Word: mezzo-soprano
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...most popular works during Cesti's lifetime, and last week's La Piccola Scala performance suggested why. From start to finish, it was a singer's opera. The orchestration for the most part was slender, graceful, beautifully designed to give space to the principals (Mezzo-Soprano Teresa Berganza, Tenor Alvino Misciano), who sang aria after aria in serene, long-breathing lines. Bright with sentimentally colored melodies, Orontea scored a hit even with the critic of the Communist L'Unita, who conceded that "it really is beautiful music." The audience did not quite hail the composer...
Brass Bugle. Shaw's background for criticism was his family of amateur musicians: a trombone-playing father, a harp-playing aunt, a mother with a mezzo-soprano voice of "remarkable purity of tone," and an uncle who played the ophicleide, a giant brass bugle. Shaw himself started training to become an operatic baritone, changed his mind, and at 20 began ghosting musical criticism for a London weekly, The Hornet, in conspiracy with his mother's voice teacher named Vandeleur Lee. While Lee posed as the magazine's critic, young Bernard wrote the notices. After a year...
...guest conductors that "if these jokers can do it, it's got to be easy." From Juilliard, where his early attempts at conducting were roundly panned, he graduated to conducting jobs with the Symphony of the Air, the American Ballet Theater, the New York City Center. Married to Mezzo-Soprano Gloria Lane (TIME, March 28), he is still astounded at being so much in demand for guest appearances. "A few years ago, if I wanted expense money for a taxi, I had to fight for it. Now they...
...production did little to improve matters. The singing-by Baritone MacNeil in the title role, Soprano Leonie Rysanek and Mezzo-Soprano Rosalind Elias as the evil and good daughters of the King, Bass Cesare Siepi as a Jewish high priest-was generally good but rarely inspired. Conductor Thomas Schippers (who at 30 is the youngest conductor ever to open a Met season) whipped his orchestra through the score at a soprano-searing pace. The sets by Teo Otto and Wolfgang Roth were contradictory in style: an ornate realistic idol in one scene, a starkly abstract grillwork in another. Although...
Among the more successful teams: ¶Vienna-born Walter Surovy was a matinee idol in prewar Prague when he met Bronx-born Mezzo-Soprano Rise Stevens, then barely launched on her singing career. They were married in 1939, and at war's end. after an unsuccessful fling at Hollywood, Surovy settled down to the fulltime business of making Rise into a "national celebrity." He sent her to top Hollywood and Paris dress designers, converted her from a lank-haired brunette into a curly blonde, insisted that she take dancing lessons at the M-G-M studios...