Word: toscas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tosca set in 1944? Carmen in an urban dump? The place to go for innovative opera productions is not the U. S. but Europe...
...London last month, the English National Opera (ENO) unveiled Director Jonathan Miller's production of Puccini's Tosca set during World War II and played in the style of one of Hollywood's gritty, black-and-white melodramas of the period. Earlier this season, the same company presented a Mad Max version of Bizet's Carmen by David Pountney that replaced castanets and mantillas with feral children darting amid junked American automobiles. In Paris, Producer Seth Schneidman staged Strauss's Elektra as a dream-theory psychodrama, freely mixing images of Greek antiquity and 19th century Europe...
...more at ease with their own heritage, feel freer to experiment with it. Those seeking a bold approach in the U.S. will rarely find it in the big houses. In New York City, the Metropolitan Opera favors conservative productions, sometimes elephantine ones like Franco Zeffirelli's La Boheme and Tosca, that reinforce the company's role as a musical museum. Occasionally, the rival New York City Opera makes a cautious foray into modernism, often with indifferent results -- Frank Corsaro's tepid Spanish Civil War version of Carmen, for example...
Recent Met stagings -- notably Franco Zeffirelli's spacious La Boheme from 1981-82 and his Tosca, for which Rome was rebuilt, two seasons ago -- also have marooned their casts in movie sets. Presto: singing pygmies. Now comes this extravagant Fledermaus with singers who become a backup chorus to the brocade and the woodwork. Rosalinde (Soprano Kiri Te Kanawa) gets lost in the crowd during Orlofsky's drinking party in Act II, and the vengeful Dr. Falke (Baritone Michael Devlin) blends nicely with the patterned wallpaper and the potted ferns...
Every opera fan knows how high Tosca bounced, when the next swan left and what Maria Callas thought of Renata Tebaldi; disasters, bons mots and bitchy remarks seem integral to the art. Ethan Mordden, who knows his way around backstage (Demented: The World of the Opera Diva; The Splendid Art of Opera), has gleefully amassed hundreds of such anecdotes, exchanges and choice bits of opera lore, along with some less celebrated stories. "Yet there is history here," he says, "for if many of the tales are silly, many others are telling...