Word: mezzos
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...licensed real estate agent in Los Angeles 15 years ago, Shirley Verrett was pretty good at selling houses. Today, she is even better at selling them out. Mezzo-Soprano Verrett last week made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the heroine in Bizet's Carmen. Be fore the night was out, she had men smiling to themselves and women wondering how a flower might look in their teeth...
...major asset: Bernstein had persuaded Mezzo Christa Ludwig to abandon her accustomed role as the youth Octavian for the lead role of the aging Marschallin, usually sung by a soprano. Ludwig's vocal prowess, womanly softness and pathos proved her a perfect choice. Said Bernstein: "She was so marvelous in the last scene that I cried watching her." And that was no Viennese exaggeration...
...Orff has steadily pared away the body of Western musical devices-themes, counterpoints, harmonic progressions and so on-to arrive at a skeletal idiom of powerfully primitive, repetitive sounds. In Prometheus, what little melody was left was expertly sung by U.S. Baritone Carlos Alexander as Prometheus and Australian Mezzo Althea Bridges as the tormented lo. The other singers, obscured by grotesque masks and headdresses, declaimed the drama in incantatory drones, while the orchestra rolled along in seemingly endless ostinato figures or erupted with brash punctuations...
...doctors and language instructors. Today they are widely used in the music world as well. Conductor Herbert von Karajan saved rehearsal time for last year's Salzburg Festival production of Die Walküre by having the singers study cassettes made from his earlier recording of the opera. Mezzo-Soprano Regina Resnik taped a recording of Adriana Lecouvreur on her cassette and is now using it to learn the role she will sing next season...
...infinite improvement, laced up so tightly that she seemed potentially explosive, Miss Horne defied the audience to disbelieve her Carmen, but no one did. Her instincts of when to talk instead of sing were uncannily correct, and her phrasing both musically and dramatically faultless. She is undoubtedly the greatest mezzo in the world, and with luck and judgement her next vehicle will be more worthy...