Word: wagner
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MOST APPEALING ARGUMENT FOR FEMINISM: Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman...
...Wagner, Die Meistersinger: Baritone Norman Bailey, Tenor Rene Kollo, Soprano Hannelore Bode; Vienna Philharmonic, Vienna State Opera Chorus, Sir Georg Solti conducting (5 LPs, London). Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Tenor Placido Domingo, Soprano Catarina Ligendza; Chorus and Orchestra of the German Opera, Berlin, Eugen Jochum conducting (5 LPs, Deutsche Grammophon). Here are two performances-one extraordinary, one merely excellent-of an operatic marvel that over the years has proved difficult to commit to disc. The Solti is the more spacious and relaxed of the two; because of London's typically distant engineering, it also has a more homogenized sound...
Flicka's current range of roles is in some ways limited. Her voice carries like a laser beam into the farthest reaches of an opera house, but because it is not large she shies away from the heavy Verdi and Puccini, not to mention Wagner. She may be ready for some of that music in five to ten years, although she herself doubts it. For now it is enough that she sings Mozart (Cherubino in Figaro, Dorabella in Cost fan Tutte) with exquisite taste, control and sheen. Or that she can blend the impetuous and the spiritual so deftly...
...highly auspicious debut with Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Dec. 6, 9 p.m. E.S.T.). Laurence Olivier, who is the artistic producer for all of the programs, plays Big Daddy. Maureen Stapleton is Big Mama, Natalie Wood has the role of Maggie the Cat, and Robert Wagner plays Brick, Maggie's sexually abstinent husband and Big Daddy's favorite son. They all give admirably strong and well-defined performances...
...portraying Brick, a difficult, ambiguous role, Wagner chooses to be a taciturn neutral who has made a separate, soluble peace with the bottle. Yet at the end, he seems gallantly ready to break his marital fast to honor Maggie's plantation-hungry lie to Big Daddy that she is pregnant...