Word: sopranoes
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...otherwise static drama. They did not merely rant and rage: they insinuated, they needled, they enticed. Both marvelous singer-actors, they bent and shaded their voices in a seemingly infinite variety of veiled sneers, smiling threats and choked curses. In duets, Ludwig's vibrant, richly textured mezzo-soprano enfolded Berry's robust, securely focused baritone like velvet over steel. A blend of poetry and power, their singing was eloquent proof that strife can be beautiful...
LAMP UNTO MY FEET (CBS, 10-10:30 a.m.). The work of Composer Antonio Vivaldi in "A Concert of Angels," with Narrator John Heffernan, Soprano Roberta Peters and the CBS Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Alfredo Antonini...
...wrote the famed castrato soprano Pier Francesco Tosi in his book Observations on the Florid Song, which was the basic handbook for opera singers during the 18th century. In those days singers freely ornamented composers' scores with their own improvised embellishments in a style known as bel canto (literally, "beautiful singing") To today's purists, who worshipfully preach note-for-note fidelity to the composer the style is strictly bellow canto. Nevertheless, performances in opera houses and on recordings are now being laced with so many variations on old arias that Tosi would sing...
...Some tenacious women singers masqueraded as castrati (which caused occasional -and embarrassing- sexual complications). When women were finally accepted on all opera stages in the early 1800s, the vain castrati resented the competition. The result was some classic vocal jousts. Castrato Domenico Caffarelli, for instance, liked to fluster the sopranos during duets by spiraling off on melodic tangents that had no resemblance to the score; Soprano Angelica Catalan!, while singing in England, tried to hold her own by tossing in elaborate variations of God Save the King in every opera she sang...
...piano and her collection of scores, never sang again, "not even to myself." She spent her last years as a kind of talent scout, holding auditions in her studio, admonishing young hopefuls to "stop studying and start singing." Though she helped the careers of dozens of singers, including Soprano Grace Moore, she sadly remarked a few years ago that she "had not found another Mary Garden." Nor has anyone else...