Word: coloraturas
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...Covent Garden, Manhattan's Metropolitan. Caruso, with whom she made a stunning U.S. debut as Tosca in 1916, once said that Claudia "knew all of our stage tricks before she wore long skirts." She had a voice to match her acting: she could, and did, sing coloratura, lyric and dramatic soprano parts with equal ease. In Buenos Aires one time, when Giovanni Martinelli momentarily lost his voice in the third act of Catalani's Loreley,* she carried off his tenor part as well...
Last week, bald, stocky Maestro Kostelanetz and wife, Met Coloratura Lily Pons, were returning to the U.S. from a European vacation. With guest-conducting, a full fall recording schedule and an estimated $100,000 annual royalties to look forward to, the mix master felt well content. "I am fortunate," he said, "to have lived at a time when radio and records have made it possible for more people to hear more music than has been heard since the beginning of time...
...first few bars of a Peruvian folk chant called High Andes, the full-figured Peruvian girl onstage rumbled roundly at the bottom of contralto range. Then, to their astonishment, she soared effortlessly up a full four octaves, began trilling like a canary at the top of coloratura. At the end of her first song, the audience was still too surprised to raise more than warm applause. The second, Tumpa (Earthquake), brought cheers; after the third, a pyrotechnical Inca Hymn to the Sun, the applause and cheers swelled to a roar for encores. Guest Conductor Arthur Fiedler, who had a plane...
...precocious age of 17 she became a Metropolitan Opera diva. At that point, pert little Patrice Munsel thought her career was dead ahead down a straight & narrow path. She would dutifully trill her way through all the Met's coloratura roles, and by the time she was a creaky 25, "I would know it all, retire, get married and start having children." She is 25 now, and neither retired, married nor creaky. But she has learned that, "starting as young as I did, your career is apt to take a funny turn...
...Francisco last week, Patrice was taking another turn, and at high speed. In her first major venture into show business, she was lifting listeners out of their seats with a pyrotechnical performance of the title role in Rudolf Friml's Rose Marie. Singing with "exquisite coloratura," she made some of Friml's most overworked ballads sound good. Wrote the San Francisco News's Emilia Hodel: "We would have considered it impossible for anyone ever again to make us enjoy Indian Love Call, but Patrice . . . made the song not only lovely but exciting...