Word: lakme
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There is much to enjoy. New and unusual works? In addition to La Rondine, the company has revived Léo Delibes' fragile song of the subcontinent, Lakmé, and mounted an operatic staging of Stephen Sondheim's Grand Guignol Broadway masterpiece, Sweeney Todd; next month it presents Philip Glass's new opera Akhnaten. Splendid singing? Clarion-voiced Tenor Jerry Hadley shone as Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, and the company's impressive roster of young sopranos this season includes Kaaren Erickson, Elizabeth Hynes and Elizabeth Knighton...
...everything has been rosy this year. Despite the appointment of American Conductor Christopher Keene as music director in 1982, the conducting on the whole remains below par, and neither of the principal singers in Lakmé had the proper French timbre or sense of style for their roles. Sweeney Todd is more gruesomely appealing in a smaller house, and the City Opera's lead cast does nothing to erase the memory of George Hearn and Angela Lansbury...
...soprano whose trilling delighted audiences worldwide for more than 30 years; of cancer; in Dallas. A prizewinning pianist at the Paris Conservatory, Pons switched to singing when she discovered she had perfect pitch and extraordinary vocal cords. In 1929 at the Opera House in Mulhouse, Alsace, she debuted in Lakmé, a role in which she later daringly appeared, navel exposed, in costume sans midriff. One of her most famous performances was at the Metropolitan Opera in 1931: she sang the difficult "Mad Scene" in Lucia di Lammermoor in the key of F, an entire tone higher than the original...
...much hoarier musical fare: the symphonic ode Le Désert by Composer Felicien David. Grand-père of all pseudo-Oriental musical concoctions, the piece was an instant hit after its 1844 Paris premiere, and its popularity, in part, inspired such works as Delibes' Lakmé and Verdi's Aida. So much for success. By the end of the century, both David and Le Désert were considered as out of date as a daguerreotype...
...golden age" of opera singers, a tiny Milanese with a flutelike voice who was a sensation at her 1908 debut in Rigoletto at Trani (a provincial Italian town where she was paid $60 a month), moved to the U.S. in 1916 to sing the great coloratura roles (Rosina, Lucia, Lakmé) with both the Metropolitan and Chicago Operas earning up to $15,000 a performance while on tour, retired in the 1930s to California but continued through her many recordings to haunt opera buffs and reigning coloraturas alike; of emphysema; in La Jolla, Calif...