![]() After a few minutes, you can go for a beer because there is nothing else to hear. His later work would inspire artists like Terry Riley and it is there, with American minimal music, where things go wrong. His sheets of sound are pregnant tapestries of notes that break down a wall, lift a spirit and crack a skull or two. That endless flow of repeats and near-repeats into which, despite the unpleasant characters and dramatic events that often await you there, you are only too willing to vanish. They push you back and forth in a world of sound where you can refresh your mind and learn something about life, or even yourself. His leitmotifs are melodies and themes that recur, but the motifs that sound the same are slightly different each time due to instrumentation and context. Our great friend Richard Wagner knew that. ![]() In a piece of music where repetition is used most successfully and effectively, repetition is never just the repetition. At most, it is referred to, as much in Der Rosenkavalier's tapestry of sound is a web of references in which the repetition is never just the repetition. It is extra beautiful because that first gradually ascending melody in which the voices of Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie coincide is not repeated. The trio at the end is one of heavenly beauty (it was played at Strauss' funeral in 1949). Lost illusions of love lie ahead, the music seems to want to tell us. Where the first time I made a triumphant Marx Brothers comparison ( A Night At The Opera), this time, instead of humour, melancholy lingered the most. The wistfulness and wisdom of the Marschallin and the descending melody line that provides the sparkling love between Sophie and Octavian with a warning, an afterthought. But t he regie lacks the finesse that made the earlier incarnation of this production so irresistible. There is, of course, no substitute for the thrill that comes with the power of a discovery, and it’s logical that looking at the same production a second time, happens with a different, more seasoned, pair of eyes. Moments where I noted a smile 8 years ago, including the moment when Ochs is stabbed in the leg by Octavian, now go unnoticed. And Russell himself did re-visit the vampire genre in 1988 with Lair of the White Worm.Now, in revisiting this production by the Dutch National Opera, 8 years later, the machine of Personenregie appears to be less tightly tuned. Russell's biographer, in the introduction to the published script, has since accused Francis Ford Coppola of plagiarism for his 90s version of the novel. But the success of John Badham's adaptation with Frank Langella ultimately killed the project. ![]() That it began its existence as a proposed ballet speaks to just how garish and over-the-top Russell intended the film to be. ![]() I’ve come up with a reason why Dracula would want to live forever." Apparently, however, much of the origin and debauchery featured in Russell's script was more autobiographical than faithful to the source. "If you lived for centuries," Russell wrote of the potential film, "would you go weak in the knees at a picture of a dull clerk’s fiancée and lock yourself away in a gloomy castle? I wouldn’t. Russell's take on the count was not unlike his portrait of Liszt. So it makes sense that he approached Bram Stoker's classic horror novel, with a cast that would include Oliver Reed in the title role, Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow, James Coburn, Peter O'Toole and Mick Fleetwood (one of these things is not like the other).
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