Word: mehtas
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...Already, it's been quite a ride. The season opened last October in grand fashion, with orchestra maestro Zubin Mehta conducting Fidelio, Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, and tenor Peter Seiffert - deemed "the best Florestan [Fidelio's leading man] performing today" by one critic - leading a stellar cast. On Dec. 2, however, a mechanical failure of the hall's stage works that forced the cancellation of several performances demonstrated just how risky and tenuous such triumphs can be. A temporary fix has salvaged the season, but the brief hiatus turned the spotlight on the scale of Valencia's ambition...
...Valencia's biggest selling point is, quite simply, the talent it has attracted. Classical music legend Lorin Maazel is the opera company's music director and Mehta is its orchestra director, but Helga Schmidt, the former artistic director of London's Royal Opera House, is the Palau's artistic director and its driving force. Once Mehta heard Schmidt was heading Palau, he says, "I was convinced that the artistic quality would be extremely high...
...world-class house that also provides opportunities for young performers to develop. Maazel personally conducted all auditions for the opera's musicians, first in Spain, then around the world, considering some 5,000 performers to find the 90-plus musicians from over 25 countries that now make up what Mehta calls his "virgin orchestra." Indeed, most of the musicians are in their early 30s, and some have never played in opera orchestras before. The opera company has a permanent troupe of approximately 10 singers, with stars coming and going for different performances, following the traditional European model...
...Zionist vision came to earth in a place of maximum inconvenience and danger. Multiple realities are always at work in Israel. Palestinians throw stones in the territories. Ultra-Orthodox Jews throw stones in Jerusalem -- against other Jews who violate the Sabbath. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra plays on, Zubin Mehta conducting, while Israeli soldiers sit on hilltops in southern Lebanon, training expensive, sophisticated observation devices on every Arab who moves -- which sadly is the chief sort of attention that Israelis accord Arabs. Israelis read books at an amazing rate (80 book- publishing houses issue more than 4,000 titles a year...
...first time in ages, the foreign-language category boasts five films that not only are quite good but which critics like me have actually seen. I'm sorry that Pedro Almodovar didn't make the finals with Volver, but it's not as if he needs another Oscar. Deepa Mehta certainly deserves some kind of award for Water, which she made despite sabotage and death threats from Indian fundamentalists. And I'm pleased that The Lives of Others was cited: partly because it's a smartly pensive spy thriller, partly because this means that some Generation Why cutie will have...