Word: pianissimo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...choral singing, and he drowns out everybody else. A few singers simply stop in the middle of a hymn, overwhelmed. Barber glares. Privately, he tells Buswell that he is even louder than the organ -- to no avail. Finally, at a Sunday rehearsal, Barber dresses Buswell down: "Look, your pianissimo is not our pianissimo. Turn it way down." In the hallway afterward, Buswell, abashed, tells the other singers, "I guess I really blew it in there...
...aria out of Maria and lending Puccinian fervor to the love duet One Hand, One Heart. Te Kanawa's pure, gleaming voice and British inflection seem a bit too uptown for a Puerto Rican girl from New York City's tough West Side, but she floats a golden high pianissimo at the end of Tonight effortlessly. Troyanos, who was born in the neighborhood where the musical is set (and where Lincoln Center now stands), crackles uninhibitedly in the rhythmically ) infectious immigration anthem America. And Bernstein, leading an orchestra of New York free-lancers, conducts authoritatively and irresistibly...
...Robert Wilson, is a cool rationalist who favors organizational clarity over overt emotionalism. The repeating patterns that ripple through her dances are imitated and finally dispersed like waves spreading across a pond. There are no kicks, leaps or pronounced extension. Childs' dynamic level rarely rises above a whispered pianissimo...
Last week the only "money" note for the tenor in Aida-the high B-flat at the end of Celeste Aida-was rough and ragged, belted out with a desperate fortissimo instead of the more difficult pianissimo that Verdi called for in the score. Elsewhere, Pavarotti's eyes clung to the safety of the prompter's box and the conductor's baton, leaving most of the acting to Soprano Margaret Price (battling a bronchial infection but singing well nonetheless) and Stefania Toczyska, a sultry Polish mezzo and a star of the future, whose Amneris blazed with passionate...
Foremost among these is Epstein's appropriation of Henry Purcell's score for The Fairy Queen, with chorus, soloists and instruments of the Banchetto Musicale, as a means both to lengthen and to enrich Shakespeare's play. The backhanded slap at Mendelssohn's romantic score, with its pianissimo fairies and ebullient wedding march, makes clear even before the lights go up the director's vision of A Midsummer Night's Dream: counterpoint over harmony. If the music doesn't bring that message home, Epstein has added a brief masque to accompany the overture: before a Paolo Uccello-like tapestry...