Word: cuenod
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...that really provides the bang for the buck. Zeffirelli and Costume Designer Dada Saligeri offer a regal gold and mother-of-pearl panoply: high atop a throne in the far reaches of the cavernous stage perches the black-clad, thousand-year-old Emperor (Swiss Tenor Hugues Cuenod, making his company debut at 84). For the first time the Met stage, which has swallowed whole such formidable productions as Nathaniel Merrill's 1966 Die Frau ohne Schatten, looks cramped. As is its custom, the Met declines to reveal the spectacle's cost, but best guesses run to about $1.5 million...
...stumble across the treacherous obstacle course of risers and steps. As a result, Marton, born for the title role, was oddly tentative, the sturdy Domingo seemed distracted and ill at ease, while Soprano Leona Mitchell's hey-look-me-over Liu was too aggressive. Only Cuenod's crotchety Emperor -- a Swiss singing Italian the way he imagines a Chinese might -- hit the mark. James Levine conducted grandly, and the powerful choruses were declaimed lustily if not suavely...
...several soprano and alto parts, however, seemed not such a bad idea, since Saramae Endich and Florence Kopleff turned out to be not in the same league as Adele Addison and Martha Lipton, who often appear with the B.S.O. The other soloists, however, performed excellently. As the Evangelist, Hughes Cuenod stood out, his lyric tenor voice reaching every corner of Symphony Hall, although he began to tire in part two. Mack Harrell sang Jesus with great expressiveness; the most tender moment of the whole afternoon as it should have been, was his "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani...
...Walker, a 23-year-old soldier from Fort Myer, Va., where he is singing in the U.S. Army Chorus. Walker had never sung the Rake role before but had learned it as understudy, hopes to become a professional singer after he gets out of the Army. Finally, Tenor Hugues Cuenod lost his voice, responded enough to frantic, last-minute medication to carry off his role...
Other noteworthy new releases: Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 (Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony; Mercury); Falla's one-act opera, Master Peter's Puppet Show (F. Charles Adler conducting the Vienna Philharmonia; SPA); Great Arias from Bach's Cantatas (Hildegarde Rossl-Majdan and Hugues Cuenod; Bach Guild...