Word: sopranoes
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What reason there is behind this show's musical rhymes is really just an excuse to throw together a potpourri of characatures: Rosalinda (Martha Ecclestone), the lead soprano, is a kind of Tricia Nixon who let her hair down: Alfred (Neil Cohen) is her would-be lover, a tenor with an endearing Bela Lugosi accent: then, there is Rosalinda's husband (Peter Kazaras), who is rather too confused to ever realize he's being cuckolded; and, finally. Adele (Leslie Luxemburg), as a chambermaid gone actress, and Frank (Bob Noonoo), as a jail-keep gone marquis. What the women occasionally lack...
...diction, precise ensemble and balance, and spiritual sympathy. But conductor James Yannatos deserves special praise for a manly, unostentatious, dramatically well-proportioned, moving yet suitably chaste reading of this Requiem of consolation for both dead and living. Baritone Thomas Beveridge sang with subtler phrasing and dynamic control than soprano Helen Boatwright, who, while possessing considerably more substantial tone, tended to substitute distracting inhalatory anguish for simpler feeling. The sorrow of her central text resides in the unadorned line, without need for such overt emotional infringement...
...swimmer, it's the Olympics or the English Channel. For an actor it is Hamlet. But for a coloratura soprano, the pinnacle and challenge was and is Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia de Lammermoor. It is an opera whose trills, turns and top tones defy the deftest voices. The stilted dramaturgy of the libretto can reduce the most colorful actress to a drab cardboard gray...
...opera at all? Because when Lucia is sung brilliantly, it is an unparalleled showpiece for great singing. New York has heard nearly every soprano of importance attempt Lucia -from Adelina Patti to Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. Most of them have played the role as a fluttering, chirping simpleton. Callas made Lucia into a figure of high tragedy, but sang with disillusioning unevenness; Sutherland sang it sumptuously, but her acting was merely studious when it should have been spellbinding...
...been a rather shaking night," the soprano quipped after singing the third act of La Bohème under somewhat unusual circumstances. First there was that rumbling noise backstage at the San Francisco Opera House. "I looked around, thinking maybe they had turned on the wind machine," Dorothy Kirsten recalled. "I was sort of dizzy and the floor was shaking. I was so engrossed, I didn't know what was happening." What was happening was a strong earthquake-5.6 on the Richter scale-the bay area's biggest jolt in twelve years. A few of the less courageous...