Word: altos
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Adams amassed a huge choir for this concert, including the Collegium Musicum, The Harvard Glee Club, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus. The soloists, all from the Boston area, were Mary Strebing, soprano, Jan Curtis, alto, Robert Gartside, tenor, and Francis Hester, bass. The very fine orchestra included both Harvard students and Boston professionals contracted by concertmaster Robert Brink. Adams led all these forces in an intense and exciting performance...
...have a proclivity for equating feeling with decibels, but his playing is characterized by careful attention to rhythm and phrasing. Even his critics concede that he possesses one of the century's greatest organ-virtuoso techniques. Born in Princeton, Ill., where his mother was alto soloist in the Lutheran church and his father owned the local moviehouse and was the "best auctioneer the state of Illinois has ever seen," Fox began piano lessons at eight. A year later he discovered an old organ in a barn and taught himself to play, practicing up to 16 hours...
...lightness and ease. He gave intelligent emphasis to the text; were his range a tenor's, he would make an admirable Evangelist for the Passion settings. Ronald Coons, singing the tenor recitative, fared badly in comparison where his vibrato obscured his diction. He was much better, joined by alto Paula Shepard, in the duet which was the climax of the piece...
...shame that Carl Schlaikjer did not receive credit in the program listings for his oboe d'amore playing. It was a display of virtuoso caliber remarkable for its sensitivity of phrase and quality of tone. The instrument's sound filled the church in beautiful counterpoint to the alto-tenor duet...
...Emperor Hsuan Tsung, but did not reach its final, refined form until the reign of Emperor Chien Lung (1736 to 1796). The style poses formidable challenges to Western audiences. There is appealing exotica in the pentatonic backgrounds played by such instruments as the two-stringed erh-hu, or alto fiddle, and assorted gongs, clappers, drums and pipes. But the high, falsetto fioritura of the singers is difficult to take at the start, even if it is the Chinese ideal of good singing. Most problematical of all are the symbolic sets and the symbol-laden gestures...