Word: umbrian
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SPOLETO (June 27-July 14). The eleventh season of the Festival of Two Worlds in the Umbrian hills opens with a new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde staged by Gian Carlo Menotti, whose approach to the opera is "romantic," and who intends to stress its "erotic and youthful theme." Other highlights: noon chamber music, a triple bill of Avant-Garde Composer Luciano Berio's Laborintus II, Goffredo Petrassi's Estri and Henry Pousseur's Response...
Director Alberto Lattuada's actors are a gallery of perfectly chosen faces leering ever so faintly from a 16th century fresco. Dressed and undressed in sumptuous Renaissance style, or hatching intrigues among the cobblestones of two ancient Umbrian villages where the action was filmed, they look comfortably removed to another time. With a lusty feel for the broad, vulgar humor of the period, Lattuada adds a delectable scene at the public baths, where gentlemen voyeurs and unsuspecting ladies are suddenly desegregated by a collapsing wall. Making a new movie from an old play can easily bring both to ruin...
When Gian Carlo Menotti took over the cobbled Umbrian city of Spoleto in 1958 for his first Festival of Two Worlds, the musical fringe of Manhattan's cocktail circuit followed him and introduced the martini to local opera buffs. Italian bluebloods rapidly caught on, and musica é martini dry became the order...
Beginning five years ago, the ancient town in the green Umbrian hills of central Italy has been the annual host of Gian Carlo Menotti's vaunted Festival of Two Worlds. Primarily a cultural Chautauqua of contemporary music and modern drama, the festival seemed to need another dimension. Last year Giovanni Carandente, ebullient gadfly in Italy's slow-moving museum bureaucracy, and champion of Italian sculptors in the international art markets, met Menotti and suggested a sculpture exhibition in the streets of the town...
Townspeople and Franciscan monks were persuaded to take minor roles, and the city was authenticked up by set designers. Crews scouted the Umbrian landscape for inspirational vistas, and cameramen photographed yards of Giotto frescoes on which to superimpose the screen credits. With all the activity, it was natural that everyone forgot about St. Francis-not Actor Bradford (Compulsion) Dillman but the gentle mendicant he was supposed to portray...