Word: bassos
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...second half of the opera, the symbolism gets thicker: Columbus' shadow and conscience appear. At one point, Columbus I and II (a baritone and a basso, respectively) clasp each other and vow to be together in death, and the finale finds a general movement towards paradise as the dove appears in radiant glory while angels (and everybody else) sing a deafening "Hallelujah...
Clean-Scrubbed Kansas. His opening curtain rose on a prairie-farmyard scene. His characters were plain, salt-of-the-earth folk: a grandfather (Basso Normaiv Treigle), a mother (Contralto Jean Hand-zlik), daughter Laurie (Soprano Rosemary Carlos) and a pair of drifting farmhands. The plot, such as it was, moved from Laurie's high-school pregraduation party through a brief, unrealistic courtship ("I'd like to have a wife for a while," sang one of the drifters), and ended on a symbolic note by sending the girl off in search of her future...
...Basso Hines's voice was as big, dark and smooth as the best of them, and his basketball-player's height (6 ft. 6½ in.) gave him a properly commanding appear ance. His craggy makeup, with its shaggy beard and beetling brows, made him resemble the tormented Mussorgsky him self. He did not quite have the authority to dominate the role, but few expected a first try to be a great one, and the crowd yelled itself hoarse after the death scene, called Hines back for seven solo curtain calls...
Except for Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust, he was long relegated to medium-size basso parts, found it difficult to compete with star foreigners for the leading roles. As a result, he does some shrewd horse-trading, e.g., he still sings the relatively minor parts of Brother Pimen (in Boris) and the Grand Inquisitor (in Don Carlo) in exchange for a share of the bigger parts...
Boris on the Couch. Basso Hines applied his scientific turn of mind to preparing his Boris. Last spring, on the Met tour, he took the character to half a dozen psychologists for analysis, wrote his findings for the current Musical America magazine. His own theory: Boris was a hysteric and a manic-depressive whose chest-heaving and temple-pounding came as natural results. His death, the cause of which is unclear in the libretto, was almost surely due to a cerebral hemorrhage. "Of course I didn't try to make a case history out of him," says Hines. "Once...