Word: librettos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
VERDI: UN BALLO IN MASCHERA (RCA Victor: 3 LPs). Masked Ball's libretto is strictly crackplot, but Verdi's tunes justify the onstage bewilderment. The opera has an ominous history: the day Verdi brought his score to Naples, assassins tried to murder Napoleon III. Frightened Bourbon censors forced the composer to switch the locale of his rather gloomy tale (about the assassination of Sweden's 18th century King Gustav III) to exotic Massachusetts and to dramatize instead the assassination of the "Governor of Boston." Conducted appropriately by Boston's Erich Leinsdorf, this version stars the lush...
...crafty Jupiter and Jeanette Scovotti's vapid Eurydice-it was almost overshadowed by Zachary Solov's spirited, stylish choreography, brilliantly danced by New York City Ballet Stars Melissa Hayden and Jacques D'Amboise. With the help of Jack G. O'Brien's updated English libretto, the buffoonery as well as the bite struck a contemporary nerve: the god Mercury was decked out like the symbol of the telephone company, and Public Opinion drew a loud, if edgy, laugh with her reassurance that she was enforcing marital fidelity only onstage, not in the audience...
...woven into the gripping nightmare of a tortured spirit. Commissioned by the Washington Opera Society and given its world première last week at Washington's Lisner Auditorium, Bomarzo is based on a prizewinning novel by Buenos Aires Art Critic Manuel Mujica Lainez, who also wrote the libretto. In 15 taut, hallucinatory scenes that take place mostly in the mind of Pierfrancesco Orsini, Renaissance Duke of Bomarzo, it flashes back over the events of the Duke's "secret life, which like the hump on my back, encumbered my soul...
WHITSUNDAY SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). An original oratorio, Galileo, has been commissioned to commemorate the appearance of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles on this seventh Sunday after Easter. Libretto by Joe Darion, score by Ezra Laderman, and featuring Basso Ara Berberian as the troubled astronomer...
...Yeomen of the Guard, written in 1888, stands out among the G&S oeuvre. The libretto is Golkbert's most serious. There is the usual measure of ponderous Victorian humor, but once the dangers suffered by the characters are real, and there are more than a few truly poignant and moving moments. Yeomen is also the opera for which Sullivan produced his richest and most solidly constructed score. Of all their works, it was the authors own favorite...