Word: coventionalism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Annunzio Paolo Mantovani, 74, mood-music maestro whose lush, homogenized sound made him the first musician to sell a million stereo albums in the U.S.; after a prolonged illness; in Tunbridge Wells, England. The Venetian-born, British-educated son of a Covent Garden concertmaster began his own career at 16 as a classical violinist. Though he conducted London's Hotel Metropole Orchestra and his own Tipica Orchestra in concerts, BBC broadcasts and on records in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, and later became music director for Playwright Noel Coward, Mantovani was little known outside of Britain...
...when he was 27, he got a job as stand-by for Giuseppe di Stefano in a Covent Garden production of La Bohème and sang several performances. Conductor Richard Bonynge heard him and was "bowled over." Eventually, Pavarotti found himself singing with Bonynge's wife, Joan Sutherland, in a Miami production of Lucia di Lammermoor. To Sutherland's skeptical eye, this strapping unknown looked like "a big schoolboy." But to her ear? "Well, it was absolutely phenomenal ? the fabulous resonance, the shading, such range, such security." The Bonynges signed him up for a 14-week tour of Australia...
Born in Budapest in 1937, Solti has been a dominant figure in the music world since 1961, when he became music director of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. Critics have lauded his recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic--especially the first complete recording of Richard Wagner's "ring" cycle, a 19-record, seven-year project completed...
...Tippett's newest opera, The Ice Break, has been given its first U.S. performances by the Opera Company of Boston (after a world premiere in 1977 at Covent Garden). Fittingly, the work is a masterly summation-not of conclusions, but of a continuing quest...
...Lady Marjorie and the visitor learn, over the inevitable tea in the morning room, that they share a love of opera. Richard Bellamy (David Langton), always preoccupied with the House of Commons, gratefully asks their guest to take his place and escort his wife to Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden. Naturally they fall in love over a Liebestrank, and soon the magnificent Lady Marjorie (Rachel Gurney) is cavorting in Hammond's bed, away from home, husband and servants...