Word: opera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Anyone who doubts that life is unfair should meet Renee Fleming. She's an international opera star blessed with a warm, creamy, lyric-soprano voice and show-stopping good looks. Signatures: Great Opera Scenes (London), her latest CD, has hit the classical charts. Andre Previn is composing an operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire especially for her (the San Francisco Opera will give the premiere next season). And as if all that weren't enough, she has two children, sings jazz on the side and is notorious for being...a really nice person...
...nothing. But not so long ago, diva moms were as rare as short NBA stars. Though it wasn't impossible to bring up children between performances (Beverly Sills did it), most big-league women singers assumed that having babies would short-circuit their careers, and chose not to. Similarly, opera stars who sang pop music were invariably condemned for pandering to the proles (Ezio Pinza starred in South Pacific, but only after he retired from the Metropolitan Opera). And according to conventional wisdom, niceness was a luxury ambitious sopranos couldn't afford, moving, as they do, in a viciously competitive...
...also known for being good colleagues, devoted mothers and accomplished pop singers--but she may be the first to combine postfeminist independence with old-fashioned glamour. In person, Fleming comes across as cheerful and unassuming; onstage, she is one of the most vividly expressive personalities ever to take an opera-house curtain call. Appearing this fall in the Met's production of Manon, she bewitched audiences and critics alike with her compelling portrayal of the title character, a teenage girl who escapes from a convent, sets up shop as a courtesan, jilts her wealthy lover, seduces a priest and cuts...
...evil in a magical world. The overture itself begins with a drawn-out progression of three chords, which add an overarching solemnness to the otherwise warm and lighthearted mood of the piece. Mozart develops his musical ideas in a straightforward way, referring only once to the music within the opera. Filling in for BSO Principal Guest Conductor Bernard Haitink, Andrew Davis carried off a fabulous execution of this overture. The orchestra achieved a beautiful, warm tone, but still managed to capture all the playfulness of the piece...
...their lives--to MTV. From complete personal profiles to in-depth analyses of seminal Real World events (i.e., the firing of Montana from the After-School Program in the Boston season), Solomon and Carter dive headlong into the magic of the TV show that exists both as half-soap opera and half-documentary. Also included are fact sheets about the locales, a minute-by-minute account of a typical Real World day, snippets from the cast member's personal journals and a dictionary of Real World terms so that enthusiastic fans can even talk like their MTV heroes. Replete with...