Word: sopranos
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...stage and screen adaptations (notably Lon Chaney's 1925 silent horror film). The version devised by Lloyd Webber and Librettist Richard Stilgoe dispensed with much of the novel's narrative superstructure to focus on two characters: the gruesomely disfigured genius who haunts the Paris Opera and the young Swedish soprano, Christine Daae, who is the object of his unholy affections...
Both Bloom and Houn have won critical acclaim in their fields. Bloom recently won the "Downbeat" magazine critics' poll for the saxophone and has been compared to soprano sax masters John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter...
...classical-music world's equivalent of Cannes. To be sure, there are no topless starlets, cigar-smoking producers or interminable socialist-realist films from Rumania. Still, the music business has a hype and rhythm all its own. Posters of such performers as Conductor Herbert von Karajan (a native son), Soprano Kathleen Battle, Conductor Riccardo Muti and Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter are plastered in shop windows. Managers from the U.S. and Europe gather to plot the careers of performers and ensembles. Diners at the swank Goldener Hirsch restaurant near the Festspielhaus burst into applause whenever an artist enters...
...live performance, the interpretation gleamed. His is not the rhythmically incisive, sharply chiseled Mozart currently in favor in the wake of the original-instruments revolution, but a mellower, more reflective interpretation that prizes sonority and melodic beauty. Bass Samuel Ramey was a swaggering antihero, cocky till the end, and Soprano Julia Varady brought a sweet pathos to the obsessive Donna Elvira. Director Michael Hampe's staging was conventional until the climax. When the Commendatore dragged the unrepentant Don to perdition, the Iberian setting vanished to reveal a cosmic firmament, quenching the earthly fires of lust in a metaphysical supernova...
...someone who never even saw an opera until he was in one. Ramey's first exposure to music was at home and in church. "By the time I was nine or ten, I knew my voice was different from everyone else's," the erstwhile boy soprano recalls. "My voice already had vibrato, and I stifled it when I sang solos. I didn't want to be made fun of." At that time his taste ran more to Pat Boone than to Robert Merrill. Young Sam was unimpressed by operatic singing: "It was such a foreign sound...