Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Opera, says Mr. Scruples in Mozart's The Impresario, "occasionally loses skirmishes, but it invariably wins the battle for survival." On the theory that some of the most interesting battles are taking place in that realm known as regional opera, TIME'S music critic William Bender visited St. Paul, Katonah, N. Y., and Ottawa. He encountered imaginative programming, talented young singers, skilled managerial talent and audiences as eager for the untried as the familiar. His report...
...this exquisite setting, the company's excellent veteran musical director Julius Rudel last week introduced an offbeat operatic double bill consisting of Antonio Salieri's Prima la Musica e Poi le Parole (First the Music and Then the Words) and Mozart's The Impresario. Since both works deal with backstage intrigue, and both had their premieres together in 1786 on commission from Austria's enlightened Emperor Joseph II, the two one-acters would seem made for each other...
There is a legend, fostered notably by a Pushkin poem and later by Rimski-Korsakov in an opera (Mozart and Sa-lieri), that Salieri poisoned Mozart. Scholars discount the thesis, but there is no doubt that Salieri hindered the career of his younger colleague. Small wonder. Salieri was a hack who saw Mozart as a threat to his own reputation. Is such historical byplay justification enough for combining the two works at this late date? Alas, no. Prima la Musica has about 15 minutes of passable music; at a length of 70 minutes, it is maddeningly vapid...
...best in Canada-almost as big as the Metropolitan Opera's. Best of all, there is Conductor Mario Bernardi, who since 1971 has presided over one of the first-rank summer opera festivals on the continent. He began the current season with a new production of Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio...
Conductor Bernardi has a discreet, controlled way with Mozart that was especially beneficial to some of his younger singers-notably Dutch-born Sonja Foot as Constanze and Montreal's Anna Chornodolska as the maid Blonde. Bass Joseph Rouleau, a regular at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was lecher-perfect as the Pasha's harem keeper, Osmin. The star of the evening, though, was the five-year-old National Arts Centre Orchestra, a chamber-sized ensemble of 46 that Bernardi conducts in concert during the winter...