"Seul sur la terre" is one of Donizetti's great tenor set pieces and at one time much favored for its wonderful lyrical equilibrium and its high-flying tests of the singer's skill.
The Democrats' change in view in less than two years might have resulted from disappointment over the fact that President Obama's appointments of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in 2009 and 2010 have not surmounted the conservatism tenor set after President George W. Bush's appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
The first act closes with a tenor aria set to Primo Levi's poem "Passover".
He sings in a supple tenor and sets up complex superstructures around sweetly sustained melodies, and he draws on an international assortment of rhythms, particularly African and Afro-Caribbean ones.
In it, Mr. Cooperman blames Mr. Obama (and his "minions") for "setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as 'class warfare.' " This is serious, this roiling and this tenor-setting, but it is not the only damage the president's words have done.
But it happens at a time when, more than any time in recent memory, the issue of mass migration — whether by immigrants from Mexico and Central America or refugees from Syria and other parts of the world — is generating intense global anxiety and setting the tenor for a presidential election.
Both composers took the conventions of comic opera into consideration, choosing a baritone for the principal role, setting the tenor-soprano love story against family opposition to the marriage, and constructing a hoax which permits the happy ending.
When he took the helm himself in the mid-1990s, afthe the deaths of Sun Ra and the tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, Mr. Allen set his sights on continuity.
The revised, tightened script by Mr. Ludwig ("Lend Me a Tenor"), which perversely sets the action in 1938 six yearss later than the original), is heavy on name-dropping jokes that go clunk.
Johan Botha, in the small role of a young Italian from Piedmont (this opera's version of the Italian Tenor from "Der Rosenkavalier") sets your mouth watering to hear him soon as Bacchus in "Ariadne".
