Word: marias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MASTER CLASS The role is larger than life: the century's most famous diva, Maria Callas, captured at an age when her voice has left but her ego remains as outsized as ever. The performance is commensurately grand: Zoe Caldwell, by turns imperious and humbled, cruel and sympathetic. Terrence McNally's Broadway play may have its structural shortcomings, but it is cheering to watch so much talent hurled at so much ambition...
...glamour and, yes, sex appeal. String players all, the women present images ranging from the frank sensuality of electric violinist Vanessa-Mae, 17, to the girl-next-door allure of Leila Josefowicz, 18, to the more mature charms of Canadian cellist Ofra Harnoy, 30, and sultry new-music violinist Maria Bachmann, 35. And then there's the all-female violoncello quartet known collectively as Cello. The group is making records, performing widely--and if physical allure helps...
...miss the femininity of Cello--four women (Maria Kitsopoulos, Laura Bontrager, Maureen McDermott and Caryl Paisner) and four cellos, with an eclectic, smoothly performed repertoire that ranges from John Adams' Nixon in China to Miles Davis' So What. For its first album, released in 1990 by Pro Arte, the group (with slightly different membership) posed in black cocktail dresses, an image the quartet now wants to downplay. "We were not happy with that picture," says Paisner, who founded the group in 1988. "We thought it was a little too sexy, although it succeeded in getting attention. But people were inclined...
Master Class has Caldwell playing Maria Callas not as singer but as instructor, imperiously advising--when she can stop talking about herself--a trio of aspiring opera stars. Although her own days onstage are over, she remains the most famous Greek woman in the world, and she has the most famous Greek man, Aristotle Onassis, for her lover--or had him, until his eye veered to President Kennedy's widow. At times, McNally arranges for the classroom to dissolve away and for Callas to address us in private monologue, revealing a tremulous woman whose fame provides some compensation...
...this "West Side Story" is less at ease in its quieter moments, when the singing and the orchestra are more exposed. As the film of the musical shows, it is difficult for anyone to get through molasses like "There's a Place for Us" and make it interesting. Both Maria (Marisa Chandler) and Tony (Adam Wolfsdorf) have good voices and sing with confidence, but they generally lack the power to carry such a heavy musical weight; the pace slackens in their solos and duets. There is an added tension in their different singing styles. Chandler's delicate, operatic tone often...