"everything is good that / has a good beginning / and doesn't have an end / the world will die but for us there is no / end!" Thus ends
Victory over the Sun (
part 1,
part 2), the "first Futurist opera".
[more inside]
posted by daniel_charms
on Dec 21, 2011 -
8 comments
Shakespeare was not a full-time writer without other responsibilities, like OโNeill or Williams. But what might look like a distraction for such authorsโacting in his own and other peopleโs plays, coaching fellow players, helping manage the ownership of the troupeโs resources (including its two theaters, the Globe and Blackfriars)โwas a strength for Shakespeare, since it made him a day-by-day observer of what the troupe could accomplish, actor by actor. [...]
'According to Pacini,' Julian Budden writes in The Operas of Verdi, 'it was the custom at the San Carlo theatre, Naples, for the composer to turn the pages for the leading cello and double bass players on opening nights.' The composer had to change his score to fit new voices if there were substitutions caused by illness or some other accident. In subsequent performances, he was expected to take out or put in arias for the different houses, transposing keys, changing orchestration. He was not a man of the study but of the theater.
Shakespeare and Verdi in the Theater.
posted by shakespeherian
on Nov 18, 2011 -
48 comments
The French romantic thriller โDivaโ dashes along with a pellmell gracefulness, and it doesnโt take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. Itโs a glittering toy of a movie... This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix... who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesnโt take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience. - Pauline Kael, 1982
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posted by Trurl
on Sep 16, 2011 -
33 comments
*Sooo* much hotter than Andrew Jackson. Sveriges Riksbank has announced that great
Greta Garbo will grace the sexy, new blue-themed 100 Krona note, Sweden's closest equivalent to the US $20 bill. In April, the Riksbank is announcing a design competition for the banknotes, with the final design selected by early 2012, and the currency released by 2014-2015. Other new faces in Sweden's complete currency makeover include author
Astrid Lindgren, musician
Evert Taube, director
Ingmar Bergman, sopranist
Birgit Nilsson, and diplomat
Dag Hammarskjöld.
posted by markkraft
on Apr 6, 2011 -
55 comments
"The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us. The night should be a time of peace and tranquility; a time to relax and be calm. We have need of a soothing story to banish the disturbing thoughts of the day, to set at rest our troubled minds, and put at ease our ruffled spirits. And what sort of story shall we hear? Ah, it will be a familiar story. A story that is so very, very old, and yet it is so new. It is the old, old story of โฆ" the
2012/13 touring production of
Einstein on the Beach.
[more inside]
posted by williampratt
on Mar 2, 2011 -
21 comments
On Christmas Eve, exactly
100 years ago,
Luisa Tetrazzini, the most famous opera singer of her day, sang in the streets of San Francisco as a gift to the city she loved. 250,000 people, most of them survivors of the 1906 earthquake listened in silence as she began with "
The Last Rose of Summer," then sang along as she ended with "Auld Lang Syne."
posted by williampratt
on Dec 24, 2010 -
9 comments
Nigel Kneale's adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four was
one of the most controversial television programmes of its time. Broadcast live, it made "
unusually extensive and imaginative use of filmed inserts (14 in total). These sequences bought time for the more elaborate costume changes or scene set-ups, but also served to 'open out' the action." And now you can watch it too! The full version
is currently on Youtube. Short of the John Hurt film released in 1984 being posted online, the 1954 BBC TV adaptation is about as doubleplusgood as it gets for now.
[more inside]
posted by Effigy2000
on Dec 12, 2010 -
12 comments
Dame Joan Sutherland has
died at the age of 83.
One of the most remarkable female opera singers of the 20th century, she was dubbed La Stupenda by a La Fenice audience in 1960 after a performance as Alcina. She possessed a voice of beauty and power, combining extraordinary agility, accurate intonation, "pin point staccatos, a splendid trill and a tremendous upper register, although music critics often complained about the imprecision of her diction. Her friend Luciano Pavarotti once called Sutherland the "Voice of the Century", while Montserrat Caballé described the Australian's voice as being like "heaven".
posted by Joe Beese
on Oct 11, 2010 -
16 comments
It is simultaneously unlike, and above, every other record. ... Because perhaps it tells us what a trivial pursuit music really is, and at the same time how indispensable to a meaningful existence it in fact is. ... No one, least of all Carla Bley, has subsequently come even within an orbitโs distance of its achievements. ... It is, in the most literal of senses, untouchable. -
Marcello Carlin
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 11, 2010 -
42 comments
We've had
excerpts before, but this is the full performance.
