Word: tenore
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Puccini: La Fanciulla del West (Soprano Carol Neblett, Tenor Placido Domingo, Baritone Sherrill Milnes; Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Zubin Mehta, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon; 3 LPs). Fanciulla (1910) is a second-rate Italian opera comically posing as a shoot-'em-up thriller. Neblett makes a dramatic frontier heroine. Domingo, as her lover, sings everyone else under the bar, and Milnes is dashingly villainous. With Mehta in the saddle, chorus and orchestra ride smartly home...
...Pelléas et Mélisande. But as opera, the music is flawed: the vocal lines are so dense and undramatic that the voices of the mostly young cast get lost. The production is often riveting. In one of the most bizarre scenes, Ferdinand, superbly sung and acted by British Tenor David Hillman, passionately kisses his strangled sister, then rips the red satin lining from her coffin and rushes from the stage...
...within himself, the pitiful kitten fathered by a lion, careful of its stride, watching slow rage then turn on us like the thunder of winter sleet driving in from the mountains. So it wasn't for Jacob alone I schemed to steal Esau's blessing, laughing, giddy, a tenor different from Abraham's hard laugh...
Stoltzman, in fact, came to the classical clarinet by the unorthodox route of jazz. During his childhood in San Francisco, he and his father, a railroad man with a passion for the tenor sax, would im- provise hymns at Presbyterian Sunday school. "We'd play the main-line melody and then just float in and out of harmonies," he recalls. "That freedom not to play all the notes exactly as they were written was the beginning to me of making music...
Gareth Jones brings a pleasant tenor to the straight role of the half-mortal Strephon, and Kenneth Sandford, who has been with the troupe for more than two decades, is a sturdy Private Willis (he will be giving something close to his 2100th performance as Pooh-Bah in The Mikado here...