Word: persia
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...himself with his new production of Giacomo Puccini's Turandot. Curious first-nighters, proud holders of the toughest opera ticket of the season, entered the Met last week wondering how far the director's passion for outsize verisimilitude would extend. Would he cut off the Prince of Persia's head and stick it on a pole? Build the Great Wall of China? Or (gasp!) actually respect the libretto and provide a tasteful pageant that would suit the lush, exotic music without overwhelming...
...exhibit's extraordinary range of colors, from the full lush tangerine to white that shines with the intensity of the noon sun on Himalayan snow, comes partly from Persia (where shades of muted pistachio and oleander pink originated), partly from the British raj (all those brown and khaki earth tones) and partly too from what Curator Singh calls "the fugitive color palette"--the homespun miracle that would occur when a villager, out of necessity, dyed and redyed the same piece of cloth. Serendipity and splendor then: fashion as tradition. Fashion, indeed, as the warp of the social fabric...
...Calaf, Katia Ricciarelli as Liu. Lorin Maazel conducting the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. MGM/UA Home Video, $79.95, stereo. Stage Director Harold Prince's stylishly barbaric 1983 production grimly captured the fairy tale's bloodthirsty, amoral ! quality with striking imagery: the gruesome severed head of the luckless Prince of Persia is held high on a stake, impassive masks hide the faces and emotions of Turandot and her retinue, and the ice princess makes her entrance in Act II down what must be the longest staircase in operatic history...
Jayne Anne Phillips' wondering, musing first novel raises such questions without ever explicitly stating them, in a way that suggests another fine family por trait, last year's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase. In a man ner that seems simple and straightforward, though its workings are intricate enough, the author sketches the histories of four people in Bellington, a town she places in West Virginia. They are Mitch Hampson, born in 1910, a soldier, heavy-equipment operator, scrambling business man; his wife Jean, born in the mid-'20s, deeper and more...
Baha'is, who are often convenient scapegoats, have been persecuted since their faith was founded in mid-19th century Persia. After a tyrannical Shah was assassinated by a Muslim terrorist in 1896, crowds attacked the Baha'i community in Yazd, killing several people. Believers were repeatedly tortured and mutilated by local vigilantes in subsequent years. The worst outburst prior to Khomeini's takeover occurred in 1955-56 under the late Shah. Former agents of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, say that government agents provoked anti-Baha'i hysteria to divert reactionary Muslims from turning...