Horizon

Ugh, that sounds terrible. I didn't realize Maazel was a composer.

What I'm really waiting for is Dr. Atomic, with music by one of my favorite living composers, premiering right across the water from me. I'm very excited.

I actually went to the opening night of this opera and thought it was pretty awful. You needed to know the novel in detail to follow the plot and the music was a mish-mash with no clear style of its own, and no decent arias. The opening five minutes were quite impressive - a massed chorus of Party members at a Hate Session - but it went downhill very quickly thereafter. The relationship between Winston and Julia was meant by the composer to be some sort of great romantic tragedy, but it came across more like a casual affair, so when they were arrested it was no big event. Who really cared? The best thing about it was the staging - quite impressive at times. One composer I thought who might have done a good job on 1984 is Kurt Weill, but, being a Communist, he probably wouldn't have touched it with a barge-pole.

There was a lot of cheering and whooping at the end, but it sounded suspiciously like a hired-in 'claque' just doing what they were paid to do. As we left someone (not me) yelled 'Rubbish!' and I suspect that was some opera-goer who knew what he/she was shouting about.

Sad, but it was worth being there, even though the show was a flop - as far as I was concerned, at least. One person we spotted in the audience was John Hurt (Winston Smith in the last film of the novel). What he thought of it I'd love to have known.

Parbety

Thanks for the review, Parbety. Sorry the show wasn't better.

(I took the liberty of snipping your second post -- it was a duplicate, wasn't it? If I missed something pls let me know.)

I dunno about a Kurt Weill *1984* actually. He could handle grim subjects of course but he was, I dunno, more graceful about it. I'm afraid he would show up Orwell as being kind of doggishly methodical about things.

Perhaps. I was thinking of the musical style. (Weill-style?) Orwell's book is a satire, and Weill could have sent it up and lightened the satire somewhat. Might have been amusingly grim rather than just grim. After all, if you can satirize Nazism why not satirize any kind of totalitarianism?

Parbety