Philip Glass has taken a slightly different approach to each of his three operas based on films by Jean Cocteau. For La Belle et la Bête (1994), he replaced the entire soundtrack with a new score to be performed live by the Philip Glass Ensemble and opera singers along with the film, with the vocal lines calculated to be coordinated precisely with rhythms of the film's spoken text. With choreographer Susan Marshall he adapted Les Enfants Terribles (1996) into a dance opera for four singers and three pianos. The most ...
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Philip Glass has taken a slightly different approach to each of his three operas based on films by Jean Cocteau. For La Belle et la Bête (1994), he replaced the entire soundtrack with a new score to be performed live by the Philip Glass Ensemble and opera singers along with the film, with the vocal lines calculated to be coordinated precisely with rhythms of the film's spoken text. With choreographer Susan Marshall he adapted Les Enfants Terribles (1996) into a dance opera for four singers and three pianos. The most conventionally operatic is Orphée (1993), which retains much of the shape and dialogue of the original, but is scored for small orchestra and singers and would fit comfortably into the repertoire of an adventurous opera company. The music is unmistakably Glass, but has some of the Romantic, overtly expressive sweep of works like La Belle et la Bête. Cocteau's very strange retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern setting is inescapably compelling, and the music is highly...
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