Word: sopranoes
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...Center Plaza with year-old productions: the Metropolitan with its comfy,old-fashioned Traviata and the New York City Opera with Beni Montresor's fairy-tale setting of The Magic Flute. In neither case was the performance on much more than a ho-hum level; in fact, Spanish Soprano Montserrat Caballe's first Met Violetta seemed an almost deliberate throwback to the bad old days when singers were meant to be heard but not seen...
...that only illustrates the composer's remarkable capacity for turning great poetry into sentimental salon entertainment. Furthermore, the performance was sadly deficient in the French accent, both in words and music. Franco Corelli nearly strangled on every attempt to produce the pure Gallic B-flat, while all of Soprano Mirella Freni's undeniable charm was defeated by the pallid music she was asked to sing. New Director Paul-Emile Deiber grouped his singers around Rolf Gerard's workaday sets in a series of static tableaux that had little to do with Shakespeare, Gounod, or anything in that...
...brutally intelligent tormentor and Franco Corelli as her devoted lover are almost overwhelming in their dynamic and masculine artistry. Yet Birgit summons all the fire in her Swedish soul and emulates, if not exactly incarnates, the Latin passions of Tosca, daring anyone to typecast her as merely a Wagnerian soprano. With Conductor Lorin Maazel whipping his orchestra along in unrelenting fury, the album becomes a musical Fort Knox...
...hottest," he says-and by way of proof, Leinsdorf had to change his sweat-soaked jacket at intermission. "In it, like the genius he was, Beethoven was asking for things ahead of his time which probably could not be done." As Leinsdorf, the orchestra and the singers-particularly Soprano Hanne-Lore Kuhse and Tenor George Shirley-showed at Tanglewood, they can be done...
...motion. He huffed and he puffed, he grimaced with grief, he smiled with beatific joy. Sometimes he succeeded (usually in fortissimo passages), but most often he was unable to convey any unified conception of this difficult and eccentric master-piece. Of the four vocal solists, Barbara Wallace's beautiful soprano line was so expansive that it all but obscured the others...