Word: bassos
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...Vice president in charge of opera" is the title of the company's newest executive, oldtime Basso Herbert Witherspoon, 57, appointed personally last week by the company's potent President Samuel Insull. Clearly indicated was a trend away from "impresarioism" and temperament. In 1916 Harold Fowler McCormick, then president, appointed Herbert Morris Johnson as business manager. Yet despite his vigilance there followed such disastrous seasons as that of 1921-22 when, with Mary Garden as general director, the company performed brilliantly but turned in a whopping deficit. Maestro Polacco is an alien. Said Samuel Insull last week: "What...
Tall, imposing as a board chairman of the old school, is Basso Witherspoon. His gallant mustachios have greyed in later years, lost something of the grand sweep which might have enabled him in his Wagnerian days at the Metropolitan Opera (1908-17) to sing such hirsute rôles as Wotan and Hunding (Die Walküre) and Hagen (Die Götterdämmerung) with little extra adornment. Buffalo-born, great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Yale graduate (1895), he studied architecture before becoming a famed singer. After leaving the Metropolitan he did Wartime...
Also in London, for six weeks beginning in May at the Lyceum Theatre, a Russian Opera Company, starring Basso Feodor Chaliapin, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, whose famed pills were once advertised by a parody of "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing...
While Clevelanders headed by Senator Robert Johns Bulkley were paying high prices to import Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company, Detroit last week followed up an experiment. Detroit four years ago had no local opera. The idea of one originated with Thaddeus Wronski (Ziembinski), a Polish basso who had studied with famed Edouard De Reszke. He came to the U. S. to sing with the Boston Opera Company in 1911, and ended by giving vocal lessons in Detroit...
...Basso Wronski's operatic scheme ignores the star system. The singers are capable but neither their experience nor their names permit their asking big fees. Orchestra and chorus are made up of local musicians, a fact which contributes considerably to local pride. The largest subscriber pays $1,000 on a four-year basis, some 300 people subscribe...