Word: wagnerian
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...critic or informed amateur, is grousing by the end of the show, when most of the principals join in the 1951 skit-song "Catch Our Act at the Met," by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne. A high-art parody that's up there with Chuck Jones' Daffily Wagnerian "What's Opera, Doc?", the number combines parody, musical virtuosity and about a million laffs. As most every Encores! show does, it sends the audience out of Ciiy Center levitating on a contact high with the best in musical theater. At Encores!, the old shows are always loved and always...
...Long before he was an eccentric recluse charged with murdering an actress, Spector was the wunderkind of pop-rock production techniques, infusing such girl-group hits as "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "Be My Baby" with his Wagnerian pomp and sonic drive. In this great set, arranger Jack Nitzsche smartly attaches vamps from RB (Sleigh Ride's "ringa-linga-linga-ding-dong-ding") and the Big Band era to the Christmas hits of the previous two decades (no spirituals here) and supplements the tambourine-and-drum pulse of the Spector sound with chimes, sleigh bells and a million maracas...
...Yale.”Finne was succeeded on stage by Yannatos, who, without speaking, launched the orchestra into their performance of “Tristan und Isolde.” Beginning from the opera’s hesitant first bars, the orchestra ratcheted up the grand Wagnerian drama by a series of sympathetic cascades, each terminating in a foreboding quiver. In a fantastic back-and-forth between the strings’ woodwinds, Yannatos led the orchestra seamlessly between moods, in a progressive build that highlighted the orchestra’s flutes.Perhaps most impressive was the orchestra’s ability...
...Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode on the Met's stage, and [was compared] to the 'incomparable' [Kirsten] Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century ... A solid (5 ft. 8 in., 150 lbs.) and imposing woman, dramatic soprano Nilsson ... displayed a big, flashing, vibrant voice that galvanized her audience and conveyed an immediate sense of the turbulent passions that animate the role [of Isolde] ... Apparently a more severe critic of herself than...
...DIED. BIRGIT NILSSON, 87, international opera star whose voice, dramatic talent and stamina made her the finest Wagnerian soprano of her generation; on Christmas Day, in Vastra Karup, Sweden. Level-headed and sharp-witted, Nilsson thrilled audiences from New York to Milan in a variety of operas, but won her most enthusiastic fans with dynamic lead performances in such Wagner works as Ring of the Nibelung and Tristan und Isolde. Asked to name the primary requirement for playing Isolde, a punishing role she performed some 200 times, she said: "Comfortable shoes...