Word: soprano
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...female leads, the three little maids are endearing even within the limits of their parts. Patte Tuell (Yum-Yum) is coy and free of squelch, while Ellen Zachos' soprano is probably the show's best. Jacqueline Meily (Katisha) is a little below the rest of the cast, as she fails to belt out her ascerbic lines with the requisite spite...
...prettiest thing about Meryl in those days was her singing voice. A promising coloratura soprano, she began taking lessons in New York with Voice Coach Estelle Liebling. "The first opera I went to," recalls Meryl, "was Douglas Moore's The Wings of the Dove, with Beverly Sills. It was incredible to see her onstage. Until then, I thought she was just a nice lady who had the lesson before me." One morning Meryl got up, squashed her glasses underfoot, put peroxide and lemon juice on her hair and set out to be "the perfect Seventeen magazine knockout." Boys quickly...
...crown of the first week's operatic offerings was the Figaro-tender, witty, effortlessly buoyant. The spectacle of servants outwitting their masters, so inflammatory in Mozart's day, was given charm and point by Baritone Walter Berry, as a rather phlegmatic Figaro, and Soprano Lucia Popp, as his pert fiancee. Baritone Hans Helm and especially Soprano Gundula Janowitz, as the count and countess, played along with aristocratic good grace...
Among the women, Caroline Rody's sweet secure voice renders the multi-lingual "Marieke" gracefully, if a bit timidly. Susan Pollock's voice sounds very well-trained--in fact, too well-trained. Her careful attention to breathing and assiduously precise placement of each note is distracting. The demure soprano of Carla Seidel finds the right, slightly cloying tone for "Carousel," though by the end she becomes both inaudible and unintelligible as she tries to keep up with the song. But then, that's the point...
...Webern's melodies, as Webern predicted. Many listeners may never get past what sounds cryptic and arid to them in his work. But these new discs show to what extent performers have mastered his difficult idiom in the past two decades. Among the highlights: the feathery shading of Soprano HeatheR Harper's pitch in the early songs; the tensile, wire-sculpture precision of members of the Juilliard String Quartet in the String Trio (1927); the transparent textures and rhythmic subtlety of Boulez and the L.S.O. in Variations for Orchestra...