Word: handel
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...serve the purpose of advancing the story) and arias (songs that do not move the plot forward). Characters are accompanied by a small pit orchestra of strings and a harpsichord. Eccles’ “Semele” is a more sexually graphic version than the better-known Handel opera of the same name. Because the Early Music Society shifts the setting of the story, however, the raunchy nature of the opera does not seem as out-of-place as it might have at the time of its creation...
...Weird Witchcraft Antichrist begins in domestic rapture. In pristine black-and-white images rendered in slo-mo, and to a soprano's lofty rendition of Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga ("Leave me to weep over my cruel fate"), a couple makes love on a snowy evening. In another room the washing machine churns. In a third, the couple's son Nic escapes his crib to, and goes to a window ledge where he teeters, then falls to his death. The sex act, Nic's life and the wash conclude simultaneously. The child's last moment has a beauty...
...decade of course, Hugo Chávez. But the South American country is now recognized as one of the world's most dynamic vessels of classical music, thanks to a 34-year-old program that gives violins, French horns and batons to poor barrio kids and lets them interpret Handel and Tchaikovsky with a Latin verve that last year led Simon Rattle, director of the Berlin Philharmonic, to declare, "The future of classical music lies in Venezuela...
...Last-minute replacement Julian Kuerti—now in his second season as the BSO’s assistant conductor—led the orchestra in a clean performance of Brahms’s “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel.” The brass section’s muddled sounds in the opening harmonies set the BSO off to a shaky start. Following the two introductory phrases, Kuerti eased into the set of 25 variations and a fugue, orchestrated by British composer Edmund Rubbra...
...controversy and skepticism. Yet, it springs from a seminal period in operatic history, and its synopsis is guaranteed to satisfy a tradition-seeking audience. Opera companies are bolder in mounting productions of lesser-known operas from the early 17th and early 18th centuries, like those of Monteverdi and Handel, but performances of works from the mid-to-late 1600s are rare. Thus, the ambition of the HEMS in selecting this somewhat hazardous reprisal is all the more admirable, but it also subjects itself to an intense test of finesse and intelligence. The uniqueness of its subject and the lack...