Word: arias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bach, were not unduly surprised. But New York Times Critic Olin Downes had had enough. Said he: ". . . More could have been heard had it not been for the extremely lachrymose and dilatory tempi, and the unblushing sentimentalism in interpretation, which almost uniformly prevailed, so that the B-Minor aria with the violin solo sounded like the Méditation from Thaïs. . . . Bach's music . . . stood up surprisingly well under the handicap...
...years the New Friends have played their devotees whole marathons of chamber music: virtually the entire output of Beethoven, Haydn, Schumann, Brahms, Mozart. They have never deigned to relieve the high-brow austerity of their concerts by anything so low-brow as a violin concerto or an opera aria...
...currently starred as a horse-opera hero in Pathé's serial The Lone Rider. ("Those horses bounce the bejesus out of me-I hate 'em.") But Houston has learned things in Hollywood. He takes grand operas in hand, revamps the stories, alters characters, rewords arias-and of course translates them into English. Rossini's The Barber of Seville, now in rehearsal, he telescoped from a three-and-a-half to a two-and-a-half-hour opera (including intermissions), put in spoken dialogue, built up the lesson scene between Rosina and the Count by adding comedy...
...immensely difficult coloratura soprano aria, even for markswomanly singers, is the one in Mozart's Magic Flute in which the Queen of the Night declares that she is boiling with fury. Last week a recording of this air, advertised entirely by rumor, enjoyed a lively little sale at Manhattan's Melotone Recording Studio...
Last week a small orchestra sat on the Town Hall stage, with most of the principal saints in evening dress, the chorus in monkish robes. After seven years Virgil Thomson's tunes still sounded engaging, well-made, occasionally trivial. The most charming aria was still that sung by St. Ignatius: "Pigeons on the grass alas. Short longer grass short longer shorter yellow grass," etc. But Four Saints in Three Acts still owed a lot to its original Cellophane...