Word: delius
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...Gaddes has found an audience for the new and the unusual. The current season is typical: the American premiere of Japanese Composer Minoru Miki's An Actor's Revenge, a double bill consisting of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's The Secret of Susanna and Frederick Delius' last opera, Fennimore and Gerda (also an American premiere), Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Verdi's Rigoletto, all sung in English...
...premieres received the best performances. The Delius, completed in 1910 and first performed in 1919, proved a major discovery. The perfumed, sensuous score is characteristic of this British composer who spent much of his life in France and suggests Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in its allusiveness and emotional restraint. Yet there is also a distinctly modern sensibility at work in the opera's structure-eleven scenes (or "pictures," as Delius called them) strung together with orchestral interludes...
...opera is based on the novel Niels Lyhne by the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen and concerns Niels' love for two women, Fennimore and Gerda. Most of it is devoted to his tragic affair with Fennimore; some months after finishing the rest, Delius added the two Gerda scenes, which provide a happy ending...
...Stage Director Frank Corsaro, who worked with her at the Houston première of The Seagull. Corsaro senses a certain turbulence, even aggressiveness inside Flicka. "I would love to see her play a real bitch," he says. The most immediate possibility is the neurotic, highly sexed Fennimore in Delius' Fennimore and Gerda, which Corsaro is discussing for next season with the New York City Opera. Says he: "We have yet to see the darker aspect of Flicka's talent emerge...
Russell made his initial reputation as a director with a series of subdued, en terprising biographical films for the BBC. Song of Summer, a life of Frederick Delius, is still one of the best and most subtle things he has done. With 1970's feature The Music Lovers, a parboiled melodrama about Tchaikovsky, it became clear that Russell was not interested in the fine details of fact. He is not much interested in narrative structure either, or intellectual or emotional consistency. What interests Russell most is turmoil, and where there are not sufficient amounts available in his subject...