Word: aria
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Mado Robin, 35, a petite ambassadress from the Paris Opera, opened the season as Gilda in Verdi's 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...
Sorrow & Pleasure. A few moments later, Nelli began her toughest assignment, Aïda's great aria from the Nile Scene. Toscanini demanded that she sing a long, difficult phrase in one breath. "I know," he had said earlier, "there is not a soprano today who does it. But you do it." He also insisted on his own interpretation of anguish in the phrase O patria mia, o patria mia. He sang it through himself, beating his chest. Nelli tried it. No, no, said the maestro, and launched into the phrase again, leaning toward her, hugging his own shoulders...
...Knock on Wood. Danny tries to give himself more room to whirl around in. Melvin Frank and Norman Panama wrote their script - and Kaye's talented wife Sylvia Fine contributed the specialty numbers - somewhat in the style of an aria with a few optional passages scattered along the way, at which points Danny could go into a comic Kayedenza if the inspiration came. And inspiration does come. One of the funniest parts of the picture is the scene in which Kaye. on the spur of the moment, becomes an automobile salesman sputtering trade talk ("overhead underslung oscillating compression decravinator...
Bach and Scarlatti were precise contemporaries yet the coupling of their works produced a striking juxta-position. The immensely powerful, almost gruff joyfulness of Bach's final variation and the lofty simplicity of the closing aria still lingered in my mind as Mr. Kirkpatrick returned after intermission and performed in immediate succession three 1) major Scarlatti sonatas which displayed to an extreme degree elements of exotic Spanish fury. These elements are all the more powerful in Scarlatti because they seem to burst forth from the refined and lyrical Italian style in which he was trained. For me, Mr. Kirkpatrick...
...soprano was at her best in modern selections, especially in the Air de Lia. Taken from Debussy's carly cantata L'Enfant Prodigue (for which he won the Prix de Rome), this aria is one of the most taxing in the repertoire. Miss Wheeler managed its wide range with case and made believable, even in a concert setting, the portrait of a bereaved mother's grief...