Word: opera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...onto the stage and opens his mouth. Out floats an exquisitely beautiful alto voice--and the crowd starts cheering. Is it a dream? A freak show? No, it's what happens whenever countertenor David Daniels makes another debut, as he did in April at New York City's Metropolitan Opera, and will be doing in August at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival. Seven short years ago, he was a frustrated tenor whose high notes refused to kick in; now he is racking up reviews that might make even Pavarotti envious...
...horrible depression," he told a psychotherapist about what he called his "other voice." She replied that both voices came from the same person. Within days he realized his true identity as a singer; just five years later, he won the coveted Richard Tucker Award, given to highly promising young opera singers (Renee Fleming is a laureate), and made a spectacular New York City Opera debut in Handel's Xerxes...
...years ago, the mischievous British media tried to fan the flames of a feud between Indian authors Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth by reporting that Rushdie had dismissed Seth's epic 1993 best seller, A Suitable Boy, as nothing but a "soap opera." Seth denied that Rushdie had been snide, but it is a measure of Seth's extraordinary skill and versatility--his first novel, The Golden Gate, was a tale of San Francisco written entirely in elegant verse; A Suitable Boy was the opposite, a marvelous, sprawling, and gripping tale of Indian family life--that one wonders...
True to any soap opera worthy of the name, the reader does race ahead, eager to see how it will all come out. But this time around, Seth appears to have hit a flat note...
India's movie industry specializes in raucous mythological epics; melodramatic histrionics are the mainstay of Italian opera. The two worlds collided in New Delhi this week with the triumphant return to politics of Sonia Gandhi. The Italian-born widow of slain prime minister Rajiv Gandhi reclaimed the reins of her Congress party Tuesday, after rowdy protests, pleading deputations and even an attempted self-immolation by a despairing supporter coaxed her out of a self-imposed week in the political wilderness. Promising that "every drop of my blood belongs to this country," Gandhi galvanized party activists for a head-on battle...