Word: nordli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FRANCE. Despite the efforts of France's year-old Socialist government to stimulate growth, Jean-Marie Chevalier, professor of economics at the University of Paris Nord, says he is being optimistic in foreseeing a 1% increase in the G.N.P. this year. One of the main effects of the government's effort to foster public consumption has been a rush of imports. The most dramatic example was foreign automobiles, which in May accounted for 32% of all new sales. French exports, on the other hand, have declined 3% so far this year...
...review of Peter Brook's recent version of Georges Bizet's Carmen [Dec. 21] at the Bouffes de Nord in Paris collapses when it argues, "Would anyone think of touching up the Mona Lisa, redesigning St. Peter's, or editing Paradise Lost? These works already exist as painting, edifice and book; they are frozen in time. By its very nature, however, an opera (or play, for that matter) exists by reconstructing it anew from its blueprint. There is no aesthetic rule that says something cannot be left out or rearranged. The only valid criterion is: Does...
...setting is a decrepit building in a seedy district of Paris, not far from the rumbles and whistles of the Gare du Nord. Its inside walls are crumbling. Its seats are long, hard wooden benches, and the stage is nothing more than a dirt floor. Yet this unprepossessing site is currently selling the hottest ticket in Paris: to Director Peter Brook's radical version of Carmen, Georges Bizet's classic opera of love and death in old Seville...
Like the theater in which it is playing, called the Bouffes du Nord, this is a stripped-down, no-frills Carmen far removed from traditional opera-house conventions. It lasts just 82 minutes, with no interval, and uses only four singers, plus two speaking actors. The full orchestra has been reduced to 15 musicians. Everything unnecessary to the plot has been jettisoned in an effort to return to the sunbaked spirit of the original Prosper Mérimée novella. Gone are the choruses of soldiers and cigarette girls, as well as most of the opera's secondary...
What Brook has produced is not Carmen, but a critical commentary on Carmen-an opera about an opera. In this he has succeeded. In the 550-seat Bouffes du Nord, the drama has more power than it possibly could in a 3,000-seat opera house. Brook has chosen his singers as much for their acting skills as for their voices. By tightening the plot he creates dramatic situations beyond anything envisioned by Bizet's librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) or even by Mérim&233;e. In this version, Carmen and Micaela...