Word: mezzos
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...Houston Grand Opera has a general director who will take a chance on the unfamiliar and still pack the house. In Marilyn Home, singing the pants role of Rinaldo for the first time, the company has a guest performer who not only can go easily from velvety mezzo caresses to sparkling high soprano fioriture, but also has the sheer power and poise to make the music conform to her character's needs. Home sings as though she has never had a finer, more rewarding role. That comes close to being the case. Mezzos have an abundance of supporting parts...
Works of Purcell, Ame, Schubert, Honegger, and Tohalkovaky; Cynthia Weinrich, Mezzo-soprano, and Priscilla Chapman, piano; Agassiz Living Room...
...most radiant and musical of prima donnas. The dilemmas that Pamira finds herself in would try even Aida, and Sills rose to them all. Briefly, Pamira loves Maometto (Bass Justino Diaz), the leader of the attacking Turks. Her father wants her to marry the Greek warrior Neocle (Mezzo Verrett...
...rest of the cast did her justice. Mezzo Shirley Verrett, in the travesti role of the warrior Neocle, revealed a stupefying coloratura technique and an enormous range of vocal textures. While Sills obviously paced herself carefully throughout the three acts. Verrett let loose in her first aria and blazed to the end at full capacity. She was gloriously confident, full of defiance and swagger, and poured out her ten-minute solo aria in the third act with the beauty that comes from inexhaustible strength. As it turned out, she had a mob of fans in the audience to rival Sills...
...when Nilsson, playing a mortal, sings at top volume, what does the superhuman Brunnhilde do? Last week the unlucky lady was Berit Lindholm, a well-known Brunnhilde in Europe making her Met debut. She turned out to be a slim, handsome woman with a thrilling mezzo register, but this did not help her with much of Brunnhilde's important music. Vickers sang Siegmund with wrenching intensity, which worked fine with Nilsson. But in the searing confrontation with Brunnhilde he was dramatically undermatched...