Word: fortissimo
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Last week the only "money" note for the tenor in Aida-the high B-flat at the end of Celeste Aida-was rough and ragged, belted out with a desperate fortissimo instead of the more difficult pianissimo that Verdi called for in the score. Elsewhere, Pavarotti's eyes clung to the safety of the prompter's box and the conductor's baton, leaving most of the acting to Soprano Margaret Price (battling a bronchial infection but singing well nonetheless) and Stefania Toczyska, a sultry Polish mezzo and a star of the future, whose Amneris blazed with passionate...
...other half saying "Don't ruin it by reforming him.") Hagman developed a touch for light comedy on TV in the '60s sitcom / Dream ofJeannie. He plays the villainy sotto voce and the humor-the infectious delight J.R. brings to the business of malevolent one-upmanship-fortissimo. He struts, whinnies, talks out loud to himself; he has a grand time being bad. His soft, smooth, surprisingly characterless face expresses J.R.'s childishness; but those huge blue eyes testify to ages of suffering given and received. He is the man we love to hate. J.R. and Hagman deserve...
...contenders. John Anderson, billed as the candidate of ideas, was seen soaring and swooping, eyes nearly closed in his passion, resembling no one so much as the late Billy Sunday. George Bush, the cool Ivy Leaguer, appeared with his neck veins protruding, finger wagging, voice in upper fortissimo. Jimmy Carter was there too, via the tube, talking calmly from the White House as the world he helped to create seemed to be collapsing around...
...voice was a loud rasp. His piano playing was strictly fortissimo. His gags were not jokes, but a litany of catch phrases. Yet Jimmy Durante was a born entertainer whose manic clowning stayed in fashion for more than half a century. When "the great Schnozzola" died last week, America lost one of its last links to the golden age of vaudeville...
...Seventh Symphony, he says, was planned in his head before the war; the so-called invasion theme, with its fearsomely swelling fortissimo, has nothing to do with the Nazi attack. "I was thinking of other enemies of humanity [namely Stalin and his killers] when 1 composed the theme." His Fifth Symphony, which established Shostakovich's reputation in the Soviet Union, was meant to describe Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37. In the post-Stalin era, his Thirteenth Symphony was intended as a protest against antiSemitism, and his Fourteenth was an evocation of the horrors of the Gulag...