Word: opera
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...Santa Fe Opera last week, two important premieres demonstrated just how potent eclecticism can be. John Eaton's The Tempest, with a libretto after Shakespeare by Music Critic Andrew Porter of The New Yorker, is a rich blend of Renaissance music, jazz and electronics that is surrounded by an uncompromisingly modernist microtonal framework. Another happily eclectic work, Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat, takes an anthropomorphic tale by English Playwright Edward Bond, based on Balzac, and sets it to music that freely ranges from kitschy consonance to acerbic dissonance. Both operas have the kind of unquestioned stylistic integrity that...
...Tempest, being performed for the first time, makes fierce demands on listeners but rewards them with an opera of stark beauty. It may be presumptuous for any composer not named Verdi to set Shakespeare, but Eaton's music passes the test, honoring its source while illuminating and transforming...
...conventional orchestra may at first seem eccentric. Further, his method of microtonal tuning, which he has long advocated, requires singers and instrumentalists to produce quarter-tone intervals, so that an octave is divided into 24 pitches instead of the conventional twelve. Yet each of the disparate elements in the opera has a dramatic function, giving characters or groups of characters distinct musical personalities...
Eaton's meticulous planning extends even to the opera's rhythmic structure, with each character assigned his or her own basic tempo. Act II, for example, closes with a stirring, cacophonous ensemble of clashing rhythms and timbres as all the major characters sing simultaneously and Prospero exults, "My high charms work!/ and these, mine enemies, are all knit up/ in their distractions. They are in my power." What Eaton has done is not merely to set Porter's concise, three-act libretto, but to retell it in musical terms, creating a cognate of Shakespeare's play. It is a formidable...
...share Asian roots and pay homage to them in distinctively Eastern designs. The new Asian wave in Australian clothing includes: BOWIE (bowie.com.au): If Bowie Wong's elaborate creations in satin and fine wool strike you as theatrical, that's no coincidence. He was born in Hong Kong to an opera singer mother, and studied costume design in Canada. Wong also picked up a design degree in Japan and, displaying a prodigious appetite for academia, returned to his birthplace to earn another degree, this time in drama. Wong emigrated to Australia in 1997, enrolling in a fashion design course...