In 'Quartet,' Opera Singers are Retired but not Retiring. Back in October, I wrote about the peculiar fascination some opera lovers have for superannuated opera singers who still perform before the public. Their frailty and artistry combined with a reluctance to see their careers end is part of what is so touching about these rare people. I thought of this article yesterday as I watched . The Beecham family made a fortune selling laxatives, eliciting a very funny line, tartly delivered by Maggie Smith, which I will not spoil for you. The residents of this home in the film are retired opera singers, instrumentalists, music hall performers, and one flamboyant impresario named Cedric, wonderfully played in large dressing gowns by Michael Gambon, who bellows . Any film with Michael Gambon is worth attending because we see him rarely now and he is one of our greatest actors. Smith is Jean Horton, a leading soprano who always put her career first and is no longer willing to sing at all. She feels herself to be the best and every resident of Beecham House, except for one, treats her that way. Pauline Collins plays Cissy Robson, a mezzo- soprano who clearly sang sexy characters and still has considerable allure. Tom Courtenay is Reginald Paget, a tenor who was enough of a romantic to sometimes put love before career and pay a price for that choice. Billy Connolly is Wilf Bond, who has had a stroke just damaging enough to make him say whatever he feels and do what he wants, no matter how it is perceived by others. Connolly finds the tender humor in the role without overacting and is the source of many good laughs. It is never made quite clear if his character was a baritone or a bass. The . The situation is ripe with drama, especially when Maddalena persuades Sparafucile to spare the Duke. The characters played by Smith, Collins, Courtenay and Connolly had made a famous recording of the opera and now find themselves in a situation in which they are asked to perform the . Will they be able to do it? I won. I did like the fact that one character who suffers from dementia was portrayed realistically and without being patronizing or falsely sentimental. It was also made gently evident that, even when memory for words, facts and faces can sometimes be cloudy, musical memory resides in a different place and seems to be more resilient. The four principal actors, wonderful though they are, seem to be acting the role of opera singers rather than fully being those people. I have known so many actors and opera singers in my life and admire both groups. A directory to online information about the history of Nova Scotia. MARINE FISH of Eastern North America in the Atlantic Ocean including inshore and offshore waters of coastal North Carolina, and south to Florida, north into Canada. Architect Edmund Blacket. Classified by The National Trust. This handsome villa was the home of Edmund Blacket while he was. Item Location Item Description; A 001.001: The John Womelsdorf & Daniel Womelsdorf Day Book 1755-1789, Property Of Tulpehocken Settlement Historical Society. But I find that most of them have a respectful regard for one another rather than a full comprehension of the gifts and mysteries required to excel at their respective arts. A corollary to this is that it is not a given that a stage director who is excellent in spoken theater or film might be good for opera, where being musical is the key to unlocking the rich textures in an opera. Similarly, not every great opera director is suitable for theater or cinema. In . Hoffman cannily chose to cast real musicians and actors in the roles of the elderly residents. Their carriage, speech patterns and evident affection for their art forms are real. Their old faces retain great beauty and wisdom and I loved looking at them in scenes set in the dining room or salons of Beecham House. In that group I spotted a beautiful, charismatic woman who I did not know was in the film. She looked remarkably like the Welsh soprano Dame Gwyneth Jones (b. Her character is named Anne Langley but she might as well be Dame Gwyneth herself. A list of prose works by Robert E. The works are sorted by genre, by series and then alphabetically. Untitled works and fragments (incomplete and unfinished. International Collections. Ancestry.com Contains digital archives of newspapers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland (much content comes. Lady Musgrave Island is a 14 hectares (35 acres) coral cay on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, with a 1,192 hectares (2,950 acres) surrounding reef. A survey of current and recent art exhibitions around the world, organized geographically and archived categorically including architecture and design. We learn that Anne Langley was the great rival to Smith. The two women cagily assess one another as the other characters all look on with a combination of terror and anticipation. She can sit at a table and utter only a few words but you feel her power. Anne Langley is also expected to sing at the fund- raising concert but she will only do a solo while all the other performers appear in groups. In an interview with Jones, I learned that Hoffman shortened or deleted some of the musical performances in the film. This is a shame and Jones makes no secret through her tense smile that she too would have preferred that her entire performance of the aria, . It is not quite four minutes and would have been a deeply affecting moment in the film to show a real opera singer, still beautiful and full of temperament but no longer in peak voice, to sing about having lived for her art and for love. Here is an older performance of Jones in that aria. Casting Jones, one of the most compelling interpreters of the Marschallin, Elektra and Salome, gave a spiritual core to the film that even those actors could not achieve. Vignettes in the film of elderly performers in bits from The Mikado and other works brought to mind the aging showgirls from Stephen Sondheim. I would not have minded if the film were a bit longer to include fuller performances. In fact, they would have been preferable to much of the badinage that flew about among certain characters and became tiresome. Opera lovers will realize that Harwood and, perhaps, Hoffman took inspiration from the marvelous documentary, . I have visited this home often and have had the pleasure of meeting and listening to performances by these wonderful old artists. This is a wonderful place for opera lovers to support. The institution counts among its past supporters Renata Tebaldi and Luciano Pavarotti, whose names are carved into a wall in the atrium.
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