Word: soprano
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...shrewd businessman, he ensured The Messiah's success by hiring the best and most popular singers in 18th century London to sing it. If the bass singer was not very good, Handel would turn the bass aria into a recitative, rewrite it for an alto or even a soprano. For flexible soprano voices, he would doll up the music with ornaments and, if another soprano complained, he would steal a few arias from the first soprano and slip them to the second. To further befuddle historians, Handel was continually juggling arias to fit whatever boy soprano, male alto...
...time capsule recording the rot of American TV might well include the tape of the Dec. 17 Tonight show. Within that dispiriting 90-minute reel were a cough-medicine commercial, Phyllis Diller's laugh, and the on-the-air wedding of Tiny Tim, the fortyish boy soprano, to his 17-year-old Miss Vicki Budinger...
...cast to do it justice. It gets just that. Colin Davis fans the music to a fierce, steady glow. Highpoints: George Shirley's rocketlike traversal of Fuor del mar-a crippling catalogue of coloratura devices -and Elettra's two arias sung by Pauline Tinsley, a British dramatic soprano whose voice has an electric radiance that recalls Ina Souez and Ljuba Welitsch at their best...
Henze: Three Cantatas (Deutsche Grammophon). Once a leading German avant-garde composer, Henze often writes mistily modern and weirdly beautiful music. In this score, German Soprano Edda Moser floats through the vocal stratosphere with astonishing ease, and demonstrates a bewildering range of sound and color...
What reason there is behind this show's musical rhymes is really just an excuse to throw together a potpourri of characatures: Rosalinda (Martha Ecclestone), the lead soprano, is a kind of Tricia Nixon who let her hair down: Alfred (Neil Cohen) is her would-be lover, a tenor with an endearing Bela Lugosi accent: then, there is Rosalinda's husband (Peter Kazaras), who is rather too confused to ever realize he's being cuckolded; and, finally. Adele (Leslie Luxemburg), as a chambermaid gone actress, and Frank (Bob Noonoo), as a jail-keep gone marquis. What the women occasionally lack...