Word: sopranos
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...Soprano Leontyne Price brought a hush to the crowd with Verdi's Pace, Pace, Mio Dio, and then the guests began to file slowly out of the tent. Like a contented preacher, White House Aide Hamilton Jordan stood at the exit, shaking hands and clasping shoulders. "Begin for President," he said, and the Israeli Premier embraced him. Inside the White House, where there was champagne and dancing, the Marine Band was playing Cole Porter's Well, Did You Evah! which ends with the line "What a swell party this...
Near the end of her 20-min. mad scene, Miss Havisham cries out, "I am tired!" There is a derisive titter from the audience. They have sympathy for Soprano Rita Shane, who plays Miss Havisham. She has flung her voice valiantly through trills, runs, arpeggios, and sung paragraph upon paragraph of words that dwarf the great mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. But the audience is tired too, because this kind of listening, when most of the words are unintelligible, is also hard work...
Trying to win prestige for his network, Paley even laid siege to the Metropolitan Opera, whose president and chairman, Financier Otto Kahn, was outraged that anyone would want to hear a mezzo-soprano through the static of the air waves. At last Paley persuaded him to come to his office and hear a performance he had piped in. "We heard the overture," he relates, "and several minutes of singing into the first act and still no one reacted. Then Kahn leaped to his feet and exclaimed: 'I can't believe it. It's simply marvelous . . . and just...
...opening-night audience greeted all this with a mixed but emphatic response. There were cheers for the buoyant conducting of James Levine and the splendid ensemble of Soprano Carol Neblett Tenor William Lewis, Bass-Baritone José van Dam and Bass Paul Plishka. The applause for Ponnelle was mixed with full-throated booing sounds, heard often enough on the Continent but rarely at the Met. New York audiences like their Wagner to be conventional...
...Soprano Teresa Stratas had to rely more on temperament and stagecraft than on an overtaxed voice, especially in the punishing higher reaches of Berg's writing. But her Lulu was sexy and mercurial, as much the victim as the exploiter of her powers. She was superbly matched by Baritone Franz Mazura's richly shaded portrayal of the newspaper magnate Dr. Schön, Lulu's patron and eventual husband. The rest of the cast was excellent too: Tenor Robert Tear as a naive painter undone by Lulu, and Bass-Baritone Toni Blankenheim as the mysterious Schigolch, Lulu...