Hints and tips:
...The best book I’ve read in the past year is The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice by Judith Mackrell....
...In one, Richard Serra in “Judith and Holofernes” pairs two shimmering steel cubes with a warm terracotta female figure and a delicate bronze of a young boy holding out a platter....
...Judith hymns peace and mercy in a long series of serene arias before seizing her moment to chop off his head. Judith’s music feels the most consistently inspired....
...During Lauretta’s beseeching aria “O mio babbino caro”, Rinuccio strokes the bare buttock of his cousin, Gherardo, while Buoso’s brother-in-law cries out the inserted line, “Non morir!” (Don’t die)....
...Bird-like Biaggio (Moisés Arias), weird and a little antic, joins them for tragicomic relief. Young people making their first feature are like earthlings landing on a new planet....
...Judith van Wanroij is a full-voiced Emilie and Kenneth Tarver’s suave Valère comes good after initial tuning problems....
...In Oedipus Rex, DeYoung sang vibrantly in Jocasta’s wonderfully Verdian aria, and Dohmen was commanding in the Messenger’s repeated announcement of Jocasta’s death....
...Four years after that, in 1951, came her stage debut, in Eugene Goosens’s Judith, and first prize in Australia’s most important singing competition, the Sun Aria, after which she went to London....
...The text by Metastasio, which treats the Old Testament story of Judith and Holofernes, behaves just like one of the master librettist’s opera seria librettos, which means that the work lent itself to Marco...
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