I've just watched last night's VCR recording of a 3sat
(Germany/Austria/Switserland) television interview from Austria's Graz,
currently flourishing the title "European Cultural Capital", apropos of a
fortnight's gig by the St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Opera & Orchestra, which
has just opened a piquant double bill there: "Cleopatra", composed by
Domenico Cimarosa for Catherine the Great's Petersburgers, and "OEdipus
Rex", staged by Sir Jonathan Miller with Klaus Maria Brandauer
unconventionally circulating among the dramatis personae as the narrator,
Valery Gergiev conducting both.
Simultaneous German voice-over obscured much of the English both
Miller & Gergiev spoke, but I sat up sharply when I suddenly heard dead-pan
Miller's mellifluous Oxonian voice, apropos of the Stravinsky, say (and here
I transcribe verbatim from the VCR tape): "mother-fucking opera in the
second half - that's where the word came from...."
The inscrutable half-smile already on Gergiev's perpetually whiskery
face remained fixed, perhaps just a tad more inscrutable than before....
Paul Moor
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
D-10715 Berlin
Telefon (4930) 8639-5784
Telefax (4930) 8639-5785
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 13 2003 - 03:17:00 PST