Word: gildas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Metropolitan Opera has a dazzling new coloratura soprano. She is Atlanta-born Mattiwilda Dobbs, 31, pert, appealing to the eye, solacing to the most opera-worn ear. She made her debut as Gilda in Rigoletto last week, and the event was doubly important, for she is the first Negro to sing a romantic lead...
Rigoletto, despite some of the most grippingly grisly melodrama in grand opera, is distinctly dated. Whenever Gilda has a spare moment, the orchestra lapses into a kind of soft-shoe accompaniment, leaving wide-open spaces for her graceful vocal glides and glitters. Soprano Dobbs sounded smooth as cashmere beside the tweedy textures of Tenor Jan Peerce and Baritone Leonard Warren. Her phrasing was always neat and true; in lyrical passages her voice floated with never an edge. In Verdi's showy old coloratura bits, e.g., Caro Nome, it glittered clear and bright as a glockenspiel in a football band...
Mado Robin, 35, a petite ambassadress from the Paris Opera, opened the season as Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto, determined not to go unnoticed. During her first scene, before Rigoletto's house, she was just a demure little coloratura. But opportunity beckoned in her florid aria, Caro Nome, and Soprano Robin seized it: she unexpectedly gave out with what critics call a B "in altissimo"-up in the whistling range. The audience gasped at the piercing sound (which Conductor Fausto Cleva had specifically outlawed during rehearsals), and the critics scolded. Wrote the Examiner's Alexander Fried: "Startling...
...Named, in alphabetical order, for the year's fifth hurricane. U.S. meteorologists, always resourceful, have already picked names for the next 18 big tropical storms that may or may not materialize before the end of 1954: Florence, Gilda, Hazel, Irene, Jill, Katherine, Lucy, Mabel, Norma, Orpha, Patsy, Queen, Rachel, Susie, Tina, Una, Vicky and Wallis...
Last-minute substitutions are something of a specialty with Roberta. She made her Met debut as a fillin, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, three years ago. Since then she has answered several other fire calls, including two for Gilda in Rigoletto (for Hilde Gueden and Genevieve Warner), one for Adele in Fledermaus (for Virginia MacWatters). But Soprano Peters is more than a high-class fireman...