Word: singeing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fabled way with the German art song, whether communicating the unearthly calm of Meeres Stille, the wild terror of the Erlkönig, the heroic defiance of Prometheus or the soft tenderness of Versunken. And certainly not the opera audiences of San Francisco, which last month heard him sing his greatest role, Mozart's Figaro, in a musically radiant (though poorly lighted and directed) new production...
...Bayreuth Festival, however, can see him as something other than a stalwart. In a brilliant bit of casting against type, the suave, silken Prey has been portraying the cantankerous Beckmesser in Wagner's Die Meistersinger. It may be the first time in history that Beckmesser out-sings his tenor rival in the prize-song contest. "In his letters, Wagner said that Beckmesser should not be too comic," says Prey. "So I said I will sing this music like Schubert's Winterreise. "And he does...
What else lies in store? Berg's Wozzeck, perhaps. A demanding performer who turned down a request by Herbert von Karajan to sing Beckmesser because he disagreed with Karajan's concept, Prey is currently mulling a couple of offers to sing the foremost 20th century antihero. He plans to ignore the tradition of croaking and barking the role that has evolved since the challenging opera's premiere in 1925. "Berg wanted a beautiful voice," says Prey. "I want to sing every note as it is written...
...PERPETUAL and steadily more disturbing self-absorption, the older Krapp apes the taped actions and words of his younger self, fantasizing each time Krapp the younger reminisces about a woman, and occasionally rousing himself to sing a song or swig from a wine bottle at the younger one's cue. In a device of mixed effectiveness, Cherson has chosen to splice actual slides of women into the fantasy sequence, which lends immediacy but punctures the script's hypnotic solipsism...
Their stories are personal, but so alike that a man named Lowell ("Bud") McKirgan wrote the Blue Grass Opera a few years back, and it seems to apply to almost all of them. It's about people leaving home and heading north (How did Bobby Bare sing it? "Home folks think I'm big in Dee-troit City"), planning to get rich quick and go back and buy a filling station or a hardware store, always talking about going home for good even as the debts piled up and children came along and roots went down and finally...