Word: coloraturas
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Died. Lily Pons, 701sh, tiny coloratura soprano whose trilling delighted audiences worldwide for more than 30 years; of cancer; in Dallas. A prizewinning pianist at the Paris Conservatory, Pons switched to singing when she discovered she had perfect pitch and extraordinary vocal cords. In 1929 at the Opera House in Mulhouse, Alsace, she debuted in Lakmé, a role in which she later daringly appeared, navel exposed, in costume sans midriff. One of her most famous performances was at the Metropolitan Opera in 1931: she sang the difficult "Mad Scene" in Lucia di Lammermoor...
...loosening up. The stereo rig blares, though Misha may interrupt it to recite the Russian poetry - Pasternak, Mandelstam, Pushkin - he loves. Records of Florence Foster Jenkins' haywire coloratura are another new enthusiasm. He enjoyed a recent trip to Paris because "there, people have more time than in New York." He is absorbing the American pace, however. When Gelsey Kirkland stalled at a recent photo session, he nudged her with "Let's go, Gelsey...
...tenor or contralto. The female version is more elaborate, and Conductor Schippers prefers it. Decked out in armor and an elegant Zachary Scott mustache, Verrett moved enough like a man to make the impersonation halfway acceptable. Hers is not a warm voice, but it is clear and brilliant. Dramatic coloratura lines spun out in the third act's "Non temer" brought Verrett a three-minute ovation of her own. As Maometto, the tall, athletic Justino Diaz not only displayed one of the richest, manliest basses around, but actually made this terrible Turk a figure of dignity and believable emotion...
Justino Diaz, Sills's leading man, has some rarely combined talents for a basso; the lightness and flexibility that coloratura singing demands, and a natural sound so powerful that it cuts through the orchestra as clearly as the shriller upper voices. Like Sills, he does a lot in this production with a boring character. The passion he shows towards Pamira, especially in their love scene, is about as much as they ever allow on the Met stage...
...belated recognition of her is a slight anticlimax. This production of Siege, mounted in 1969 for the centennial of Rossini's death, was the vehicle for her debut at La Scala in Milan; even then she had already been acclaimed as one of the greatest coloratura sopranos of this century. The production was so successful that the Met bought it and signed its first contract with Sills--that bastion of complacent conservatism having taken six years to acknowledge what everyone else had known for a long time that Sills, an American, was as good as any of her European colleagues...