Word: figaro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...question now arises at the Pepsico Summerfare festival in Purchase, N.Y., where Sellars' versions of the three operas that Mozart wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte are all being restaged. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is set in Manhattan's Trump Tower, Don Giovanni (1787) in Spanish Harlem and Cosi fan tutte (1790) in a sleazy diner called Despina's. Nor does the Sellars game end ) there. At 31, the aging enfant terrible is talking of deconstructing Idomeneo in Brussels and The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne...
This orchestra, like Sellars' repertory company of gifted young singers, performs admirably under the deft and scrupulous conducting of Craig Smith, and so it is a pleasure to find that Sellars has pretty much left the performers alone in one of the three operas, Figaro. The setting in the Trump Tower is no more than a mild gag, not another excuse for wholesale Sellarsization. Donald Trump does not appear from behind a bush. The singers just sing, and sing beautifully. What a relief...
...Giovanni in Spanish Harlem? Figaro in Trump Tower? Why? A skeptical view of Peter Sellars' zany productions of three Mozart-Da Ponte works...
Mais non, said Bohan. In an interview with Figaro, he claimed that the changeover had come as a terrible blow. French couturiers were irked that Dior had not chosen a replacement from the ranks of Gallic designers. In fact, Dior is getting ready for the hot competition that will result from European unification in 1992. In the past decade Ferre has won numerous prizes for sophisticated ready-to-wear clothing that might sell better in the broader market than Bohan's classical creations...
Impeded at times by a fairly lame English translation of Da Ponto's libretto by Andrew Porter (I mean, would Susanna really call Figaro a "blockhead" in the eighteenth century?), it is Mozart in the end who gives us the most aural pleasure. Who can resist the remarkable closing scene of The Marriage of Figaro, in which Figaro and Susanna, the Count and Countess Almaviva, Marcellina and Bartolo and all other cast members join together in praise of love and happiness? It's a scene not to be missed, confirming Mozart's brilliance in choral writing and the Lowell House...