Word: ring
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Central Park West"). Newest of the offbeat generation is Bob Newhart, whose button-down mind opens up some odd pockets of history-Khrushchev getting a head spray to cut down the glare for television-all related in a tone so quiet and dry that the wildest caricature has the ring of truth...
...tricks: stripped down, sparsely lighted productions designed to free the stern old gods of Valhalla from heavy, cardboard-shield and plaster-throne cliches. But by now, this once revolutionary style has produced some bothersome clichés of its own. The basic stage set of last week's Ring was an eight-ton, segmented concave disk looking somewhat like a huge radar antenna. In the second and fourth Rheingold scenes it was used intact, tilted toward the audience to suggest the rugged slopes of Wotan's mountain home; in other scenes the disk's movable segments represented...
Despite such simplicity of design, stage movements throughout most of The Ring were so statuesque that they suggested oratorio rather than opera. Realism was often ludicrously mixed with abstraction; when Mime helped to fashion a sword for Siegfried out of a magic potion, he matter-of-factly cracked two eggs into the potion as if following a recipe by Gayelord Hauser. Worst of all was the lighting, which was so murky that it came close to achieving Richard Wagner's stated ideal: "Now that I have created the in visible orchestra,* I would like to invent the invisible stage...
What redeemed Bayreuth's Ring was the first-rate musical performance by Conductor Rudolf Kempe and his singers, among them Birgit Nilsson, Aase Nordmo Loevberg, Hermann Uhde, Jerome Hines. While the stars bore familiar names, the surprises of the festival were provided by the talented newcomers. Among them: Berlin-born Anja Silja, 20, singing Senta in The Flying Dutchman, who first came to Bayreuth four years ago as a visiting teenager; Texas-born Thomas Stewart, 32, who was selected for the impressive role of Amfortas in Parsifal after illness forced George London to cancel; U.S. Conductor Lorin Maazel...
...Bums or the Six and Seven-Eighths Band. In his first LP starring role, Jazz Authority Souchon offers some rambling recollections of pre-World War I New Orleans music and provides a few choice examples-Sweet Baby Doll, Animules Ball-in a gravelly, sowbelly voice that has the unvarnished ring of authenticity...