Word: basso
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...truth can be told: some children grow up on mother's milk, building blocks and plastic trucks, or even with other children. I grew up with Walter Cronkite. My formative years were absorbed, not with coloring books and Crazy Cat, but with Saturn B Ones described in melifluous basso, and election nights in enormous studios resembling a Cecil B. DeMille vision of the end of the world. And conventions, where my hero sat serene above the tedium and hubub, reassuring a doubtful nation that democracy needn't be orderly...
Justino Diaz, Sills's leading man, has some rarely combined talents for a basso; the lightness and flexibility that coloratura singing demands, and a natural sound so powerful that it cuts through the orchestra as clearly as the shriller upper voices. Like Sills, he does a lot in this production with a boring character. The passion he shows towards Pamira, especially in their love scene, is about as much as they ever allow on the Met stage...
...Kipnis became a harpsichordist is something even he is not sure of today. One thing was certain when he was a boy: he was not going to be a singer. His father is the great Ukrainian-born basso Alexander Kipnis, now 83 and living in Westport, Conn...
...general not the work of a professional. In truth, Mussorgsky, a civil service clerk, had little formal training but did possess, as Schippers puts it, "an incredible soul, obviously. It had to come out." Rimsky's rich, opulent revision swept the operatic world, with the great Russian basso Feodor Chaliapin making the title role practically his own. It was not surprising that many came to assume that Mussorgsky's original work was unperformable...
...Basso Profundo. Save for Tenor Harry Theyard's dry-sounding, unathletic Pretender, the cast is just right. Mignon Dunn as Princess Marina is cunningly believable as an ambitious conspirator. Paul Plishka's Pimen is delivered with a basso profundo of enough tensile magnificence to signal a potential Boris. Right now, though, the role is the hot property of Finland's Martti Talvela, a huge (6 ft. 7 in., 260 Ibs.), nimble, running tackle of a man with an obsessed, Orson Wellesian face. At 39 he has a voice that may lack the steely edge of, say, Chaliapin...