Word: massenet
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...City Opera last week, Head Costumer J. Edgar Joseph had a problem. Would the off-white silk nightgown take to the rose dye? If not, Diva Beverly Sills would have to portray the heroine of Donizetti's Anna Bolena 30 hours later in a hand-me-down from Massenet's Manon. The dilemma was only one of several dozen facing Joseph at the time. Suddenly he rose from his chair, walked to a big dressing mirror and began screaming at himself. "What's the use of yelling at someone else?" he said. "It's nobody...
...contraption on an unsuspecting world. A hybrid of the brass and woodwind families, the instrument is the perennial Cinderella of serious music. Its rich, sometimes dozing sound has never found a permanent place in the symphony orchestra, although after its invention in 1840 such French composers as Berlioz and Massenet experimented with it. In Germany only Richard Strauss, whose Domestic Symphony included a quartet of saxes, regarded it as anything but a yeoman of military bands...
...MASSENET: MANON, 4 LPs; DONIZETTI: LUCIA Dl LAMMERMOOR, 3 LPs (both ABC). When operatic tastes are weighed, the soprano who tips the scales-and the trills and roulades and fioritura-in favor of the French lyric and Italian bel canto repertories is Beverly Sills, here in two exemplary roles...
Beverly does not have the powerful top notes for roles like Tosca or Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, and particularly not for Wagnerian roles like Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung. But she is ideally suited to bel canto, and to the French lyric romanticism of Gounod and Massenet. In these areas she is unbeatable, and even among the diverse other sopranos in this age of great sopranos?Birgit Nilsson, Sutherland, Price, Marilyn Horne, Monserrat Caballé?she more than holds...
...more to an opera performance than voice, of course. Beverly rightly describes herself as a singing actress, with equal stress on each word. That is why her live performances will always be more exciting than her recordings, successful as those recordings may be (the recent four-LP set of Massenet's Manon has sold 25,000 copies in a market where sales of 10,000 for a single LP are considered substantial). "I'm a visual performer," she says. "I have to act, use facial expressions, get mood changes across. It's hard to share any of this with...