Word: cecilia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BACKSTAGE AT THE OPERA WITH CECILIA BARTOLI...
...there another art form that attracts so many sublime sufferers and so many nuts?" asks Manuella Hoelterhoff in her new book Cinderella & Company: Backstage at the Opera with Cecilia Bartoli. The narrative, loosely based on a two-year period in the life of the world famous mezzo-soprano, provides a way for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hoelterhoff to expose all the craziness of the opera world. Her readable anecdotes of eccentric divas, push managers and overweight sopranos give a "behind-the-scenes" picture of opera that will delight everyone from the hard-core opera buffs who live for this...
This chatty smorgasbord is nominally about Cecilia Bartoli, but the greater part is a hilarious collection of anecdotes, gossip and shrewd observations concerning that unique branch of humanity, the opera singer. Tenors are uncommonly stupid; divas, when they are not scarfing down pasta, are outrageously unreliable. The imperious troublemaker Kathleen Battle, feeling chilly in a limo in Los Angeles, is said to have telephoned her manager in New York City and ordered him to call her driver to ask him to turn down the air conditioning. A nervous Deborah Voigt, waiting backstage for her entrance, absentmindedly ate a prop chicken...
...them? We can't simply throw them out. Out of tradition and aesthetic fashion, Bach's St. John Passion will continue to be performed, and we will be lucky when it is performed as brilliantly and discussed as thoroughly and as responsibly as it was by The Boston Cecilia...
Bach's St. John Passion, more philosophical than the expansive St. Matthew Passion, has an eerie, sonorous sound that plays off of soft, massive murmurs braced against loud declarations by the chorus. The dramatic moments are based on a timing which The Boston Cecilia hits with ease: the narrator will call, "Sie aber sprachen," and the chorus will resound with the answer, "Jesum von Nazareth." The chorus does not back down from the lines which most directly implicate "the Jews". At the proper moments they exhort Pilate to accept Jesus ("Nicht diesen, sondern Barrabam") and crucify him ("Kreuzige! Kreuzige!") with...