Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rossini's The Barber of Seville. Then she headed for Italy, where next week she will sing the same role at La Scala. When not in the opera house, she is in the recording studios. Two new albums, French Opera Arias (Columbia) and Frederica von Stade Sings Mozart-Rossini Opera Arias (Philips), display what the fuss is about -a lustrous amber mezzo-soprano voice with an unusually high, sweet crystalline top and seemingly effortless agility...
...Rudolf Bing who plucked her out of the Met opera studio when she was 24 and gave her a contract. Three years later she surprised everybody by taking a season off to broaden her experience in Europe. There, in the spring of 1973, she scored a smashing success as Mozart's Cherubino in a new production of The Marriage of Figaro at the Paris Opera, with Sir Georg Solti conducting. Suddenly, she found herself an international star, and made a triumphant return to the Met-as Rosina in The Barber...
...opera house, but because it is not large she shies away from the heavy Verdi and Puccini, not to mention Wagner. She may be ready for some of that music in five to ten years, although she herself doubts it. For now it is enough that she sings Mozart (Cherubino in Figaro, Dorabella in Cost fan Tutte) with exquisite taste, control and sheen. Or that she can blend the impetuous and the spiritual so deftly as Nina in Thomas Pasatieri's The Seagull, or the childlike and the vulnerable so magically as the heroine of Debussy's Pelleas...
Equally convincing was the performance of the first four movements from Mozart's "Haffner" Serenade, K. 250. Again, Shumsky played a dual role as conductor and violin soloist. The work, Mozart's first great orchestral effort, retains both a light, chamber music coloration and a tendency toward a concertant style. (This style makes soloists operate in opposition to the orchestra...
...piece is written in D Major, which signifies, in Mozart, an emphasis on orchestral sonority. Shumsky promoted this interpretation with considerable success. The HRO spun through the four movements, permeated with tricky cutoffs and entrances, with flair and vitality. The bassoon work was especially fine. In two cadenzas written by Fritz Kreisler, Shumsky livened up the work (which does not have the force of the mature Mozart's masterpieces) with spectacular double-stopped trills and breakneck-speed runs...