Word: librettist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even if these worthy but obvious sentiments had been set with the wit of a Brecht or the irony of a Weill, the piece would still be weak. But Librettist Tage Danielsson is no Brecht, and Werle shares with Weill only three letters of their surnames. In an opera as dependent as this on sure- handed pastiche, Werle's parodies of American lounge acts and soulful Russian folk songs consistently fall flat. Surely, the company that premiered Conrad Susa's magical chamber opera Transformations in 1973 and has championed resident Composer Dominick Argento could have chosen a better piece...
This poses a problem that MacDermot and his librettist, WilliamDumaresq, never quite overcome. Indomitability is all very well, but a concept cannot sing...
...Rise of the Stage Director. All right, if there are no new works, then make old works new through flamboyant reinterpretation. The stage director, once a traffic cop, has become in effect a second librettist. These show doctors have made some startling alterations: Jonathan Miller updated Rigoletto as a '50s Mafia love story; Patrice Chereau set the Ring during the turbulence of the industrial revolution; Jean-Pierre Ponnelle WIDE WORLD played The Flying Dutchman as the phantasmagorical dream of one of its minor characters. Most radical of all is Peter Brook's La Tragédie de Carmen...
...Bernstein felt the need to add a cumbersome sequel is a mystery. Does anyone care what happens to Mr. and Mrs. Calaf after the curtain goes down on Turandof? But Bernstein and Librettist Stephen Wadsworth, 30, a former editor of Opera News, have gone ahead to construct a convoluted second chapter that picks up 30 years later, just after Dinah's death in a suicidal, drunken car crash. There are now ten characters instead of two: the couple's son Junior (Baritone Timothy Nolen) and daughter Dede (Soprano Sheri Greenawald, in an outstanding performance); Dede's bisexual...
...Librettist Colby's campy, hit-or-miss humor works best in a scene describing the heroine's mother, a "chronic shiverer" who goes to her reward wearing enough garments to stock a branch of Marks & Spencer. Other beguiling wackinesses: a song about a man who makes eating vegetables seem a sexual experience, the vocal travails of a hiccuping, stuttering woman who has "bubbles in her bonnet," and the soprano heroine's sudden loss of her "high note," which she regains at the price of addiction-to helium sucked from balloons. In less good taste is a character...