Word: sopranos
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...soloists--Ellen Hargis, soprano, Laurie Monahan, mezzo soprano, William Hite, Frank Kelley and Arthur Rishi, tenors, and Paul Guttry and David Ripley, bass--were superb as well. Hargis was particularly impressive; she is a specialist in pre-Baroque music, and it shows. She captured the Renaissance style perfectly, demonstrating complete control over her voice so that there was no excessive vibrato, yet no shrill tone. Also greatly enjoyable was the tenor dialogue in the Audi coelum (IX), in which Hite sang his responses to Kelley from the balcony...
DIED. LJUBA WELITSCH, 83, Bulgarian-born soprano acclaimed for her vivid operatic performances; in Vienna. Welitsch played to ecstatic audiences in the 1940s and '50s, before overuse ruined her voice...
...host of interpretative intangibles from the guy who's waving a baton at them. If Kaplan at Salzburg did not bring to mind a slick stick like Riccardo Muti or Valery Gergiev, his intense, attentive manner in front of the Philharmonia, the Vienna State Opera Chorus, mezzo-soprano Doris Soffel and soprano Rosa Mannion bespoke a firm grasp. Mahler's heaven-storming climaxes shook the Grossesfestspielhaus to its granite foundations, and anyone who did not feel a chill at the tremendous peroration must either have been dead or Austrian...
...legend. Try this one. Nineteen months ago, when he was beginning to make breaker-size ripples in the international opera pool, his wife died of a brain tumor, leaving him with their toddler Ornella. Then last year in London he fell in love with a beautiful Romanian soprano, Angela Gheorghiu, 30, who was making headlines at Covent Garden as Violetta in Sir Georg Solti's production of La Traviata. The pair have been together ever since, as inseparable as two can be who must manage separate singing careers; they plan to marry in the next couple of weeks...
...playing doomed heroes and heroines onstage. Alagna plays the 19th century romantic lover with a modern twist, reinterpreting a vanished ideal for the 1990s--no sobs or lunges here. Gheorghiu's calling card is the home video of the Solti Traviata (London). This is an opera in which the soprano must rule the stage, and she brings a riveting combination of glamour, poignancy and guts to the role and extends it with her lavish response to Solti's bravura reading of the score...