From the delectable Conchita Supervia (who made her debut at fourteen!) to the divine Maria Callas; from the gentle Elisabeth Schumann to the fiery Maria Jeritza (adored by the public, feared by several leading tenors and spat at by a fellow diva); from the giant Lauritz Melchior to the versatile Richard Tauber - More Legendary Voices mixes biography, anecdote, opinion, and penetrating analysis of each singer's strengths and weaknesses. Once more Nigel Douglas, the international tenor and well-known radio presenter, brings to this collection his professional knowledge of the world of opera, his infectious enthusiasm for the subject, and a natural gift for distilling the essence of a singer's life and career into one entertaining and instructive chapter.
Bodily Charm is a passionate defense of opera as a living as well as live art. Written for both the opera lover and the specialist by a physician and a literary critic, it is an accessible and engaging interdisciplinary exploration of the operatic body—both the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members and the represented body on stage in operas such as Death in Venice, Salome, Rigoletto, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Elektra.
The Legendary Voice of the Sonic Boom of the South by Dr. Jimmie James, Jr. and Arthur James Dr. Jimmie James, Jr. is best known as the long-time voice of the Sonic Boom of the South, Jackson State University’s storied marching band. His dazzling, virtuosic displays of verbosity rallied and inspired crowd across decades. Now he brings us The Legendary Voice of the Sonic Boom of the South, an inspirational and educational tool for our youth and adults, and especially for educators: all who are teachers in the body of Christ, who desire to help others find their purpose. Now, once again, let us welcome that legendary voice…
"The Funniest People Who Write Books and Make Music" contains such anecdotes as these: When Peg Bracken started writing, she would often type the first page of a famous short story for inspiration. Often, she discovered that the page did not look as impressive typed on a sheet of paper as it did printed on a page in a book, so sometimes she would imitate her English professor and write on the sheet of paper: 'You can do better than this, Mr. Faulkner." Andri Previn played jazz with a couple of American-African musicians. Afterwards, he went into a diner, where two white men asked him, 'Why the hell don't you play with your own kind?" Mr. Previn replied, 'To tell you the truth, I wanted to, but I couldn't find two other Jews who swing." Soccer and Cup Final day are important in England. Once, the noted conductor Sir Thomas Beecham held a rehearsal on Cup Final day. The rehearsal had been going on for only a short time when a giant television was delivered to the rehearsal area. Sir Thomas then said, 'Now, gentlemen, let's get down to the most important business of the day-watching the match."
This book recounts the lives and careers of fourteen of this century's greatest singers along with a critical evaluation of their recorded works newly available on CD. - Inside front cover.
“Muzio was a case apart: you cannot classify her, for in the end you have been so emotionally destroyed by her performance, you did not even know anymore what kind of instrument she had”. So spoke Lucrezia Bori, the beloved soprano of the Metropolitan Opera. Bori was echoing the opinion of many of Claudia Muzio’s contemporaries and successors such as Eva Turner, Rosa Ponselle, and Mafalda Favero who wrote:“Actually,” she [Favero] admitted with her total candor, “it took me a long time to find my own interpretation [La traviata], for I was haunted by Claudia Muzio in this role. When she sang it at the Colon in Buenos Aires in 1933, I went to each rehearsal, worshiping her, and it took a superhuman effort for me to finally obtain my personal approach. … I recall a performance of Muzio’s in Refice’s Cecilia, an opera she created in Rome in 1934 which deals with the saint’s martyrdom. She was so sublime in it that I went backstage to express my admiration at the end and impulsively dropped to my knees. ‘Now, really, my child!’ she said with those sad eyes which haunted me. ‘What are you doing?’ Her Norma was also an unforgettable creation. She had the quality I consider so essential in an artist: to make the public suffer along with her.” Sometimes we hear artists described as “She was born a hundred years too late”, but Claudia Muzio was born too soon. She was a great “singing actress” whose stage portrayals produced the hysterical kinds of responses cited above. Most reviews mention her stage work first, not failing to praise her singing. It is from her late recordings from 1934-35, when she was ill, that she is remembered today. Muzio had a distinctive vocal timbre, and an unparalleled command of dynamics and phrasing that, once heard, is never forgotten. Indeed, she was called “La Unica” in South America where she was the Teatro Colón’s brightest star for fifteen years. Muzio made her debut as the first Italian Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in 1916 at the age of 26 with Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti. She went on to sing with all the great artists of her time in a world-wide career of over twenty-five-years. Claudia Muzio sang over a thousand performances of major dramatic operatic repertory, including 131 Aidas, 146 Traviatas, 81 Trovatores, and 129 Toscas. This figure does not include concerts and by all accounts, Claudia Muzio was also a great recitalist.
The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance is the first volume in a series of books compiled by the Music Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. The series explores the widening of the meaning of the term “music theatre” to reflect new ways of thinking about this creative practice beyond the genres circumscribed by discourses of theatre studies and musicology. Specifically it interrogates the experience of music theatre and its performance energies for contemporary audiences who engage with the emergence of new expressive idioms, new performative paradigms, new technologies and new ways of thinking. The Legacy of Opera considers some of the ways in which opera’s influence has informed our understanding of and approach to the musical stage, from the multiple perspectives of the ideological, historical, corporeal and artistic. With contributions from international scholars in music theatre, its chapters explore both canonic and experimental examples of music theatre, spanning a period from the seventeenth century to the present day.
