Word: sopranos
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...Mottetti, stylishly performed by Mezzo-Soprano Janice Felty and Pianist Edward Auer, recalls the late Ital ian composer Luigi Dallapiccola in its lyricism and sophisticated melodic charm. Harbison sets dark, vivid images from Montale's Le Occasioni (1939) allusively, often employing the familiar device of musical tone painting. In the ninth poem, for example, the mezzo sings of a darting green lizard, and the piano responds with a scaly slither. But the music is much more than a literal transcription of the poetry, for Harbison has given it a deeper layer of meaning in transforming it into song...
Europe's great lyric soprano is expanding her career-maybe...
Vibrant and attractive, she could be a successful businesswoman or a television newscaster. But then Mirella Freni opens her mouth to sing. And suddenly there is only the voice-the voice of the world's foremost lyric soprano...
...sparkling, scheming Susanna in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Despite taking on some distinctly heavier parts, mostly Verdi heroines, in recent years-Aida, Desdemona in Otello and Elisabeth in Don Carlos-she is still rightly regarded as the finest Mimi and Susanna around. "The dramatic soprano voice is big, and for the coloratura you must have the high notes," says Freni. "But the lyric voice is about quality of expression. It must sing easily and softly in the high notes. I think I am really pure lyric...
This has come as a surprise to those who have always thought of her as essentially a lyric soprano, including Freni. Says she: "When I started, I thought Mozart and La Bohème would be the maximum for me." For challenging her to expand her range she credits Karajan, the controversial, magisterial Austrian conductor who has played Svengali to her Trilby. It was with Karajan at La Scala that she came to international attention, singing Mimi in Franco Zeffirelli's 1963 production of La Bohème, and it has been with Karajan at his Salzburg Festival that...