Word: sopranos
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...easy enough to pick out the ringers, the professionals, in the choir. In the instant before she sings, Carole FitzPatrick, the lead soprano, sits forward and seems to assemble herself into a musical instrument, spine straightening, chest swelling, head lifting and tilting back. When the volunteers mumble through the first reading, she growls, sotto voce, "Come on, girls, sing!" "I was singing," comes the lament. The volunteers regroup to one side of their leader, for strength in numbers. They start to open up and "honk it," as FitzPatrick indelicately urges on the third...
...With a big t before the 'off.' Crisp as a knife." He is relentlessly attentive to the details that weave together the different parts: "Everybody, on the bottom of page 3, let's make that a dotted quarter note with an eighth rest, so we can hear the soprano entrance...
...what is one to make of an opera about the life and turbulent times of Francisco Goya (Domingo, in robust voice) that omits almost every significant incident in the painter's life? Of a work that concentrates on a historically disputed love affair with the Duchess of Alba (Mezzo-Soprano Victoria Vergara), concluding with a gratuitous mad scene, replete with writhing spirits and fun-house demons? Of a score whose one striking musical device, an insistent, high-pitched whine signifying Goya's deafness, is borrowed from Smetana's string quartet From My Life...
VICTOR HERBERT: The American Girl. Soprano Teresa Ringholz, with Donald Hunsberger conducting the Eastman-Dryden Orchestra (Arabesque). KURT WEILL: Stratas Sings Weill. Soprano Teresa Stratas, with Gerard Schwarz conducting the Y Chamber Symphony (Nonesuch). Americans seem to have show music in their blood, even when they were immigrants like Weill (Germany) and Herbert (Ireland). Herbert, a cello virtuoso and conductor who directed the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1898 to 1904, wanted to be taken seriously -- as did, similarly, Sir Arthur Sullivan -- but it was his 40-odd operettas (Babes in Toyland, Naughty Marietta) that won him lasting fame. Hunsberger leads crisp...
Unlike the songs on Stratas' earlier album, The Unknown Kurt Weill, these are among the composer's most familiar. The soprano's increasingly raw voice is not entirely suitable to the works of the American period, like the wistful waltz Foolish Heart, from One Touch of Venus. But it is just right for the angry desperation of the Brecht-Berlin years; the harsh, bitter edge to the smoky Surabaya-Johnny proclaims there will be no happy end here...