Word: zambello
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Opera's new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. But the prospect of finding a fresh pair of singers capable of tackling Wagner's most vocally demanding roles is only part of what's drawing opera lovers to the Pacific Northwest. This Tristan is being staged by Francesca Zambello, whose penchant for scandalizing stodgy opera buffs with a startling blend of flashy theatrics and unabashed feminism has made her the most controversial opera director of her generation. "Tristan's ship," Zambello explains gleefully, "is a huge ocean liner that has Isolde in the middle...
Judging by Zambello's history, that isn't a bad prediction. Six years ago, she staged Donizetti's popular Lucia di Lammermoor for New York City's Metropolitan Opera, and her vision of madness and death--the stage was strewn with coffins--drew catcalls from tuxedoed first-nighters expecting something considerably more romantic. In her version of Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride, presented last fall by the New York City Opera, the two principal male characters were stripped down to skimpy loincloths and chained together, to underline what Zambello believes to be the opera's homosexual subtext. "Cesca...
Born in New York City, Zambello, 41, majored in philosophy at Colgate University, although she already knew she wanted to become a director. Dark-eyed, strong-featured and forceful to a fault, she confesses to being "a born control freak." An apprenticeship with the innovative opera director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle led to her 1986 European debut at Venice's Teatro la Fenice, and her work is now seen regularly at London's Covent Garden and Paris' Bastille Opera, as well as in such American cities as Houston, where her joltingly fresh takes on Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Britten...
Incentives can get a young audience into an opera house, but what will keep it there? American opera director Francesca Zambello, who has worked in innovative houses like Houston, Seattle and Los Angeles, agrees that spectacle has boosted opera's pulling power, but she rejects the TV comparison. "Young people are craving something beyond television sensibility," she says. "We need myth and large-scale emotions--dramas that present magnetic qualities. I think we want something we can't get in our own lives. The three tenors succeed because they are larger than our world...
directed by Francesca Zambello...