Word: operas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life composed of second acts bring off a grand finale? Sonny Bono did just that. His opera buffa culminated in a Palm Springs, Calif., funeral in a Roman Catholic church, attended by three wives, his gay-activist daughter, conservative G.O.P. hierarchs from Washington and stand-up eulogists getting laughs from leather-clad bikers listening in from the streets and a worldwide audience watching live on cable TV. Even when his life finally got suddenly and fatally out of control, his timing was impeccable. He died like a Kennedy, on skis, against a tree. And if that's funny...
Grove is not all work: he skis, bikes with his wife Eva, listens to opera. He occasionally breaks out into a wild, disjointed boogie (his kids call it groving instead of grooving and recall the time Eva snapped her ankle on their shag carpet as the two danced to the sound track of Hair). The dance step is typical: Grove is a passionate, if disjointed man. He is a famously tough manager who, late at night, can still fill Intel's offices with a rolling laugh. He is a man who lost most of his hearing when he was young...
This was another Grove passion: opera. Seduced by Carmen's "Toreador March" as a youngster, Grove dreamed of becoming an opera singer. He took lessons and sang around school. And in the weeks before he fled Hungary, Grove and a handful of classmates sang the first, murderously lovely scene of Don Giovanni in a Budapest recital. Grove can't remember if he took the part of the footman Leporello (who beseeches, "Potessi almeno di qua partir!" [I wish I could escape!]) or the blackguard Don Giovanni (who bellows, "Misiero! attendi se vuio morir!" [Wretch, stay if you would...
CAMILLA PARKER-BOWLES On the verge of recapturing her true love, tragedy strikes. No soap opera would dare make a character as unlucky...
...With the apparent end of Andrew Lloyd Webber's string of hits, Wildhorn has taken over as the middlebrow melodist critics love to hate. His soaring ballads are dismissed as bland pop geared for easy-listening radio; his shows are scorned as cut-rate imitations of Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. ("The man writes galumphing, dunderheaded musicals that make...everything by Andrew Lloyd Webber seem like great art"--Newsday.) But he is a musical populist and proud of it. "Lyrics can be hard to grasp," he says. "If the music isn't comfortable on the ear and doesn...