Word: sopranos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soprano Leona Mitchell's career goes boom...
...gold curtain rises on Verdi's La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera this season, it does more than unveil the first act set: it also reveals a bright new star in rapid ascent. As Leonora, Soprano Leona Mitchell, 34, sings with smoldering intensity. Each performance mingles sweet lyricism with raw-edged emotion that brings audiences to their feet, shouting bravas and tossing bouquets. From a dutiful but passionate daughter to the pathetic, penitent recluse at the end of the opera, Mitchell recalls Leontyne Price in the quality and dramatic power of her performance...
...PARTICULARLY poignant moment in Jean Jacques Beineix's new movie Diva. Cynthia Hawknis, the striking Black soprano of the title, and her adoring fan Jules stroll through the streets of a rainy and ancient Paris. Floating serenely across grassy parks and statue-ridden boulevards, the pair find themselves suspended in a world more appropriate to the match-making machinations of Maurice Chevalier in Gigi than to the high tech high punk goings-on of the film's other characters. Hawkins carries a ruffled parasol, and young Jules, wearing the kind of lean and hungry look that only a European...
...chronic shiverer" who goes to her reward wearing enough garments to stock a branch of Marks & Spencer. Other beguiling wackinesses: a song about a man who makes eating vegetables seem a sexual experience, the vocal travails of a hiccuping, stuttering woman who has "bubbles in her bonnet," and the soprano heroine's sudden loss of her "high note," which she regains at the price of addiction-to helium sucked from balloons. In less good taste is a character called Skitzy, who talks in voices high and low, has two personalities, and eerily resembles the shopping-bag ladies who wander...
Rochberg has done his best to flesh out the unpromising material. The opera, his first, is filled with striking set pieces: a lyrical duet for China (Tenor Neil Rosenshein) and his wife Annabella (Soprano Sunny Joy Langton); an ominous interview between China and his moneyed friend Orchis (Tenor Michael Fiacco), whose threatening nature is underlined by a snap-pizzicato line in the low strings; a good-natured, bibulous ensemble lauding the joys of wine. In his handling of the choruses, Rochberg is especially skillful; indeed the final chorus, extolling the virtue of confidence, recalls the Falstaffian spirit of Verdi...