Word: crespin
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...Erich Leinsdorf to the contrary notwithstanding [Aug. 23], we have more first-class Wagnerian singers now than we had in the Melchior-Flagstad era. In the last few years the Metropolitan Opera has offered us such topnotch artists as Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, Gladys Kuchta, Inge Bjoner, Regine Crespin and Anita Valkki, sopranos; Jon Vickers, Sandor Konya and Jess Thomas, tenors; Jean Madeira, Nell Rankin and Irene Dalis, mezzos; George London, Hermann Prey, Walter Cassel and Eberhardt Wachter, baritones; and Jerome Hines, Giorgio Tozzi and William Wilderman, bassos...
...Rosenkavalier, other singers keep a respectful distance. The Marschallin's notes are within easy reach of the best sopranos, but dramatically her role is too restrained for Italians, too aristocratic for Americans, too Viennese for the French. Last week though, a French soprano named Régine Crespin sang the final Marschallin of her first season at the Metropolitan Opera. It was the best at the Met since Lotte Lehmann's swan song 16 years...
Head & Heart. When Crespin made her Met debut last fall, a critical audience was as startled by her temerity as it was pleased by her voice. Lehmann herself-the peerless Marschallin-had returned at 74 to coach the new singer, but Crespin clearly had ideas of her own. "We have met an impasse," Crespin said, then went onstage to offer a compromise interpretation of the role that even Lehmann had to admire. True to her introspective notion of Strauss's aging princess, Crespin sang the first act at fingertip touch, hiding her immense voice behind a melancholy that...
Good French singers are as rare as good French boxers, but Crespin is the grand exception. Born in Marseille in 1927, she made her debut at the Paris Opera at 24 in Lohengrin, and the German repertory has been her forte ever since. Audiences at Bayreuth and Vienna have been astonished by the precision of her diction, a triumph Crespin considers her most significant. "When I have a success," she says, "it is a double one. I always have to fight against the Italian and German sopranos." On her top notes, her insistence on singing all the consonants often makes...
Fear & Anguish. Built on the grand scale of the heavy roles she prefers, Crespin is the sort of singing actress who can seem desirable as Tosca and despairing enough for The Masked Ball. "Opera is an art of convention," she says, "and no one appears ridiculous who has dramatic command of the role." Her voice, chilly in its lack of vibrato but warm in its swelling power, makes her best for the German opera, and the summit of her ambition is to sing Isolde. Crespin and her Alsatian husband live quietly on a demanding musical diet dictated by her commitments...