Word: sopranos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Charles who?" asked the singer, forgetting for the moment the Prince's warm admiration of her top notes. Her agent hastily explained, his client hastily accepted, and this week, Kiri Te Kanawa, originally from New Zealand and lately of the Royal Opera, will let her shimmering soprano loose on a three-minute anthem by Handel. She will be accompanied by a trumpet soloist and 95 other musicians drawn from three orchestras in which the bridegroom has taken a particular interest...
Europe's great lyric soprano is expanding her career-maybe...
...paid off, for the performance had an unselfconscious ease about it that helped to eliminate any difficulties the audience might have had with the style, dry by conventional standards but supple and expressive. Especially impressive was the Nero of Susan Larson, taking a part originally written for a male soprano; the Arnalta of Tenor Karl Dan Sorensen, playing a nursemaid in another of the opera's travesty roles; and the Ottone of Countertenor Jeffrey Gall. Kerry McCarthy made a vocally handsome, icily regal Poppea. Pearlman translated Giovanni Francesco Busenello's masterly libretto into idiomatic, singable English...
...score has two powerful moments that foreshadow the composer's mature style. The first comes in the opening, when the heroine Odabella (Soprano Marilyn Zschau) confronts Attila (Bass Samuel Ramey), who has just killed her father and razed her city, Aquileia. In a fiery aria laced with coloratura, she swears vengeance. Around her a chorus of barbarians praises Attila's conquests. The scene is an early example of the art of dramatic juxtaposition perfected at the end of the third act of Otello, with lago gloating over his fallen master as the Venetians outside sing the Moor...
...York she learned quickly that credentials from Greece meant nothing. She pushed endlessly for auditions. Finally, she got one with Edward Johnson, the Met's general manager, who offered her a contract for two starring roles. Inexplicably, she turned him down. Her refusal started the soprano off on a long, wearing odyssey. On the way she studied the subtleties of her art with great teachers like Conductor Tullio Serafin and learned stagecraft from Luchino Visconti, whom she deeply loved...