New Delhi: Web browser company Opera on Wednesday announced that it is adding AI-powered features to its desktop browsers Opera and Opera GX — namely AI Prompts, plus sidebar access to ChatGPT, and ChatSonic, to transform users’ browsing experience.
These new tools are available in early access across all desktop platforms, according to the company.
AI Prompts, a native feature in the Opera Browser, will help users shorten a long confusing text or explain it to them, whether it’s a paragraph, a whole article, or even a website.
“Accessible when you highlight text or directly from the address bar, AI Prompts is your new, go-to tool to interpret, to summarise, and to explore the web, offering you an experience that’s tailored to your interests and needs,” Opera said in a blogpost.
Besides the new AI Prompts feature, users now also have access to the web versions of ChatGPT and ChatSonic right in the sidebar of the Opera browser.
The company said these two new features will help generate ideas, summaries, translations, and itineraries, plus users can write code, learn music, get help on math, draft text, and more.
“ChatSonic is additionally so clever that it can create images for you. Altogether, the new AIGC tools offer a portal to a more personal and intelligent web – one that provides solutions to your specific needs,” the browser maker mentioned.
Moreover, the company stated that it intends to announce more AI-powered features in the future, powered by its own GPT-based model.
fIt is actually an unfavorable premiere date for a hitherto almost unknown work by a world-renowned composer who is an integral part of international opera repertoire when reality catches up with him. This seems to be the case now with Georges Bizet’s Grand Opéra “Ivan IV.”, which was musically enthrallingly designed by the conductor Philippe Bach and the choirmaster Manuel Bethe and designed and staged by Hinrich Horstkotte at the Meiningen State Theater. The very first Russian tsar went down in history as “the Terrible”, but it could also be translated as “the mighty”. In view of the anniversary of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, this opera about the murdering, kidnapping and raping tyrant, which was written in Paris in 1864/65 almost at the same time as Bizet’s “Pearl Fishermen”, but was only staged as a four-act torso in Bordeaux in 1951, has little chance of being published Reception that would not be dominated by current dismay.
The horror-and-love plot, based on the historically documented second marriage of Tsar Ivan (he lived from 1530 to 1584) with the Circassian regent’s daughter Maria (she only adopted her name after the wedding), inevitably evokes associations with modern-day Russia with his murderous campaign of conquest, which can easily prevent an understanding of the work from the production conditions of its composition when Paris was the opera capital of the nineteenth century. But it was precisely the minute of silence for the victims of the war, which was worthily scheduled in Meiningen before the first note, and also the final scene with a large white sheet covering all the actors, which was lit up after the first curtain with the Ukrainian national colors, that took away from the performance and thus from getting to know each other of the foreign work the pressure of topicality that distracts from himself.
How safe can you feel in a windowless dungeon?
Through the narrative and historical breaks in the libretto by François-Hippolyte Leroy and Henri Trianon, in which, for example, the Circassian woman from the Caucasus, loved and hated by the tsar in equal measure, is a Muslim, although the Circassian people did not belong to Islam at the time, but Maria did from the beginning that is to say, and the tsar, who is as brutal as he is capable of the deepest love and mercy, is never unequivocally characterized musically, Bizet had largely freed himself from a Russian-nationalistic sound coloration. So he created a monumental musical, choral and soloist opera whose plot and music really get under your skin and in which even the Marseillaise would not have been a surprise.
Scene from “Ivan IV.” at the Meiningen State Theater :
Image: Christina Iberl
Horstkotte’s picturesque Doctor Zhivago costume mix clearly underlined this completely video-free (thanks for that), fluid play of forms. The fact that a personality-split dictator only feels safe in a windowless dungeon, if he feels anything at all, was underlined by the gloomy, high-walled stage area with ventilation slits. A discarded explosive belt, with which Maria’s brother Igor (sung by tenor Alex Kim in terms of intonation as resolutely as it is precise) wanted to kill the ruler, i.e. to take revenge for the kidnapping of his sister, updated almost incidentally.
