Word: sopranoes
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...rich, supple flute: it is precise, a little light, and floats with ease in the stratosphere above high C. More than anything, it is agile. "The unique thing about Beverly's voice is that she can move it faster than anybody else alive," says Conductor Thomas Schippers. Soprano Leontyne Price is "flabbergasted at how many millions of things she can do with a written scale...
BESIDES Beverly Sills, the other leading heiress to Maria Callas' artistic legacy is the Australian coloratura soprano Joan Sutherland. Sutherland, 45, sings many of the same roles as Sills and, like Sills, was a late bloomer-she burst onto the international scene with a Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden in 1959. Otherwise the two are a study in contrasts: separate conjugations of greatness. Each has her passionate following. Ask a Sutherland admirer about Sills' voice and he might say, "Pretty, but thin." Ask a Sillsian about Sutherland and he might retort, "Beautiful, but boring." Still, all would...
Sutherland began by thinking of herself as a dramatic soprano. She feared high notes until her husband, Conductor Richard Bonynge, tricked her into extending her upper voice by playing her music in higher keys. Originally bright and youthful-sounding, her voice darkened as she transformed herself into a coloratura. There is a suggestion of Callas' famous middle register in Sutherland's vocal center-a tone that sounds as if the singer were singing into the neck of a resonant bottle...
...budget balancing and a gift for inspiring loyalty in colleagues. As a conductor-the job he likes best-Rudel is almost wholly devoid of showy theatricality; yet his taste, musicianship and sense of rhythm are faultless, and he is at home in an unusually wide variety of styles. Says Soprano Beverly Sills: "I think he is one of the greatest opera conductors in the world...
True Amalgam. An evening at City Opera does not alway glitter with great singing stars, although in Bass Norman Treigland and Soprano Sills the company possesses two of the finest voices in the world. But Rudel's shows are rarely dull. Because he believes that "open should be a true amalgam of the visual and musical," he was steering City Opera toward total theater long before the term became fashionable. He hired such experienced directors as Frank Corsaro and Tito Capobianco, and gave then free dramatic rein. In those hands even old familiars like Gounod's Faust became...