Word: altissimo
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...Rollins closed out the performance with another calypso, the West Indian folksong "Don't Stop the Carnival." Rollins seemed to feed off the energy of the crowd, playfully examining the entire range of his tenor saxophone, conjuring the highest altissimo wails and lowest foghorn blares. He then paused, while the band played on, to restate some of his environmental qualms. "We gotta live easy on the planet," Rollins implored. "Stop driving all those SUVs." Perhaps realizing that he could touch his audience much more powerfully with his horn than with his words, he finally sighed and said, "Y'all understand...
...Rigoletto, determined not to go unnoticed. During her first scene, before Rigoletto's house, she was just a demure little coloratura. But opportunity beckoned in her florid aria, Caro Nome, and Soprano Robin seized it: she unexpectedly gave out with what critics call a B "in altissimo"-up in the whistling range. The audience gasped at the piercing sound (which Conductor Fausto Cleva had specifically outlawed during rehearsals), and the critics scolded. Wrote the Examiner's Alexander Fried: "Startling is the word for the tone . . . It was so loud and impetuous that it sounded more like...
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart made his first visit to Italy, at 14, he heard a soprano called La Bastardella sing an "unbelievable" C in altissimo, an octave above the C in alt (high C) which is the difficult top of many a soprano's reach. Later in his Magic Flute, Mozart wrote for the Queen of Night-one of the most difficult coloratura soprano roles sung today-nothing higher than F in alt, or three and one-half tones below C in altissimo. Less than a century after Mozart's death, Jenny Lind produced effortless...
...pfennigs to study voice, she thought she was a mezzo-soprano. So did her first teacher, although a subsequent teacher lightened her voice so that, when Conductor Bruno Walter heard it, he gave her small lyric soprano parts at the Charlottenburg Opera. After her accidental discovery of C in altissimo, Soprano Sack perfected her coloratura. When, as a member of the able Dresden Opera, she sang in the world première of Richard Strauss's Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman), and later in a revival of his Ariadne Auf Naxos, Composer Strauss wrote in extra fioriture...
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