Word: freni
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Soprano Mirella Freni, 56, will not sing Madama Butterfly onstage. The part is so heavily emotional that she feels it could upset the vocal balance she has spent a lifetime achieving. Luciano Pavarotti has just won acclaim for his first Otello, and most musical experts think he was right to wait until age 55 to try the heroic role. The list of parts that tenor Alfredo Kraus, 63, will not touch reads almost like a chart of opera's greatest hits, including Cavaradossi in Tosca and Rodolfo in La Boheme. Kraus sticks strictly to lighter parts that do not strain...
Several major singers, among them Mirella Freni, Joan Sutherland, Von Stade and Alfredo Kraus, are too rarely heard at the Met, although all four are appearing this season. And British Soprano Margaret Price, who sings in the major international houses, has never sung there. Somewhat ingenuously, Levine blames their absence partly on the Met's distance from Europe. Even in the Concorde age, he contends, they prefer to work closer to home, no more than a couple of hours' flight from Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra or Milan's La Scala, rather than take...
...relentless pounding of timpani that recalls the opening of the Brahms First Symphony. Along the way, several of the ensembles are strikingly crafted, such as a dramatically dilatory but musically effective trio for Marie (Phyllis Hunter), her sister Charlotte (Beverly Morgan) and a haughty but generous countess (RoseMarie Freni). And the final scene, in which civilization explodes in a brilliant burst of light and a final crash of the drums, is chilling...
...century moral object lesson to a Götterdämmerung of destruction that occurs on "the last day of the earth." Nor was the Boston performance much help. The work was slackly conducted and indifferently staged by Caldwell and only sporadically well sung, principally by Morgan, Hunter and Freni, and John Brandstetter as one of Marie's military lovers...
...very happy for Luciano, he is like a brother to me. But it is not my character. I like my privacy. I enjoy singing, I enjoy creating something with my voice. But when it is finished, it is finished." The great American hype machine is wasted on Mirella Freni...