Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite these gifts, he failed to invest his orchestra with enough expressiveness or subtlety to rival Doc Severinson's band. Carmen's rousing prelude came out as a consistent, if uninspiring, series of oompah-oompahs, and in the orchestral finale to the Gypsy Song the melody somehow got lost beneath the percussive power of the tambourine...
...into "The Girl That I Marry" at the smallest provocation. Carole Bogard's Micaela had lots of potential but her lively soprano couldn't compensate for the inherent dullness of the role. Glade Peterson's powerful and expressive tenor seemed perfect for Don Jose, but he muffed the Flower Song and never fully recovered...
AMIDST the general bungling, Ciro's choreography gave the Gypsy Song tremendous vitality, and his flamenco solo at the beginning of Act Four stopped the show. The staging, by Sarah Caldwell, was always competent and occasionally inventive, as when Carmen threw her Tarot deck into the air at the end of Act Three. And Marilyn Horne played Carmen...
...weight of her low register in the Tarot Scene was miraculous, and the delicacy of her flirtation dance before Jose no less so. Her characterization omitted no details, from the Third Act baiting of Jose to the seductively hoarse suggestion of "L'amour" at the end of the Toreador Song...
Neither is Hotiana (Paul Mancusco), and with a vengeance. Hot is Kate's rival for the favors of a village mailman, and when she pleads, sounding like a duck in heat, for "Nothing But Him," it not only obscures the merits of the song but leaves a faint prickly sensation in the ears. Her briefer wishing-well plea for Joe is hysterical...