Word: rudel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Where this really shows up is in her ability to cope when things go wrong onstage. Last month, while singing under the baton of City Opera Director Julius Rudel, she inadvertently skipped a few bars and hit a high A too soon. "I held up my hand, and she knew immediately what the problem was," recalls Rudel. "So she held the note until I lowered my hand eight bars later. To make anything clear to her, a finger, an eyebrow, is enough...
...Under Rudel's stewardship, the company has become one of the most inventive opera troupes in the world. Rudel has presented 38 operas by living composers (15 of them American-born). It does not bother him that few of these new works are likely to be permanent additions to the repertory. "Of 20,000 operas written throughout history," he notes, "1 defy anyone to name 50 masterpieces." He has also dug brilliantly into the past to retrieve and remount such almost forgotten musical delights as Handel's Julius Caesar and Donizetti's Roberto Devereux...
True Amalgam. An evening at City Opera does not alway glitter with great singing stars, although in Bass Norman Treigland and Soprano Sills the company possesses two of the finest voices in the world. But Rudel's shows are rarely dull. Because he believes that "open should be a true amalgam of the visual and musical," he was steering City Opera toward total theater long before the term became fashionable. He hired such experienced directors as Frank Corsaro and Tito Capobianco, and gave then free dramatic rein. In those hands even old familiars like Gounod's Faust became...
With some justice, Rudel boasts this "our repertory is about as safe as a British soldier in Northern Ireland." Presumably, he will bring his sense of theater and his fondness for growth and risk to his tasks at Kennedy Center. His first two productions in Washington were Ginastera's strident Beatrix Cenci (TIME, Sept. 20) and Handel's rarely performed Ariodante. Though he hopes to invite La Scala, the Vienna Staatsoper and Britain's Royal Opera to Washington, he wants "nothing to do with a glorified booking house." Included in his future plans for the center...
...Bigger Gamble. Although Rudel lacks the fame of such maestros as Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, he seems an ideal choice to head the Kennedy Center. Along with his high standards, he has always had a remarkable sense of what the public will accept, and his experience with the City Opera has taught him how to provide quality on limited budgets. "I have never found that purely financial limitations need to limit you artistically," he says. "Sometimes it is an advantage to have limited funds but unlimited imagination. At City Opera, we have long ago learned to turn every...