Word: musicologist
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Bloodshot Eyes. Not surprisingly, the sexual practices of singers are as odd as their gastronomic habits. Musicologist Henry Pleasants, whose new book The Great Singers, will be published this month, reports that Tenor Jean de Reszke (1850-1925) favored continence for male singers for two or three days before a performance. Should women indulge? a pupil asked. "Not," replied De Reszke, "while onstage...
...scene is lowdown and swinging, too, a few blocks away at Pepper's or Turner's Blue Lounge, or out on the West Side at Smoot's or Silvio's. Indeed, such a wealth and variety of authentic blues abounds in Chicago today that Musicologist Samuel Charters says: "It's the last place left in the country where a living music is still played in local bars and neighborhood clubs. It's what New Orleans used to be like in the '30s, what Memphis was like...
What Mahler left of the work was a patchy sketch of seemingly inscrutable calligraphy. In 1924, Composer Ernst Krřenek stitched together the more fully outlined first and third movements, but abandoned the rest as unsalvageable. Then in 1960, British Musicologist Deryck Cooke set out to solve the enigma. Making a painstaking note-by-note transcription of Mahler's sketch, Cooke "found to my amazement that what I was slowly writing down was entirely intelligible and indeed fascinating music...
...comparative newcomer to the world's opera houses. Long the foremost interpreter of German lieder, he only recently turned to opera on a more than part-time basis, now divides his time equally between the two mediums. He is, essentially, the thinking man's baritone. With a musicologist's lore and fidelity to the text, he meticulously works out each vocal inflection until, as one critic put it, "he not only knows what he sings, but also why he sings." Not a splashy, booming singer, he achieves the utmost theatrical effect with subtle shadings of his husky...
...rummaging through the Hungarian National Library in Budapest, a young U.S. musicologist named H. C. Robbins Landon unearthed a treasure-trove of eight operas by Franz Joseph Haydn. The scores, written in the master's hand between 1762 and 1780, were in various states of disrepair. Landon set himself to the task of preparing them for production. Last week the Landon-restored Le Pescatrici (The Fisherwomen) opened at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam to critical acclaim: "A score which swarms with pleasing musical finds"; "Some arias and duets are jewels which nobody other than Haydn could have...