Word: verdis
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...swimming pools, beaches and other public facilities. Khomeini even banned most music from radio and TV. Marches were acceptable, he told Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci, but other Western music "dulls the mind, because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs." Fallaci: "Even the music of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi?" Khomeini: "I do not know those names...
...with these decadent people? It is not to create a morality play. The director does not ask us to care about his characters or even to judge them; they are only instruments to make us share his vision of the world. As always, Bertolucci owes a lot to Verdi, whose life and work is invoked here even more than in 1900. The director believes that life takes on its fullest meaning when it is lived at the intensely passionate pitch of grand opera. By sheer cinematic force, he seduces us into sharing his perverse, voluptuous sensibility...
...real show was inside, however, and what a show it was. Audience and TV viewers alike were treated to a full-scale display of all the elements that can make opera truly grand: a masterpiece of the repertory-Verdi's Otello-opulent staging, brilliant conducting by Met Music Director James Levine, and a cast of top singers giving a blazing performance...
...capable of holding his twisted, demonic drives in check with a keen intelligence. No moment in the opera was more splendidly sung or powerfully acted than the second act S i, pel ciel, with Otello looming over him with upraised hand, like a malign marionette master. In this scene Verdi transcended Shakespeare, said Shaw. Watching Domingo and Milnes, one could only agree...
...ciel is one of the biggest climaxes in a score that sometimes seems to be nothing but climaxes. But Verdi and Librettist Arrigo Boito knew that after the massive choral scene in Act III, enough was enough. Hence the rightness of the subdued, wistfully melancholy fourth act, a sort of spacious postlude. This act is Desdemona's great moment. Soprano Gilda Cruz-Romo made the most of it, although in the earlier acts her singing had somewhat lacked color and shading. Poignant and dignified, she spun out the Willow Song and Desdemona's final prayer in long, crystalline...