Word: debutitis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Negro singers are still rare enough in grand opera to be news to the public and to make managers self-conscious about what roles to give them. Two possible answers: Carmen, the gypsy girl, and Aïda, the Ethiopian slave. But they are also taxing debut parts, both vocally and dramatically. Last week, on opera stages 4.000 miles apart, two of the most promising of the U.S.'s young Negro singers appeared in Carmen and Aïda to audience cheers...
...Price in Porgy and Bess. She toured in the role from San Francisco to Cairo, finally abandoned Bess to avoid being typed. She studied Aïda, sang the title role in the opera house at Nice but had never attempted it with a big-league company before her debut at the Metropolitan Opera last week. Soprano Davy was thrown in with a strong cast-Kurt Baum as Radames, Irene Dalis as Amneris. Leonard Warren as Amonasro-which might well have overpowered her. Tentative at first, Singer Davy warmed up as the evening progressed, sang her low tones with...
...debut, Soprano Little radiated much of the cool assurance-but not all the stagewise technique-of a veteran. The voice she displayed was not yet a big one, but it had a smooth, satiny quality ideally suited to the menacing, feline tension of her carefully calculated movements. Her opening-night performance was received with warm applause and scattered smart-aleck brays of "Little, go home!" By the second performance, she had her audience cheering after both her big first-act arias. Concluded one influential critic: "The debut came perhaps a bit too early, but it might well be the beginning...
...younger Dumas' tears-and-champagne tale of the consumptive courtesan-with scant help from a minor-league cast. As Alfredo, Tenor Daniele Barioni sang powerfully but uncertainly and sometimes off-key, acted in an emotional monotone that made his rages indistinguishable from his passions. In his U.S. debut, Italian Baritone Mario Zanasi displayed a smooth, ample voice but made his Germont pompous and wooden where he should have been dignified, faintly sentimental where he should have been compassionate...
Saxophonist Mule chose for his debut program the works of two contemporary French composers-Jacques Ibert's Concertino da Camera and Henri Tomasi's Ballade. What the audience heard was an open, evenly controlled sound that could sing with a clean vibrato or a finely trimmed staccato, swell robustly and solidly with no trace of the breathy "air sound." Under Mule's scurrying fingers, the saxophone sometimes took on the quick sheen of strings, or the water-clear inflections of the flute, or the warm quality of the bassoon. Gone were the wah-wahs and wobbles...