Hints and tips:
...Only Gregory Kunde, as Enée, really rises above all the nonsense....
...They sing opera arias, music-hall songs and nationalist ballads. Joyce does not make them more Irish than they need to be....
...The aria “All my Thursdays were the same” stays in my memory, as does the “freeze-frame into a black and white film still” staging. Gregory King Aberdeen, UK...
...Spears’s music offers attractive vocal lines, shifting smoothly from recitatives to arias to ensembles that blend deftly into his instrumental writing....
...“It’s vital, for me, that it’s good art,” says Gregory. It’s not about “people having a good time”, nor “some notion of betterment”. And it’s certainly not therapeutic, agrees Arias....
...The first hour bumps and grinds its way through numerous da capo arias — sometimes aided by silken ropes and feather dusters — with wearying predictability....
...Elsewhere, some of the most apt musical moments come at the most frankly operatic points of the plot, as with the arias for Sibyl Vane, the actress cruelly jilted by Dorian....
...“There has been sustained demand from Asia and from the Middle East for both beef and lamb,” said Pedro Arias, a livestock economist at the FAO in Rome, echoing a widely held view in the industry....
...If you don’t have it, you should get hold of Hunt Lieberson’s CD of Handel arias with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Harry Bicket....
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