Word: opera
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...told you it wasn't over until she sang. After London's Royal Opera House fired soprano DEBORAH VOIGT for being too portly for her signature role, Ariadne, in Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos in 2004, opera fans feared that the last refuge of the plus-size artist was gone. Two years later, Voigt has had gastric-bypass surgery and lost 135 lbs. (the equivalent, roughly, of one Mariah Carey) and the Royal Opera has rehired her for the 2007-08 season. Maybe the Royal Ballet will hire her next...
...wandered past well-tended flower beds. As passionate French politicians were broadcast live on myriad flat screens, also surrounding my trail were busts of Marianne, that feminine, immortal, omnipresent personification of la République française. Meanwhile, other Harvard friends kicked down inner doors at the National Opera and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although none of us was invited to dine with parliamentarians, sopranos, or immortals, we undoubtedly penetrated the façade, if not (yet) the innermost sanctuaries, of some of the elite cultural institutions that Paris boasts in such abundance. Armed only with our Veritas...
...Hunt Lieberson, a violist, didn't get her big break as a singer until she was 31, when controversial director Peter Sellars cast her in a summer festival production of Handel's Giulio Cesare. Throughout her career, she made unconventional choices, favoring complex roles in little-known baroque operas as well as contemporary pieces such as John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, in which she made her 1999 debut at New York City's Metropolitan Opera, playing Myrtle Wilson. Audiences were enthralled by Hunt Lieberson's deeply passionate portrayals, but she once said they left her "crispy fried in every...
...restaurant, but there is a ground-floor caf? serving breakfast and a complimentary all-day snack buffet of sandwiches, soup, and so on. You'll be refueling there frequently if you're going to attempt all the sightseeing possibilities of the neighborhood, which include La Boqueria market, the Opera El Liceo, the Plaza Catalunya and lots of shopping. Of course, if all that walking wears out your soles, you couldn't ask for a better location. The hotel is next door to (what else?) a Camper boutique...
...Vienna. As a young composer, he was afraid to write down the modern pieces he heard in his head for fear of government retaliation ("totalitarian regimes do not like dissonances," he wrote). After escaping communist Hungary, he wrote polyphonous, unpredictably paced concertos, chamber pieces and other works, including one opera, Le Grand Macabre, which opens with the sound of honking cars and is now one of his best-known works...