Word: libretto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...groups aren't as established. The Lowell House Opera Society, Harvard's only entry now that its Leverett House rival seems to have vanished, is doing a double bill of Purcell's Indian Queen and Poulenc's Breasts of Tiresias, a funny, approachable and lyrical work with an Apollinaire-libretto involving a couple of sex changes and a lot of non sequiturs...
...eventual result: Johnson decided to write an hour-long opera that spoofs opera. He picked a cast of four characters, created a libretto that does nothing except describe itself and, using only four notes (A,B,D,E) created a deadpan score that he calls The Four Note Opera. The work began convulsing opera fans last May and has lately moved on to such respectable platforms as the Metropolitan Opera Studio and, in truncated form, CBS-TV's Sunday morning Camera Three...
Threepenny Opera. Music by Friedrich Weil, libretto by Bertoldt Brecht and production by Leverett House. It should be a winning combination. "Mack the Knife" is Richard Nixon's favorite song...
...this plot, Davies' libretto fashions an Everyman kind of morality opera, in which cardinals, white abbots, Latin-spouting priests, heretics and jesters parade in and out of stylized throne rooms and courtrooms while Taverner's destiny is worked out. Allegorical characters such as Joking Jesus, a Pope/Antichrist and Jester/Death trail them in symbolic profusion. Director Michael Geliot (on loan from the Welsh National Opera) and Designer Ralph Koltai have built their set around a huge tower of seesaw platforms on which the merits-and fates-of Taverner and his antagonists are literally and figuratively weighed in the balance...
Directing opera is difficult at best and David Bartholomew did not do a great deal that was original or exciting. Most ensemble movement consisted of describing circles in the middle of the stage; and intense drama was more from Daponte's libretto--such as the Commendatore's duel--than from directed motion...