Word: arias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...music was an intricate work in five movements, the last a musical inversion of the first, the fourth the reverse of the second. Most listenable was No. 2, an aria on the Song of Songs, which British Tenor Richard Lewis made sweet and plaintive as an Urdu love song, each syllable quivering through half a dozen notes. Elsewhere, the 70-voice chorus surged in powerful chant, defeating the squeaking, thudding, 50-piece orchestra. When it was over, Stravinsky bowed to the orchestra in the thundering silence and bounced off. Said one festival official: "In a cathedral the audience cannot applaud...
...think?" He played with opinions as versifiers play with words. Don Juan's speech in Man and Superman ("They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public-spirited, only patriotic," etc.), is really a prose aria balancing on a counterpoint of ideas...
...songs and operatic excerpts ranging from Elizabethan period to the present. Ticknor has luscious G-G octave, which he handles expertly, but lower notes as yet weak and unfocused. Soprano not up to her usual standard. Her best singing was fittingly in the premiere of the "Glamis thou art" aria from a new opera Macbeth by Edward Goldman, who was present; an aptly melodramatic setting, with particularly effective use of low notes. Singers joined at end for pair of the too rarely heard Schumann duets and a scene from Carmen. Laurence Berman the able accompanist on an out-of-tune...
...ravishing. Renata Tebaldi has too heavy a soprano for the role of Liu, but she gives a more sustained performance than has been her wont of late. As the Calaf, Mario del Monaco is properly stentorian; recent years' wear in his voice is apparent only in the lyric aria "Nessun dorma." Although performance for performance the new set is balanced by the old Cetra album, improved recording gives the London set more of the flavor of Puccini's colorful score...
...craftsmen, but it also offers charm, humor, pageantry and plenty of cues for imagination, and these the Met missed. Scenic backgrounds were ingeniously provided by special 5,000-watt projectors, but most of the projections were hazy and dull (one, during the Queen of the Night's big aria, looked like a distorted Manhattan skyline). And despite the magic lights at his disposal, Scene Designer Harry Horner insisted on trundling in all the conventional heavy scenery; one notably ugly set, looking like a Stone Age apartment house, made more noise with its entrances and exits than the gods...