Word: lyric
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...voice is a lyric soprano with an unusual coloratura, capable of unearthly runs, trills and ornaments, but with a bigger, lusher sound than most. Anderson commands the bel canto repertory, whose heroines tend to be, as she puts it, "girls who are sad, mad or dead." She herself is a larger-than- life heroine with a bravura temperament to match her voice. If critics see her as a young Joan Sutherland, opera fans compare her with Maria Callas. Like la Callas, Anderson stirs things...
...Lyric Opera of Chicago has asked him to undertake Frank Norris' McTeague. Bolcom recalls that in his student days he improvised at the piano during a silent-movie showing of Greed, Erich von Stroheim's classic film version of McTeague. "I was bowled over. I thought, 'Jesus, this is an opera.' " The libretto is almost done, and the composer already has a fat folder full of musical sketches. "It is about sex and violence, passions and emotions," Bolcom says gleefully. And he notes, just as gleefully, that the story is set in the ragtime...
...That lyric, with its cross-cultural elisions and unsprung rhythms stashed inside orchestrations belonging more to Sondheim than Springsteen, is from Tokyo Rose, an elfin but savage ten-song essay on the growing misalliance of Japan and America. The record is not only big themed, it is big fun. That combination of intellectual ambition and musical serendipity can be recognized as the work of Van Dyke Parks by his legion of . . . oh, say, 782 fans. We're not talking Milli Vanilli here. But we are on the subject of someone rather terrific...
Oliver and Waldeck win over listeners because they are entertainers first and crusaders second. Dressed in T shirts and sneakers, they mix humor with their anger, and fun with their activism. In one number, Waldeck strolls around the stage under an umbrella. The lyric: "I walk the shores of Lake Champlain/ in the placid acid rain." In another tune, Waldeck dreams of being reincarnated as a "big, wrecking ball" so he can "crack down on condos." But fast-food executives would not find the show especially funny. "Lay down your Whopper and your fries," one song goes. "Save a rain...
JAMES MCMURTRY: TOO LONG IN THE WASTELAND (Columbia). A fine debut album that fixes a bleary, jaundiced eye on the back roads and byways of small-town life. McMurtry turns a lyric with irony and precision, even if his voice can't carry a tune as far as the barn door...