Word: aria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Miss. Owen's musical personality, expressed with restraint in the Yannatos work, blossomed in the Verdi Bolero, "Merce dilette, amiche." She sang the aria with perfect intonation and virtuosity, and the audience demanded that she repeat it. The second time around, Miss Owen was every inch the soprano. Flowers in hand, she sang to the audience, to the orchestra, to Yannatos and, quite possibly, to Verdi himself. She was obviously enjoying herself and her joy was contagious...
...horn alone; admittedly it is a dirty trick to play on the unfortunate hornist, but it is a common enough practice, and this particular player was not up to it. He also succeeded in spoiling a large part of the orchestral accompaniment to the soprano in the Beethoven aria Primo amore, piacer del ciel. In the second half of the minuet in Haydn's Symphony No. 14, he not only had trouble in playing the correct intervals, but also played sharps where they were not written...
...having trouble getting his instrument to speak in the slow movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1, somewhat disrupting the serene beauty of the movement. There were strings who had intonation difficulties occasionally throughout, and rhythm troubles in both Beethoven works. At one point in the aria, the dramatic effect of what was supposed to be a Grand Pause was lost in the scraping of some disoriented violist or 'cellist...
Then there was David Borden's aria for soprano and orchestra on Dylan Thomas's Force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age. There was no clear relationship between the music and the words. The poem invokes a myriad of very different images: plant metabolism, evaporation, the action of tide and wind, and time, the dripping of blood and the hanging of a man. The music pounded along its atonal course without proper variation in color for the different verses. Borden did demonstrate his sensitivity to the poem, once, with his treatment of the reiterated...
What is the point of a stagehand appearing in the middle of aria who paints the same white patch of scenery she painted in the last scene, again with a dry red brush? If the cast has to flirt with the crew, couldn't they be more convincing--and remember their infatuations in the next...