Word: elisir
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...storybook debut. In 1988 the Metropolitan Opera needed a last-minute replacement for Kathleen Battle in L'Elisir d'Amore. It turned to an apprentice in its young-artists program named Dawn Upshaw. The audience cheered, and the critics raved about Upshaw's charm and freshness; she seemed set for a predictable rise in the soubrette roles of grand opera. But Upshaw had ideas of her own. A few years earlier, one of her voice teachers, Jan DeGaetani, had told her to "seek your own path." Upshaw took that advice. From Mozart to Stravinsky to show tunes, she sings...
...standards. The tenors have no firmer fan than their maestro for the evening, Met music director James Levine. He bridles when critics chant the over-the-hill blues -- that Domingo has lost his top notes or that Pavarotti phones in the arias. Says Levine: "When Pavarotti sings L'Elisir d'Amore with such youth and spontaneity or Domingo explores the depths of Parsifal, now that is artistry...
Vocally, Pavarotti in recent years has skillfully negotiated the most treacherous shoals that face a tenor. Early in his career he was a classic tenore lirico, ideally suited to lighter lyric roles like Rodolfo, and florid bel canto roles like Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore. With age, however, a tenor's voice takes on a heavier tone and darker coloration. By the time he is in his 40s, a tenore lirico is usually ready for roles in the intermediate spin to (pushed) range, like Cavaradossi in Tosca, and maybe even in the forceful, baritonal tenore drammatico category, like...
...Lyric remains a world-class op era house, and its average cast will rival the Met norm. Its secret: a short twelve-week season that welds its cast for brief, intense, festival-like engagements. This season began with Luciano Pavarotti in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. Coming up are Jon Vickers in Britten's Peter Grimes and Frederica von Stade in The Barber of Seville. This November the Lyric will mount its first Die Meister singer. For opening night next year, Fox has even hired Broadway Director Harold Prince (A Little Night Music) to concoct...
Daughter lacks the stature of Donizetti's comic masterpieces Don Pasquale and L'Elisir d'Amore, but it does provide Sills with countless opportunities for lambent fioriture, whistling-high E-flats, and howling farce. Her windup salute, which starts somewhere near her right thigh and then circles deliciously upward, has to be seen to be believed. So does the way she gives her dancing master a knee in the chin, or wraps him around her neck while learning to do the quadrille...