Word: opera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Decadence in magenta plus strong singing makes good opera. At three hours, L'Incoronazione di Poppea is a lazy, titillating show with a beautiful string orchestra. The Aggasiz stage is great all-around, and Poppea is fun to watch...
...slip of pale magenta light shone out between red velvet curtains. It and the musical prelude could have gone on for three hours, and I would not have missed the opera. Three violins and a phat viola fiddled while Nero was ostensibly still in the dressing room. They made up the feisty, devilish flank of the Early Music Society Orchestra, balanced by a quietly attentive harp and two awfully long lutes (allegedly a "chitarrone" and a "theorbo") on the right, with two harpsichords rammed together in the middle like poorly parked flagships...
...Douglas Allanbrook '48 played the piano reduction of his Ethan Frome for Aaron Copland, who tentatively promised to give the opera a New York premiere after requesting a second play-through. Soon after, however, Copeland finished his own Tender Land, which he produced instead. "Immensely proud" and wanting "the Met or nothing," Allanbrook shelved the score and moved onto other projects, not wanting to waste time selling the piece when he could be writing others. So, for nearly 50 years following its composition, the opera lay unproduced and unpremiered while Allanbrook wrote other pieces and carried on his busy life...
...press writes isn't worth "a thimble-full of rat's piss." Always mentioned in the same breath as the faltering Mr. P is the superhuman Placido Domingo (everyone's second favorite tenor.) Hoelterhoff describes Domingo's unfailing energy, which allows him to conduct a matinee performance of one opera, star as lead role in another opera that evening, then hop on a plane to the other side of the country to fill in as a sub for a sick Othello...
...true opera lover that loves to soak up every last bit of juicy opera gossip, this is a book that could easily be read in one sitting, as the comments on the back of the book jacket profess. For all of those sane, not-yet-obsessed opera fans, however, the book will take a little more effort. Although written in a relaxed, unpretentious style, the narrative is inundated with the names of every important performer, publicist, conductor and record company CEO in the business, not to mention the titles and allusions to plot synopses of most of the major operas...