Word: francesco
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lack of a strong individual style. For all its harmonic piquancies and orchestral sleight of hand, the score of Francesca sounds derivative-a touch of Puccini, a sprinkle of Debussy, a pinch of Wagner. Further, it lacks a single memorable melody, the essential ingredient that keeps a relic like Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur on the boards. Its plot, however, is operatic gold. Based on a play by Gabriele d'Annunzio, it recounts an episode from Dante's Inferno. Francesca (Soprano Renata Scotto) is tricked into marrying the deformed Gianciotto (Baritone Cornell MacNeil) when his handsome brother...
Andrea (Adalberto Maria Merli) left home to make good and made soso; he conducts and composes for television in Milan. Francesco (Michele Placido) stayed home and did about the same-though he thinks he did worse-teaching music and conducting the choir. But at 40, the lifelong friends still have some ambition left and a last chance to exercise...
Both are logical candidates for the post of musical director if Chieti, their birthplace in Abruzzi, revives the defunct town symphony as a tourist attraction. Francesco's desperation for the job is the more comically visible, and his wife (Giuliana De Sio) tries to advance his cause by sleeping with a town councilor. Less obviously needy, Andrea pursues the job with a worldly resignation that contrasts to good dramatic effect with his rival's cookie-tossing eagerness for it. Luciano Odorisio's Dear Maestro is not much to look at, but it is shrewd in its examination...
...learn the manner to glide with the vowels, and to drag the voice gently from the high to the lower notes," advised Pier Francesco Tosi in his book Observations on the Florid Song. "Let him take care that the higher the notes, the more it is necessary to touch them with softness, to avoid screaming. Let him take care that the words are uttered in such a manner that they be distinctly understood...
...York's SoHo district, is the most promising of the artists who have emerged from Italy in the past few years, floating to New York City like putti on roseate, gaseous clouds of hype. Because they share the same initial and transplanted nationality, Chia, Enzo Cucchi, 32, and Francesco Clemente, 31, tend to be bracketed together as the "three Cs." In fact they are very different painters. Chia's light-operatic gifts have little in common with Cucchi's mucky, doom-laden earnestness: apoplectic chickens and mud slides in the cemetery, done in umber and black...