Word: zambello
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...arts organizations. In the past few years, however, a string of important and popular new works by composers as disparate as John Corigliano, Philip Glass and William Bolcom has helped improve opera's artistic fortunes. At the same time, audacious native-born stage directors like Peter Sellars and Francesca Zambello have replaced the old histrionic semaphoring with bold, psychologically penetrating productions starring fine singing actors like June Anderson and James Morris...
...undead have stalked opera houses as disparate as San Francisco and Bayreuth, in both cases in Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. But Zambello goes further in her use of pop cultural references, particularly cinematic ones. The expressionistic sets recall Tod Browning's original 1931 film, Dracula (Bela Lugosi would have felt right at home at Ravenswood), while Martin Pakledinaz's costumes evoke David Lynch's sanguinary 1984 intergalactic flop, Dune. In the famous mad scene, Lucia's descent into insanity is symbolized by a steep staircase, down which the white-gowned murderess floats like her Nosferatu namesake, Lucy Westenra, Coppola...
...cast will change throughout the season, both during the current run and again when the production is revived in the spring. What remains is the controversial conception. When Zambello and her production team came on for their opening-night bows, cheers for the plaid-less performers turned to jeers. And yet the director had just done something usually only managed in the movies: she had raised the dead...