Word: heldentenor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...vivid choral setting of poetry by John Donne and Emily Dickinson -- and in Nixon its dramatic qualities have flowered. The figures are sharply characterized: Nixon (James Maddalena), for example, is a gruff baritone whose music is often stiff and halting, while Chairman Mao (John Duykers) is cast as a heldentenor. His body may be weak, but his mind and voice are as vigorous as Siegfried...
Elsewhere the touch is surer. Blessed with an extraordinarily vivid Mime in Dutch Tenor Hubert Delamboye, Rochaix gives the conniving dwarf free rein, particularly in Siegfried, where his exchanges with the sturdy Siegfried (American Heldentenor Edward Sooter) have a sharp, often humorous bite. And having Siegfried relate his wooing of Brunnhilde directly to Gunther near the end of Gotterdammerung gives the innocent Siegfried's ensuing murder a special poignancy...
...tackle parts like Lohengrin, Tristan and Siegfried. Although he has said that he would some day like to sing Parsifal and perhaps Tristan, Domingo's natural territory is the lyric roles of Italian and French opera. It is too much to expect him to become a true Heldentenor: he lacks the sheer force to surge over Wagner's complex orchestral writing, his German diction is heavily Latinized, and his phrasing belongs to the Mediterranean, not the Teutonic, school. But as an example of pure vocalism, his Lohengrin was a stunning success...
...sense of Wotan's majestic agony to his portrayal. After Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, he canceled his appearance in Siegfried and was replaced by a weak Bent Norup. Poor Manfred Jung, the substitute Siegfried, is physically unprepossessing and vocally inadequate to this most heroic of heldentenor roles, which demands both strength and stamina. Although he gave it a game effort, especially in Götterdammerung, Jung put one in mind of Scholar-Critic Ernest Newman's acidulous remark that too often Siegfried gives "the impression of a man whose mental development was arrested...