Word: falsettos
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Died. Mei Lan-fang, 67, China's "Great King of Actors," whose willowy grace and flawless falsetto made him the foremost female impersonator in the all-male Chinese classical drama, won him worldwide applause-his 1930 U.S. tour brought him honorary degrees from two U.S. colleges-and earned him as much as $4,000 per half-hour; of a heart attack; in Peking. He defiantly grew a mustache to avoid entertaining China's Japanese conquerors during World War II, but traveled the world for the Communists, was visited during his fatal illness by another onetime tan (male actress...
...used to quaver through the scores of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov or Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos), Shaw saved some of his sharpest shafts for vocalists. Of the famed Italian Tenor Enrico Tamberlik, appearing in Rossini's Otello, he wrote: "He sings in a doubtful falsetto and his movements are unmeaning, and frequently absurd. For the C sharp in the celebrated duet L'ira d'avverso fato, he substituted a strange description of shriek at about that pitch. The audience, ever appreciative of vocal curiosities, eagerly redemanded...
...French, the foolish old nymph in Platée was written for a tenor.) As Sénéchal launched into the music, he quickly demonstrated why he is one of France's most courted lyric tenors. The smooth, light-textured voice moved with ease from falsetto to full voice, changing shading and color as it kept pace with Tenor Sénéchal's brilliant comic miming...
...brontosauri lovingly cultivate their abs (abdominal beef), glutes (backsides) and pects (chest muscles). There he spies the girl of his dreams-but alas, she loves a weight lifter. Can the underpected salesman sunder this pair? Sure he can, if he will only assert his baritoned intelligence against the rival falsetto. A falsetto, of course, is-in the definition of Poet-Punster Mark Van Doren-a guy with a false set o' values...
...orchestra that gives way abruptly to the tinselly tinkle of a café piano; Wozzeck's morbid fears are unforgettably etched in a single, slithering pianissimo in the strings; the cowardice that lurks beneath the captain's bluster becomes apparent in his occasional lapses into shrill, falsetto shrieking...