Word: violettas
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PERHAPS IT IS FITING that two other members of the junta, Violetta and Joaquin Chamarro, are the children of the President who fell from power shortly before Anastasio Somoza's Debayle's father made his meteoric rise. But poetic justice will not sustain their newgovernment. If they succeed in their dream of becoming a social democracy, the U.S. will find it must account for its dealings there in the future. If not, the coalition could dissolve into another civil...
...work cries out for an elegant musical approach and superior acting on the part of the heroine. Both were in ample supply last week. At long last, Conductor Sarah Caldwell (TIME cover, Nov. 10) made her debut at the Met, and Soprano Beverly Sills sang her first Met Violetta-her second role there since her successful debut last April in The Siege of Corinth...
...drama, not a bored bystander. She gave Verdi's familiar music breadth, intimacy and, when appropriate, thoughtful pause. Her bold use of the brass and low strings, for example, gave the orchestral fabric a strikingly firm and secure bottom. One heard small details, often lost, that underscore Violetta's isolation: the clarinet obbligato accompanying the Act I "Ah! fors' é lui" and the oboe solo in the death scene...
Still it was not a perfect Traviata. Created nine years ago by Director Alfred Lunt and Designer Cecil Beaton, this production has Violetta's bedroom looking like a barn in winter-something Walt Disney might have conceived in homage to Charles Addams. Because the windows are so high and remote, the poor girl cannot even get to the win dow to watch the revelers in the last act. The current stage director, Fabrizio Melano, has not really resolved all the old problems: the Baron's challenge to Alfredo in Act III, for example, comes off much too tame...
...Violetta is a role that Sills has sung only three times before in New York, but close to 300 times elsewhere throughout her career. It remains one of her no blest portrayals...