Word: operas
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...opens on Christmas Day, is a pretty damn fine one, well cast and handsomely visualized--easily the best adaptation of a Broadway-style musical in decades. It is faithful to the sting and breadth of Tim Rice's libretto, to the ravishing Andrew Lloyd Webber score that synthesizes Broadway, opera and pop with the lilt of Latino lounge music. But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions. For at the heart of the drama is Rice's fascinated ambivalence toward...
Incentives can get a young audience into an opera house, but what will keep it there? American opera director Francesca Zambello, who has worked in innovative houses like Houston, Seattle and Los Angeles, agrees that spectacle has boosted opera's pulling power, but she rejects the TV comparison. "Young people are craving something beyond television sensibility," she says. "We need myth and large-scale emotions--dramas that present magnetic qualities. I think we want something we can't get in our own lives. The three tenors succeed because they are larger than our world...
...their personalities simultaneously. Indeed, Marshall's fluid, shifting, molting steps stand in marked contrast to Glass's crystalline music, scored for three electronic keyboards and recalling the textures, if not the melodies, of Igor Stravinsky's Les Noces. The collaborators--Cocteau obviously excepted--call their work a dance-opera spectacle. But Les Enfants Terribles is neither grandiose nor grand, merely the work of three artists, whether quick or dead, at the top of their form...
Increasingly, orchestra lovers stay home listening to the perfections of their audio systems--without hearing coughs, Dick Tracy watches, the bungled notes. Says Mark Lamos: "The home-entertainment experience is replacing the live-music experience in a concert hall. In opera you are operating on many more levels than pure sound. You need to be there. It is like a contact sport...
...resulted in 1993's Orphee, 1994's La Belle et la Bete and now Les Enfants Terribles, each based on a film of the same name by Cocteau. Distinguished not only by Glass's familiar, artful brand of minimalist music but also by Cocteau's impish, erotic sensibility, the operas are nevertheless quite different from one another. Orphee was a conventional opera that followed the script of the original film. With La Belle, Glass went a step further, stripping the film of its sound track and composing a live but carefully synchronized operatic accompaniment that quickly took its place among...