Word: khovanchina
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...given Met audiences many a performance they might not have seen but for him: the Met's first Abduction from the Seraglio of Mozart, the first Alceste of Gluck, Mussorgsky's Khovanchina. He had resurrected the dusty Marriage of Figaro (now one of the Met's best performances and biggest hits), Boris Godunov, Otello, Falstaff. He brought the best of Europe's singers to the Met, but he made his era the era of the American singer too: in this year's roster of 108 singers, more than half are U.S.-born...
...Russian Composer Modest Mussorgsky began putting together a notebook entitled "Khovanchina; a People's Musical Drama-Materials." It was the biggest project of his career: a historical opera dealing with the abortive revolt of the feudal Princes Khovansky and their followers (Khovanchina) against the Westernizing influences of Peter the Great's court...
Last week the golden curtain at Man hattan's Metropolitan Opera House went up on Khovanchina for the first time. As the gloomy drama rolled along, at the lumbering pace of a sullen rhinoceros, the audience was sometimes confused by the Russian palace politics, put off by the arthritic English libretto. But gradually the glowing music, which had been expertly edited by able Conductor Emil Cooper, put them in a good mood...
...want to do people," Mussorgsky wrote a friend-"big, without any paint or tinsel." Among the paint & tinsel he avoided were the fripperies of Italian and French opera with their wooden recitatives and stagy arias, and the prettied-up harmonies of such fellow Russians as Tchaikovsky. In Khovanchina, Mussorgsky came very close to his ideal of realistic singing speech...
Metropolitan Opera (Sat. 2 p.m., ABC). First radio performance of Mussorgsky's Khovanchina, with Rise Stevens and Lawrence Tibbett...
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