A beguiling self-portrait of a great artist at work.
Though the renowned soprano mostly discusses singing here, her perceptive account of what it takes to become and continue to be a great performer will resonate with all those who dream big.
First-time author Fleming recalls her experiences with agreeable frankness, but she favors tracing her education as a singer over breathlessly reprising her past. The Inner Voice is primarily about music, though she mentions with appreciation the influence of her musician parents and describes her husband, their painful divorce, and their two daughters. “Not just natural talent and hard work, but tenacity, resilience, and luck” make a singer, Fleming writes, and she had plenty of all five. Tracing her path from high school in Rochester, New York, where she starred in productions of My Fair Lady, to the Metropolitan Opera, she ruefully recalls the nerves and self-consciousness that once led her to fall apart on stage when auditioning for the Met National Council Auditions, which were designed to help promising singers. But she never thought of quitting as she struggled with these fears, and though there were setbacks she was accepted at Juilliard, awarded a Fulbright to study in Germany with the famous Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, and given opportunities to sing at La Scala and the Met. As she notes these achievements, Fleming offers advice on how to treat the voice itself, on choosing the right teacher (you need an unerring intuition about whether the instruction suits your needs), on learning to act; and, given today’s realities, on the business side of maintaining a great career. Singers, she notes, need able advisers who will not only secure engagements at the great opera house and major concerts halls, but also recording contracts and TV appearances. Her advice and insights are seasoned with recollections of great singers she has known, from Renata Scotto to Luciano Pavarotti.
A beguiling self-portrait of a great artist at work.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03351-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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