Word: sopranoes
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...week, conducting a performance of the new production, Boulez turned Pelleas into a musical affirmation by treating the drama not as a fairy tale but a human story. Thus he brought passion and pain to a work that all too often seems pale. In the famous scene where Melisande (Soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom) looses her hair over the ardent Pelleas (Tenor George Shirley), Boulez whipped the music to a Tristan-like sexual intensity. Then, at the entrance of Melisande's jealous husband Golaud (Baritone Donald McIntyre), he cut through the sensuality with harsh, jabbing chords, tightening the singing until...
...shrewd businessman, he ensured The Messiah's success by hiring the best and most popular singers in 18th century London to sing it. If the bass singer was not very good, Handel would turn the bass aria into a recitative, rewrite it for an alto or even a soprano. For flexible soprano voices, he would doll up the music with ornaments and, if another soprano complained, he would steal a few arias from the first soprano and slip them to the second. To further befuddle historians, Handel was continually juggling arias to fit whatever boy soprano, male alto...
...time capsule recording the rot of American TV might well include the tape of the Dec. 17 Tonight show. Within that dispiriting 90-minute reel were a cough-medicine commercial, Phyllis Diller's laugh, and the on-the-air wedding of Tiny Tim, the fortyish boy soprano, to his 17-year-old Miss Vicki Budinger...
...cast to do it justice. It gets just that. Colin Davis fans the music to a fierce, steady glow. Highpoints: George Shirley's rocketlike traversal of Fuor del mar-a crippling catalogue of coloratura devices -and Elettra's two arias sung by Pauline Tinsley, a British dramatic soprano whose voice has an electric radiance that recalls Ina Souez and Ljuba Welitsch at their best...
Henze: Three Cantatas (Deutsche Grammophon). Once a leading German avant-garde composer, Henze often writes mistily modern and weirdly beautiful music. In this score, German Soprano Edda Moser floats through the vocal stratosphere with astonishing ease, and demonstrates a bewildering range of sound and color...