Word: librettos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only serious flaw in the production, and it is a serious one, is the clear lack of attention to convincing acting. The music of Faust is readily available on CD; we go to a performance to see the dimensions of meaning which are lost in a libretto. Unfortunately, with the exception of Doss, the singers in this Faust might as well be in a recording or a concert performance. Acting is reduced to mannerism, often-as with Marguerite's mincing
...trying to beat one of the world's best poets at his own game by writing a contemporary Faust as a ferocious musical Valentine to temptation, damnation, redemption and the beguiling persistence of evil. It is classic pop and prime Newman. The tunes are jaundiced, lyrical and funny; the libretto (by Newman, with a tip of the hat to Johann Wolfgang) winningly softhearted and hardheaded where it counts. The composer has also exercised his artistic prerogative by giving himself the best part. He plays the devil...
...freshest production is a real oddball: one of the few stagings ever done of Benjamin Britten's first opera, Paul Bunyan. Written to a libretto by W.H. Auden shortly after the composer and poet came to America as pacifists in the late 1930s, the work was conceived as a comic-populist valentine to their new country, one that would be suitable for school productions. Singable it is: the stream of songs and choruses exploits and gently parodies everything from American folksiness to Broadway jazziness, from Italian opera to Victorian ballads...
Adams and Sellars are no strangers to topical political controversy. Their two previous operatic collaborations, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, both set to elegant, literate librettos by poet Alice Goodman, tackled explosive subjects in unconventional ways. Nixon presented a surprisingly intimate, sympathetic portrait of the former President, while Klinghoffer roused the ire of some American Jews with its compassionate presentation of Palestinian suffering. Jordan, the team's new librettist, is a political activist whose lapidary vernacular libretto uses a catastrophic Los Angeles earthquake as a metaphor for the shattering power of love...
...every major international festival, a member of the jury at the 1995 Sundance Festival, and a darling of both critics and audiences for films such as "Speaking Parts" (1989), "The Adjuster" (1991) and "Calendar" (1993). Egoyan is currently working on Elsewhereness, an opera for which he has written the libretto, with composer Rodney Sharman. He is also adapting Russell Banks' novel, The Sweet Hereafter, for film...