Word: sopranoes
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Playing Cleopatra, Soprano Leontyne Price was so heavily costumed in bolts of sparkling cloth that she looked like a junior-sized pyramid herself; it was a wonder that she eould sing at all, though sing she did, and her burnished voice never sounded better. At the top of their form, too, were Basso Justino Diaz as Antony and Tenor Thomas as Caesar. Composer Barber's setting for Shakespeare's text was notable chiefly for an orchestration built of conflict ing clouds of moody, often eerie thun-derbursts of sound, punctuated with enough jutting exclamations of dissonance to label...
...auditorium, watching a rehearsal. Then he leaps up, steps over some seats and halts a bevy of girl dancers onstage. "How about raising the hems above the knee? Hmm. Better check the knees first." (Titters.) Now he is off to one of the rehearsal rooms to tend to a soprano who is feeling neglected. "It's freezing in here," she shivers. (Singers hate air conditioning more than they hate other singers.) Ignoring the air-conditioning controls, Bing ceremoniously goes to the wall and turns the knob for the intercom system. "There," he purrs in his caramel-soft Viennese-British...
...protect the prestige of the Met name, Bing dropped Soprano Helen Traubel for "singing in smoky nightclubs" and Baritone Robert Merrill for taking leave to make a class-C movie, Aaron Slick from Punkin Crik (Merrill was reinstated a year later after making a public apology: "I have learned my lesson"). That lesson was clear: the wiry Mr. Bing was no man to tangle with. One Met dowager, who like most of the oldtimers was eying the new manager with suspicion, had to learn the hard way. "From what I hear," she airily informed him one night...
...muses began musing on the music business. He took to it like Barnum to bun kum. Once he billed a sorry troupe of dancers as terpsichorean exponents of "Vice, Horrors and Ecstasy," then hurriedly had to schedule extra performances to accommodate the crowds. Among his clients were Soprano Lotte Lehmann, a young redheaded violinist named Eugene Ormandy, and a troupe of Russian modern dancers, one of whose members, a slim, dark-eyed blonde named Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, later shortened her name to Mrs. Rudolf Bing...
...evade taxes," explains Bing, "so I have to cope with the names of their dogs listed as secretaries, and of their wives as managers." Birgit Nilsson once paid Bing a double-edged tribute by listing him on her income-tax report as a dependent. At all events, as Italian Soprano Mirella Freni says, "The Met is marvelous experience, a theater where one works with tranquillity in a warm, almost friendly atmosphere without nervousness. In Italy you can feel this nervousness all around...