Word: impresario
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...75th anniversary with a nostalgic birthday review (lantern slides and ancient recordings assembled by the Metropolitan Opera Guild) of some of its finest achievements. The yellow brick house was built (in 1883) at a cost of $1,732,478.71, principally as a showcase for New York society (the impresario of the older, posher Academy of Music referred to it as "the yellow brewery on Broadway"). The architect, Josiah Cleaveland Cady, had never seen a grand opera, and he built the Met on the theory that its most important feature was not the stage but the boxes. At first, there were...
...about the acoustics: Architect Cady had the good sense to face the auditorium with wood and to build an egg-shaped masonry sound chamber beneath the orchestra pit. During its early years, the Met removed the seats, held charity balls and a flower show on the orchestra floor. When Impresario Henry Abbey lost $600,000 in the house's first season, he recouped some of his losses by tossing in a special variety show at which Soprano Marcella Sembrich played a violin concerto, moved to the piano to rip off a Chopin mazurka, and sang Ah! non giunge from...
...jazz like Ella Fitzgerald. Ella it was who schooled a whole generation of vocalists to phrase and improvise like jazzmen; Ella, too, who popularized scatted lyrics and the word rebop. But Ella has always moved with equal ease through the palm-frond world of popular dance music, and Jazz Impresario Norman Granz set out to prove it by issuing a series of albums on his own Verve label featuring Ella in great pop hits. Latest addition to the series: Ella singing Irving Berlin...
...four years she has been working with Impresario Granz, Ella has tripled her income (to $300,000 a year) and moved out of the jazz cellars into such brassy clubs as Manhattan's Copacabana. Does that mean she plans to stick entirely to pop songs? Not at all, says Ella. "I sing like I feel. Sometimes some of the fellas say, 'What's the matter, Ella, you goin' square?' And I tell them, 'I'm not goin' square, I'm going versatile...
Died. Richard G. Herndon, 85, theatrical producer (first try: 1914's The Lady in Red), impresario who introduced Anna Pavlova and Waslaw Nijinsky to U.S. balletomanes, managed concert tours for Enrico Caruso, Mischa Elman, Jacques Thibaud; in Philadelphia...