Word: operas
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Imagine a Mexican-American TV soap opera written with Federico Garcia Lorca's dramatic intensity and passion for female characters but produced with the randy exuberance of a soft-core-porn video. Then spread it all across the gritty black-and-white panels of a comic book. What you would get is Love and Rockets, the comics series created by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, known to the comixcenti as Los Bros. Hernandez...
...that end she is working on a "brief love story" called Paper Pool, based on artist David Hockney's luminous pictures. Oh, but there's also a book on poker. And another inspired by Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress. "There's always that exciting moment when you see something in your head," she explains, "and you feel you've never seen something like it before, and you have this passionate desire to see it exist." Whatever new world she creates next, surely readers will want...
...youth and talent of the performers that makes the evening so moving - and the immense, concentrated hard work that went to stage "Figaro"'s bright silliness. Mozart's late-18th-century opera flows from the mouths and instruments (violins, cellos, flutes, oboes, clarinets, horns, trumpets, timpani) of early-21st-century students, fresh and young. They put dew on the music of another young man, long dead, and roses in its notes...
...from the theater where I saw the opera, I went into a large chain record store that sells the accumulation of the horizontal culture. Some of it is sardonically funny and talented and diverting, but on the whole, the good tends to be overwhelmed by wanton outpourings of id - the literature on tattooing and body-piercing and drugs and grim sexual mess (domination, S&M and the like), and CDs of rock bands with names taken from an obsessed, sophomoric metaphysics of death. In the democracy of trash, Jeffrey Dahmer achieves afterlife as Hannibal Lecter. The atmosphere of mutilation...
...Dispiriting. The Trazom Effect goes to work on the lazy, the ignorant, the passive. But I was there when the students of the Boston University School for the Arts Opera Programs and Chamber Orchestra performed "Le Nozze de Figaro." Putting together that magic four hours required brains, talent, and training - after all, apart from mastering the gaily demanding music, they had to learn Italian in order to sing the libretto...