Word: operas
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Impresario's departure scuttles Brokeback Mountain opera. Guess he did know how to quit...
...Opera is a vocally-driven performing art. But this past Tuesday, Ellen Hargis—a “Baroque-music diva” according to The New Yorker—proved that sleight of hand can improve even the most skilled voices. During a lecture and masterclass hosted by the Office for the Arts (OFA) at the New College Theatre (NCT), soprano Hargis demonstrated the importance of performance gestures.“Ellen Hargis is an extraordinary resource for Baroque vocal music,” said Thomas Lee, Program Manager for the OFA’s Learning From Performers...
...idea of China as the gravitational center of a globalized world is something most countries have gotten used to. But classical music hadn't seemed like it would be part of that mix, if only because Western opera and the Eastern world never made a natural fit. To outsiders, the traditional Peking opera seemed as much circus as song, with extraneous acrobatics and melodies that struck European ears as atonal and arhythmic. Western opera - with its volume and bombast - fell similarly flat in the East. But since Western ways were the planet's dominant ones, it was China that...
Maoism and the Cultural Revolution made that harder to do. Even indigenous opera was swept aside in favor of such turgid revolutionary works as The Red Detachment of Women and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Long experienced the suffocation of the musical arts in a more personal way than most when his grandfather, who had studied music in Paris, was sent to the country to work - but only after the Red Guards destroyed his musical library. "When I was five he started teaching me music anyway," Long says. "We were only allowed to learn revolutionary songs, but he taught them...
This year's BMF was a wholly global affair, with fourteen corporate sponsors that included such multinational giants as Audi, Credit Suisse, UBS and American Express. Performers came from across Europe and the Americas. Germany alone sent two complete opera companies - a massive mobilization that involved 420 people and 16 trailer-sized shipping containers. The overall program was an eclectic one that included an evening-long tribute to Leonard Bernstein performed by the China Philharmonic, a globally competitive orchestra that pushed aside the government symphony in 2000 and that Long himself was tapped to lead. Just days after...