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From:  ODivaTina@a...
Date:  Thu Mar 28, 2002  6:48 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] Check out JS Online: Jerry's an opera! Can Oprah be far behind?

In a message dated 3/28/2002 9:13:30 AM Pacific Standard Time,
Mezzoid@a... writes:


> <A HREF="http://www.jsonline.com/enter/tvradio/mar02/30513.asp">Click here: JS
Online: Jerry's an opera! Can Oprah be far behind?</A>

There's a really great article about the opera in the March 17 edition of the
Sunday New York Times magazine. Brought up great issues regarding the
ridiculous pretenses so much of opera has nowadays, which are a far cry from
the pretenses under which opera was in its infancy. "It's absurd to think of
opera as grand or stodgy," Morris (artistic director of the Battersea Arts
Center) says. "If you'd have characterized it that way to Mozart or Gluck,
they'd have laughed you off the premises. Opera evolved as a crude and
accessible form. The audience would be eating dinner or having sex while
watch it! So the idea now that one should sit in a grim-faced state to
impress the president of his company and suffer through, well, that's just
madness."
I, personally, like it very much when the boundaries between all the
different forms become melded and the forms each get a shot in the arm, since
that is a more direct expression of our amalgamated culture and society
nowadays than the ivory towered, arcane approach. And what else is a
successful expressive art, than an accurate projection of the culture that
spawned it?
TinaO






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