Word: aria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...freely and clearly although without much range of emotion. Spring Fairbank sings the soprano in both cantatas smoothly and precisely. She is especially fine in the Coffee Cantata, which has a real plot, and a ridiculous one at that; Miss Fairbank milks almost as many laughs from her coffee aria as Richard Fermin does later from the Beatles. James Jones as Schlendrian has a wonderful voice, but his over-acting was almost painful by the time the cantata ended...
...accuse Jones of an undisclosed misdeed, subject him to a "trial" in a cotton warehouse and beat him mercilessly. He seeks help from the Legal Aid Society, friends, a minister, but to no avail. In desperation, he turns and pleads his case to the audience in a moving aria, ending with the anguished cry, "I am your conscience." In the final scene, while the orchestra plays a wailing New Orleans funeral dirge, the white toughs drag the beaten Negro on stage, kill him with a shovel, and bury him in an earthen grave...
...Hitchcock and turns up onstage as a breastplated soldier in Eugen Onegin or leading the soldier's band in Faust. But he is really a frustrated conductor. In the theater, in the subway, walking along the street, his hands are continually dancing as he sings and hums some aria playing through his mind (he also knows the words and music to more than 1,000 lieder, continually amazes the singers by quoting snatches of librettos from obscure operas). At night, sitting in his office, he has been known to sneak a baton out of his desk drawer and direct...
...splicing a variety of noises into the staccato piano theme: the sound of traffic on the street outside, a patrician English girl chattering nervously, a chanteuse, a coloratura, a boy soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins murdering high D at the end of the Queen of the Night's aria from The Magic Flute. Oddly but irresistibly, they add up to a cry from the heart...
GLUCK: ORFEO ED EURIDICE (RCA Victor; 3 LPs). An opera for people who do not like singing, Orfeo is long on dances, and its best-known aria (in the Dance of the Blessed Spirits) is reserved for a flute. Renato Fasano and the Virtuosi di Roma give a pastel but translucent orchestral performance, almost otherworldly, as befits the score. Unfortunately, the singers are a bit too bloodless, even the promising young mezzo, Shirley Verrett, who sings Orfeo...