Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...initial impression almost has to put the listener off. But the only way to appreciate what a really good record this is is to look past all the misanthropic window-dressing. The key to this album is, indeed, its misanthropy. This is certainly the biggest lyric theme; unfortunately, it's also possibly the biggest problem people will have in accepting...
...would be a real shame--there's more to this album than the crazed rumblings of an embittered anachronism. There are three cuts, especially, that deserve a careful second listening. They're not only the record's most interesting expressions of Costello's viewpoint--they point up strengths, both lyric and musical, obscured elsewhere...
...first Goretta allows us to luxuriate in love's spell for an hour or so, staging a series of tender scenes that describe the tentative, early episodes in Pomme and null idyll. The mood is lyric, and the Normandy air is thick with affection: when the sensitive Frangois takes the virginal Pomme to bed for the first time, we are too caught up in their unaffected eroticism to notice much else. Only after the lovers leave their vacation paradise does Goretta begin to reveal his hand: as null grows bored with the affair, The Lacemaker seamlessly goes from lush romance...
That resilience is apparent in every Fox endeavor. In 1956 she outmaneuvered her two fellow partners, both men, for control of the Lyric. "In the end I was the most powerful," she recalls with characteristic bluntness. In a field short on long runs, Fox has not only exceeded Rudolf Bing's 22-year reign at the Metropolitan Opera but made the Lyric by far the longest-lasting company in Chicago's rich operatic history...
...Lyric remains a world-class op era house, and its average cast will rival the Met norm. Its secret: a short twelve-week season that welds its cast for brief, intense, festival-like engagements. This season began with Luciano Pavarotti in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. Coming up are Jon Vickers in Britten's Peter Grimes and Frederica von Stade in The Barber of Seville. This November the Lyric will mount its first Die Meister singer. For opening night next year, Fox has even hired Broadway Director Harold Prince (A Little Night Music) to concoct...