Word: rigoletto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from the opera repertory. If, however, you are a connoisseur of rock videos, with their images like Day- Glo wallpaper after a food fight, you will feel right at home. Watching three of the segments (based on hit songs from Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino and Rigoletto), purists could sneer at Aria as MTV -- Movies Trash Verdi. But Producer Don Boyd and his crew want to revive the old music's passion and fun, not to mock its petrified conventions. And as often as not, the film succeeds. This is high culture dolled up as pop culture...
...Paris gym. Body builders pump iron; two gorgeous sorceresses dust them off. Murder is in the air, and the kinetic poetry Godard can create from the way a woman's hair falls across her face. Julien Temple's witty episode -- quick gags and endless tracking shots -- plops Rigoletto into California's baroque Madonna Inn. A movie producer philanders in a room decorated in Late Neanderthal, while his wife dallies in Heidi's Hideaway, and an Elvis impersonator lip-syncs La donna e mobile. In another Western hotel, Tristan and Isolde execute a quickie marriage and a slow double suicide. Director...
What does it matter when and where an opera is set? Does the nature of Verdi's Rigoletto fundamentally change if the action takes place in the court of France (Verdi's original intention), 16th century Mantua (his ultimate choice) or even 20th century Manhattan as long as the relationships among the characters are preserved? Adventurous stage directors, for whom tradition is the memory of the last bad performance, are answering that in many cases, it does not. "Tradition is slovenliness," exclaimed Gustav Mahler. His cry has never seemed more apt, and it is being taken up with brio...
...decades, then his Communist Party membership, his Moscow apartment and finally, in absentia, his citizenship. After years of agitating for permission to work in the West, Lyubimov had cruelly been granted his wish. Since then he has staged plays and operas throughout Europe and in Israel, ranging from a Rigoletto in Florence, in which the heroine sang an aria while wafting through the air on a swing, to an expressionistic version of Pushkin's Little Tragedies in both Stockholm and Bologna. But his career, however thriving, involves painful artistic detachment, akin to a nuclear scientist's working through a glove...
Indeed, Muti can be emotionally chilly, even icy in his interpretations. A believer in the primacy of the printed musical score, Muti brooks no interpolations in his concert versions of Verdi operas, like last October's Rigoletto, which adhered rigorously to a new scholarly edition of the opera, or his 1983 Macbeth. This unsmiling view of what were once popular entertainments, steeped in a popular idiom, is at odds with the spirit of the composer he professes to serve. And in recasting the sound of the orchestra in line with today's international ideal -- brighter, crisper, sharper -- he has rendered...