SCREENINGS AT THE SHOE FACTORY The Art of Singing: Golden Voices of the Opera
Sunday 18 April 2010
The Shoe Factory, 304 Ermou Street, Nicosia 8.30pm
(Limited Seating, Pre-booking essential)
Throughout the year the Pharos Arts Foundation presents screenings of an
eclectic range of films to showcase various ways of art expression and
history. Screenings at the Shoe Factory promise some engaging and exciting
evenings of music and art documentaries, rare sound and vision footage, as
well as historical performances.
Duration: 116'
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Twenty-six illustrious opera stars of the 20th century, among them Caruso,
Gigli, Tetrazzini, Ponsele, Chaliapin, Flagstad, Melchior, Bjorling,
Tebaldi, Sutherland, Corelli, and Callas, are featured in sound and vision
in rare footage, much of it previously unavailable.
''Our noisy century began quietly in one respect
-
its moving-pictures went
silent. The 'silent screen' they called it, and to our ears the phrase
sounds like poetry. The cinemas themselves were a different matter. People
laughed a lot, cried a little, held their breadths and let them out again,
while the pianist played on. Occasionally, the heroine might be seen to sing
a song, and though nothing could be heard the innocence of her face and the
tears which coursed down leathery cheeks in response so touched the heart
that old and young, sentimental and cynical alike, were sure they had heard
the singer and were moved too. Sometimes the subject itself had to do with
music and the character was supposedly a singer. To today's film-goers the
obstacles to credibility might seem insuperable; our ancestors were less
dependent.
The two grand houses, the Metropolitan and Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan,
played to large and eager audiences; their rivalry, their supply of new
operas and new stars, were talk-of-the-town. Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago,
San Francisco and other leading cities duly followed. For the very first
time in operatic history, people had these very stars in their own homes:
the phonograph or gramophone transported Caruso and Melba by miracle' not
to the casual, taken-for-granted and never-given-a-second-thought acceptance
of today's ears, but to ears that listened and concentrated in wonder. The
opera singers became domesticated, almost an exotic and enchanted extension
of the family. This opera-craze and the raise of the two essentially linked
arts and industries
-
those of recorded sound and the motion picture
-
helped each other from the start, so that in films a pattern persisted even
after its natural attractions had faded. It began with the greatest of the
recording operatic stars, the tenor Enrico Caruso....''
Entrance: EUR5 / Free for Friends & Supporters of the Foundation
Click here
to purchase your tickets online or telephone 7000 9304
