Word: mezzos
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...Lazy" (1924), Joan Morris and William Bolcom, on "Blue Skies: Songs by Irving Berlin" (recorded 1985, released 1990). Mezzo-soprano Morris and pianist Bolcom, those most joyful archivists of antique pop, turn this ode to indolence into a statement on the ecstasy of doin' nothin'. A classical classic...
...Francisco Opera specializes in movie-into-opera custom conversion jobs designed to tantalize non-operagoers who don't know Rigoletto from rigatoni. Two years ago, it was A Streetcar Named Desire, with superstar soprano Renee Fleming as Blanche Dubois; now it's Dead Man Walking, with superstar mezzo Susan Graham as Sister Helen Prejean, the spiritual adviser who brings salvation to a death-row inmate, the role for which Susan Sarandon won an Academy Award. The score is by Jake Heggie, a gifted purveyor of bittersweet art songs, and the libretto is by playwright-opera buff Terrence McNally (The Lisbon...
Ripe-voiced Graham is well on her way to becoming the Renee Fleming of mezzo-sopranos. Her starring role in the San Francisco Opera's upcoming premiere of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking will probably do the trick. So why not board the bandwagon early? Her new CD, a collection of 32 well-chosen art songs by Ned Rorem, is already a prime candidate for Best-of-2000 status. Graham's singing is smart and sumptuous, while Rorem's French-flavored songs--bittersweet, transparent, unsentimentally lyrical--are the best that any American classical composer has given...
...complex persona she had first painstakingly built up with her voice alone. When Hollywood finally slammed its doors in her drug-raddled face, she moved into concert halls and sang her way back to superstardom. An ideal biography would have had something memorable to say about that molten mezzo voice and the shrewd musical mind behind...
...last--a classy Christmas album. Von Otter, the best of all possible mezzo-sopranos, has put together a kaleidoscopically varied program of pop, jazz, classical and folk songs accompanied by an equally diverse instrumental ensemble (accordion, marimba, guitar, synthesizers, a brass quintet--you name it, she's got it). Every number, be it Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, O Come, All Ye Faithful or Benjamin Britten's Corpus Christi Carol, is sung with stylish grace and disarming sincerity. And unlike most classical singers, Von Otter knows how to make a pop tune swing...