Word: flagstad
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Inside, when Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, dressed in white and gold brocade, walked onstage and took her place in the curve of the piano, the jampacked audience rose to its feet and cheered her for a full minute. As she left the stage after her fourth group of songs, she tripped and fell. The audience rose again in a hush that was loud with sympathy. They cheered again when she had finished singing her program of Beethoven, Schubert and Grieg...
Praise. Was the applause only for Flagstad's voice? (The reviews next day were unanimous: "Flagstad Returns, Greater Than Ever." The Herald Tribune called her "incomparably the most distinguished of living singers." The Times spoke of "eloquence and splendor unequaled in this writer's experience.") Or was the cheering also for Kirsten Flagstad the woman-a way of saying that the past was over, that her political sins were forgiven...
...orchestra again into a first-rate symphony, using the same old hands (only the piano player and the first horn were new). He had given Chicagoans the finest opera they had heard in years: a concert version of Elektra with Marjorie Lawrence, and Tristan und Isolde with Kirsten Flagstad. He had given the musicians some rough treatment at rehearsals -but no conductor was ever fired for that, so long as he produced good music...
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Love Duet (Helen Traubel, soprano; Torsten Ralf, tenor; Herta Glaz, contralto, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Busch conducting; Columbia, 4 sides). Traubel & Ralf take the famed love duet faster than Flagstad and Melchior. The result is surprisingly warmer, and the orchestral setting is fuller. Recording: good...
...Chicago, much-debated Soprano Kirsten Flagstad (did-she-or-did-she-not-collaborate?) made her postwar operatic debut in Tristan und Isolde, sang them into the aisles, got a blizzard of bravos and cheers, eleven curtain calls, not a tomato from audience or critics...