Word: opera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...admits: "That's a lot." The Bee Gees are dishing up a new album in February that Coury predicts will be "a gorilla." There will be new albums from the small roster of 13 RSO acts, and a record package of Evita, a pop-top opera about Eva Peron that is S.R.O. in London. Al Coury has to love it all. "I don't love vacuum cleaners and underwear. But I love music, and I can sell it." And it will be sold. What comes out of the RSO outfit may not seem a whole lot like real rock...
...mighty, but the New York City Opera has Beverly Sills. In 1966 she became a top star overnight, singing the coloratura role of Cleopatra in Handel's Julius Caesar. She repaid City Opera by becoming the bestselling box-office draw in its 34-year history. Last January, when Sills, 49, announced that she would end her singing career in 1980, she promised that she would stay on at City Opera?as co-director with Julius Rudel, 57, her mentor and director of the company for 21 years. Last week "Good Queen Bev," as Rudel has called her since her smashing...
...transition may be bumpy at first.Sills, a charmingly mettlesome Norina in the Met's effervescent new production of Don Pasquale, has a full performance schedule through 1980. She will cut back. But some promises may be impossible to break, such as the San Diego Opera premiere next June of a new opera written for her by Gian Carlo Menotti. Sills has little administrative experience, but she has a sharp, well-organized mind. During the past seven months, she has spent every free moment trailing the City Opera managing director. Says she: "I have learned everything: how subscriptions work...
...speed of the transition surprised the musical world and started speculation that Rudel had quarreled with City Opera's board of directors. The company has had some sour notes in recent years. A deep financial crisis?now successfully surmounted?threatened at one point to close the house. Performances have often been slipshod lately, the casting haphazard. Rudel, although tireless, has been away from the house more and more on conducting engagements; he has accepted the directorship of the Buffalo Philharmonic beginning next fall...
Along with City Opera's problems, however, Sills will inherit a healthy, adventurous tradition. Under Rudel, the company staged early operas like Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea and such rarities as Janacek's The Mahropou-los Affair and Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d 'Or. It has nurtured young singers, mostly American?including, on their way up. Sills, Sherrill Milnes, Donald Gramm and Placido Domingo. "Rudel did interesting operas and developed interesting singers," says Anthony Bliss, executive director of the Met. "It is no mean achievement...