of Boris Godunov. The Soviet leader's personality clashes with Russian populist Boris Yeltsin, their pendulum swings from angry betrayal to wary reconciliation, were as important for the process of perestroika as finding the right mechanisms for a free-market economy. Then came the high drama of the August putsch and the final unraveling of the union. Given his turbulent career, the Soviet leader probably never suspected that everything would come tumbling down just because three republic leaders decided to hold a weekend...
When Moscow's Bolshoi Opera paid its first visit to the U.S. in 1975, it amply lived up to its name, which is Russian for big. The company offered majestic productions of such epics as Prokofiev's War and Peace and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, plus that Russian national favorite, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. That was the monolithic age of Brezhnev, after all, and the Bolshoi had long been the Kremlin's chief cultural weapon; the party bureaucracy decreed the choices of repertory, casting, even stage sets. The results were as strong as a tank, and just as subtle. Still...
...Levental is a sky- above, mudslinging-below construct. But beyond the "aria portraits" that graphically limn each of the principal characters, Dead Souls contains every cliche in the state manual, including the obligatory lament for the suffering people that has been a staple at least since Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. The opera has just enough technique to work and not enough heart to make anyone care...
Director Benjamin's gift for this kind of comic invention (first hinted at in My Favorite Year) is now finely honed. Long is the adorable mistress of frazzled common sense. Hanks poises between panic and exasperation with the kind of weird aplomb Cary Grant used to manage, and Alexander Godunov, the dancer, proves himself a gifted comic actor as an egomaniacal symphony conductor. They are all comparatively new to film, and that makes their display of old, all but lost movie skills even more cheering. The medium may have a future after...
...Ring and the elegance of Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro; after a long illness; in Armonk, N.Y. He found success quickly, with critically praised debuts at Europe's leading opera houses and New York City's Metropolitan. In 1960 he became the first American to sing Boris Godunov at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater. In 1967 a paralyzed vocal cord cut short his career; he turned to arts administration, and was general director of the Washington Opera when a 1977 heart attack left him disabled...