Word: one-act
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...last week's performance, Strauss's one-act shocker still had plenty of power - from the moment the enlarged orches tra came crashing to life, through the frankly erotic music accompanying the incestuous recognition scene between Elektra and Orest, to Elektra's shrieking "Stab her once more!" at the news that Klytaemnestra had been struck down. But the performance also was a reminder that Elektra no longer has the almost physical shock value it possessed in Strauss's time: overlaying the stark story is a thin coat ing of German Gemütlichkeit that too often...
Rarest item on the program was Sessions' 72-minute, one-act opera, The Trial of Lucullus, with a libretto originally written as a radio play by Germany's Bertolt Brecht. The unrelievedly dissonant work has to do with the plea of the Roman general Lucullus, for admission to the Elysian fields before a jury of citizens. Although it had several appealing orchestral passages and at least one rousing chorus, the opera for the most part is in what Sessions calls his "linear and severe" mood, with many of the vocal parts written in droning monotone...
...first effort, The Zoo Story, an affecting work about the failure of communication between a lonely outcast and a smug square, had its première in Berlin, where it was hailed as "the Götterdämmerung of the gutter." Albee has since turned out four more one-act works, is currently working up from one-acters toward full-length drama by writing a two-act play that seems unlikely ever to appear on a midtown marquee. Its title: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...displayed the extremes of two warring contemporary Italian styles. The Admiral, by Arturo Andreoli, 58, a longtime coach at La Scala, was a typical example of verismo (an operatic movement comparable to literary "realism"), made popular in the late igth century by Mascagni, Leonca--vallo, Puccini. Based on a one-act play by Chekhov, the opera had to do with a )': drunken bum masquerading as an admiral at a wedding party. Exposed when he fails to identify a snatch of Morse code, the -phony admiral exits, announcing with sad dignity: "If I were really a nobleman, I would challenge...
...week was the world première of a 143-year-old one-acter titled Pygmalion, composed not by a modern twelve-toner but by a talented local boy named Gaetano Donizetti. Written in 1817, when Donizetti was 19, the forgotten opera was rediscovered by Missiroli in an orchestrated version in a box of manuscripts found in Donizetti's house in Bergamo. Equipped with a spirited libretto, it had a fine, rich overture and enough tuneful arias to satisfy any Donizetti fan. "Of the three one-act operas given in Bergamo last night," wrote one critic, "the most modern...