Word: idomeneo
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...being restaged. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is set in Manhattan's Trump Tower, Don Giovanni (1787) in Spanish Harlem and Cosi fan tutte (1790) in a sleazy diner called Despina's. Nor does the Sellars game end ) there. At 31, the aging enfant terrible is talking of deconstructing Idomeneo in Brussels and The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne...
...this season there have been two new productions: a grandly ceremonial staging of Mozart's Idomeneo by Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and a controversial setting of Macbeth by Sir Peter Hall. The Met cast Idomeneo as few houses can, with Pavarotti, Mezzo Frederica von Stade and Sopranos Hildegarde Behrens and lleana Cotrubas. All had voices big, agile and beautiful enough to handle the opera's extraordinary demands, and the result was a triumph...
...comfortable ..." Too often, there is an air of comfortable ordinariness about the Met, such as casting a popular opera like Il Trovatore with a soprano past her prime and a tenor who never had one, or substituting a less-than-star-quality singer like Herman Malamood for Pavarotti in Idomeneo. Still, on a day-to-day basis, the Met's productions are the equal of any, the result of Levine's mighty and long labor...
Nonetheless, the 24-year-old composer produced the best opera seria ever written. Indeed Idomeneo contains some of Mozart's greatest music, much of it achieved with effects that were novel then -and are striking today. In the awesome Act II storm scene, Mozart played with orchestral color like a would-be Romanticist. Never before had Munich heard the morose strains of muted brass. He also gave the chorus a vital role that would have been daring even by the standards of French opera. The arias of opera seria had traditionally been set pieces; Mozart often led the music...
...this season jointly by the Lyric and San Francisco operas, displays a unit set of striking originality. The rear wall consists entirely of a huge head of Neptune. On a series of short steps leading down from his face the play unfolds. Occasionally Ponnelle overstyles that drama: Idomeneo (skillfully interpreted by Swiss-born Tenor Eric Tappy) and the court freeze their poses, while Ilia laments the apparent loss of Idamante. But such effects are redeemed by the cast-and by the brilliantly inventive lighting. In Gilbert Hemsley, Ponnelle has the best lighting designer in American opera. Hemsley paints on Ponnelle...