Word: opera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Operas like these may give the art form new relevance to young audiences, but there are less weighty ways to attract them. Almost every house has a group or club aimed at the under-30 crowd. When Robert B. Driver took over as general director of the Opera Company of Philadelphia five years ago, he began to woo young professionals. Presto!--a brand new event called the Puccini-tini, a martini-tasting bash. A Junior Guild, for people under 35, offers a package of dinners and discounts plus a chance to try out as a spear carrier in Aida...
Incentives can get a young audience into an opera house, but what will keep it there? American opera director Francesca Zambello, who has worked in innovative houses like Houston, Seattle and Los Angeles, agrees that spectacle has boosted opera's pulling power, but she rejects the TV comparison. "Young people are craving something beyond television sensibility," she says. "We need myth and large-scale emotions--dramas that present magnetic qualities. I think we want something we can't get in our own lives. The three tenors succeed because they are larger than our world...
...their personalities simultaneously. Indeed, Marshall's fluid, shifting, molting steps stand in marked contrast to Glass's crystalline music, scored for three electronic keyboards and recalling the textures, if not the melodies, of Igor Stravinsky's Les Noces. The collaborators--Cocteau obviously excepted--call their work a dance-opera spectacle. But Les Enfants Terribles is neither grandiose nor grand, merely the work of three artists, whether quick or dead, at the top of their form...
Increasingly, orchestra lovers stay home listening to the perfections of their audio systems--without hearing coughs, Dick Tracy watches, the bungled notes. Says Mark Lamos: "The home-entertainment experience is replacing the live-music experience in a concert hall. In opera you are operating on many more levels than pure sound. You need to be there. It is like a contact sport...
...resulted in 1993's Orphee, 1994's La Belle et la Bete and now Les Enfants Terribles, each based on a film of the same name by Cocteau. Distinguished not only by Glass's familiar, artful brand of minimalist music but also by Cocteau's impish, erotic sensibility, the operas are nevertheless quite different from one another. Orphee was a conventional opera that followed the script of the original film. With La Belle, Glass went a step further, stripping the film of its sound track and composing a live but carefully synchronized operatic accompaniment that quickly took its place among...