Word: britten
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Best Opera Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten...
...kaleidoscopically varied program of pop, jazz, classical and folk songs accompanied by an equally diverse instrumental ensemble (accordion, marimba, guitar, synthesizers, a brass quintet--you name it, she's got it). Every number, be it Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, O Come, All Ye Faithful or Benjamin Britten's Corpus Christi Carol, is sung with stylish grace and disarming sincerity. And unlike most classical singers, Von Otter knows how to make a pop tune swing...
...there's more to View than switchblades and red sauce. Bolcom has refracted Miller's '50s angst through the prism of an unlikely source: Benjamin Britten's great opera Peter Grimes, in which a deeply alienated antihero confronts a band of small-minded English villagers who demand his conformity or his life. Incapable of sleeping with his wife Beatrice (soprano Catherine Malfitano) and tortured by his dark longing for his niece, Eddie finds himself similarly ostracized by his fellow immigrants--a situation that allows Bolcom to deploy his chorus to galvanizing effect. View is among the first American operas...
Enter England's Alfred Deller, who, starting in the mid-1940s, singlehandedly revived countertenor singing. Deller inspired Benjamin Britten to write the first countertenor role in a 20th century opera, Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Other singers began emulating Deller, and as the revival of interest in baroque opera picked up steam in the '70s, countertenors became popular once more...
...understandably more interested in talking about his first CD, Handel Operatic Arias (Virgin Veritas); or his recent debut at New York City's Avery Fisher Hall, a four-encore lovefest at which he sang art songs by Britten, Schubert and Ravel so gorgeously that the audience was reduced to frenzied foot-stomping; or the fact that in November he will record Handel's Rinaldo with Cecilia Bartoli. It is all proof positive that the ex-tenor with the shaky top has definitely found his other voice...