Word: lyrically
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...feeling in a blues singer, but here they serve only to enhance an already powerful emotive force. The Reverend Gary Davis, blind "street singer," has a new release on the Prestige Bluesville label, which is a total gas because the man plays guitar like nobody's business. Folks-Lyric, has released a series of discs made by blues singers at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. (The Penitentiary has since released some of the singers.) The best of these is titled "Angola Prisoners' Blues," and features Robert Pete Williams, Hogman Maxey, and Guitar Welch...
...Moor," and (Orangemen take note) "The Old Orange Flute." I cannot recommend it too highly. (This means I own a copy.) The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem have several other releases, on Tradition and Riverside, which are not too hard to come by, although deleted from the catalogues. Folk-Lyric records Dominic Behan, the younger brother of the playwright-autobiographer, in a splattering of Irish songs ranging from high-toned love ballads to songs-to-incite-a-pub-brawl-by. If you have the Gaelic, Folkways records "Songs of Aran"--but beware; these are field recordings. Field recording involves finding...
...Nevertheless, it was Callas who opened up the whole range of classical opera by demonstrating that she could sing anything written for a female performer. Although in a recent recording of Norma, Callas' voice is badly frayed and painfully wobbly, it also retains all of the lyric intensity, the emotional inflections and nuances, the dramatic insights that no singer of her time can equal. Indeed, Callas herself remains the best argument for her belief that beautiful sound can-and must-be sacrificed at times to powerful drama...
...listen to, and appropriately entertaining. But in its use of formulas and constant sweetness, it becomes almost painful. Too often, the musical originality matched the startling news proclaimed by the singers: "Love conquers all," and: "The fates have been at work." Still, the rare opportunity of hearing a coherent lyric line in a new composition made most of the score a happy experience...
...sheriff like a refugee from Gunsmoke. And although the opera provided few memorable arias (one striking exception: Johnson's "Ch'ella mi creda libero"), it had a score full of surgingly beautiful moments. The weakest links in the production were the cavernous sets, borrowed from the Chicago Lyric Opera; they looked for all the world as if they dated back to Caruso...