Folkloric dancing was also allowed
The reason why “Ivan IV.” by the then twenty-six-year-old Bizet, who incidentally maintained friendly contacts with Ivan Turgenev, was already being rehearsed at the Théâtre Lyrique but not premiered may have been due to the announced visit of the actual Tsar Alexander II to the Paris World Exhibition in 1867, who should not be upset with episodes from the life of the first Russian tsar. All the same, Bizet used parts from “Ivan IV” in later works, up to and including “Carmen” (1873/74), which Turgenev directly suggested, and thus used the score as an inspirational storehouse of parts.
Actually, the version planned in Meiningen as a scenic premiere, completed by Howard Williams in 1975 with some unorchestrated scenes, was intended for autumn 2021. Corona intervened. The Saint Petersburg Chamber Theater premiered it last December. With the German premiere or also the first performance within the European Union, the Meininger Theater has once again shown alertness and courage, as well as the best historical and philological knowledge.
Folkloric dancing was also allowed, skilfully arranged here by the choir itself at the beginning of the third act. Bizet would have served the democratizing self-assurance of the Parisian bourgeoisie very well at the time, just as he would have succeeded in enchanting the listener with his constant game of deception with the most beautiful and of course also the darkest timbres in this dynamic vocal effect opera: buzzing strings, instrumental solo lines, even a barcarole and again and again the tutti, from which rise the desperate, agitated and lyrical, then again very pastoral, vocally always demanding lines of all the soloists and the voluminously enveloping choir.
Horstkotte’s experienced directing of characters, the urge to perform of the wonderful cast, above all the expressive soprano Mercedes Arcuri as Maria, the mentally and vocally strong bass Tomasz Wija as Ivan and again and again the excellently tuned choir ultimately gave the work its artistic rank above the actual raging of today World. The latter has not been forgotten. This also has been good.
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
A leading German ballet choreographer who smeared dog faeces into the face of a dance critic in revenge for her negative reviews of his work has been sacked from his post, the Hanover State Opera said on Thursday.
It said Marco Goecke’s actions last weekend in confronting Wiebke Hüster, a journalist with the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, had been hugely damaging to its reputation.
It had suspended Goecke, 50, on Monday, and police are investigating after Hüster reported the incident to them.
“Marco Goecke’s irresponsible actions have deeply unsettled the audience, irritated the public, violated all the principles of the house and massively damaged the reputation of the Hanover state opera,” the theatre’s statement read.
Hüster has said she cried out and burst into tears upon realising what Goecke had done, and she believes it was a meditated attack. She said she was shocked a second time when Goecke initially refused to apologise.
Instead, in a television interview, he expressed his regret for the attack, describing “the manner of it” as “certainly not super” and admitting it would not be viewed as socially acceptable. But he called it a “heat of the moment” response on seeing Hüster, whom he accused of having “throwing mud” at him over more than 20 years of negative reviews of his work.
Under pressure, he later issued what was widely interpreted as a half-hearted written apology. He wrote: “I want to sincerely apologise to all involved, first and foremost Frau Hüster, for my absolutely not to be applauded action.” He said the attack had been the result of “nervous overload due to two premieres that followed each other closely”.
But in the same statement he made further accusations towards the journalist and spoke of the “often hateful critiques” he was subjected to.
Hüster has denied his accusation that she had been set on rubbishing all his performances, saying she had “cherished” a lot of his work. But she vowed to never attend another Goecke production.
The Hanover opera’s head, Laura Berman, said its contract with Goecke, a celebrated, prize-winning choreographer, would be dissolved with immediate effect by mutual agreement, but he would be permitted access to the premises for the time being and his productions would continue to be staged by the theatre.
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Goecke, in his explanation, poured scorn on the critics of German newspapers, in particular of the feuilleton or feature sections of the highbrow broadsheets, urging them to refrain from negative publicity of the cultural world, which he said was not helpful to theatres struggling to get back on their feet after the pandemic.
In the most recent criticism of his work to which Goecke had taken exception, on a collaboration with the the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague, Hüster had said it was like a badly tuned radio. She wrote: “One alternates between a state of feeling insane and being killed by boredom,” and she compared the experience of watching the performance to viewing a warm winter beach from a glass window, “as if in a permanent state of retirement”.
She said his apology had been anything but. “He immediately switched into strengthening the accusations that he had previously held against me. What sort of an apology is that? That is a justification. In addition: we’re talking here about a criminal act. Of insult and bodily harm.”
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#Hanover #State #Opera #ends #contract #ballet #director #dog #faeces #incident
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
