Word: coloraturas
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Nancy Boyd, soprano, lacked purity Friday evening and was often blemished by curious shifts of timbre. Technically, however, she was in complete control and in her final number picked her way through a twisting coloratura passage and then leapt to a ringing high D. Tenor Roger Childs was called on only once--to sing "The Roasted Cygnet's Song," which lies in a stratospheric register--and Childs produced the notes as well as the proper quality of a wailing lament...
Massachusetts-born Cathy Berberian is not 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...
JOHN CAGE: VARIATIONS IV (Everest). Composer Cage arranges a curious counterpoint to the playing of David Tudor by splicing a variety of noises into the staccato piano theme: the sound of traffic on the street outside, a patrician English girl chattering nervously, a chanteuse, a coloratura, a boy soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins murdering high D at the end of the Queen of the Night's aria from The Magic Flute. Oddly but irresistibly, they add up to a cry from the heart...
...usual competent performance, handling the scattered ornaments (such as the arpeggios in the Act I finale) with total assurance. Sills keeps her voice rather supple and unfocused, resulting in dazzling, blended trills, but also a general blurring of the vocal line. Thus she is far more impressive in pure coloratura than in Rameau's customary cantabile style...
Arriving at Sydney airport for her first concert in her native city in 14 years, she was distressed to see that photographers were waiting. Commanded the coloratura: "Get those people away from here." Her husband-manager, Richard Bonynge, followed with a back handed swing at a photographer's camera and smashed the flashbulb...