The Lyric Opera of Chicago's recent staging of Professor John Harbison's opera The Great Gatsby has received positive reviews. "Watching Lyric's tightly paced, beautifully polished production, it was clear that Harbison's Gatsby is, at its core, an intimate tale," wrote Wynne Delacoma in the Chicago Sun-Times. "If we surrender our expectations for grand scale and follow Harbison into its moody, quiet heart, we will find an atmospheric universe where hopes and disappointments are as piercing yet evanescent as the coastal fog off Long Island." John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune said that "Harbison, working from his own ingenious libretto, has met the challenge with great flair, creating not a pale imitation of the novel but a worthy, independent work of art." Revisiting the work, Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe noted that the piece "may be the most musically sophisticated opera ever written by an American composer, and some of the score haunts the memory and the imagination.'' New York City's Metropolitan Opera -- which commissioned the opera -- plans a restaging in spring 2002.
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Vladimir V. Zelevinsky may no longer be the arts editor of The Tech, but that doesn't mean he's retired from journalism. The physics alumnus (SB 1994, SM 1998) has reappeared in print -- as a correspondent reviewing theater and movies for the Boston Globe.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 8, 2000.
