Word: hendersons
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...daybreak Saturday, Ray and the five others were still at large. Meanwhile, Brushy Mountain officials could pick up no clues on the prison grapevine. Said C. Murray Henderson, Tennessee corrections commissioner: "We are dealing for the most part with hardcore prisoners who live by an inmate code. They aren't going to tell anybody anything...
American Composer Leon Kirchner, 58, began the work, based on Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King, 18 years ago and finished it just before its première last week at the New York City Opera. The rather surprising title -the name of Henderson's second wife -came about because United Artists owns the rights to Bellow's title, and Kirchner feared a lawsuit. That is one problem avoided, but only...
...Harvard and a 1967 Pulitzer Prize winner, Kirchner concedes the opera's transparent comment on American intervention abroad. In fact, he once considered (and wisely reconsidered) calling it Why We Were in Viet Nam. What he has produced, however, is a 91-minute, one-act work in which Henderson simply fails to come alive as an operatic hero. Possibly he is too rambling, too widely split a character to be captured in the broad terms that opera thrives on. Certainly Kirchner, who conducted the première, has come up with nothing musical to match the rich flow...
Bellow's Henderson is a man of vast comic incongruity. Kirchner's hero (even though splendidly performed by Bass Ara Berberian) is a one-dimensional klutz. The pity is that there is so much good music in Lily - the Bartokian orchestral evocation of the jungle, the sweet, pristine chants of the natives, the often amusing coloratura chirping of Lily (Susan Belling...
...essence, Kirchner has produced music for a pageant - the pageantry in this case being the external processions of Henderson's mind. Sensing this, Director Tom O'Horgan (Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar) has rolled out the ribbons and ordered up some eye-catching costumes from Designer Randy Barcelo. The first entrance of the natives has a typically splendiferous O'Horgan touch. The sun rises to reveal Princess Mtalba sitting high atop a pyramidlike structure. Then the queen is discovered in a formal pose just below her. Then the entire population of the village emerges from under the queen...