Word: verrette
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Perhaps only a tribute to Singer Marian Anderson, 79, could have brought together those operatic rivals Shirley Verrett, 50, and Grace Bumbry, 45, for a performance on the same stage. The first black person to sing with the Metropolitan Opera, Anderson has been inspiration and mentor to the two younger singers. Both, in fact, are Marian Anderson Scholarship winners. And so Verrett and Bumbry, who have occasionally flung verbal darts at each other, put aside their simmering feud long enough to participate in a rousing 80th-birthday tribute to Anderson last week at New York's Carnegie Hall. Since...
...century Castile, more obedient to the conventions of courtly love than to the discipline of his vows. He falls in love with a lady whom he has seen in church, and dashes out into the world, not even knowing her name. He eventually learns that she is Leonora (Shirley Verrett), but for an unforgivable amount of time it eludes him that she is the mistress of King Alfonso XI (Sherrill Milnes), even though a chap wearing a crown is always lurking about her or walking up and down the steps to a throne. There are also political complications in Leonora...
Milnes' vocal judgment, at least, was excellent. Verrett acted with an effective blend of charm and elusiveness. For a few years she has been trying to retrain her lush mezzo voice to sing soprano roles. The strategy seems wrong; by now the registers of her voice are as separated as the drawers of a desk. Only near the end did her singing match her style...
...boundaries the protagonists play out the drama of saintly endeavor and human fear like dancers in a dream of both life and death. Stage Director Dexter can take credit for that too, although he has been given some splendid singing actresses to work with - Régine Crespin, Shirley Verrett, Betsy Norden, Maria Ewing. As Blanche, the rich-voiced Ewing emerges as a genuine comer in her blend of inner anguish and, at the end, heroic resolve. In the pit, French Conductor Michel Plasson shapes the music with enough loving deftness to underscore the fact that Dialogues...
...Azucena was Shirley Verrett, who, like Pavarotti, is at a career turning point.A Met regular for eight years, she is basically a mezzo with an unusually high, extended range. Lately, she has been trying to move into the repertory of the dramatic soprano. The results have been only partially successful, largely because in moving higher her voice takes on an icy whiteness of tone. Returning to the mezzo range of Azucena, however, Verrett sang with overwhelming fire and urgency. One would hate to see a woman as lovely as Verrett consigned forever to play a hag like Azucena, but hers...