Word: tenors
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...critics ladled out the praise generously to the cast, headed by Soprano Zinka Milanov, Tenor Richard Tucker, Baritone Leonard Warren and Basso Cesare Siepi. Just to keep franchise, the critics grumbled a little because of some of the cuts that were made (or some that were not made) in shortening Verdi's overlong opera. But they more than made up for that with praise of Painter Eugene Berman's "deeptoned and properly ominous" new sets (TIME...
...Charles Elson of the company staff, took Josef Urban's rich old sets apart, reset the best of the gloomy old forms against fields of bright new color. The Met had a vivid new set, "dirt cheap" (about $15,000), and a first-class singing cast topped by Tenor Hans Hopf in his first Met performance of Lohengrin and Soprano Eleanor Steber as Elsa...
...Mind Music." Stravinsky used only five instruments-two flutes, an oboe, English horn and cello. A chorus of eight women and two soloists. Mezzo-Soprano Marni Nixon and Tenor Hughes Cuenod, were the only voices. Stravinsky conducted in his usual jerky, graceless style, looking, with his prominent eyes and waving tailcoat, rather like a dapper little Beatrix Potter frog...
...slow music, in close harmony and mildly dissonant, not a dirge of despair but rather "contemplative," as one listener put it. The soprano solo, The Maidens Came, was sparse, austere, reminded some in spirit of Italian primitive painting of an even earlier era than Stravinsky's models. The tenor solo, Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, was a singer's nightmare of half tones and difficult intervals. Most everybody was relieved when the duet, Westron Winde, came breezing in with a cheerfully dissonant allegro...
Stravinsky took three curtain calls. There were bravos for the tenor. A slight hissing was heard at the rear of the hall. Mostly, though, the audience didn't quite know what to think. "It is mind music," said one musician. An esthete put it precisely: "From the lush, full, rich sound we think of as Stravinsky, you are suddenly in an entirely different world-in a bony world...