Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...work creating the American Guide series. Artists like Ben Shahn, Jackson Pollock and Alice Neel (see cover portrait) painted pictures to be displayed in schools and other public buildings. The WPA Federal Theater Project provided 12,000 jobs for novelties like Orson Welles' all-black version of Macbeth and the jazzed-up Gilbert and Sullivan Swing Mikado. "It takes a lot of nerve," Hopkins warned Theater Project Chief Hallie Flanagan, "because when you're handling other people's money, whatever you do is always wrong. [But] what's a Government...
...life of Napoleon Bonaparte, with Ian Holm as the Little Corporal and Billie Whitelaw as his Josephine; a drama series called A Play for Love, which debuted last week with a new one-acter by John Osborne, starring Alec Guinness; and the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth, with Ian McKellen as the Scottish insomniac...
...already completed ten of the 15 symphonies he was eventually to write. But as a rule, first impulses tend to be more vital and visceral: Hindemith's first version of Cardillac, for example, or Verdi's original Don Carlos. The same is true of Lady Macbeth. As staged by the enterprising San Francisco Opera, which gave Katerina Ismailova its U.S. premiere in 1964, Lady Macbeth showed a power and raw urgency that was weakened by its later revision...
...Sergei during the long march to Siberia. Her erstwhile lover, however, blames her for his predicament and already has eyes for another female prisoner. This is too much for Katerina, who pushes the other woman off a bridge into a swiftly moving stream and then leaps in herself. Lady Macbeth ends with a desolate chorus of convicts bemoaning their fate as they trudge wearily into Siberian oblivion-an effect that in its peculiarly Russian desolation recalls the Kromy forest scene at the end of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov...
Curiously, the rough edges, inevitable in a piece by so young a composer, give the work more impact. Lady Macbeth is an opera of sexual obsession; Katerina Ismailova, by comparison, is merely about crime and punishment. The restoration of the third act of Lulu two years ago ensured that the truncated version-which was the way the opera was presented until 1979-would not be heard again. So now will Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk become the standard version of Shostakovich's masterpiece, and Katerina will fade into obscurity, an object for musicological study, not for performance. There...