Betty Allen
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Betty Allen
Betty Allen (March 17, 1927 – June 22, 2009) was an American operatic mezzo-soprano who had an active international singing career during the 1950s through the 1970s. In the latter part of her career her voice acquired a contralto-like darkening, which can be heard on her recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s ''Alexander Nevsky'' with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was known for her collaborations with American composers, such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson among others. Allen was part of the first generation of black opera singers to achieve wide 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. She was greatly admired by Bernstein and the conductor notably chose her to be the featured soloist for his final performances as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1973. After her singing career ended, sh ...
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Campbell, Ohio
Campbell (; ) is a city in eastern Mahoning County, Ohio, United States, along the Mahoning River. The population was 7,852 at the 2020 census. Located directly southeast of Youngstown, it is a suburb of the Youngstown–Warren metropolitan area. Campbell was first called East Youngstown and this designation still appears on real estate deeds between 1902 and 1926, when the city was renamed for local industrialist James Campbell, then chairman of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company. History In 1902, the Youngstown Iron Sheet and Tube Company established a factory near the Mahoning River in what was then Coitsville Township. A settlement grew around the factory, called East Youngstown, due to its location just southeast from downtown Youngstown. The village was incorporated in 1908, as its population swelled with young immigrants to work in the steel industry. Many immigrants to the village were Greeks. The plant, which would later be known as the Campbell Works, contained f ...
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Wilberforce University
Wilberforce University is a private historically black university in Wilberforce, Ohio. Affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), it was the first college to be owned and operated by African Americans. It participates in the United Negro College Fund. Central State University, also in Wilberforce, Ohio, began as a department of Wilberforce University where Ohio state legislators could sponsor scholarship students. The college was founded in 1856 by a unique collaboration between the Cincinnati, Ohio, Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) to provide classical education and teacher training for black youth. It was named after William Wilberforce. The first board members were leaders both black and white. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–65) resulted in a decline in students from the South, who were the majority, and the college closed in 1862 because of financial losses. The AME Church pu ...
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American National Theater And Academy
The American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) is a non-profit theatre producer and training organization that was established in 1935 to be the official United States national theatre that would be an alternative to the for-profit Broadway houses of the day. The ANTA, which by law was to be self-sustaining, sponsored touring companies of numerous shows to foreign countries in the post-World War II in the 1940s and 1950s, owned the ANTA Theatre on Broadway, played an important role in the establishment of the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, was the main membership organization for regional theatre in the U.S. before ultimately having a greatly diminished role in the 1980s. Today as an entity its main focus is the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. History It was established by Congress in 1935 at the same time as the Federal Theatre Project. Its mission was to set up a theatre for the whole country. It sponsored architectura ...
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August Wilson Theatre
The August Wilson Theatre (formerly the Guild Theatre, ANTA Theatre, and Virginia Theatre) is a Broadway theatre, Broadway theater at 245 West 52nd Street (Manhattan), 52nd Street in the Theater District, Manhattan, Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1925, the theater was designed by C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim and was built for the Theatre Guild. It is named for Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson (1945–2005). The August Wilson has approximately 1,225 seats across two levels and is operated by Jujamcyn Theaters. The facade is a New York City designated landmark. The facade is designed as a variation of a 15th-century Tuscan villa, with a stage house to the west and an auditorium to the east. The facade has a stucco surface and openings with quoins, as well as a loggia. The placement of window openings reflected the theater's original interior arrangement. The front of the theater had facilities for the Theatre Guild, inclu ...
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Four Saints In Three Acts
''Four Saints in Three Acts'' is an opera composed in 1928 by Virgil Thomson, setting a libretto written in 1927 by Gertrude Stein. It contains about 20 saints and is in at least four acts. It was groundbreaking in form, content, and for its all-black cast, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral director, and supported by her choir."Eva Jessye"
''Eva Jessye Collection,'' African American Music Collection, University of Michigan, accessed December 4, 2008
Thomson suggested the topic, and the libretto as delivered can be read in Stein's collected works. The opera features two 16th-century Spanish saints—the former mercenary and the mystic

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Boston Symphony Orchestra
The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) is an American orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the second-oldest of the five major American symphony orchestras commonly referred to as the " Big Five". Founded by Henry Lee Higginson in 1881, the BSO performs most of its concerts at Boston's Symphony Hall and in the summer performs at Tanglewood. Since its founding, the orchestra has had 17 music directors, including George Henschel, Serge Koussevitzky, Henri Rabaud, Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg and James Levine. Andris Nelsons is the current music director of the BSO. Seiji Ozawa has the title of BSO music director laureate. Bernard Haitink had held the title of principal guest conductor of the BSO from 1995 to 2004, then conductor emeritus until his death in 2021. The orchestra has made gramophone recordings since 1917 and has occasionally played on soundtrack recordings for films, including ''Schindler's List''. History Early year ...
