Between staging, music, and material, it’s hard to decide what feels most broken about New York City Opera’s American premiere of Brokeback Mountain.
Norman Dello Joio, who was knocking about winning prizes for film and TV scores, composed The Trial at Rouen, his second opera on the subject, for NBC.
In the seventies and eighties Dominick Argento (who turned ninety this year) was one of the most oft-performed of American opera composers.
LoftOpera’s accurately but unpromisingly named Pergolesi & Vivaldi stumbled rather than soared.
Beginning with the dark, ominous music of the prelude of Charles Wuorinen and Annie Proulx’s opera Brokeback Mountain, we know we are in for a very different and far less sentimental version of the work than was had with Ang Lee’s iconic 2005 film.
In a post Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwell era and with politicians spouting that natural disasters are God’s way of telling us to reduce the national debt, Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry seems more prescient than even he probably intended. A satirical novel about the excesses of the evangelical movement in the early part…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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