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The sun is buried and the stars weep
Gian Carlo Menotti has died.
He wrote some of the strangest and eeriest music I have ever heard or sung. Steal me, sweet thief, for time's flight is stealing my youth. Yes, I know a child the color of earth, the color of thorn. If you're not shy, pin up my hair with your star and buckle my shoe. Horizons! Horizons! There's no guard to kiss or kill. Death's frontiers are free. "The Black Swan" was my standard audition aria for years, a murder ballad with a drowned lover and a bloodied sun and a sleepless, weed-mouthed ghost. Its source opera, The Medium (1946), is a shivery film noir in which the boundaries between childish pantomime and bereaved, believing grief and a charlatan's drunken delusions all blur together into the brush of a cold hand in the dark; The Consul (1950) is a Kafkaesque fever dream of a bureacracy, where a husband can disappear into a paper trail without a trace and the same hopeless figures have inhabited the waiting room for years and even a magician can produce anything out of his pockets—doves, cards, flowers—but the papers he needs to escape. The Old Maid and the Thief (1941) is a self-described "grotesque opera," in which rich old women and ambitious young ones project onto an unassuming traveler every guise from a dashing convict to a kept lover to a stand-in for Death, and Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) is a miracle play, the night the Three Magi stopped by the home of a lame beggar-child and his mother, following their star toward the east. These aren't even all Menotti's operas, only the ones I know best: and there will be no more. But I am glad of them.
Choose your partner! The dance is on!
He wrote some of the strangest and eeriest music I have ever heard or sung. Steal me, sweet thief, for time's flight is stealing my youth. Yes, I know a child the color of earth, the color of thorn. If you're not shy, pin up my hair with your star and buckle my shoe. Horizons! Horizons! There's no guard to kiss or kill. Death's frontiers are free. "The Black Swan" was my standard audition aria for years, a murder ballad with a drowned lover and a bloodied sun and a sleepless, weed-mouthed ghost. Its source opera, The Medium (1946), is a shivery film noir in which the boundaries between childish pantomime and bereaved, believing grief and a charlatan's drunken delusions all blur together into the brush of a cold hand in the dark; The Consul (1950) is a Kafkaesque fever dream of a bureacracy, where a husband can disappear into a paper trail without a trace and the same hopeless figures have inhabited the waiting room for years and even a magician can produce anything out of his pockets—doves, cards, flowers—but the papers he needs to escape. The Old Maid and the Thief (1941) is a self-described "grotesque opera," in which rich old women and ambitious young ones project onto an unassuming traveler every guise from a dashing convict to a kept lover to a stand-in for Death, and Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) is a miracle play, the night the Three Magi stopped by the home of a lame beggar-child and his mother, following their star toward the east. These aren't even all Menotti's operas, only the ones I know best: and there will be no more. But I am glad of them.
Choose your partner! The dance is on!
no subject
You should definitely find a banjo player (or learn to play the banjo: though I say this as someone who plays no instruments beyond enough piano to pick out melodic lines and I can get maybe three chords out of a harp). That's the kind of music that should be handed on.
My sister is on the web at www.michelle-rice dot com
I'm on the wrong part of the east coast to have seen her in performance, I think, but I wanted to make sure.
Yes, Britten and Pears - quite the dynamic duo! I would love to hear his recordings of Peter Quint, one of the creepiest tenors in all of opera!
Unfortunately, all I can offer you is Peter Grimes. (Although if you want to go outside Britten, I do have Pears' Winterreise: it remains my favorite version of the cycle. He sounds like some weird wintry instrument himself; already a stranger, turning away into silence and cold.) I need more recordings of Pears and Britten in my life.
no subject
My sis mostly sings in the DC area and frequently in Cleveland. Striving towards other, bigger venues, etc. (I think of DC as the east coast simply because it takes me all day to get there! but perhaps it is not very accurate geographical shorthand.)
Do you attend much opera in or around Atlanta, and if yes, do you have recommendations on companies not to miss?
no subject
You're welcome. I think he's phenomenal.
"Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier dreh'n . . . ?"
Do you attend much opera in or around Atlanta, and if yes, do you have recommendations on companies not to miss?
I'm currently in Boston, actually: where I do attend operas, particularly Opera Boston (where I saw an excellent production of The Consul last year). I was better placed when I was in New Haven and the Met was only an hour and a half away on the train, but I'll make do for now.
no subject
It's on the list.