Word: pavarottie
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This Saturday, as the Metropolitan Opera turns 100 years old, it is wrestling with this question as never before. The centennial celebration, to be telecast live on PBS, is an extravagant affair lasting eight hours; offering a nonstop parade of stars (Domingo, Pavarotti, Milnes, Sutherland, Nilsson, Te Kanawa, among 90 others), it seems to be a ringing affirmation of the opera-as-vocalism theory. But the Met gala is more likely a capstone than a portent, for the very nature of opera is being changed by history and technology. The Met-which began life...
...richer in butterfat, the soul of ice cream, than the familiar commercial American brands. Little or no air is pumped into it, making for a deep, intensified taste. And the flavors, natural and innocent of chemicals, can seem, singly or in combination, as impassioned as an aria sung by Pavarotti...
...this season there have been two new productions: a grandly ceremonial staging of Mozart's Idomeneo by Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and a controversial setting of Macbeth by Sir Peter Hall. The Met cast Idomeneo as few houses can, with Pavarotti, Mezzo Frederica von Stade and Sopranos Hildegarde Behrens and lleana Cotrubas. All had voices big, agile and beautiful enough to handle the opera's extraordinary demands, and the result was a triumph...
...ordinary was comfortable ..." Too often, there is an air of comfortable ordinariness about the Met, such as casting a popular opera like Il Trovatore with a soprano past her prime and a tenor who never had one, or substituting a less-than-star-quality singer like Herman Malamood for Pavarotti in Idomeneo. Still, on a day-to-day basis, the Met's productions are the equal of any, the result of Levine's mighty and long labor...
...what he wants, and I may have to go back to him and say, 'We can't afford to use so-and-so because everything he does is too expensive.' I would never say to Jimmy, 'I think Domingo ought to sing that instead of Pavarotti.' I'm a lawyer, not a musician, not a stage director, not a scenic designer, not a singer...