Word: verdis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hill's Phantom of the Opera. First produced in England in 1976, this comic melodrama had a book by Hill and a score by Ian Armit. In 1984 Hill dropped the original music and wrote new lyrics to arias by Gounod, Offenbach, Verdi, Mozart and Donizetti. Lloyd Webber considered producing an embellished version of it, then decided to do his own. Thank heavens. Hill's backstage farce is a kind of Noises Off without the wit, and the cast plays it as hammy gaslight farce -- a penny dreadful that at today's prices plays like a $32.50 dreadful. It alights...
...heavyweight Salzburg production conducted by Barenboim in 1994; the Met's Cosi fan tutte the following season. Bartoli is happily caught up in her repertory, but her fans, as well as many opera managers, already ache to see her expand it. Why not the big-money operas -- Verdi and, above all, Carmen...
...Verdi, Bartoli says, "Never!" Carmen has been offered by several houses and turned down -- at least until she is in her 30s. The wise men who hover over her career, like Barenboim and Levine, hope she sticks to her resolve. The fact is that, lovely as her voice is, it is not large. But 26 is very young. It is nearly impossible to predict how a voice will develop; the supreme Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad sang operetta in her 20s. "You must never force," Bartoli insists. "The test is after the concert: Is the voice still fresh so that you could...
Lengthy conversations unfold about their various relationships, opera and especially the soprano Maria Callas. The title refers to an elusive 1958 bootleg recording of Callas singing Verdi's La Traviata. Throughout the play, the characters invoke this hard-to-find record as a symbol of the unobtainable--true love, lasting happiness, freedom from anxiety in the age of AIDS...
...BETWEEN THE DEATH OF A public figure and his operatic commemoration is getting shorter all the time. The ancient Greeks and Romans had to wait millenniums before their reincarnation on the European stage; even Don Carlos' career move from Spanish royalty to Verdi opera took a couple of centuries...