Word: pavarotti
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Soprano Mirella Freni, 56, will not sing Madama Butterfly onstage. The part is so heavily emotional that she feels it could upset the vocal balance she has spent a lifetime achieving. Luciano Pavarotti has just won acclaim for his first Otello, and most musical experts think he was right to wait until age 55 to try the heroic role. The list of parts that tenor Alfredo Kraus, 63, will not touch reads almost like a chart of opera's greatest hits, including Cavaradossi in Tosca and Rodolfo in La Boheme. Kraus sticks strictly to lighter parts that do not strain...
...initial years onstage are crucial, and according to their elders, many of today's young singers are in too much of a rush. Leonie Rysanek, 64 and still a shimmering soprano, says, "The first word to learn is no, if you want a career." Says Pavarotti: "Go easy. One new role a year is plenty." Before his Otello, sung in a concert version with the Chicago Symphony, music fans speculated that he lacked the declamatory heft for the part. But Pavarotti not only had it; he was able to sing three out of four performances with a bad cough...
...after all, the Bear, whom some describe as only part grizzly and the rest Teddy. His wife Brenda and their three children know him as a pussycat: an outdoorsman, an amateur magician, a cookie muncher, a fellow who lulls himself to sleep listening to tapes of Pavarotti or the sounds of honking geese and mountain streams. So what if he likes Charles Bronson movies...
...admits that she cannot think of one. "I can wait," she says philosophically. "But who knows? I may be too old when it finally happens." A third wish is that a fine young tenor would appear on the opera horizon. "My three tenors," as she refers to Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Alfredo Kraus, will do nicely for now, but at 37, Anderson is at least twelve years younger than any of them. What to do, she wonders, when they retire...
...June Anderson, and where does she get off being so -- well, so demanding? For starters, she is the newest diva on the international music scene. Her coronation came last fall with her Metropolitan Opera debut as Gilda in Rigoletto, the season's major event. "Ah, she is beautiful!" croons Pavarotti, her co-star. "So tall! And she has beautiful musicality, beautiful voice, beautiful phrasing." Leonard Bernstein, who chose Anderson for the new recording of his operetta Candide, likens her to Jennie Tourel, among others, in "the sense of vocal color, of the dramatic use of technique and the endless drive...