Word: boccanegra
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COURTESY CALL In a belated effort to improve relations between cell-phone addicts and the people who sit near them, Nokia has begun a campaign to silence phones during theater performances. Its public-service announcement, which debuted Nov. 3 at a Dallas Opera production of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, began with increasingly annoying rings, then urged the audience to switch phones to "vibrate." It was met with wild applause, and Nokia is now taking its show on the road...
...Metropolitan Opera House. It is one of the few places in the world that can offer truly grand productions of an art that thrives on bravura and artifice. This season the Met has two such extravaganzas, new productions of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Both look real enough to step into. Butterfly's fragile cottage is guarded by a line of sentinel iris standing in an authentic Japanese garden. The walls and ceiling of the doge's council chamber in Boccanegra, which opened in late January, are frescoed in Renaissance magnificence. Both settings are opulent backdrops...
...years Del Monaco has worked closely with American set and costume designer Michael Scott, both in Bonn, where Del Monaco is artistic director, and on the international circuit. Boccanegra is a triumph of that partnership. The first act's set, again a house and a garden, is closely modeled on Petrarch's villa outside Padua, a mellow, roseate brick with a graceful staircase. To gaze at it is to be transported to the vivid politics of 14th century Genoa...
...enthusiastic, excitable man, Del Monaco is a hands-on operative with his casts. At a piano rehearsal for Boccanegra, a chorister who stepped in front of the hero received a genial tongue lashing. The hapless soprano assigned to cover for Kiri Te Kanawa should she get sick had a bad day, going left when she should have gone right, up the stairs when she belonged on the ground, picking a prop flower off cue. At the beginning of the glorious duet in which the heroine learns that Boccanegra is her father, she began playfully fingering his shirt. For the umpteenth...
...Monaco had to throw Boccanegra together in eight days--the chronically overbooked Placido Domingo was late in starting rehearsals; Vladimir Chernov, the Boccanegra, was silenced by flu; and Cheryl Studer, who was to sing Boccanegra's daughter, canceled. In a remarkable piece of last-minute luck, the Met was able to sign Te Kanawa. On opening night the ensemble came through under conductor James Levine's eloquent direction. Only the massive council-chamber scene looked tentative. Viva grand opera that is grand...