Word: auf
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Inflaming Ease. In ten years in San Francisco, Adler's furious pursuit of perfection has brought remarkable results. The company has given the first U.S. performances of such works as Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream and Cherubini's Medea, revivals of Nabucco and Ariadne auf Naxos, American opera debuts to such singers as Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Boris Christoff, Sandor Konya and Sutherland. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who has yet to sing at New York's Metropolitan, has been appearing in San Francisco since 1955. On good nights, the opera's chorus and ballet...
What made the chorale's success doubly surprising was the fact that Conductor Shaw made no compromise with his audience. He not only included Friede auf Erden by Composer Arnold Schoenberg, who is ideologically unacceptable in Russian musical circles, but he also scheduled a great deal of religious music, which is virtually never heard in Russian concert halls. Shaw, 46, was surprised by the Russians' fervent response. Said he: "You couldn't ask for anything more." Soviet Deputy Cultural Minister Alexander Kuznetsov offered a hopeful explanation. "We Russians," said he, "also understand things of the spirit...
...Pardue's performance of the opening chorale-prelude, "Wachet auf," was the first I have ever heard taken at a sufficiently fast tempo. With most players, it sounds more like taps than reveille. The only trouble was that the pedal stop had pipes that were rather slow-speaking; at this tempo, therefore, the bass line tended to lag perceptibly behind the upper ones...
...quite the purity and control of four or five years ago, and the acoustics of the HST seem bright and clear almost to a fault. Handel's Care selve, for example, suffered from too many changes of vocal color within its long phrases, and the exaltation of Schubert's Auf dem Wasser zu singen was conveyed more in the singer's facial expression than in the somewhat imperfect articulation of the notes. Madame Schwarzkopf's historical curiosity got the better of her usually flawless taste when she chose to sing a version of Mozart's Voi che sapete "with embellishments...
...Bluemen, were projected with mastery; no less remarkable--for Schwarzkopf dearly loves a song in which she can be girlish and winning--was the sly humor of In dem Schatten meiner Locken ("In the shadow of my tresses, my lover fell asleep"), where the phrase "Weck'ich ihn nun auf? Ach nein!" ("Shall I wake him? Ah no"), repeated three times, was first coy, then a bit reproachful, and finally just the merest sigh of content. The Wolf group was lengthened by two encores, which Miss Schwarzkopf announced and (bless her!) translated: an exultant Ich hab' in Penna (a catalogue...