Word: operas
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...tiny crucifix of a tuning key. A Cupid darts across the unclothed scene, her bow unstrung and one wing dangling. Someone jostles the stringed spear of a chitarrone, and two primped and padded militaries saunter on stage left. This is the dress rehearsal of Cavalli's Giasone, a baroque opera put on by the Harvard Early Music Society...
...ready. The scene is unclothed, the lights are out, the curtains malcoordinated. And yet as the tensed wrist of the harpsichordist travels across the tuning pegs, as the organ's pitch is finally affixed, as each musician is gathered into place, one senses that the real setting of this opera is here fully assembled...
...This is the wealth and the worth of the opera--the strange and elegant improvisations of the continuo accompaniment, the endless intricacies and expression of the baroque orchestra...
...novel dissolves rapidly after Sashie gives birth to her daughter, Mara, and it continues to unravel with the later insertion of Mara's niece, Naomi, as the final narrator. The work changes from a mythical tract to a soap opera of human fallibility. In the last section of the novel, one gets the impression that Budnitz wants to explore every facet of the human experience: mother and daughter, east and west, moral dilemmas and cheap symbolism...
...dancers can really only last 10-15 minutes at a time because the intensity and energy required for a particular number is excruciating. So the rest of the time is filler--often thuddingly, anachronistic, cliched, diluted filler. At one point, a blues singer launches into almost a mini-opera about liberation from bondage (I confused it for a Civil War hymn at first)--it entirely changes the show's tone. Seconds later, of course, the bouncing Irish return to claim their stage. But the most egregious offense comes a few acts later. A group of African-American dancers saunter onto...