Word: canto
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...best of the color silk-screen paintings, like Retroactive I, 1964, are such soaring bel canto that one is apt to skip over the odd resonance of their images. Consider the red patch in the lower right corner: a silk-screen enlargement of a stroboscopic photo by Gjon Mili of a walking nude, done in imitation of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was itself based on an earlier sequential photo by Marey. The image stutters backward through technological time. But then it also looks like the grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden...
...perfection of the festival's venue obscures its contributions to opera. Standards decreed for Mozart by Glyndebourne's first conductor, Fritz Busch, sound inevitable today: original languages, a minimum of bel canto fireworks and intimate orchestration as Mozart scored it. Venetian operas now returning to the international repertory were first revived here only a decade ago under the direction of Musicologist Raymond Leppard. Glyndebourne's current showpieces are the neglected conversational operas of Richard Strauss, Capriccio and Intermezzo. They were staged for the lustrous Swedish Soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom under Administrator Moran Caplat's dictum of "hiring...
...makes a fitting backdrop for the evening's vocal triumph. In the current vogue for bel canto opera, I Puritani appears increasingly in the repertory of major companies. Often the production is not much more than a vehicle for a soprano. But the Met also offers a stirring male trio: Pavarotti, Milnes and 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...
...Opera had established her American reputation in 1966, the La Scala Siege made her an international star. Last week one could see and hear why. In lesser hands, Rossini's florid vocal writing might be just that-little more than tedious vocalizing. With Sills, a mistress of bel canto, each triplet, each double-octave run, each pianissimo high note was given musical and dramatic meaning. At one point in the second act, she sang lying on her back on one of Maometto's couches. At another, she held a soft high D while strolling away from the audience...
...kept good company. Verrett, singing her first bel canto opera at the Met, was emphatic and secure as Neocle. It is a so-called pants role, written originally by Rossini for contralto, but later rescored for tenor in deference to the historic Parisian insistence that men are men and women are women. Today, the role could be sung by either tenor or contralto. The female version is more elaborate, and Conductor Schippers prefers it. Decked out in armor and an elegant Zachary Scott mustache, Verrett moved enough like a man to make the impersonation halfway acceptable. Hers...