Word: sung
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...Alfredo, Tenor Stuart Burrows sang with taste and grace, but he lacks the sharp vocal and theatrical edge required by the role. Sills started off with a surprisingly wide vibrato that spoiled some of her high notes. But the problem cleared up, and the confrontation with Germont-splendidly sung by Baritone William Walker-was in ev ery way convincing. Looking slim and sexy, Sills throughout the evening exhibited an appealing range of emotions and musicality. From the glossy extravagances of the opening party scene to the despair of her pact with Germont, Sills once again asserted her claim...
Violetta is a role that Sills has sung only three times before in New York, but close to 300 times elsewhere throughout her career. It remains one of her no blest portrayals...
...actually look like the characters they play. He achieved an intimacy rarely possible in staged drama by filming his singers mostly in close-up and bathing them in warm, golden lights that make everybody look very healthy. The language problem is solved in the simplest way: the opera is sung in Swedish, but we can read from the subtitles. It's a rare functional approach. With complete respect and evident love for the Mozart-Schikaneder score, Bergman added dazzling stage sets, high Renaissance costumes and editorial wit, and elicited a daring bawdiness from the text that warms the heart...
...except through the music. Ullmann's eclectic style produces a constant interplay between the melancholic and the light comic in Germany's rich musical tradition. Death, in the shabby uniform of a Central European functionary, could be a sadly tired Wotan. The Emperor's edicts are sung in the piercing soprano of the German cabaret...
...Emperor of Atlantis resembles another expressionist work, Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins, but it goes beyond Weill's elegant cynicism. The final chorale, describing death as part of life's "delight and woe," is sung to A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, while the orchestra counters with a cabaret tune of incredibly sweet pathos. From this juxtaposition emerges a requiem for a civilization literally going up in smoke, but the hymn's chords reassert the promise of redemptive life...