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Symphony No
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section (violin, viola, cello, and double bass), brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts (e.g., Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). Etymology and origins The word ''symphony'' is derived from the Greek word (), meaning "agreement or concord of sound", "concert of ...
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Berkshire Music Center
The Tanglewood Music Center is an annual summer music academy in Lenox, Massachusetts, United States, in which emerging professional musicians participate in performances, master classes and workshops. The center operates as a part of the Tanglewood Music Festival, an outdoor concert series and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). History The Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) was founded in 1940 as the Berkshire Music Center by the BSO's music director, Serge Koussevitzky, three years after the establishment of Tanglewood as the summer home of the BSO. He served as director of the center until one year after his retirement with the BSO, when he was succeeded by new BSO director Charles Münch, who ran the TMC from 1951 until 1962. Munch was succeeded by BSO director Erich Leinsdorf, who was TMC director from 1963 to 1970. In 1970, three years before he was appointed as Music Director of the BSO, Seiji Ozawa took over BSO activities at Tanglewood, with Gunther S ...
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Tanglewood Music Festival
The Tanglewood Music Festival is a music festival held every summer on the Tanglewood estate in Stockbridge and Lenox in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. The festival consists of a series of concerts, including symphonic music, chamber music, choral music, musical theater, contemporary music, jazz, and pop music. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is in residence at the festival, but many of the concerts are put on by other groups. It is one of the premier music festivals in the United States and one of the top in the world.Anthony Tommasini: "Review: Tanglewood Orchestra Celebrating Its 75th"
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Zinka Milanov
Zinka Milanov (; May 17, 1906 – May 30, 1989) was a Croatian operatic dramatic soprano who had a major career centered on the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. After finishing her education in Zagreb, Milanov made her debut in 1927 in Ljubljana as Leonora in Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore. From 1928 to 1936, she was the leading soprano of the Croatian National Theatre. In 1937, Milanov performed at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time, where she continued to sing until 1966. She also performed as a concert singer and was a noted vocal coach and teacher. Milanov is the sister of the composer and pianist Božidar Kunc. Biography Born in Zagreb, Croatia as Zinka Kunc (), she studied with the Wagnerian soprano Milka Ternina and her assistant Marija Kostrenčić. She also studied in Milan with Carpi and in Berlin with Stückgolt. On October 29, 1927, she made her operatic debut as Leonora in Giuseppe Verdi's ''Il Trovatore'' in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at age 21. Her debut in he ...
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Paul Ulanowsky
Paul Alexander Theodore Ulanowsky (March 4, 1908, Vienna – August 4, 1968, New York, NY) was an Austrian-American pianist, accompanist, vocal coach, and music educator of Austrian Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent. He began his career as the pianist for the Vienna Philharmonic from 1927 to 1935. He then embarked on a long career as an accompanist, notably enjoying a particularly close relationship with soprano Lotte Lehmann during the last fourteen years of her career. He played in concerts with many of the world's best singers and instrumentalists during the 1940s and 1950s. Ulanowsky lived in the United States from the late 1930s on. He began a highly successful teaching career in the 1950s, serving on the faculties at the Berkshire Music Center and Boston University. During the 1960s he was active as a teacher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Yale School of Music. Early life and education Born in Vienna, into a Jewish family, Ulanowsky's father wa ...
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Hartford School Of Music
The Hartford Conservatory was a performing arts school in Hartford, Connecticut, that operated from 1890 to 2011. It offered programs in music, dance, musical theater and recording arts to post-secondary students on a pre-professional level. Its small student body, diverse in age, background and geographical area of origin, pursued immersion studies in music and dance with a jazz emphasis. Some of its students became prepared nationally known performers and teachers. The Hartford Conservatory was one of the nation’s oldest performing arts schools. It was founded in 1890 at the Hartford Theological Seminary as the School for Church Musicians. Five years later it became the independent Hartford School of Music. In 1934, Truda Kaschmann, a student of Mary Wigman, brought modern dance to the school. It later became known as the Hartford Conservatory and provided not only a community program of weekly instruction in music and dance for all ages and levels, but also an accredited t ...
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