Marta Belen

	Marta Belen Marta Belen (December 1, 1942 – April 5, 2005) was an American opera singer, artist, and music coach. She was the first American to record Rachmaninoff's art songs in Russian. Early life and education Marta Belen was born Martha Gradine Pinnell in the small town of Meridian, Texas to Grady Pinnell and Gladys Weehunt. She graduated with a degree in composition from Wichita State University and in 1967 received a degree in music theory from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Later she studied voice with Igor Gorin at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Opera career Between 1967 and 1977 Belen performed in multiple locations around the United States, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain. She sang for the Tucson Opera (now the Arizona Opera) and the San Francisco Opera. She sang the principal soprano role for ''La Traviata'', ''Madame Butterfly'', and ''La Boheme'', as well as performing in ''La Sonnambula'', ''Daughter of the Regiment'' (La fille du régiment), ''The Magic Flute'', a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
picture info	Rachmaninoff Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff; in Russian pre-revolutionary script. (28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness and rich orchestral colours. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output and he made a point of using his skills as a performer to fully explore the expressive and technical possibilities of the instrument. Born into a musical family, Rachmaninoff took up the piano at the age of four. He studied with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory and graduated in 1892, having already composed several piano and orchestral pieces. In 1897, following the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
picture info	La Sonnambula ''La sonnambula'' (''The Sleepwalker'') is an opera semiseria in two acts, with music in the '' bel canto'' tradition by Vincenzo Bellini set to an Italian libretto by Felice Romani, based on a scenario for a ''ballet-pantomime'' written by Eugène Scribe and choreographed by Jean-Pierre Aumer called ''La somnambule, ou L'arrivée d'un nouveau seigneur''. The ballet had premiered in Paris in September 1827 at the height of a fashion for stage works incorporating somnambulism. The role of Amina was originally written for the soprano sfogato Giuditta Pasta and the tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini, but during Bellini's lifetime another soprano sfogato, Maria Malibran, was a notable exponent of the role. The first performance took place at the Teatro Carcano in Milan on 6 March 1831. The majority of twentieth-century recordings have been made with a soprano cast as Amina, usually with added top-notes and other changes according to tradition, although it was released in soprano sfogat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
picture info	People From Meridian, Texas A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]