Word: puccini
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Having raised up the Castel Sant'Angelo from the depths of the Metropolitan Opera in Tosca and put half of Paris onstage for La Boheme, Franco Zeffirelli must have felt some pressure to top himself with his new production of Giacomo Puccini's Turandot. Curious first-nighters, proud holders of the toughest opera ticket of the season, entered the Met last week wondering how far the director's passion for outsize verisimilitude would extend. Would he cut off the Prince of Persia's head and stick it on a pole? Build the Great Wall of China? Or (gasp!) actually respect...
...contemporary listener, the mystique seems hard to fathom. The core of Toscanini's repertoire was small -- Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner made up 40% of his New York Philharmonic programs; Puccini and Verdi were favorites in the opera house -- and his interest in contemporary music, aside from fellow Italians like Respighi, was almost nil. The famous RCA recordings of the Beethoven symphonies now sound febrile and coarse. Even the conductor's notorious temper and torrents of epithets, which once seemed so romantically apposite -- no musician had really lived until Toscanini called him Porco! (pig) -- come off today as operatic posturing...
...London last month, the English National Opera (ENO) unveiled Director Jonathan Miller's production of Puccini's Tosca set during World War II and played in the style of one of Hollywood's gritty, black-and-white melodramas of the period. Earlier this season, the same company presented a Mad Max version of Bizet's Carmen by David Pountney that replaced castanets and mantillas with feral children darting amid junked American automobiles. In Paris, Producer Seth Schneidman staged Strauss's Elektra as a dream-theory psychodrama, freely mixing images of Greek antiquity and 19th century Europe...
...MOST SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE That of Giacomo Puccini and Kiri Te Kanawa; his music and her voice gave A Room with a View the year's loveliest sound track...
Menotti's musical wares -- Puccini with a little water, Mussorgsky with the Mussorgsky removed -- may once have been serviceable. But in Goya, and in its equally forlorn predecessor La Loca, written in 1979 for Beverly Sills, the music no longer has any discernible creative impulse; instead it seems to have been composed by the yard, measured to fit and then snipped off with blunt pinking shears. Menotti has recently confessed that "I have my doubts about how important my music is." After Goya, he may be the only one who does...