Word: opera
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...from the Old Norse vik, meaning bay) refers properly only to men who went on raids. All Vikings were Norse, but not all Norse were Vikings--and those who were did their viking only part time. Vikings didn't wear horned helmets (a fiction probably created for 19th century opera). And while rape and pillage were part of the agenda, they were a small part of Norse life...
...does not always protect fools and drunks. He almost never protects the beautiful. But Elizabeth Taylor survived. Taylor turned her life into America's longest-running one-woman soap opera. At this point, her tacky misadventures seem to have been going on since the beginning of time. She has passed through so many addictions (to booze and painkillers), through so many rehabs, and subsequent relapses, and re-rehabs, and through so many medical crises (brain tumors, broken backs), all chronicled by the tabloids, that she comes to seem at last to be a gloriously vulgar principle of unsinkability. Each brush...
...Beijing. Without fanfare, crews in the capital last month started construction of Beijing's National Theater, a glitzy, $420 million monument to modernity just minutes from the imperial splendor of the Forbidden City. Designed by French architect Paul Andreu, the voluptuous glass and titanium complex will encompass an opera house, a 2,500-seat conventional theater, an experimental theater complete with rotating stage, and a 2,000-seat concert hall. The cultural overhaul has taken nearly a half-century to get under way: former Premier Zhou Enlai first conceived of a national stage in 1958, but plans languished during both...
Ripe-voiced Graham is well on her way to becoming the Renee Fleming of mezzo-sopranos. Her starring role in the San Francisco Opera's upcoming premiere of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking will probably do the trick. So why not board the bandwagon early? Her new CD, a collection of 32 well-chosen art songs by Ned Rorem, is already a prime candidate for Best-of-2000 status. Graham's singing is smart and sumptuous, while Rorem's French-flavored songs--bittersweet, transparent, unsentimentally lyrical--are the best that any American classical composer has given...
Like a long-running soap opera, the characters in Northern Ireland's peace process rotate roles from episode to episode. Two months ago the IRA were the implacable hard men whose refusal to hand over weapons cast them as the villains in the breakdown of the process; now, they've donned the mantle of peacemaker and left the Ulster Unionists to choose between the bad guy role and some sort of short-term happy ending. Unionist leader David Trimble was battling Monday to persuade hard-liners on his own side to at least give serious attention to an IRA offer...