Word: operas
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Henze's The English Cat was first performed in Germany in 1983 and is now presented in America in English. Henze, one of the leading contemporary opera composers, has suppressed his penchant for blatant politicization to produce a subtle, cautionary fable. Bond's libretto tells the story of a pacifist band of petit bourgeois cats who have formed the Royal Society for the Protection of Rats and have been rearing a young orphan mouse. The plot concerns the ill-starred triangle of Tom (Baritone Scott Reeve), Minette (Soprano Inga Nielsen) and her husband Lord Puff (Tenor Michael Myers). Seeing...
Henze's score displays the composer's familiar mastery of a variety of musical idioms, from a seductive rooftop serenade to a dry Stravinskian neoclassicism that accompanies the cat's pompous posturings. The delightful storybook production by Charles Ludlam, founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, turns the opera into a tragicomedy in the vein of a 19th century melodrama, but one with a pointed moral. In a season that also includes Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld and Strauss's neglected Die Liebe der Danae, Santa Fe has proved once again that...
Wetherby owes equal allegiance to the anguished conundrums of Ingmar Bergman and to the 1967 Harold Pinter film Accident, another story of academics in rural England, a young man who dies violently and his mysterious death-magnet of a girlfriend. It can even be seen as an upscale soap opera, in which a decent spinster finally stumbles into a mature, equitable relationship with the local policeman. But Hare is after much more: the composite portrait of middle-class England, a community in which an affable exterior hides sexual crimes behind the privet hedge. The casting coup of Redgrave...
...Double Quartet for Strings (1984), heard as part of the San Francisco Symphony's week-long salute to the composer, Zwilich displays a formidable technical command coupled with a striking ear for beguiling string sonorities. Her 1979 Chamber Symphony, a kind of elegy to her late husband, Metropolitan Opera Violinist Joseph Zwilich, is reminiscent of Shostakovich in its arching melodies and air of melancholic brooding...
...immaculately coiffed romance. With 19 published novels (more than 55 million copies in print), she knows better than most that the majority of women readers want stories of endless love and eternal youth. Lately a touch of career and financial independence is not out of place. The three soap-opera actresses in Secrets manage to be both busy professionals and powerful love goddesses. The most impressive of the trio converts a homosexual into her lover and father of her child. The plot deals with how these women eventually pair off with three male colleagues. As in the soaps, beauty...