Nixon in China, with music by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman and choreography by Mark Morris. Directed by Peter Sellars, conducted by John DeMain, and presented by Walter Chronkite. Houston Grand Opera, 1987. Parts
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
posted by Navelgazer
on Jun 7, 2010 -
17 comments
Rene Fleming pulls a reverse-Sting and enters a "parallel universe" of sound. Brings up interesting issues in the different ways people in the pop and classical realm define the "natural" vocie, as well acknowledges that in our completely shattered, niche market this cross-over record has no more or less validity then any other album being released today.
posted by The3rdMan
on May 31, 2010 -
52 comments
One day ago,
Neil Gaiman wrote the beginning of a story, which was
retweeted by BBC Audiobooks America as the
first of a thousand or so tweets that would compiled and edited to become an audiobook. People are
still contributing, and
BBCAA's blog has four scenes compiled (
1,
2,
3,
summary of scenes 1-3, and
4), for a total of 175 tweets. When 1,000 or so tweets are logged, they'll be edited into a script, and produced in a studio to make the final audiobook, which will be released for free on BBCAA's website. This isn't the first game of
exquisite corpse played via twitter that made a piece to be refined and presented in some way.
The first Twitter opera was
one of a few recent "gimmicks" to garner attention for the
Royal Opera House (
twitter opera feed,
ROH twitter feed,
ROH blog). The result, Twitterdammerung, was
given a decent review by opera critic
Igor Toronyi-Lalic.
posted by filthy light thief
on Oct 14, 2009 -
32 comments
In
Hypermusic Prologue, physicist Lisa Randall re-imagines her extradimensional theories of the universe as opera, with a score by Hèctor Parra. Some more about this on YouTube (the last three are in french, but you can hear some of the music):
Episode 1 (Randall speaks),
Episode 2 (scenery),
Episode 3 (the music), and
Episode 4 (more scenery).
posted by twoleftfeet
on Aug 21, 2009 -
20 comments
All the Great Operas in 10 minutes (
1992) is a very quick overview of
La Traviata,
Carmen,
Don Giovanni,
Aida,
Tosca,
Tristan and Isolde,
Madame Butterfly,
Ring of the Nibelung (a four-parter), resulting 26 dead, plus all the gods of Valhalla, which brings the grand total to 38 dead.
10 More Operas in 10 Minutes is a tribute to the original, created by the students of
the Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences, covering
The Merry Widow (technically an
operetta),
The Force of Destiny,
Lucia di Lammermoore,
The Magic Flute,
Falstaff,
The Damnation of Faust,
Rigoletto,
Romeo and Juliet,
La Bohème, and
William Tell. Only 14 deaths tallied (not counting armies fighting).
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 17, 2009 -
13 comments
Opera, the inventor of tabbed browsing who just won't quit, today released a trial version of
Unite, a dramatic attempt to reverse the centralization of the web as well as Opera's own decreasing relevance in a market dominated by
far larger companies [more inside]
posted by crayz
on Jun 16, 2009 -
78 comments
Three years after the failure of his recklessly ambitious Marxist epic
1900, Bernardo Bertolucci returned to directing with
La Luna - a story of opera and
incest featuring a Golden Globe-nominated performance by Jill Clayburgh, then at the height of her late 70s fame. [Also appearing in small roles were Fred Gwynne and an up-and-coming Roberto Benigni.] Writing in The New York Times,
Vincent Canby described it as "one of the most sublimely foolish movies ever made by a director of Mr. Bertolucci's acknowledged talents."
Roger Ebert wrote, "Bertolucci has sprung his gourd this time."
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on May 30, 2009 -
4 comments
