Word: musicalizations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Before the establishment of communist rule, Romania enjoyed an extremely vigorous cultural life. In the pre-communist years it produced such luminaries as: Brancusi in sculpture, Iorga in history, Lipati and Enesco in music, and better-known playwright Ionesco. Today there is a general stifling of creativity and the life of the mind...
Despite the musical ambition implicit in the international cast and the Paris Opera name (Bergman used an all-Swedish cast for his Magic Flute), this Don Giovanni is musically undistinguished. Lorin Maazel's conducting sounds muddy and sluggish throughout--which could easily be the fault of the Exeter Street's Rocky Horror-blasted sound system. None of the singers does very much of the ornamentation most music scholars today believe was a critical part of performances in the composer's time. Most of all, there's a surprisingly lackadaisical air about Mozart's music as Losey presents it--as though...
...into their roles with intensity, but only the exotic Kiri Te Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey's heavy seriousness. Missing are the wit and verve, the "elate darting rhythms" with which Shaw said Mozart conveyed the spirit of the work. Here the music is not as much help as it might be, since Lorin Maazel conducts it with such grim, unrelenting drive. (The complete soundtrack has been released in a three-LP set by Columbia...
...cypress-dotted vistas. Losey scatters the action of the opera over every photogenic square foot of them. Characters grope endlessly down pillared corridors, wander around outdoors and are unaccountably set afloat on gondolas. Consecutive scenes shift disconcertingly from nighttime to broad daylight and back again. Most of the music is lip-synched to a prerecorded track; inside or out, wind or rain, we hear the souped-up ambience of the recording studio. The result is that characters who ought to be interacting lose touch with each other and finally with the sense of the libretto. The most absurd example...
...casual visitor, it looks like a typical boarding school for the overprivileged-300 acres in Stockbridge, Mass., a mansion, dorms, art studios, a gym, music rehearsal rooms and a barn, and 150 teen-agers so bright-faced and chipper that local residents say they can identify them by the "DeSisto glow...