Word: quartetting
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...Back to My Heart (whose melody echoes Paul McCartney's I've Just Seen a Face) is a lesson in hard-earned self-reliance; Happiness (lyric by Michael McDonald) has the ethereal Eire sound of Enya. The anthemic finale, There Is a Reason, begins in a string-quartet drone and escalates to a wilderness cry for salvation. These are songs in the past tense--love mourned, pain savored, from beyond the grave. Or from heaven: Krauss has the voice of a lost angel, beckoning you into the beyond...
Though the finale of Act I, where a duet becomes a trio and then a quartet, is the opera's grandest moment, there are more musical gems in Act II. This is true partly because the orchestra's role becomes more important: it offers sympathy for the lovelorn Nemorino. Adina's emotional volatility is manifest in ever-higher notes and ever-wider leaps. Turay and Saffer, by far the most talented singers in the production, were brilliant throughout. His rendition of "Una furtiva lagrima" got more applause than any other aria; her passionate confidence in the panacea...
...want to bore people with my music," says Michael Daugherty. He needn't worry. Daugherty's zany, pop-flavored brand of classical music is lots of things, but boring isn't one of them. His compositions include Elvis Everywhere, a work for string quartet and three Elvis impersonators on tape; Desi, a woodwind tribute to I Love Lucy; and Metropolis Symphony, a five-movement orchestral salute to Superman. And on March 14, Daugherty's first opera, Jackie O, about guess who, was produced by Houston Grand Opera. Set to a libretto by Wayne Koestenbaum, author of the panegyric 1995 book...
...younger classical performers, themselves suckled on pop, want to play it, not only to make big bucks but also because they like it. When Jean-Yves Thibaudet, famous for his interpretations of Ravel and Rachmaninoff, records an album of piano solos by jazz great Bill Evans, or the Kronos Quartet programs Jimi Hendrix side by side with Bela Bartok, you know something is happening...
...angry band of G.O.P. radicals, who paid their party's elders as much deference as would Hell's Angels swaggering into a bar full of Shriners. Lott won the trust of both sides and remained the Happy Warrior: backslapping and optimistic, the bass of the Capitol's barbershop quartet...