Word: mezzos
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...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...
Oddly enough, Soprano Sutherland started out in an entirely different style, hoping to be a Wagnerian singer. The daughter of a Sydney tailor, she took her first voice lessons from her mother, a "nonprofessional mezzo-soprano," won a number of local competitions and with the prize money decamped for London. At Covent Garden auditions, she learned that the Wagner repertory was not for her: "My voice really isn't heavy enough for that, and I soon understood that I'd been forcing it along a road that was wrong...
...Scala's Carmen is a grandiose production featuring Todd-AO-sized sets, live horses and a chorus of hundreds. But when statuesque Mezzo Lane stepped onstage dressed in black stockings and a startlingly low-cut shirt ("I never wear a brassiere''), she stopped every eye in the house. Moving with feline grace, she developed a Carmen glittering with gypsy pride and animal excitement. "Singing with her," says a La Scala tenor, "can be pretty tough on a hot-blooded Sicilian like me." Even on La Scala's great stage, Mezzo Lane's voice was opulent...
...comparatively brief operatic career, 29-year-old Mezzo Lane has made something of a specialty of dying gracefully. The daughter of an immigrant Russian harnessmaker, she heard her first music in a Trenton synagogue where her father was baritone cantor. Gussie Seit became Gloria Lane in her teens, after she won a Y.M.H.A. amateur contest singing Let Yourself Go. She abandoned a $40-a-week secretarial job to win the role of the secretary in Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul, later sang the role of Desideria in Menotti's Saint oj Bleecker Street, a part that, like...