Word: bravura
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...James Morris, 29, whom the company has brought along carefully. Though Mimes' baritone is too dramatic for a legato line, his declamations are thrilling. Pavarotti, a money tenor in the way that Tom Seaver is a money pitcher, revels in his recklessly high flourishes. Sutherland fits into this bravura company, partly because she never tries to outshine her colleagues. A languid, settled presence onstage, she has been called in Italy, with affection and an edge of wit, La Serenissima (the most serene). At 49 she still sings with supple power, and her coloratura flights have the brilliance and definition...
...audiences, and it still sounds good today. With a chamber orchestra drawn from the Houston Symphony, Conductor Lawrence Foster, the symphony's regular leader since 1972, makes his players key members of the drama. He cannot draw from Sopranos Evelyn Mandac (Almirena) and Noelle Rogers (Armida) the Baroque bravura he gets from Home, but Mandac is an especially lovely singer with a bright future. In Samuel Ramey (Argante), Foster has a bass baritone of extraordinary dramatic and lyric gifts, and it is easy to see why Ramey is fast filling the shoes and cape of the late Norman Treigle...
...tries to satisfy the demands of his groupies (they want him to play his hit, Chopsticks), his conscience (by introducing some new music by a radical named Wagner) and his id (casing the audience for a suitable post-concert bed partner). If there is such a thing as bravura irony, this sequence is a prime example...
...That bravura statement of Tory faith earned her a standing ovation when she preached it to the annual convention of Young Conservatives recently. But Mrs. Thatcher's zealous championship of individual initiative may not go down well in the depressed towns of the industrial north and Scotland-the two areas where the party must gain strength if it is ever to return to power...
Shaw wrote the play in 1895, saying that it was "hardly more than a bravura piece to display the virtuosity of the two principal performers." He actually had two performers in mind when he wrote it: Ellen Terry--considered one of the most popular actresses of the time--and Richard Mansfield, also a popular actor and the producer of Shaw's first play staged in America. After they turned him down he made an aborted attempt to sell the play to Henry Irving, who was something of a tyrannical manager-leading man at London's Lyceum Theater. Possibly Shaw...