Word: massenet
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Last month the New York City Opera became the first major company in the U.S. to subtitle a live opera performance. For the experiment, General Director Sills chose Jules Massenet's Cendrillon, a rarely performed, exquisitely frothy turn-of-the-century version of the Cinderella tale. The English subtitles, selectively translated from the French libretto, were projected on a dark, 6-ft. by 47-ft. screen unobtrusively suspended below the theater's proscenium arch. Members of the audience could either ignore the running titles or read along as the action unfolded onstage...
...Sills coloratura was a rich, incredibly supple flute. The high notes do not come as effortlessly as they once did, but the voice is still basically secure, and Sills should have no trouble finishing her last seasons in high style. Her first big test comes this very week with Massenet's Thaïs at the Metropolitan Opera. It is a high lyric role ("Manon with no clothes on," says Sills), and its range is brutal: from below middle C to high D. The show is a loan of the same production Sills scored a success in last season...
...shelves of possible Bellini and Donizetti operas must be getting bare; the new trend in vehicles for the box office sopranos may well be little-known French operas. Along with one fragile masterpiece, Manon, Jules Massenet wrote several operas that fit this description. After 87 years, one of them, Esclarmonde, has just made its Metropolitan Opera debut as a vehicle for Joan Sutherland. The title character is a Byzantine Empress with magical powers, and after hearing the music, one can only wish that she had used her sorcery to summon up a different show-Rigoletto, maybe...
...peerless artificer of movie music, would have deeply appreciated. Wagner (including an outright steal of Tristan's theme for Roland), Meyerbeer, Offenbach, all emerge from the pit. The vocal music is lifted mostly from Berlioz, who wrote wonderfully sensuous love duets. The pity is that in Manon, Massenet created an ineffable erotic style...
...start, her career was decent but unspectacular, notable mostly for her sweet laments in Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe. She achieved her major reputation with a blinding display of Baroque wizardry 8% years ago in Handel's Julius Caesar. Subsequent years brought triumphs in Massenet's Manon; Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and trilogy of queens, Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena; and more recently, Bellini's / Puritani. Vocal fireworks are Sills' glory. She has a light, lyric coloratura so clear and swift that it seems phosphorescent. Though...