Word: coloraturas
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...white ballets"-the classics that England's Royal Opera House company has made its specialty-it had to have both. Says U.S. Choreographer George Balanchine: "When you dance in a short skirt, a tutu, you have to be very well trained, very precise. It's like a coloratura singing Mozart; she has to sing every note. In classical ballet, legs are coloratura...
Prime & Proportion. In brown-eyed, British-born Margot Fonteyn, Sadler's Wells had its coloratura. Her perfectly proportioned ballerina body (5 ft. 4 in., 112 Ibs.), her effortless grace and technique had U.S. ballet connoisseurs and critics going back for comparisons to such ballet immortals as Anna Pavlova, Olga Spessivtzeva and Tamara Karsavina, the sometime partner of the great Nijinsky. Just behind Fonteyn were two other fine dancers who could take her roles: tall, handsome Beryl Grey, 22, and flame-haired, 23-year-old Moira Shearer, dancing star of the British film The Red Shoes (which...
...sportswear in a Buenos Aires department store for $32 a month. She liked to sing, finally decided to make a career of it. One day she slipped backstage at a Colón rehearsal, asked María Barrientos, oldtime operatic star and famed teacher, to give her lessons. Coloratura Barrientos took a shine to her, made her a prot...
...singing, too, was superb. The one more unfortunate bit of casting was that of Helen Roberts as Josephine, daughter to the Captain, beloved of Ralph Rackstraw, but promised to Sir Joseph Porter. Miss Roberts possesses a fine set of high notes, but she all to frequently let her coloratura get away from her and succeeded in casting her words into some oblivion above the proscenium...
Lily Pons fares no better: "The singing of a coloratura is a cross between cackle and a whistle, and performers on the vocal high wire and trapeze are utterly devoid of musical interest to me." O'Connell attacks Lily ("The Pons That Depresses") and husband André Kostelanetz with a waspish malice that a few, backhanded compliments fail to soften. He dislikes their "hand-decorated and chromium-plated" music, inveighs against their commercialism, even gossips that Lily's high heels are designed "to distract the eye from rather generous dimensions in the horizontal planes...