Word: music
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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CLINT BLACK: KILLIN' TIME (RCA). Real nice, unassuming, go-to-meeting country music by a new Nashville hotshot. Black sounds like Randy Travis with a few more years of book learning and a cozy way with a melody...
...Kurt Weill's most ambitious opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), seems to be set on a wildly imaginary Florida Gold Coast. But to Jonathan Miller, the gifted British director who was commissioned to stage a new Mahagonny at the enterprising, young Los Angeles Music Center Opera, there could be only one locale. "Hollywood," he said before last week's opening night, "seemed to be a living metaphor...
...philanthropy. The parable itself, though, is rather silly. Brecht was a brilliant playwright and poet, but his ideas were pure Stalin-era blustering. As a viewer sits watching the hero Jimmy get executed for having been unable to pay his bar bill, he can only marvel at the gorgeous music Weill provided for this nonsense...
...That music is admirably presented by Kent Nagano, 37, a long-maned Californian who has guest-conducted widely and won a solid reputation for his performances of works by such contemporaries as Olivier Messiaen and Steve Reich. His reading of Mahagonny is sharp, clear and briskly energetic (even a bit too much so in the lovely "cranes duet"). Gary Bachlund brings an appropriate touch of Nelson Eddy to the role of the doomed hero, though Anna Steiger (daughter of Rod) plays Jenny with a less happy touch of Jeanette MacDonald. As Lotte Lenya taught a whole generation of admirers, Weill...
...blacks, Asians and Latins. "Japanese consumers now want to see somebody unique and somebody they can easily empathize with," says Hidehiko Sekizawa, senior research director for Hakuhodo, Japan's second & largest ad agency. In France the two hottest commercials of the summer, for Schweppes and Orangina, featured Brazilian music and casts of brown-eyed, mixed-race beauties...