Word: mezzo
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...enough. Micaela -- a character not found in Merimee's gritty original novella -- was her conventional, boring bourgeois self, and the reserved British performers did not really get the sleaze factor right. This should have been Carmen: Beyond Thunderdome. Still, it boasted a brilliant performance by Mezzo Sally Burgess in the title role and some crisp conducting from Paul Daniel...
...face-lifting was undertaken this year. Among the improvements: an enlarged lobby, a cream-and-gold repainting of the main hall, new seats and elevators, and a modern air-conditioning system. The reopening of the hall last week was celebrated with a gala concert that featured performances by Stern, Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Horne, Frank Sinatra and Pianist Vladimir Horowitz. The real star of the evening, however, was the legendary Carnegie sound itself. The critical consensus: richer and more crystal clear than ever...
...what is one to make of an opera about the life and turbulent times of Francisco Goya (Domingo, in robust voice) that omits almost every significant incident in the painter's life? Of a work that concentrates on a historically disputed love affair with the Duchess of Alba (Mezzo-Soprano Victoria Vergara), concluding with a gratuitous mad scene, replete with writhing spirits and fun-house demons? Of a score whose one striking musical device, an insistent, high-pitched whine signifying Goya's deafness, is borrowed from Smetana's string quartet From My Life...
Bolcom's concerto is indeed that. The composer is probably better known as the peerless accompanist for his wife Mezzo Joan Morris in their programs of American popular songs. But his spacious cantata on Blake poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was in contention for 1985's Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto...
Based on an especially grisly Brothers Grimm fairy tale, the Juniper Tree libretto, by Children's Author Arthur Yorinks, recounts the fable of an evil stepmother (Mezzo Ruby Hinds) who murders her stepson (Soprano Lynn Torgove) and serves the dismembered boy to his father (Baritone Sanford Sylvan) in a stew. His spirit reincarnated as a bird, the boy takes his revenge by dropping a millstone on the stepmother and is joyfully restored to his father and half sister. Watching over all is the juniper tree, in which dwells the benign spirit of the boy's real mother...