Word: coloraturas
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Costa has been a star of the San Francisco Opera ever since her debut there in 1959, but her voice has developed remarkably in the past two or three seasons. She is a strong lyric soprano with an agile coloratura range, giving her an easy facility in a wide reach of the soprano repertoire. In New York the critics found it hard to keep their minds on her singing because of her dazzling beauty. The Met, they suggested, could use some dazzlers...
Died. Amelita Galli-Curci, 81, Italian-born coloratura soprano, one of the last survivors of the "golden age" of opera singers, a tiny Milanese with a flutelike voice who was a sensation at her 1908 debut in Rigoletto at Trani (a provincial Italian town where she was paid $60 a month), moved to the U.S. in 1916 to sing the great coloratura roles (Rosina, Lucia, Lakmé) with both the Metropolitan and Chicago Operas earning up to $15,000 a performance while on tour, retired in the 1930s to California but continued through her many recordings to haunt opera buffs...
With Charles Bressler as tenor soloist, Dunn and the Festival Orchestra recreated Cantata 55 ("Ich armer Suendenknecht") and three arias chosen from other cantatas. Bressler, who might be called a coloratura tenor, apparently found no difficulty in notes an octave above middle C; lower, however, his voice was so mobile that it seemed thin at any one instant. Dunn chose slightly strange tempos in the closing work, Brandenburg Concerto No. 5: the second movement was faster, the third slower than usual...
...worked through the logistical gambits of mounting the U.S. premiere of Alban Berg's atonal, macabre, erotic opera Lulu, Crosby collected a power ful king and queen: Conductor Robert Craft, a devotee of Berg, and brilliant and beautiful Coloratura Soprano Joan Carroll, who had sung the leading role 39 times before, yet never in English. But the chess game only began with the big names. Scene shifters had to be taught to handle six sets ranging from a wealthy home to a brothel; dressers had to learn how to zip Joan Carroll in and out of ten costume changes...
...Rire song cycle, the lovely a cappella Motets. The sonata's first movement is nervously melodic, the second drowsily romantic, the third merely gymnastic; nowhere does the music lead the two instruments into the tense conversation the form requires. The piano simply accompanies the clarinet, as in a coloratura song, and the clarinet does little more than produce the kind of music an inspired Greek might dream up to charm a belly dancer. It is vapid, threadbare stuff-good fun for Benny Goodman, but hardly sport for Bernstein...