Word: svoboda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Ludvik Svoboda, 83, President of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Soviet invasion; in Prague. Having fled to Poland when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Svoboda returned in 1945 as a triumphant general, alongside Red Army forces. He became Czechoslovakia's first postwar Defense Minister and secretly abetted the Communist takeover three years later. Discredited and imprisoned during the Stalinist purges of the early '50s, he was politically resurrected by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1968, the retired general was selected as a compromise presidential candidate by liberal Czech Leader Alexander Dubcek, who hoped the choice would allay Moscow...
...rearrange themselves in varying zigzag patterns as a good unit set should. Meanwhile, barricade walls slide in and out from the wings, prison bars float gracefully down from the flies. All this has its effective moments, although it seldom looks like medieval Sicily. What Dexter and Set Designer Josef Svoboda have really done is to build a stairway to a bella voce evening - and that is something Caballe and her swains provide...
DAVID GRANT SVOBODA...
...opera. This Carmen does not carry a rose in her teeth; she would bite it off. Don Jose is no innocent victim of Carmen's wiles; to her obvious fascination, he is a brute with enough temper to kill. With the hauntingly Iberian sets by Czech Designer Josef Svoboda, one can believe that Seville is steaming hot (it literally is: 280,000 watts of light beam down on the cast from behind the proscenium), that Pastia's tavern is a fun place to go, that the mountain pass is desolate enough to make people fall out of love...
...does a dead stage director leave an operatic production behind him? In Gentele's case, in scrawled notes on a mere five pages of his Carmen score, as well as in the sketches for the sets and lighting that Svoboda had worked up for him last winter. The rest lay mostly in the minds of the people he had talked to about the production. His widow Marit also contributed valuable detail (since Gentele had not wanted Jose or Carmen to be pitied, she suggested that Jose should not kneel or sob over Carmen's body). It then fell...