Word: operas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Strange people and situations pile into a Madrid penthouse until the place looks like the stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Carmen Maura is the put-upon heroine in this glossy farce by Spain's naughty new auteur Pedro Almodovar...
That was the most remarkable of the many striking effects in German director Peter Stein's production of Falstaff, with which the celebrated Welsh National Opera was making its American debut. But the applause that swept the amiably musty BAM theater was not just for Stein. Nor just for Donald Maxwell's passionate performance as Sir John. Nor even just for the smiling Princess of Wales, Princess Di herself, who appeared in a glowing white satin dress for the black-tie benefit. Also to be applauded and celebrated was the start of a new kind of opera season...
...intends to present each year a limited season of varied and offbeat repertory, using its midsize (2,000 seats) theater as well as the more intimate (900 seats) Majestic a few blocks away. BAM officials like to boast that their house has actually been staging opera since 1861, more than two decades before the mighty Metropolitan Opera was born. But in fact the whole place nearly died during the 1950s. Its revival in recent years has depended heavily on presentations of theater and dance, along with stagings of operas by contemporary composers like Philip Glass and John Adams...
...There is so much interesting opera that could and should play in a theater of 2,000 seats instead of 4,000," says BAM opera artistic director Matthew Epstein. "The visual and musical values are different than in a bigger house, and now the gigantism of the '70s is turning around. These are troubled times for the bigger houses in Paris, London, Vienna. Some of the most exciting work today is being done in smaller theaters like Cardiff or Brussels. There is less emphasis on superstars and more on ensemble...
Cardiff, of course, is where the new Falstaff was born (last September), after the Welsh National Opera spent years courting Stein, who made his reputation at Berlin's famous Schaubuhne theater. Stein saw Falstaff as an intensely personal drama, clearly sexual and even slightly sadistic. "Hold your paunch, celebrate it," he instructed Maxwell at one point during rehearsals. "For Falstaff, it is not grossness, it is greatness, virility." Bearing out Epstein's point, the modest dimensions of the BAM theater enabled Stein to stage Verdi's last masterpiece as a kind of chamber work, with the stage action fast-moving...