Word: fortissimo
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...still news when a Negro stars in grand opera, even in a role calling for a dark skin. Marian Anderson's Metropolitan Opera debut as the Negro Ulrica, in Un Ballo in Maschera (TIME, Jan. 17), made fortissimo headlines, and this week Baritone Robert McFerrin is causing another stir at the Met by singing the Ethiopian king Amonasro in Aida. The NBC Opera Theater was even bolder: this week it cast Leontyne Price, 26, as the Italian opera singer Tosca...
...last week, at the sold-out concert at Chicago's Civic Opera House, celebrating the famed choir's soth anniversary, such a thing as a flat tone was unthinkable. The program, which ranged from Palestrina to Stravinsky, produced a fortissimo reaction from the music critics. "Cool, thin, silver tone . . . timeless patina," said the Tribune. Said Paulist O'Malley: "It was one of the finest concerts I've ever conducted...
Student nurses, with dark capes billowing behind their white uniforms, pranced into a back ward at Central Oklahoma State Hospital at Norman one day last week. Their exaggerated steps kept time with the firm beat of The Stars and Stripes Forever, played fortissimo over the public-address system. In their hands, accenting the rhythm still more, they held tambourines, clappers, castanets, maracas, and even bongo drums. Other nurses, also armed with noisemakers, stood around among the patients...
Strictly Business. Perched on his high stool at rehearsals, Conductor Reiner is strictly business. In quiet passages the tip of his baton ticks off the beat with the precision of a stop watch, in fortissimo it slashes the air like a rapier. When a phrase is not up to snuff, he raps sharply for silence, speaks quietly but in a no-nonsense tone, e.g., "I would suggest you play that adagio." When he is pleased, he warms the players' spirits with quick nods of approval...
Schuman's G-Minor Sonata gave her the opportunity to display her considerable technical powers. Despite the composer's maddening instructions ("As fast as possible," he demands at one point in the Rondo, and, a few measures afterwards, "still faster"), the sudden fortissimo outbursts, fast octave scales, and other bravura passages rattled along without mishap. And while Beethoven's Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance Tune may lack profundity and grandeur, they are good, clean fun and Miss Drooker made the most of them. Her elastic, but consistent phrasing gave logic to the variations, without binding them in a formalistic...