Word: coloraturas
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...bonneted young lass stepped demurely from stage right. But the savvy fans at Manhattan's Delacorte Theater would know those brown eyes anywhere. They belonged to Linda Ronstadt, making her operatic debut on the day she turned 34. The rock star seemed a mite shaky in the coloratura runs, but the audience melted when she warbled Gilbert and Sullivan love songs to her devoted pirate swain. So did the swain, played by fellow Rocker Rex Smith, 24. Said he: "When she walks out the first time, I don't have to act. It's like a fantasy...
...wounded attitudes. But if Shipley evokes various girl groups, Benatar sounds like all of them packed tight into one. She can put a lot of sass into a song like I Need a Lover ("Who won't drive me crazy"). Benatar's teen-age studies as a coloratura soprano have taught her, she says, "a lot of technique and stamina - I can scream without hurting myself...
...prettiest thing about Meryl in those days was her singing voice. A promising coloratura soprano, she began taking lessons in New York with Voice Coach Estelle Liebling. "The first opera I went to," recalls Meryl, "was Douglas Moore's The Wings of the Dove, with Beverly Sills. It was incredible to see her onstage. Until then, I thought she was just a nice lady who had the lesson before me." One morning Meryl got up, squashed her glasses underfoot, put peroxide and lemon juice on her hair and set out to be "the perfect Seventeen magazine knockout." Boys quickly...
Atlanta's Spelman College harmonized with an apt duet of famous singers as it granted honorary fine arts degrees. One was to Opera Soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs, 53, a Spelman alumna who polished her coloratura with a Marian Anderson Scholarship. The other, fittingly, was awarded the legendary Anderson herself, now 77. Hailed as "the most famous and best loved contralto of our time," Anderson received a standing ovation for her long, path-marking career. Responded she in a brief, upbeat acceptance: "It's all waiting for you out there, and you can make your lives what you want them...
...calamitous wedding day, deserted by her bridegroom. (The young Miss Havisham is sung by Gianna Rolandi, who has a generous mad scene of her own.) There is a brushstroke plot involving an inquest into Miss Havisham's death, but the opera is really a star vehicle for a coloratura. Argento had Beverly Sills in mind when he began work two years ago. She agreed to do the role, but withdrew last fall. To what degree the challenge of writing for Sills may have deflected Argento's usually stable dramatic sense cannot be known, but he has produced...