Word: cantos
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Vincenzo Bellini's 1831 opera Norma is one of the Matterhorns of the repertory for sopranos. Many of the world's finest singers have come to grief on its melodic precipices because they lacked the bel canto technique, emotional projection, and soaringly powerful voice that the title role requires. The 19th century Soprano Lilli Lehmann said it was easier to sing three Brünnhildes than one Norma, and the great French Prima Donna Pauline Viardot was so obsessed with the difficulties of the part that the last word she spoke on her deathbed was "Norma." Maria Callas...
...Scala's novelty for this tour was Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, a bel canto relic that the company recently revived after a century of relative neglect. A retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story that owes little to Shakespeare, Capuleti, with Bellini's intimate scale, pervading sweetness and utter predictability, is a distinct contrast to Verdi's powerful, primitive themes and vaulting imagination. But the company -notably the two leads, Tenor Giacomo Aragall and Soprano Renata Scotto-traded the flawed gusto of its Trovatore and Nabucco performances for restraint and quiet artistry, making...
...musicianship of the singers, especially the two sopranos, but in this performance Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Home are equal to the task. In the early scenes, Sutherland's voice has a rather thick, clotted quality that soon clears up; Home is superb throughout. For aficionados of bel canto and tortuous vocal ornamentations, this recording is a major event, owing in no small part to Bonynge's intelligent handling of the text and the London Symphony...
...only a singer of note but also a singer of sounds. Her expressive voice, ranging three octaves from contralto to coloratura, enables her to handle every thing in the standard repertory, but Cathy prefers to specialize in avant-garde music. Impressed by her ability to mix bel canto with barks, grunts, moans and sighs and to compete vocally with tape-recorded noises and electronic beeps, such experimental composers as John Cage, Sylvano Busotti and Luciano Berio (her estranged hus band) have helped make her the undisputed diva of the daring (TIME, Oct. 4, 1963) by creating pieces for her. Currently...
...consider first the second half of the book, including the version of Juvenal, three Horatian odes, the Brunetto Latini canto from Dante (Inferno XV),and four sonnets by the sixteenth century Spanish poets Gongora and Quevedo. I say versions because I do not think these poems belong in the class which Lowell described as imitations in the preface to his 1961 volume. There he concentrated on the transmission of tone, quoting Boris Pasternak's remark about the usual translator's sacrifice of tone to literal meaning. He then cautioned us to read Imitations as a book of original poems, with...