Word: montresor
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More than anything else, the set design by Beni Montresor supplies the production with its anti-gravitational quality. More precisely, the near-total absence of set accomplishes this purpose. A mirrored floor and a red velvet curtain constitute the sole permanent scenery, and both seem oddly out of place. Chairs and a packing crate and blankets on the floor (to suggest beds) appear briefly, as do autumn leaves whose color is much too bright for the mood of the last...
More appealing symbolism surfaces in the series of visual images which are a Serban trademark and which are enhanced in this production by Montresor's ghostly, haunting light design. Andrei (Thomas Derrah), the three sisters' only brother, and his fiancee, the inhospitable Natasha, kiss in the foreground while everyone else in the cast trots offstage in a long line, their faces illuminated and their bodies dark against the back wall...
...coloratura fireworks in Esclmonde. One hears instead her middle-high range - lustrous, dusky, moving seamlessly between registers. No other singer could bring this music so close to distinction. Among the other principals, Mezzo Huguette Tourangeau, as the Empress' sister, sang with impeccable French style. The sets by Beni Montresor consist mostly of scrims and drops on which light shows swirl. To fashion his opulent costumes, the garment district must have emptied its bins of beads...
Ustinov succeeded where others had failed by playing the opera, as he put it, for "what's on the surface." It turned out to be a poetic, elfin romp, somewhat in the spirit of Beni Montresor's enchanting 1966 production for the New York City Opera. Said Ustinov: "Too many directors try to make another Parsifal out of The Magic Flute...
...sizes and ages chattered to life across the country last week like firecrackers on a string. Manhattan's two companies faced off across Lincoln Center Plaza with year-old productions: the Metropolitan with its comfy,old-fashioned Traviata and the New York City Opera with Beni Montresor's fairy-tale setting of The Magic Flute. In neither case was the performance on much more than a ho-hum level; in fact, Spanish Soprano Montserrat Caballe's first Met Violetta seemed an almost deliberate throwback to the bad old days when singers were meant to be heard...