Word: birgit
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Wagner has not fared well at the Metropolitan Opera during the 21-year regime of Rudolf Bing. No fault of Bing's: except for the shining example of Soprano Birgit Nilsson, most singers during that period barely coped with Wagner's long, heroic, leading roles. On the whole, it was left to stage directors and designers to make up in looks what was missing in sound, usually with limited success...
...particularly not for Wagnerian roles like Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung. But she is ideally suited to bel canto, and to the French lyric romanticism of Gounod and Massenet. In these areas she is unbeatable, and even among the diverse other sopranos in this age of great sopranos?Birgit Nilsson, Sutherland, Price, Marilyn Horne, Monserrat Caballé?she more than holds...
...Superstar concert tour and the LP provided Mary Magdalene and Pilate. "There's a special kind of singer needed for rock opera," O'Horgan explains. "It's much more gut, more street. We have vocal ranges in this show that no one could produce without a mike, not even Birgit Nilsson...
...gongs. The whales were accompanied by whooping brass glissandi, glockenspiels, tam-tam and bass drum. When it was all over, the audience applauded enthusiastically, though it remained unclear whether their applause had been for Composer Hovhaness or the whales themselves. Backstage, the whale voices had already been nicknamed "Beverly," "Birgit" and "Cesare...
Once in a generation there appears an artist who by virtue of voice and temperament seems to symbolize an entire school of singing. Today, Birgit Nilsson is the archetypal Wagnerian Soprano, just as Jussi Bjoerling was the ultimate Italian Tenor during the 1940s and '50s. Both are Swedish, proving that national style has nothing to do with nationality. Since the death of Leonard Warren in 1960, no one man has been acknowledged by critics and conductors as the quintessential Italian Baritone. Now, though, there may be a legitimate claimant to the title. Like Warren and Lawrence Tibbett before...