Word: vocalisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...package of 16 vintage LPs documents Sinatra's vocal...
...descendants. But not in pop music, where one Italian baritone has, however unwittingly, put Tosi's recommendations into practice throughout his four-decade career: Frank Sinatra. A 16-album, $350 set of vintage recordings, recently released on the audiophile label Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, documents Sinatra's vocal art at its peak...
...Those Things against a background of burbling saxophones, or punching out Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn's Five Minutes More in front of some antiphonal spitfire trumpets that would have made Gabrieli gladly forsake San Marco for the recording studio, Sinatra is a master of mood and vocal nuance. He can ornament a line, subtly altering its rhythm, or bend just a single note to startlingly expressive purpose; he sings the first word of Just One of Those Things with a momentarily indeterminate pitch that colors the entire song with tantalizing emotional ambiguity. As evoked by Sinatra...
...major romantic-opera composers, along with enriching the repertory, each toughened the requirements for those who perform their music. In addition to the usual considerations of vocal agility and purity of tone, Wagner demanded endurance, a prodigious memory and a sound that could cut like hot steel through his dense orchestrations. Puccini required singers capable of searing dramatic flights, coupled with limpid lyricism. And Richard Strauss, envisioning his ideal Salome, was only partly joking when he asked for a 16-year-old with the voice of Isolde. No wonder then that outstanding interpreters of such operatic peaks as Briinnhilde, Turandot...
...world is currently waiting for a true Siegfried to climb the Valkyrie rock and rescue productions of Wagner's Ring cycle from the efforts of overstrained tenors, but the air is clearer at the higher vocal elevations. In Hildegard Behrens and Eva Marlon, both in their early 40s, there are two formidable sopranos who between them may rule the dramatic repertory for at least the next decade. Not since the heyday of Birgit Nilsson, now 67 and retired from the opera stage, has there been a singer who dominated the German roles and triumphed in dramatic Italian parts...