Word: vocalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tonal nostalgia" that Robert Craft pointed out in Alban Berg's music, at other times borrowing the jazzy strains of theater music. At Aspen, his pounding rhythms generated a powerful momentum and his thickly massed sonoraties built to sharp climaxes, especially in the big choral scenes. His solo vocal passages and more lyrical moments, however, seemed to lack a distinctive melodic contour...
...full-length Lulu is being given its first U.S. performances by the venturesome Santa Fe Opera. Some of the vocal panache and soaring emotion of the Paris production may be missing, but little else is. The Santa Feans have staged the work with unusual care and intelligence. This time Berg the librettist is as well served as Berg the composer...
Michael Tilson Thomas' conducting matches the urgent pace of the staging without blurring the transparent intricacies of Berg's twelve-tone score. As Lulu, Soprano Nancy Shade sings her precipitous vocal lines strongly and accurately, which is more of an achievement than it may sound. But she only acts out bewitching allure; she does not embody it. During rehearsals, the cast screened Louise Brooks' Lulu in the 1928 silent film of Wedekind's Pandora's Box- which may partly account for Shade's tendency to play the role as a jazz-age vamp...
...young lovers in the play pale beside their counterparts in the earlier romances. Anne Kerry's unnaturally studied elocution and rather monotonous vocal timbre do not help Miranda. As her suitor Ferdinand (whom Prospero tests in too testy a manner), Peter Webster is handsome enough and speaks acceptably, save for a couple of misplaced accents...
Shakespeare paid insufficient attention to King Alonso and his five lordly cronies--"that dismal sextet," Agate called them. The actors can do little but go through their plot-serving paces, though someone should have kept Theodore Sorel from going way out of vocal control in Alonso's "billows" speech. As old Gonzalo (a weak retread of Polonius in Hamlet), Daniel Benzali gets an unintended laugh from today's fuel-conscious audience when he outlines his ideal commonwealth as having "no use of...oil." And it is a nice touch, at the end of the play...