Word: mezzos
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Mozart: Mitridate, Re di Ponto (Sopranos Arleen Augér, Ileana Cotrubas and Edith Gruberova, Mezzo Agnes Baltsa, Tenor Werner Hollweg, Mozarteum Orchestra, Salzburg, Leopold Hager, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon; 4 LPs); La Clemenza di Tito (Mezzos Janet Baker and Yvonne Minton, Tenor Stuart Burrows, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Colin Davis, conductor; Philips; 3 LPs). Mozart composed Mitridate when he was only 14; La Clemenza came just before he died at 35. Both works are all but forgotten. They are opera seria, the early style of Italian opera that can present obstacles for the modern...
Anna Amati, mezzo-soprano, his wife, a former actress...
Milnes' vocal judgment, at least, was excellent. Verrett acted with an effective blend of charm and elusiveness. For a few years she has been trying to retrain her lush mezzo voice to sing soprano roles. The strategy seems wrong; by now the registers of her voice are as separated as the drawers of a desk. Only near the end did her singing match her style...
...musicality of Shaw's language pervades the evening. His mother had a fine mezzo-soprano voice, and at the beginning of his journalistic career, he was a music critic signing himself Corno di Bassetto, which means basset horn. The cadences of his speeches are like arias, and Donnelly delivers them that way with an ingratiating Dublin inflection. Indeed, most of Shaw's greater plays could be transposed into operas, just as Pygmalion was made into My Fair Lady...
Berlioz: L'Enfance du Christ (Mezzo Janet Baker, Tenor Eric Tappy, Baritone Thomas Allen, London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis conductor, Philips; 2 LPs). Just as he could roar thunderously in the Te Deum, so Berlioz could write with reverent calm in this exquisite tapestry on the early events in Jesus' life. The music is kept deliberately simple by a chamberistic use of the orchestra and frequent resort to medieval modes and other archaic devices. Yet how fresh, urgent and devoted the result, notably in the central section-The Flight into Egypt. Continuing his pioneering Berlioz cycle, Colin Davis...