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Andrew Frierson
Andrew Benny Frierson (March 29, 1924 – December 6, 2018) was an American operatic baritone and music educator. He was part of the first generation of black opera singers to achieve success and is viewed as part of an instrumental group of performers who helped break down the barriers of racial prejudice in the opera world. In 2000 he was the recipient of the Legacy Award by the National Opera Association, an award given annually to recognize the contributions made by African-American artists to opera in America. Life and career Born in Columbia, Tennessee on March 29, 1924, Frierson was raised in Kentucky. He earned degrees in vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, and has taught on the voice faculties of Southern University and Oberlin College. At Juilliard he studied voice with Belle Julie Soudant; the teacher of opera singers Frances Bible and Gloria Davy. In his early career he was a member of The Belafonte Folk Singers with whom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another. Opera is a key part of the Western classical music tradition. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as '' Singspiel'' and '' Opéra comique''. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Street Scene (opera)
''Street Scene'' is an American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, ''Street Scene'' is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1929 play of the same name by Rice. It was Weill who referred to the piece as an "American opera", intending it as a groundbreaking synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947. Considered far more an opera than a musical, ''Street Scene'' is regularly produced by professional opera companies and has never been revived on Broadway. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the mid-ground between Weill's ''Threepenny Opera'' (1928) and Leonard Bernstein's ''West Side Story'' (1957). The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, some of them, such as Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Fran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carol Brice
Carol Brice (April 16, 1918 – February 15, 1985) was an American contralto. Born in Sedalia, North Carolina, she studied at Palmer Memorial Institute and later at Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, where she received a Bachelor of Music in 1939. She continued her studies at the Juilliard School of Music from 1939 to 1943. She attracted considerable attention for her role in a 1939 production of '' The Hot Mikado'' at the New York World's Fair, where she worked with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Brice made her recital debut in 1943, that year becoming the first African-American to win the Walter Naumburg Award. Her concerts often featured the piano accompaniment of her brother, Jonathan Brice. In 1945 she taught briefly at Black Mountain College. She was the featured contralto on the February 5, 1946 recording of Manuel de Falla's ''El Amor Brujo'' conducted by Fritz Reiner with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. (Columbia Masterworks MM-633, 3 12" 78 RPM discs. Also LP ML ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Rounseville
Robert Rounseville (25 March 19146 August 1974) was an American actor and tenor, who appeared in opera, operetta, Broadway musicals, and motion pictures. Career Rounseville was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts. He made his Broadway debut in a small role in the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical ''Babes in Arms'', then appeared in other musicals in the chorus. Between 1943 and 1945, Rounseville was billed as Robert Field, using his middle name as a surname. He again played small roles on Broadway, in a revival of ''The Merry Widow'' and in ''Up in Central Park''. Rounseville appeared several times on television, as well as in two films. He is perhaps best known to opera buffs for starring in the role of Hoffmann in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film of Jacques Offenbach's ''The Tales of Hoffmann'' (1951), the first color film of an opera to use genuinely cinematic techniques (as opposed to filming a performance on stage). That same year, he was also the first Tom Ra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anita Darian
Anita Darian (April 26, 1927 – February 1, 2015) was an American singer and actress who had an extensive career from the 1950s to the 2010s. A soprano, Darian performed roles with the New York City Opera and was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic. She also performed and recorded several roles from musicals, including Julie in a studio recording version of ''Show Boat'' for Columbia Masterworks in 1962 with John Raitt, Barbara Cook, and William Warfield. She portrayed Lady Thiang in the 1960 revival of ''The King and I'' at New York City Center with Barbara Cook as Anna and Farley Granger as the King. She made a number of classical recordings with various contemporary composers as well as solo albums for Fidelio Records and Kapp Records. She was born Anita Margaret Esgandarian in Detroit, Michigan, of Armenian descent. She was a 1945 graduate of Cooley High School. She later studied opera at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jo Sullivan Loesser
Elizabeth Josephine Sullivan Loesser (née Sullivan; August 28, 1927 – April 28, 2019) was an American actress and high lyric soprano singer. She became a musical theatre star with her performance in the original production of ''The Most Happy Fella'', for which she was nominated for a Tony Award in 1957. Early years She was the daughter of Hessie Boone Sullivan and Eileen Celeste Woods Sullivan, who worked for a lumber-distributing company and sold cosmetics, respectively. She was born in Mounds, Illinois, on August 28, 1927, and attended Cleveland High School. After studying singing in St. Louis, in the late 1940s, she studied music at Columbia University after failing to be accepted at Juilliard School and working at Lord & Taylor department store in New York to support herself. She competed on the ''Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts'' radio program but lost to a pair of harmonica players. Career Sullivan played Polly Peachum in Marc Blitzstein's English-language adaptation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Show Boat
