Word: sopranoes
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PLEASURES OF THEIR COMPANY (Angel). A cozy recital by Soprano Kathleen Battle and Guitarist Christopher Parkening...
...lifting was undertaken this year. Among the improvements: an enlarged lobby, a cream-and-gold repainting of the main hall, new seats and elevators, and a modern air-conditioning system. The reopening of the hall last week was celebrated with a gala concert that featured performances by Stern, Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Horne, Frank Sinatra and Pianist Vladimir Horowitz. The real star of the evening, however, was the legendary Carnegie sound itself. The critical consensus: richer and more crystal clear than ever...
...blend is a question not just of music but of personalities. The singers share a familial sensibility, with a family's history of love, conflict and eccentricity. The chemistry of rehearsals has lately been altered, for instance, by the absence of a popular soprano, who lives someplace called Katydid Lane and who is celebrated for crawling around her living room in her nightgown lest her appearance in the picture window scare off visiting deer. The chemistry is also different because Ethel Brandon, who directed the choir for 38 years, is now back in the congregation after an illness...
Then the evensong begins, with the choir in blue robes and white cottas. They sing intensely about a voice from heaven, and as they intone the words "Blessed are the dead, blessed are the dead . . ." bass, tenor, alto and soprano seem to wheel around one another, in an eerie polyphony that rolls across the congregation...
...choir falter momentarily at the start of the Nunc Dimittis. But then, suddenly, everyone is there. You can hear the blend, unmistakably. They sing through the rest of the service as one choir, from the foundation of Buswell's subdued bass on up to the surging descants of the soprano line. The 22-note "Amen" dances down like the leaves in the streets outside. For a few moments, it is possible to feel ordinary people lift themselves up into the communion of saints and the cloud of witnesses...