Word: mansouri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This month, as the 1988 season opens and new General Director Lotfi Mansouri takes command, the road back begins. During his tenure, Adler had transformed ! the San Francisco Opera from a regional ensemble devoted largely to Italian opera into an international powerhouse that won renown by presenting major works, like Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, for the first time in the U.S., and by offering major American opera debuts to Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Sir Georg Solti. While never equaling New York City's Metropolitan Opera in either budget (currently $23.7 million vs. $88 million) or length...
...short summer season. With a bottom-line board of directors perched on his shoulder, McEwen never had the freedom that Adler enjoyed. Nor, apparently, will his successor. "Opera has changed from the autocratic days, when people like Kurt Adler did it all themselves," says the affable, Iranian-born Mansouri, 59, a veteran stage director who has run the conservative Canadian Opera Company in Toronto since 1976, a post he is leaving this year. "It is much more of a business...
Sometimes, alas, it is business as usual. This year's season opener, Giacomo Meyerbeer's hoary grand opera L'Africaine, typifies the ills that have afflicted the company. As Vasco da Gama, Tenor Placido Domingo sounds tired and wan, Maurizio Arena's conducting is enervated and Mansouri's own stage direction merely serviceable. Only veteran Soprano Shirley Verrett, as the regal Selika, captures the fiery spirit of Meyerbeer's diffuse and improbable last opera...
Improvement will take time -- and money. Opera is fundamentally a money- losing proposition, requiring heavy fund raising each year. Even though the company plays to 96% of capacity, box-office revenues account for only 45% of operating income. Thus Mansouri faces a precarious balancing act: while he needs to take bold new artistic steps to regain the company's pride of place, he must also mind the box-office receipts and keep the paying customers in the seats...
...drawn-out war against Iraq has clearly helped the regime to deflect attention from much of its internal strife. The offensive occupies an army that could otherwise become dangerously restless, while allowing Khomeini through assassinations and contrived battlefield accidents to get rid of certain "undesirables." Says Mansouri: "Khomeini is the time bomb the Shah bequeathed to Iran when he fled." It is a lesson even the Soviets have had to learn the hard way. -By Pico Iyer. Reported by Raji Samghabadi/New York