Word: sing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SONATA RECITAL (2 LPs; Vanguard). Bela Bartok wrote for the piano as though it were a percussion instrument, but when he played it, he could make it sing in the best romantic tradition. This historic album, made at a Library of Congress recital in 1940, is one of the few recordings that survive to attest to Bartok's virtuosity as a performer, long eclipsed by his fame as a composer. With Master Violinist Joseph Szigeti, Bartok gives a bold and dramatic rendition of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata and plays the Debussy Sonata for Violin and Piano lightly...
...came upon two boats jammed with 67 refugees, including the chauffeur of Fidel's brother Ramon (an obscure bureaucrat in the Department of Sugar Transport) and Orlando Contreras, once one of Cuba's most popular singers, now declared "decadent." Said Contreras: "They wouldn't let me sing what I wanted to, and they wouldn't let me make a tour inside the country, and finally they put a 70% tax on my wages to make me stop asking." So he and the others set sail to join their countrymen in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York...
Soprano Phyllis Curtin makes the same point in terms of everyday life by noting that "children sing when they really mean it: 'You're a dirty bul-ly.' " She even illustrates music's power by citing, "Double your pleasure / Double your fun, / With Doublemint, Doublemint, / Doublemint...
...basic complaint against opera is that it does not reflect reality, that "people do not converse in such a way"-that in real life, people do not sing. As a matter of fact, they sing more often than they recite Shakespearean verse or the kind of phony political speeches with which they harangue each other in the supposedly real theater of Arthur Miller. Of course people do not speak in asides ("I'll have her yet!"), which were accepted on the stage for decades, nor in a Joycean stream of consciousness, which is accepted today. People do not mumble...
...none of this proves that opera is finished. New works are almost never quickly accepted-even Carmen flopped at first. Singers complained that they couldn't sing Wagner (some still do, and can't), and again and again the end of opera was proclaimed. To many, the most recent "end" came with Richard Strauss, who died in 1949. When Alban Berg's magnificent Wozzek was first performed in 1925, some people covered their ears in horror; today it is widely accepted as an almost mellow classic. Julius Rudel, director of Manhattan's enterprising New York City...