Word: coloraturas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Manhattan-born Soprano Sills bowed at the age of three on a kiddy broadcast called Uncle Bob's Children's Hour, and even today is not above singing the tune she sang then (The Wedding of Jack and Jill). At seven she was performing such coloratura arias as the Bell Song from Lakmé and Caro Nome from Rigoletto, and singing them with skill; at twelve she retired for further study, but three years later she was back in harness, ready for the long road ahead...
...first act of the Metropolitan Opera's new Don Pasquale, Baritone Frank Guarrera peeks behind a screen where Coloratura Roberta Peters is making an onstage costume change. "Brava," he sings with a leer. "Brava, brava!" That sentiment might well serve as comment on the whole production. Peters & Co. have turned Gaetano Donizetti's old (1843) comic opera into something to cheer about...
...staging makes him a passionate amateur gardener; he sang in a deeply resonant style that may ultimately restore their proper musical qualities to comic basso roles, long lost in mere boom-and-rasp renditions. Tenor Cesare Valletti sang with the sweetness and eloquence of a low-pressure Caruso. Pretty Coloratura Peters was expertly coquettish. Using her voice almost as if it were a tangible object, she tossed a trill to port, another to starboard, a third dead amidships of the great opera house...
...Sake? But Callas' singing, remarkable as it is, accounts for only part of her impact. To the unregenerate art of operatic acting, she brings a powerful personality. It shows in the expressive toss of her head as she trills some word less coloratura, in the dramatic contrast of her long white fingers spread against a jet-black robe, in the sudden change in her face as, in mid-song, a new thought crosses her mind. She listens with a special intentness while others sing to her-although it is a question whether the pain that sometimes touches her brow...
...settings projected behind fixed arches onto a backdrop screen. Ahead for the enterprising San Francisco Opera this season: the U.S. premiere of Sir William Walton's Troilus and Cressida (TIME, Dec. 13), and a revival of Rimsky-Korsakov's Coq d'Or with first-rate Negro Coloratura Mattiwilda Dobbs...