Word: voix
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Little Help. Villa-Lobos' demanding score, unfortunately, has too little dramatic variety and characterization. The opera focuses on Yerma with such single-mindedness that only an extraordinary singing actress-and such types are rare-could bring it off. Poulenc made the same demand in La Voix Humaine, Jánaček in The Makropulos Case, Cherubini in Medea, Richard Strauss in Salomé and Elektra. All in some degree have paid the price in lack of performances. Yerma needs a soprano who can act like Maria Callas and sing like Leontyne Price. In Santa Fe it had Mirna...
...already played a decisive historical role in contemporary opera. His success with The Medium (1946) and The Telephone (1947), for example, may or may not have had an influence on such subsequent works as Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) and Poulenc's La Voix Humaine (1958), but they clearly helped create an audience for contemporary opera...
...Ampex and Sony tape decks, McIntosh amplifiers, and six large speaker enclosures along the walls. The first Visage, "L'air et l'eau," was dull, using everyday electronic sounds to no new effects. It sounded distressingly like the background music to either an aspirin commercial or a spaceranger episode. "Voix de la Ville" and "Forges," on the other hand, were fresh, and full of exciting ideas, unusual sounds creating a wide range of mental images: massive steam engines running wild, fiery boilers bursting at the seams; or perhaps the violent battle between Orlando and Mandraicado, hundred-foot giants astride equally...
Sept Répons was one more reminder that Poulenc's genius lay more with choral music and songs than with instrumental music. His lyrical sensitivity to poetry led his songs into fragile moods that passed subtly from laughter into grief. "J'aime la voix humaine," he would say. and no composer of the century knew better how to write for it; Frenchmen now call him their Schubert, their Puccini. From the Mouvements Perpétuels he wrote at 19, through his days with the anti-impressionist Groupe des Six, on through all the rest of his career...
...Proclamation to schoolchildren in Bangkok, told schoolboys in Malaya: "I might bring to your attention that hate and fear are two things with which babies are not born." There were many, but not too many, songs-Schubert's Serenade in Manila, Mon Coeur S'ouvre a Ta Voix from Samson and Delilah in Bombay, Schubert's Ave Maria in many places-and some long, too long, interviews in between. She went to an old church in Viet Nam to sing Let My People Go, to a meditation temple in Rangoon to talk religion with a Buddhist scholar...