''Show Boat'' is a musical with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It is based on Edna Ferber's best-selling 1926 novel of the same name. The musical follows the lives of the performers, stagehands and dock workers on the ''Cotton Blossom'', a Mississippi River show boat, over 40 years from 1887 to 1927. Its themes include racial prejudice and tragic, enduring love. The musical contributed such classic songs as "Ol' Man River", " Make Believe", and " Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man". The musical was first produced in 1927 by Florenz Ziegfeld. The premiere of ''Show Boat'' on Broadway was an important event in the history of American musical theatre. It "was a radical departure in musical storytelling, marrying spectacle with seriousness", compared with the trivial and unrealistic operettas, light musical comedies and "Follies"-type musical revues that defined Broadway in the 1890s and early 20th century. According to ''The Complete Book of Light Opera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jerome Kern
Jerome David Kern (January 27, 1885 – November 11, 1945) was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as " Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", " A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago (and Far Away)". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg. A native New Yorker, Kern created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted for more than four decades. His musical innovations, such as 4/4 dance rhythms and the employment of syncopation and jazz progressions, built on, rather than rejec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City Center
New York City Center (previously known as the Mecca Temple, City Center of Music and Drama,. The name "City Center for Music and Drama Inc." is the organizational parent of the New York City Ballet and, until 2011, the New York City Opera. and the New York City Center 55th Street Theater) is a 2,257-seat Moorish Revival theater at 131 West 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, one block south of Carnegie Hall. City Center is a performing home for several major dance companies as well as the Encores! musical theater series and the Fall for Dance Festival. The center is currently headed by Arlene Shuler, a former ballet dancer who has been president since 2003. The facility houses the 2,257 seat main stage, two smaller theaters, four studios and a 12-story office tower.New York Times, March 17, 2010, pg C1, "City Center Is to Start Renovations", by Robin Pogrebin Architecture The building's design is Neo-Moorish and features elaborate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chautauqua Opera
The Chautauqua Opera is the resident summer opera company of the Chautauqua Institution. It is one of the oldest continuously active summer opera companies in the U.S, having been founded in 1929 as the Chautauqua Opera Association, and it has produced several operas during the Institution's nine-week summer season every year since. Generally opera productions are performed in English in Norton Memorial Hall, usually on specific Monday and Friday evenings throughout the season. Recently, however, Chautauqua opera has increasingly been performed in concert productions at the Chautauqua Amphitheater. The first production director of the company was Alfredo Valenti, who began Chautauqua's rich opera tradition with Flotow's "Martha" on July 19, 1929. Henry Ford and Mrs. Thomas A. Edison were in the audience. Valenti, who served as director for twenty-eight years, championed young American singers such as Rose Bampton, who performed that season and in 1930 and who, like many other sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Così Fan Tutte
(''All Women Do It, or The School for Lovers''), K. 588, is an opera buffa in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was first performed on 26 January 1790 at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Austria. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte who also wrote ''Le nozze di Figaro'' and ''Don Giovanni''. Although it is commonly held that was written and composed at the suggestion of the Emperor Joseph II, recent research does not support this idea. There is evidence that Mozart's contemporary Antonio Salieri tried to set the libretto but left it unfinished. In 1994, John Rice uncovered two terzetti by Salieri in the Austrian National Library. The short title, ''Così fan tutte'', literally means "So do they all", using the feminine plural (''tutte'') to indicate women. It is usually translated into English as "Women are like that". The words are sung by the three men in act 2, scene 3, just before the finale; this melodic phrase is also quoted in the overture to the opera. Da P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Porgy And Bess
''Porgy and Bess'' () is an English-language opera by American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin. It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward's play '' Porgy'', itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel of the same name. ''Porgy and Bess'' was first performed in Boston on September 30, 1935, before it moved to Broadway in New York City. It featured a cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring artistic choice at the time. A 1976 Houston Grand Opera production gained it a renewed popularity after languishing in the doldrums of the 1960s and early 1970s, and it is now one of the best known and most frequently performed operas. The libretto of ''Porgy and Bess'' tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black street beggar living in the slums of Charleston. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin' Life ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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