Word: satyagraha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...made 20 trips away from his New York City base, including three to California, for performances of the San Francisco Opera; to Buffalo, for a story on Rock Singer Pat Benatar; and to Lewiston, N.Y., for the American premiere of Philip Glass's controversial new op era, Satyagraha. He has been to Boston, Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, and the White House twice, once for a memorable concert featuring the American debut of a long-lost Mozart symphony. Last week found Walsh in Paris to review Peter Brook's idiosyncratic new production of Bizet's opera...
...Thomson deftly sidesteps the question of his reaction to all the tributes: "I don't know what my emotions are. I don't give them names. If you give names to your feelings, then you are stuck with them." Chatting with fellow Composer Philip Glass-whose opera Satyagraha has been the most discussed piece of the year-he succinctly bridges the gap between his own down-home aesthetic and Glass's new-wave minimalism: "Glass makes an opera in Sanskrit, and I make an opera in Gertrude Stein...
Philip Glass's Satyagraha is not your standard opera. For one thing, it is sung in Sanskrit. For another, it dramatizes Mohandas Gandhi's struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. The libretto is drawn entirely from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text that served as the moral authority for Gandhi's nonviolent resistance movement-called Satyagraha, after the Sanskrit words for truth and firmness. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the opera, given its American premiere at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y., last week, is the music itself. Melodically sensuous, harmonically...
...Satyagraha is certainly appealing, indeed beautiful. The score glows with a spiritual luminosity rarely encountered in this secular, anxious age, and its inner peace harmonizes with the tenets of the Bhagavad-Gita being sung and the goals of Gandhi's revolution acted out onstage. The opera's three acts (seven scenes) trace the beginnings of the Satyagraha movement during Gandhi's 21 years in South Africa: the founding of the Tolstoy Farm commune, the increasing resistance to discrimination against Indians, the climactic Newcastle march of 1913 in which Gandhi led striking miners in protest against restrictive racial...
Glass is now at work on an opera, "a continuation of Einstein's dense harmonies." Titled Satyagraha, it is based on the life of Mahatma Gandhi and has been commissioned by the city of Rotterdam for a Netherlands Opera performance in 1980. But Glass also wants to pursue the quiet vein of Part 4: "I don't have to break the sound barrier every time...