Word: dieskau
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...overture; the delicately interlaced trio in which Musician, Poet and Countess comment on the Poet's sonnet; the Countess' hushed mirror monologue at the close, with its spun-silver vocal tracery. The performers-notably sopranos Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Anna Moffo, baritones Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau-sing superbly under Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch. In its flashing orchestral coloration and its soaring vocal lines, Capriccio is an echo of some of the great works of Strauss's youth. At its dress rehearsal the 78-year-old composer said to a friend: "I can do no better...
...help quiet his preperformance jitters and tune up his musical perception, German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau packs his luggage with a few tested literary tranquilizers: some volumes of poetry, selected detective stories, classics such as Crime and Punishment. As he wound up his third U.S. tour last week on the West Coast, nobody thought to ask him whether he was stoking his emotional fires on Donne or Dostoevsky or Dashiell Hammett. What mattered was that he was in top vocal form, and that meant that he was giving his audiences the most moving performances of German lieder to be heard...
Concert-Tour Legend. At 33, Fischer-Dieskau has become a concert-tour legend in Europe and the U.S.: almost singlehanded, he has accounted for the postwar popularity of the German art song. On his U.S. tours, he has held audiences rapt through the whole of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise and through the complete Schumann Dichterliebe. He has reached an even wider public through his 40-odd LP recordings, including Hugo Wolf's 16 Songs, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, Brahms's German Requiem, albums of Mahler songs...
...Fischer-Dieskau is also one of the most consistently popular opera singers in Germany; aided by an imposing 6-ft. 2-in. figure, he has shaped a number of moving characterizations, e.g., Wolfram in Tannhäuser. Sir John Falstaff, and the title role in Busoni's Doktor Faustus. Even more surprising than the scope of his success is the fact that he had no early singing experience: he took his first voice lesson when he was 16, had scarcely started to sing professionally when he was drafted into the German army. As an American prisoner...
Spine-Tingling Blasts. There are showier, more opulent-sounding baritones than Fischer-Dieskau. But there are no singers about nowadays who use their voices with more intelligence, accuracy or theatrical effect. Fischer-Dieskau never uses his texts as excuses for mere vocal gymnastics. In the art songs of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, he sings his way into moods alternately tragic, boisterous and nostalgic with subtle modulations of his dry, husky voice. And when at climactic moments he throws his baritone out in a high, ringing fortissimo, the effect is as spine-tingling as a trumpet blast...