Word: aria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When she was twelve, her stepfather, "a whiz at selling anything," got Julie a spot with the "Starlight Roof" revue at the London Hippodrome. On her first night she stopped the show with an incredible F above high ¶in Titania's aria in Mignon. Immediately, her parents' agent, "Uncle Charlie" Tucker, moved in, arranged to get Julie's buckteeth straightened. Within a year, she was belting out her "bastardized opera" in a special command performance. "You sang beautifully, Julie," Her Majesty, now the Queen Mother, told her. She had become, at 13, the family...
...copyist whose job it is to decipher the scribblings of composers. He works in a dingy cubbyhole on Manhattan's upper West Side, surrounded by towering stacks of music and a massive duplicating machine named Ozalid. Together they make a unique team: Arnie singing an aria from La Bohème while bent over a new score, Ozalid humming contentedly and smelling of ammonia. Yet despite the humble trappings, for the past 25 years Arnstein's office has been the musical clearinghouse for practically every major U.S. composer...
...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...