Word: sopranoes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...existence comes to a halt in Beckett, it is absurdly speeded up in the work of Eugene Ionesco. When the clock strikes 17 in the first scene of his first play, The Bald Soprano, it sounds the meaning of all his plays: "The universe is out of control." Better than any other playwright, Ionesco has captured the ludicrous panic that invades modern man in an age of rapidly changing technology. An ardent admirer of the Marx Brothers, Ionesco produces tragic farce by using the proliferation and acceleration of physical objects-much the way that the Marx Brothers in A Night...
...line of the well-made play seem slowpoky. The modern play is all middle like a Happening, all now. Unable to conceive of a destination, it coils endlessly around its theme. Genet's The Blacks begins and ends with identical scenes; so does Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Almost nothing has happened. There is the suggestion of unalterable and eternal repetitions in human behavior. Pinter does this almost subliminally with poetically repetitive speech patterns...
...Good to Sing. The Tchaikovsky launched some new personalities last week. One was a California soprano, Jane Marsh, 24, who took first prize ($2,775) in the voice competition. At first glance, Marsh seemed too good to sing true. A tall (5 ft. 11 in.) blonde with a fresh-scrubbed athletic look, she is the embodiment of a capitalist American background. She was a tomboy, an expert swimmer, a 4-H girl who in true Walt Disney tradition sold her favorite horse to pay for music lessons. She sang in public professionally for the first time only last season, when...
JOHN CAGE: VARIATIONS IV (Everest). Composer Cage arranges a curious counterpoint to the playing of David Tudor by splicing a variety of noises into the staccato piano theme: the sound of traffic on the street outside, a patrician English girl chattering nervously, a chanteuse, a coloratura, a boy soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins murdering high D at the end of the Queen of the Night's aria from The Magic Flute. Oddly but irresistibly, they add up to a cry from the heart...
...exodus of name singers, the Italian audiences can in part blame themselves. "They hiss or whistle too easily," says Soprano Mirella Freni. "I like a certain battle climate, but in Italy every evening is a graduation exam...