Word: cantos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pavarotti's voice is the "bel canto" voice par excellence: light, thin, with a pleasant floating quality: truly lyric. In contrast to tenors like Jon Vickers or James McCraken, who sing as if they had swallowed cooking knives, Pavarotti's sings effortlessly. Nothing is worse than a singer who strains. But unfortunately, Mr. Pavarotti, like too many other lyric tenors, suffers from the identity crisis of a vocal lightweight. Not satisfied with the lyric repertoire, he wants to conquer the dramatic roles; Manrico, Radames, Canio. He could make no greater mistake. Nothing destroys a lyric tenor more quickly or completely...
...only learned that when he won his long-overdue Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. By that time Neruda's poetry had become virtual proverb for most Chileans. The poet could attract 5,000 or more working people on a rainy night to hear him recite the verses of "Canto General," his paean to them, or "Spain in Our Hearts." During the Popular Unity government of Salvadore Allende, his verses were painted on thousands of walls throughout Chile. A spokesman for the left, Neruda always wrote for, and to, the people, all people. His poetry, and more recently his Memoirs...
...bank vault and skipped the country. Doing a spot of housecleaning at the Pall Mall branch of Barclays Bank the other day, officials opened the unclaimed trunk and turned up one of the literary finds of the century. Among the treasures: an original copy of the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, by Davies' pal Lord Byron; early manuscripts of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and two possibly unpublished poems by Shelley. Also scattered in the trunk were some 14 letters from Byron, including a complaint that he had picked...
...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...