Word: silverman
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...York State Theater: NEW YORK CITY OPERA-WHERE OPERA COMES ALIVE. And so it did last week, as the City company presented new works by U.S. composers. In an evening titled "An American Trilogy," the company premiered three one-act works by two well-known New Yorkers, Stanley Silverman and Thomas Pasatieri, and a relatively unknown Middle Westerner, Jan Bach. The results were mixed, but overall the night was a success and a must for anyone interested in the state of American opera...
...least rewarding is the first of the three, Silverman's Madame Adare. Using a libretto by Richard Foreman, his longtime collaborator, the composer has written a fantasy, or more precisely a phantasmagoria, about psychoanalysis and creativity. As the piece begins, Miss Adare, played by Soprano Carol Gutknecht, is seeing her psychiatrist Dr. Hoffman (Bass-Baritone Richard Cross). Her problem: she cannot make up her mind whether she wants to be an opera star or a movie star, and while she dallies, she cannot even make enough money to pay for her sessions. When Hoffman refuses to treat her again...
...Madame Adare sounds like a jumble, it is. In previous works, Silverman, 42, and Foreman, 43, deliberately avoided linear plot lines in favor of surreal musical and visual images, with results that were sometimes beguiling. Here there are too many images and, perversely, too much plot. Silverman's music is as always, eclectic and occasionally witty. When Adare decides to become an opera singer, for instance, the orchestra plays strains from Boris Godunov. Unfortunately, Silverman seems to have no point of view, and his music is an uninspired mélange...
...night, incidentally, when the first episode of Shôgun was shown. Shôgun's slashing samurai sword decapitated the opposition for five nights, and if that week is counted, NBC will have a jump on the other two networks, which just might cause NBC President Fred Silverman to yell "Banzai...
...still enjoys his job, which he called the best in the newspaper business. "I don't live in fear of somebody taking a dislike to me and saying, 'Get rid of him.' I have a better job than Fred Silverman--and safer...You've got to add about $150,000 a year onto that--being your own boss--it's great...