Word: arias
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...producers of Peyton Place saw more in Mia than she saw in herself. For two years as Allison MacKenzie, Mia made the soap opera one long disaster aria and attracted the attention of millions of viewers?including Frank Sinatra. It was 1964?a very good year for long-haired swingers and toupeed singers. The way the public pop-psyched it out, at 19, she was looking for a father; at 48, he was looking for his youth. Their life became about as secluded as an airport. The couple took the most curious romantic cruise since the owl and the pussycat...
Mozart's Vesperae was much more exciting and slightly less well-done. The major problem was the grim Carl Orff assault which soprano Donna Newman made on the sacred coloratura aria Laudate Dominum: all the notes were there, too many of them flat, all of them invested with a Donizettian apocalyptic bravura, Mozart may have been only one year away from great operatic achievement in Idomeneo, but at the moment he was still close by the altar. Miss Curtis seemed intimidated by this Salome-like display but still bettered her prosaic performance in the Schutz. The two male soloists sang...
...center after a protest rally in the Old Town Square in front of the monument to the 15th century Czech reformer Jan Hus. In the evening, demonstrators waving Czech flags marched to the National Theater, where the audience later gave a thunderous, emotional ovation to the final aria of Smetana's opera Libuse...
...flashing lights, it unfolded a plotless jumble of scenes that might have resulted from a collaboration by Brecht, Beckett and Buster Keaton. "Nobody looks at me," sang one character in a typically enigmatic line, "therefore I retrace my steps." In another episode, a scruffy charwoman incongruously trilled out an aria while brandishing a three-foot wooden spoon at the other characters...
Although Gaunt dies rather early in the play, Josef Sommer makes him unforgettable. Gaunt's great panegyrie on England ("this scept'red isle") usually emerges as a one-key aria. But Sommer takes his time with it, carefully shapes its rhythms and dynamics, and lovingly introduces modulations--so that the whole thing comes across as a miniature scena with dramatic form. I have never heard it done better...