Word: mezzo-soprano
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...stage was bare, the costumes were rehearsal-type togs in grey, white and black. "If you combine sumptuous sets and costumes with Mahler," explains MacMillan, "you get something like jam on jam." A tenor and a mezzo-soprano sang the vocal parts from opposite sides of the proscenium, while onstage dancers representing such allegorical figures as Youth, Beauty and Everyman traced a melange of MacMillan movements that seemed to draw equally on classical, modern and Chinese dance styles...
...fastest-rising male dancer, Anthony Dowell, 24. Though always a brooding, ominous figure, the Messenger was also a familiar and alluring one, sometimes standing patiently to the side, sometimes dancing among the other figures or carrying them away. At the end, something beyond his triumph was suggested as the mezzo-soprano sang, "Everywhere and forever the distance looks bright and blue-forever . . . forever," and he and the Everyman and Woman figures united in a slow, floating movement directly toward the audience...
Just in case the thought runs through your fertile brain that I am a frustrated old maid: I am 27 years young, measurements 35-24-35, a redhead, and a mezzo-soprano at the Deutsche Oper. I am considered not to be a prude but to have especially discriminating taste...
...otherwise static drama. They did not merely rant and rage: they insinuated, they needled, they enticed. Both marvelous singer-actors, they bent and shaded their voices in a seemingly infinite variety of veiled sneers, smiling threats and choked curses. In duets, Ludwig's vibrant, richly textured mezzo-soprano enfolded Berry's robust, securely focused baritone like velvet over steel. A blend of poetry and power, their singing was eloquent proof that strife can be beautiful...
...Ludwig, 32, daughter of German Tenor Anton Ludwig, also prepped as a cabaret singer during the hungry days after World War II, worked on the side as a seamstress (one of her more dubious creations: a red, white and black frock made out of an old Nazi flag). Her mezzo-soprano mother advised her "not to fall in love in a small opera house because then you may have to leave him behind when you go to a big house." Dutifully, Ludwig poured her heart into her art for nine years, finally graduated to the Vienna State Opera...