Word: macbeths
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...VERDI: MACBETH (Philips). Renato Bruson is a driven Scottish thane under Giuseppe Sinopoli's electric leadership...
...book's most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming...
...rest of the play is spent exhausting every funny situation that could possibly arise from such circumstances. The crux of the comedy comes when George is left on stage for what is supposed to be a soliloquy of Shakespeare from Macbeth to a Midsummer Night's Dream. he resorts to reciting the pledge allegiance and the act of contrition. Like the rest of the play, the speech is funny for a while, but rapidly becomes tiresome. By the end of the evening, George's nightmare has become the audience's own bad dream...
STRAUSS: Also Sprach Zarathustra; Macbeth (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon). Who could have predicted that a tone poem based on Friedrich Nietzsche's notions of the death of God, the will to power and the rise of a superman would become one of symphonic literature's greatest hits? Yet long before Director Stanley Kubrick popularized its spectacular organ and brass apostrophe in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Strauss's blazing essay in orchestrational virtuosity ranked high in audiences' esteem. Maazel and the Viennese give this mettle tester a commanding reading, capturing the grandeur...
DIED. Flora Robson, 82, versatile British character actress who graced both the London and Broadway stages and scores of films; in Brighton, England. She specialized in villainesses, including Lady Macbeth, the demoniacal Ellen Creed in Ladies in Retirement (1939), and the shoplifter in Black Chiffon (1949), but was also known for her portrayals of Queen Elizabeth I, most notably in the 1937 film Fire over England...