Word: coloratura
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...score has two powerful moments that foreshadow the composer's mature style. The first comes in the opening, when the heroine Odabella (Soprano Marilyn Zschau) confronts Attila (Bass Samuel Ramey), who has just killed her father and razed her city, Aquileia. In a fiery aria laced with coloratura, she swears vengeance. Around her a chorus of barbarians praises Attila's conquests. The scene is an early example of the art of dramatic juxtaposition perfected at the end of the third act of Otello, with lago gloating over his fallen master as the Venetians outside sing the Moor...
...bonneted young lass stepped demurely from stage right. But the savvy fans at Manhattan's Delacorte Theater would know those brown eyes anywhere. They belonged to Linda Ronstadt, making her operatic debut on the day she turned 34. The rock star seemed a mite shaky in the coloratura runs, but the audience melted when she warbled Gilbert and Sullivan love songs to her devoted pirate swain. So did the swain, played by fellow Rocker Rex Smith, 24. Said he: "When she walks out the first time, I don't have to act. It's like a fantasy...
...wounded attitudes. But if Shipley evokes various girl groups, Benatar sounds like all of them packed tight into one. She can put a lot of sass into a song like I Need a Lover ("Who won't drive me crazy"). Benatar's teen-age studies as a coloratura soprano have taught her, she says, "a lot of technique and stamina - I can scream without hurting myself...