Word: haplessness
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...Hapless Leeching Victim...
...National League expansion franchises, the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins, as hapless as the 1962 New York Mets? (Not unless the Rockies persuade Marvelous Marv Throneberry to make a comeback...
...literature -- Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin -- but the real impetus for this new opera by Russia's finest living composer is a powerful short story by the former underground author Victor Erofeyev. Any political resonance in the tale of an idiot named Vova (Lenin's nickname), who moves in with a hapless couple and destroys their lives, is, of course, purely intentional. Schnittke limns the moral and social breakdown of "I" and his "Wife" in a score of terrifying, eclectic intensity. The first-rate performance, recorded live at the premiere last year in Amsterdam, is led by Mstislav Rostropovich -- in his element...
...Rossini's tidal score more than a story of comic abduction, spousal warfare, anachronistic feminism and subtle slapstick. In this opera, one Bey of Algiers, Mustafa, seeks to rid himself of his dull wife. Elvira and replace her with the kidnapped Isabella, an Italian femme fatale. Enter Lindoro, a hapless Italian slave who just happens to be the lover of Isabella. With the cooperation of an unlucky suitor and the assistance of Elvira, Isabella and Lindoro escape to Italy together by means of an outragerous contrivance, leaving Mustafa and Elvira reunited...
Lars Mellander (Ali), Dorothy Morris (Elvira), and Janine Wanee (Zulma) turn in performance of technical aplomb but little else. Mellander's inexpressive mime doesn't go beyond the essentials. Morris's Elvira is appropriately pitiful, but comes across more contentious than helpless, more an evil shrew than a hapless victim of a inane husband's scorn. And Wanee's Zulma, although not a major part, fades too easily into inconsequence...