Word: tenore
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...star has been steadily rising. Last week Kiri began to shine in New York too. In the grandest of operatic traditions, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut on a mere three hours' notice. Substituting for an ill Teresa Stratas, she sang Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, with Tenor Jon Vickers. Said the New York Times: "Her voice had a lovely fresh sound. She won the audience from the very beginning." Kiri herself credited Vickers. "He made me feel," she explained, "like a wee baby being taken care...
...kept in touch with New York largely via phone and Telex exchanges. In his absence, things began to come apart, beginning in January with a spectacularly unlucky production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Swedish Soprano Catarina Ligendza, scheduled for the first performances, canceled, citing illness. In turn, Tenor Jon Vickers, who is the best Tristan in the world right now, began to have second thoughts about making his Met debut in the role. Conductor Erich Leinsdorf apparently caught the pouts from him and nearly quit as well...
...Levine and Stage Director John Dexter eliminated a half-hour's worth of ballet (wisely, considering the Met's declivity for dance) and edited the work down to three acts, running a relatively tidy 3½ hours. Then there were the principal singers: Sopra no Montserrat Caballe, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Baritone Sherrill Milnes, Bass Justino Diaz. They constituted the kind of front-rank cast that the company does not regularly assemble these days. Nor does the Met orchestra play every day with the snap and precision that it gave Conductor Levine...
...opera's oldest saws is that if you do not know what else to do with a tenor, put him on a staircase. In Vespri, everybody has been put on a staircase, which suggests that Director Dexter did not always know what else to do with his singers. The stairs (38 in all) rise gradually from the apron to stage rear and, depending on the scene, rearrange themselves in varying zigzag patterns as a good unit set should. Meanwhile, barricade walls slide in and out from the wings, prison bars float gracefully down from the flies. All this...
Gary Schwartz, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard, agrees that the tenor of the times makes people long for "more control over their own lives. Like biofeedback, the book promises a way to achieve that control." Adds Mildred Lerner, past president of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis: "In today's alienated society, nobody's got a best friend. People want a way to nurture themselves...