Word: birgit
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VERDI: REQUIEM (RCA Victor). The virtues of this new recording are the soloists. Carlo Bergonzi is good enough to make the listener forget Jussi Bjoerling's masterly reading of the Ingemisco. Birgit Nilsson is all fire; Lili Chookasian and Ezio Flagello both have big, warm voices. The difficulties stem from Erich Leins-dorf's conducting of the Boston Symphony. The pace is much too slow. The long, dramatic Otello-like lines enshroud the listener rather than move him. Tullio Serafin's interpretation of the Requiem (Angel) is still the best...
SONGS OF SCANDINAVIA (London). Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish farmer's daughter, puts aside the superhuman passions of Wagner's Valhalla to sing most expressively some quiet love songs and mystic reveries about the fir forests, mists and dripping rocks of Scandinavia. Seven songs are by Sibelius, three by Grieg, and four by the little-known Swedish songwriter and symphonist, Ture Rangstr...
...second act, she showed the stuff great prima donnas are made of, held the final high note beyond everyone else on the stage and, with an arrogant toss of her head, strode off still singing full throttle. Her warm, artfully shaded voice is not as large as Birgit Nilsson's, nor does she favor the bel canto filigrees of Joan Sutherland. Instead she infuses a role with an earthy energy reminiscent of Maria Callas, a quality which, above all else, excites...
...revised the scenery. Grandpa's gods and goddesses journey toward their Gotterdümmerung through abstract-mobile backgrounds created by light projections with only the minimum of necessary realism: an oppressive Mycenaean Valhalla and a Gibichungen hall studded with hundreds of bleached animal skulls. A cast headed by Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Theo Adam, James King, Anja Silja, Lili Chookasian and Leonie Rysanek responded to Wieland's direction with magnificent singing. Under the baton of Conductor Karl Boehm, the orchestra became accompaniment and comment, echo and counterpoint of each gesture onstage...
Among themselves, singers are naturally divided. Soprano Birgit Nilsson has referred to a tenor partner as "having a resonance chamber where his brain used to be." Metropolitan Opera Soprano Teresa Stratas takes a feminine view: "Stupidity, no. Egomania, yes. Tenors seem stupid because they are so fully absorbed in themselves. Sopranos -they all have to be pretty smart cookies to have gotten where they are." Tenor Richard Tucker, in a cheerily frivolous reaction that goes far to refute the thesis, comments: "Since tenors usually carry their fat elsewhere, you can be sure they are not fatheads. And besides, the mere...