Word: sopranos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Students who showed up last week for the previously announced band concert at Syracuse University's Grouse Hall were in for a jolt. The band had been canceled, and in its place was a performance with two pianos that were out of tune with each other, a soprano who bent her notes off pitch, and a chamber ensemble that blatted, swooped and squeaked like an ordinary orchestra warming up. At first it all sounded merely crabbed and comic, but soon it also took on the astringent freshness of a brave new musical vocabulary. It was a group...
Mary Sindoni as Leonora-Fidelio was the musical heroine of the evening. As lovely vocally as in appearance, she sang the soprano role with taste, showing remarkably little strain in the high register and shifting effortlessly from one register to the other. James Parks as the wicked Governor Pizarro was dramatically the most successful of the soloists. He achieved a characterization where the others only sang well. This is not to slight his vocal capabilities--a bass-baritone, he took the high A in "Ha! Welch'ein Augenblick" and held it painlessly. The only singers supposed to be able...
...stage was bare, the costumes were rehearsal-type togs in grey, white and black. "If you combine sumptuous sets and costumes with Mahler," explains MacMillan, "you get something like jam on jam." A tenor and a mezzo-soprano sang the vocal parts from opposite sides of the proscenium, while onstage dancers representing such allegorical figures as Youth, Beauty and Everyman traced a melange of MacMillan movements that seemed to draw equally on classical, modern and Chinese dance styles...
...rising male dancer, Anthony Dowell, 24. Though always a brooding, ominous figure, the Messenger was also a familiar and alluring one, sometimes standing patiently to the side, sometimes dancing among the other figures or carrying them away. At the end, something beyond his triumph was suggested as the mezzo-soprano sang, "Everywhere and forever the distance looks bright and blue-forever . . . forever," and he and the Everyman and Woman figures united in a slow, floating movement directly toward the audience...
...Stravinsky's Russian Peasant Songs, the women, singing alone, gave the best performance of the evening. Every note and word was crisp and clear in these pulsating, rhythmic songs. In the third, the chorus and an excellent solo trio gleefully tossed the song back and forth. Dorothy Oeste's soprano in the fourth was flawless...