Word: puccini
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...some 15 blocks north of the theater district, at the Metropolitan Opera House. It is one of the few places in the world that can offer truly grand productions of an art that thrives on bravura and artifice. This season the Met has two such extravaganzas, new productions of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Both look real enough to step into. Butterfly's fragile cottage is guarded by a line of sentinel iris standing in an authentic Japanese garden. The walls and ceiling of the doge's council chamber in Boccanegra, which opened...
...million people worldwide saw the television broadcasts. The record turned into by far the best-selling classical album of all time (total sales: around 10 million, and still going strong); only a dozen or so albums of any description have sold more copies. The program's most popular aria, Puccini's Nessun dorma, became a fight song not only for the World Cup competition but also for record buyers everywhere, who used it as an anthem to get them onto the freeway in the morning or ready to confront the boss. All'alba vincero (At dawn I shall...
...classical music, Gim says he likes it, but could perform his routines just as well without Bach in the background. Nonetheless, Gim often receives accolades from students for his musical selections. His repertoire includes such titles as "Puccini's Greatest Hits," Brahms Violin and Double Concerti, Tschaikovsky Piano and Violin Concerto and "Top Ten Sopranos...
...downside is that her singing voice, while warm and true, does not extract nearly as much angst or musicality as LuPone does from the anthems With One Look and New Ways to Dream. Lloyd Webber's music, as usual, has the lush extravagance and candy-box prettiness of Puccini, with themes repeated often enough to ensure their hummability. Though no single number has the pop allure of Memory or The Music of the Night, the score is probably his most coherent and effective...
...wastes the talents of its principals. Irons makes the most of his two-dimensional character, and Lone ("The Last Emperor") manages to make clear Song's contempt for the fantasies he caters to. One of the film's few decent moments is Song's explication of the appeal of Puccini's Madama Butterfly: would the opera seem so romantic, she asks, if the races of the protagonists were reversed? Would Westerners swoon to see a blond cheerleader kill herself over a doomed love affair with a Japanese businessman...