Word: vocalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rest of the cast did her justice. Mezzo Shirley Verrett, in the travesti role of the warrior Neocle, revealed a stupefying coloratura technique and an enormous range of vocal textures. While Sills obviously paced herself carefully throughout the three acts. Verrett let loose in her first aria and blazed to the end at full capacity. She was gloriously confident, full of defiance and swagger, and poured out her ten-minute solo aria in the third act with the beauty that comes from inexhaustible strength. As it turned out, she had a mob of fans in the audience to rival Sills...
...comically into the wings, making everyone laugh but Schippers, who never laughs. It seemed that she was clowning on purpose, to make the rehearsal less tedious--behavior entirely consistent with a personality so generous and secure that she was willing to share her debut with another female singer whose vocal abilities are as prodigious...
...form for use around Good Friday. Jeremiah's sense of suffering captures the appropriate Christian feeling at that time of year: "Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow." In an age when religion and music were inextricably bound, many of the great masters created vocal settings that rival the text in beauty...
...Humperdinck (Hansel und Gretel) was to Wagner-a brilliant but minor follower. The style of Die Tote Stadt is a lush, clamorous, occasionally schmaltzy orchestral sonorama that lies somewhere between Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra, with special added effects from Puccini, Debussy, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov. The best of its vocal moments, like the taunting Marietta's Lied, sound like pure Franz Lehár, the master of popular Viennese operetta...
...reputation with a blinding display of Baroque wizardry 8% years ago in Handel's Julius Caesar. Subsequent years brought triumphs in Massenet's Manon; Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and trilogy of queens, Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena; and more recently, Bellini's / Puritani. Vocal fireworks are Sills' glory. She has a light, lyric coloratura so clear and swift that it seems phosphorescent. Though she is the best Manon around, her trademark has become the revival of obscure operas of the 19th century bel canto...