Word: arias
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...just after the turn of the century, in the golden age of U.S. opera. On the stage of the Metropolitan the great Australian-born Soprano Nellie Melba was singing Marguerite's spinning-wheel aria in Gounod's Faust. In midphrase Nellie was interrupted by the clatter of half a dozen wax cylinders which smashed down one after the other from the fly floor high above the stage. There, in brown suit and wing collar, crouched a spidery little man over an Edison cylinder gramophone with a horn almost as big as he was. Although he lost the Melba...
...pretty street singer who ditches her poor but honest boy friend (Baritone Theodor Uppman) for a viceroy of Peru, Soprano Patrice Munsel does some discreet bumps and grinds, rides an ass, and prettily sings the operetta's best-known tune, a farewell aria to her sweetheart-one of those lovely, almost-convincing pieces of lyricism that Offenbach turned out along with his musical ironies. In addition to the ass ridden by Soprano Munsel-a beast named Amos, rented at $30 a night-Actor-Director Ritchard has assigned himself a black charger for a grand entrance as the viceroy. This...
Joining her for the first part of the recital was violinist David Hurwitz. After a nicely balanced performance of a Bach aria with obbligato, they presented Gustav Holst's Four Songs for Voice and Violin. Holst wrote these to please a friend who said she liked to sing as she fiddled, but on presenting them to her the composer was told, "I can only hum when I play." As long as two performers are necessary, Holst could have wished none better than Hurwitz and Miss Smith to present his simple, modal settings...
...Scarpia's den looking like the Queen of the Night in her black velvet and ermine gown and glittering tiara. Her lip curled shrewishly at Scarpia's overtures, but she staggered when she heard her lover's tortured screams. She wound up her big show-stopping aria, Vissi d'Arte, on her knees just in time to receive the ovation that greeted it. Meanwhile, Mitropoulos, silhouetted against the stage lights, was kneading, soothing, irritating, roiling his orchestra, bouncing around in the climaxes like a marionette on a string. With a start, Callas took the knife from...
...Count Almaviva, Malcolm Ticknor handles his small voice nicely in his arias but tends to get drowned out in the ensembles. His acting is particularly effective in the second act when he pretends to be a drunken soldier. Margaret Russell sings Berta's aria rather pleasingly...