Word: sung
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...famous opera and the story was set in China. He talked a lot about Puccini and other basic knowledge of opera.... He found a videotape of Turandot for me. It was a version released by the New York Metropolitan Opera...but I still didn't understand what was being sung. The next day Zhao Jiping gave me a rough summary of the story, and suggested that I really should direct this opera even if it meant that I had to give up a film. Seeing that he was so into it, I faxed the Florence Opera house saying that...
...that glittering opening night of The First Emperor as a movie-critic. The title role is sung by Placido Domingo, who in the 80s displayed his celebrated tenor in movie versions of Cavallieri Rusticana, Pagliacci, La Traviata and Otello, all directed by Franco Zeffirelli. But I was mainly interested in the Chinese connection. I wanted to see ? hear, really ? what Tan Dun, the gifted composer who had won an Oscar for his scoring of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, would do with his epic subject. I also was eager to see the production, since it was to be staged by Zhang...
...libretto, by Tan Dun and Chinese-American novelist Ha Jin, adheres to the contours of The Emperor's Shadow, but with a different ending: Jianli cuts out his own tongue, and the anthem he leaves to be sung is a slave song we heard at the beginning of Act 2. The writers have trouble marshalling the movie's dramatic pull; their lyrics don't put the personal conflicts across with the same clarity and intensity. Domingo, a trouper at 64, has the notes down but struggles with his enunciation. (Even though he's singing in English, we needed the subtitles...
...million subjects. So it's a bit of a surprise to realize that Kim's name isn't mentioned at all in the 280 pages of James Church's impressive North Korean thriller, A Corpse in the Koryo. The dictator and his father, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, are in passing alluded to as "our great Leaders", but to Inspector O, a gruff cop from the Ministry of People's Security, they have all the influence of distant planets...
...Hang up your pretty stockin's / Turn off de light / Santa Claus is comin' / Down the old chimney tonight." Sexually explicit enough for ya? The title track - which lyrically is just another song about being alone or lonely on a holiday that's meant to reunite loved ones - was sung as a cry of sexual deprivation. Elvis' "White Christmas" borrows heavily from the 1954 doo-wop version by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters; but most of the other renditions are not so extreme. He does an excellent, committed "Silent Night," with careful intonations that his Tupelo elocution teacher would...