Word: stadt
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...Vienna-bred Korngold landed in Hollywood in 1934, he had behind him an astounding career as a musical Wunderkind in Europe. When he was a teenager, his works were performed by Pianist Artur Schnabel and Conductor Bruno Walter. In 1921, when Korngold was 24, his third opera, Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), was staged at New York's Metropolitan Opera. In the leading role of Marietta was Soprano Maria Jeritza, making her Met debut. The American public took to Jeritza but not to Korngold, and after a few years it forgot him as a serious composer...
Last week Die Tote Stadt was finally revived by the New York City Opera, with Jeritza, now a remarkably robust and handsome 87, sitting in the fourth row center. Even in the 1920s, Die Tote Stadt was an anachronism. Korngold was to Richard Strauss what Engelbert Humperdinck (Hansel und Gretel) was to Wagner-a brilliant but minor follower. The style of Die Tote Stadt is a lush, clamorous, occasionally schmaltzy orchestral sonorama that lies somewhere between Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra, with special added effects from Puccini, Debussy, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov. The best of its vocal moments, like the taunting...
Sexily Luscious. Director Frank Corsaro has staged Die Tote Stadt as a brilliant, psychologically adroit multimedia show. Movie and slide projectors play on the front scrim. Four slide projectors illuminate a scrim in the rear. Corsaro and Cinematographer Ronald Chase spread a series of images that are at times dazzling in their three-dimensional effect-grotesque faces, Gothic walls and towers, eerie grottoes, flowers, woodlands. The production opens, for example, on the exterior of Paul's house. Then, through the masonry, the portrait of Marie begins to shine. The lights come up behind the scrim in Paul...
...Tote Stadt worth the effort...
Linda Ronstadt: Heart Like a Wheel (Capitol). Ron stadt sheds her foxy Barbie doll image for an assertive straight forward approach that displays her vocal diversity. Besides Ronstadt's supersmash single You 're No Good, cuts include the title song by the talented Anna McGarrigle, and Paul Anka's It Doesn 't Matter Anymore...