Word: soldate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...production of Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat last week, Seattle Opera Director Glynn Ross got no less a guest star than Stravinsky, who at 84 flew up from Los Angeles to conduct the lyrical fairy tale he composed 50 years ago. In addition, Ross got Saul Steinberg, whose metaphysically satirical cartoons appear in The New Yorker, to design the sets; Actor Basil Rathbone was the narrator, Screen Actor John Gavin the soldier, Ballerina Marina Svetlova the princess, and Dancer Anton Dolin the Devil...
STRAVINSKY: L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT and PROKOFIEV: QUINTET, OPUS 39 (Melodiya-Angel). Written at the end of World War I, Histoire is a clever little musical outrage featuring a demented tango, ragtime gone wrong, a satanic mockery of a Bach chorale, and countless other musical japes in the story of a soldier who sells his soul to the Devil, wins it back and finally loses it again. The Prokofiev is also dramatic, originally composed for a ballet about a circus. The Moscow Chamber Ensemble, led by Gennedy Rozhdestvensky, has just the right touch for both: cool, brusque, almost offhandish...
Lithgow has been content to make a mere fairy tale out of what may have been meant with more seriousness. But if it has none of the pretensions of Trouble in Tahiti, Histoire du Soldat is warm, charming theatre...
John Lithgow and James Paul's Histoire du Soldat is witty, charming, visually engaging--everything that Trouble is not. Stravinsky's score is a minor classic and the seven-piece ensemble plays with precision and grace. The English text by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black occasionally becomes more childish than childlike in its rhyming, but it captures the spirit of the original Russian folk tale more closely than the French text of C.F. Ramuz...
...Festival also recieved Godard's Le Petit Soldat, made in 1960 but never before shown in this country. The film, banned in France, concerns the activities of a group of Rightist terrorists who bomb noted French liberals in placid Geneva. To introduce the actress Anna. Karina, his latest find, Godard has a fictional magazine photographer shoot pictures of her singing, pouting, and dancing for five full minutes...