Word: operas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ROSSINI TENOR (Arabesque). Up bel canto hill and down rodomontade dale, con brio, with the rising young opera star Rockwell Blake...
...have to love opera to like Aria. In fact, knowledge of music drama may prove a liability in appreciating this anthology of ten short films by ten prominent directors, each one spitballing on themes from the opera repertory. If, however, you are a connoisseur of rock videos, with their images like Day- Glo wallpaper after a food fight, you will feel right at home. Watching three of the segments (based on hit songs from Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino and Rigoletto), purists could sneer at Aria as MTV -- Movies Trash Verdi. But Producer Don Boyd...
Instead one thinks of an institutionalized, not to say industrialized, sweetness: the Chagall of the blue, boneless angels, the muralist of Lincoln Center and the fresco painter of the Paris Opera, the stained-glass artist who flooded interiors from the U.N. headquarters in New York City to Reims Cathedral in France to the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem with the soothing light of benign sentiment. His quasi-religious imagery, modular and diffuse at the same time, would serve (with adjustments: drop the flying cow, put in a menorah) to commemorate nearly anything, from the Holocaust to the self...
...hotel. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, observes Brinkley, "invented the modern press conference by accepting direct questions," whereas his predecessors had demanded they be written and submitted in advance. Yet F.D.R. regarded his journalistic critics with "what seemed to be the consuming, corrosive hatred of his public life." The black opera star Marian Anderson broke the color line by singing in the D.A.R.'s Constitution Hall. But for Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, there was no such thing as race relations: "He repeatedly introduced a bill to deport all Negroes to Africa and once suggested that Eleanor Roosevelt be sent with...
...wide array of psychological ailments, from eating disorders and drug abuse to depression and, most often, stage fright. Those who take care of the performers admit to having some jitters of their own as well. Last fall Dr. Michael Saviano was roused from his sickbed by the San Francisco Opera to tend a singer whose voice was giving out. His verdict: finish the performance but sing at half power. His backstage visit concluded, a feverish and bleary Saviano headed for the hospital to await his patient -- and a reassuring once-over of those valuable vocal cords...