Word: set
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Here again Chéreau's treatment, often strikingly effective in its own terms, followed Berg's structure erratically. He identified two of Lulu's customers with her former lovers but not the third. Where Berg set Lulu's grisly end in an attic, Chéreau was led by his monumental staging scheme to place it in what looked like an abandoned subway station...
Erratic or not, Chéreau's solutions will set the standard of comparison for the many full-length productions that are sure to follow. The problematic third act has been from the start one of the opera world's chief prizes and puzzles. World War II brought an inhospitable climate for productions of Lulu, since the Nazis regarded it as entartete Kunst (decadent art), but thereafter it began to enter the international repertory. Approaches to other composers about finishing the third act had ended inconclusively. Opera managers vied for the chance to present the first complete performance...
Boulez's view of Lulu is close to Stravinsky's. "As Mahler did for the symphony, Berg simultaneously amplified and destroyed the traditional outline," Boulez says. "Today the relationship between music and theater requires different conditions, for which Berg set the precedent...
...Sweeney, Cariou performs with epic ashen gravity like a scion of the House of Usher summoned forth by Poe. Quite wonderful and totally different is Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett, a blowsy pragmatist as wickedly succulent as one of her pies. Within a broodingly ominous iron clad set, Harold Prince directs his accomplished forces with the flash, flourish and panache of a Broadway Patton...
...initial eight-year plan, unfurled in 1978, set some Olympian goals, including a 30% increase in China's grain production, a doubling of steel output and the completion of 120 major new industrial projects by 1985. Today the general commitment to modernization remains, but there is apparently a shift in strategies and priorities. The Chinese are suddenly worried about two key problems: 1) How to pay for the transfusion of technology that will be required? 2) How to absorb it into an economy in which education levels are low, "modern" machinery is out of date...