Word: operas
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...Emanuel Schikaneder, it offers such an idealistic view of human nature and interpersonal relationships that it seems in danger of being laughed to scorn by modern audiences. But on the March 17 closing night performance of its recent Die Zauberflöte production, New York’s Metropolitan Opera demonstrated just how powerful and convincing Mozart’s final opera really is. In the hands of the Met’s skillful musicians, directors and set designers, Die Zauberflöte gave its audience a journey into a magic world where good triumphs over evil, night yields...
...overall effect was something like watching a three-hour cartoon, which only made the impact of Die Zauberflöte’s idealistic vision more powerful. This opera is, after all, a fairy tale—albeit a bizarre one full of Masonic rituals and Egyptian gods. And like all fairy tales, Die Zauberflöte seeks to teach us a moral. Its particular lesson—the transformative power of brotherhood and love—would lose much of its force if we forgot, even for a minute, that what we are watching is markedly not the world...
...York Metropolitan Opera...
...painted on the curtain, which flies open to reveal a dozen dancers in Spanish costumes prancing merrily in front of a backdrop that is an explosion of magenta and yellow. Hold on to your ticket stub: Mark Morris' joyous dance version of Four Saints in Three Acts, the surrealist opera by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, is off and galloping...
...spoiled Mark Morris? Not even slightly. In his glorious production of Four Saints, the singers are relegated to the orchestra pit, while St. Teresa (Michelle Yard), St. Ignatius (John Heginbotham) and 12 "assorted saints" swoop, skip, strut and tango across the stage, bringing out all the fun in an opera that, since its 1934 premiere, has been embraced almost solely by devotees of the avant-garde. Skating atop Stein's nonsensical wordplay ("Once in a while and where and where around around is as sound and around"), Morris has created a heavenly playground full of beautiful saints who dance like...