Word: sopranos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...said yes, or asked me first and told me she had said yes." But they got on "like sisters," reports Sutherland. "I only hope this acquaintanceship continues." Sills, in her new role as director of the New York City Opera, quickly made sure of that-by inviting her sister soprano to come and be her guest star "any time she likes." -By Claudia Wallis
...least rewarding is the first of the three, Silverman's Madame Adare. Using a libretto by Richard Foreman, his longtime collaborator, the composer has written a fantasy, or more precisely a phantasmagoria, about psychoanalysis and creativity. As the piece begins, Miss Adare, played by Soprano Carol Gutknecht, is seeing her psychiatrist Dr. Hoffman (Bass-Baritone Richard Cross). Her problem: she cannot make up her mind whether she wants to be an opera star or a movie star, and while she dallies, she cannot even make enough money to pay for her sessions. When Hoffman refuses to treat her again...
...crucial importance of the play's word-music: "It is not enough to see Richard III: you should be able to Whistly it." In his speech, Moriarty covers a wide pitch range, and repeatedly resorts actually to singing his lines, at one point using falsetto to ascend to soprano F. Near the end he takes one line, "Why love forswore me in my mother's womb" (borrowed from the third Henry VI play and sings it over and over as a musical refrain...
...music, first sketched around World War I and completed later, has more lateromantic intelligibility than Erwartung, but it is so somber and static that one eventually wants to cry out with the chorus: "Is it really to go on like this forever?" Yet there is a moving finale. Soprano Janet Northway, as a soul who is dying into a new life, slowly ascends a series of platforms, singing an eerily ecstatic duet with a tape recording of her own voice...
...romantic notions. Director Bliss Hebert wittily stages the action with an array of modish accouterments undreamed of by Schoenberg, including Visa cards and telephones with TV monitors; Maxine Willi Klein's sleek set looks like a sci-fi Better Homes and Gardens; and the cast, especially Soprano Mary Shearer as the wife, delivers a slyly spirited performance. Slight as it is, this is the kind of production that Schoenberg's reputation could use more of. Even the sort of people who only played tennis with him could warm...