Word: mezzos
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Last summer, Hindemith thought he had finally approached his ideal. Manhattan's New Friends of Music asked famed Mezzo-Soprano Jennie Tourel to give the new Marienleben its first performance. Jennie, as good as they come in skill and agility of voice, took a run over the score and gulped. Even after revision, the score was the most difficult Jennie had ever seen. But, she says, she couldn't shake off the beauty of Rilke's poems and the challenge of Hindemith's powerful music. With Pianist Erich Itor Kahn, she worked on it, finally, after...
Last week, an audience in Manhattan's Town Hall got to hear the music that had become "a real labor of love" for both Mezzo Tourel and Composer Hindemith. Incandescent with devotional power and warmth, much, if not all, of Das Marienleben made far easier listening this time. Most listeners found it "noble music" indeed. Japed Jennie, tired, but flushed and excited by the music and the ovation: "Let's go back on and do it again...
Dark-eyed Elena Nikolaidi, assured and lovely in a pale taffeta gown, stepped out on the stage of Manhattan's Town Hall, composed her hands and began to sing. Her voice, ranging from a mellow low contralto to a brilliant mezzo-soprano, glided through songs by Gluck, Haydn, Schubert, Rossini, Mahler, Ravel and De-Falla; the performance came to an end with the Sleep-Walking Scene from Verdi's Macbeth. The audience shuffled their programs to look at the name again. Thirtyish Elena Nikolaidi, making her U.S. debut and almost unknown outside Athens and Vienna, had achieved...
When plump little Italian Mezzo-Soprano Ebe Stignani walked onstage for her New York debut, she got an unexpected ovation. It overwhelmed her so much she could hardly get through her first group of Handel and Vivaldi songs. "I can't sing when I am emotional," she said. But when she got her own emotions under control, her listeners began to lose theirs. A singer in the great bel canto tradition, she was as golden at the top of her voice as at the bottom, and as velvety in her ringing forte as in her piano. And she could...
...Harvard and Radcliffe Music Clubs will present a concert of contemporary chamber music in Paine Hall tonight at 8:30 p.m. at their first open meeting of the year. The program, containing pieces by Ravel, Kohn, Milhaud, and Hindemith, will feature Phyllis Curtin, mezzo-soprano, as guest artist...