Word: libretto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...formulaic plot and unlikely heroics wouldn't matter, and it wouldn't be necessary to explain that it is what Arkady's obligatory adventures let us experience along the way that stirs the mind. So let's say that Red Square's music is extraordinary, and never mind the libretto. Or if that's too flossy, say that the story's texture, the dark background against which Arkady moves and about which he shrugs and thinks his wry thoughts, is real in a way that seems bitterly true. Clearly the thriller form, with no artistic expectations whatsoever, can free...
...self- determination by 70 years. In between came the faux noir of Porgy and Bess, which is really a Russian grand opera in blackface (the choral scenes are closer to Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky than they are to anything Catfish Row ever heard). With a fierce, angry and brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer's cousin, X is at once a musical entertainment, a folk epic, a cautionary tale and a cri de coeur...
These discrete flaws are tied together by the fundamental problem in this production: the lack of a coherent vision of just what the opera is about. It is evident in the translation of Schikaneder's libretto, which, in cutting huge chunks of dialogue, makes the opera's story seen hurried and almost incomprehensible (even if the original, with its sudden plot reversal, is itself somewhat incoherent). The transitions are sudden, and such delicious scenes as the first act duet of Pamina and Papageno are deflated by a lack of preparation. The half-hearted characterization of the singers conspires with...
...masterpiece in minature (it only lasts, on this recording, 20 minutes and 14 seconds). The characterization found in the arias of Adam and Eve in the "Creation" is present, but is transformed into the unilateral statement of a powerful soliloquy. The music, which is set to a libretto of unknown authorship, accompanies Ariadne's discovery of her abandonment at the hands of Theseus...
...what would seem to be very awkward, complex material. Corigliano was interested in a story that would include the characters from The Marriage of Figaro as they appear 20 years later in Beaumarchais's play La Mere Coupable. He asked his librettist, William Hoffman, "to create a libretto that did not set me in 1792 but set me in a world of smoke and haze from which I could look into the past, leap into or out of the past...