Word: sopranoes
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...history as well. The tenor said. "In the Bach Motet, John continually points out the musical symbolizations of the text. I had always known that Baroque, music did that, but I tended not to notice it as much as I do now. I sing much more intelligently now." The soprano agreed: "It's difficult to mediate between concentrating on the small, glorious moment and the macrostructure of a piece of music. John points out through his conducting that the small moments are the integral parts of the whole work. I've learned to look for that...
Wagner has not fared well at the Metropolitan Opera during the 21-year regime of Rudolf Bing. No fault of Bing's: except for the shining example of Soprano Birgit Nilsson, most singers during that period barely coped with Wagner's long, heroic, leading roles. On the whole, it was left to stage directors and designers to make up in looks what was missing in sound, usually with limited success...
Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, returning to the Met after a ten-year absence, leads a performance that surges excitingly, especially when Soprano Nilsson pours forth oceans of brilliant sound. Tenor Thomas does not give the world the Tristan that it has lacked since Lauritz Melchior retired in 1950. He looks romantic, but is overwhelmed by Wagner's demands. Still, thanks to Leinsdorf and the unique Nilsson, there are moments when one can forget that this new Tristan looks like an astronomy lecture with visual aids from Hallmark...
...first read lonesco in the ninth grade. I particularly remember it because The Bald Soprano was the first piece of grown-up literature I ever got excited about. It is interesting that we should have gone beyond our pubescent skepticism to enthusiastically appreciate a play that strained even the breadth of adult tolerances. It certainly fit our attention spans much better than Dickens and, to be candid, we were not above its nihilism. But our liking for The Bald Soprano was not the product of our baser thirteen year old instincts. After a childhood of Dick and Jane and Landmark...
...ogres of Ionesco's imagination, but never does he refer to the play Rhinoceros which was his first commercial success. Except for a smattering of italicized comments sprinkled throughout the text Present Past was written before Ionesco wrote his first play. The Bald Soprano, at the age of thirty-seven. Ionesco writes of his youth in Rumania and Paris, his father's desertion of his mother, the horrors of World War Two--all his life before he embarked on his playwriting career at the end of the 1940's. The book is a document of Ionesco's psychological crisis...