Word: vespri
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...established stars. And it also has Mikhail Baryshnikov, ballet's reigning superstar. Last week the company gave the world premiere of a showcase for some of the explosive talent: Jerome Robbins' The Four Seasons, set to snippets of Verdi ballet music, most of it from I Vespri Siciliani. There is nothing very deep here, but the work is a flashy hit. Ballet, like opera, is a virtuoso art. There are a lot of high Cs for the young dancers who portray the seasons of the year, and for Baryshnikov the scale steps up to paradise...
...Judith Blegen, soprano; Chicago Symphony; James Levine, conductor; RCA, $6.98). There appears to be little that James Levine, 31, cannot do, except perhaps play Scott Joplin on the tuba. The remarkable new music director of the Metropolitan Opera already has several superlative operatic recordings to his credit (notably / Vespri Siciliani on RCA and Joan of Arc on Angel). This version of Mahler's Fourth, a genial pastoral masterpiece, has a flowing line rarely matched in current interpretations and an intimacy that, comes close to Bruno Walter's incomparable recording of the 1940s. The formidable Chicago Symphony sounds somewhat...
...then, even bother with Vespri? Why should the Metropolitan Opera, currently some $3,000,000 in debt, go to the time, trouble and expense of mounting the opera for the first time in its 90-year history? Fair questions, which were not entirely answered by the premiere performance at Lincoln Center last week. Yet the Met's brief for Vespri contains any number of good points. Conductor James Levine and Stage Director John Dexter eliminated a half-hour's worth of ballet (wisely, considering the Met's declivity for dance) and edited the work down to three...
...Most important, Vespri contains a lot more good music than any but scholars would have deduced from its century or so of neglect. The over ture is more or less an orchestral favor ite. The first-act aria, "O tu, Palermo, " is a recital staple for basses. What a surprise, though, to discover the power of the quartet and chorus with which Verdi concludes the second act - a moment of grand confrontation in which every body perceives everybody else's seeming treachery. Or to find that Verdi has rarely written anything lovelier than Elena's farewell to Arrigo...
...opera's oldest saws is that if you do not know what else to do with a tenor, put him on a staircase. In Vespri, everybody has been put on a staircase, which suggests that Director Dexter did not always know what else to do with his singers. The stairs (38 in all) rise gradually from the apron to stage rear and, depending on the scene, 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...