The romance, passion, and competition of modern opera come alive in this sequel, aimed at aficionados.
This second volume of a history series on tenors offers extensive interviews, letters, and critiques focused on Franco Corelli.
Picking up where his first installment left off, Zucker (Franco Corelli & a Revolution in Singing: Fifty-Four Tenors Spanning 200 Years, Volume 1, 2015, etc.), once host of Columbia University’s radio show Opera Fanatic and a performer himself, applies his impressive pedigree of classical music knowledge to outline the fall of the castrati in the early 1800s. The culture of the Napoleonic era began banning castrati—male children castrated at a young age and raised to sing in more feminine ranges—from schools, and the pope lifted the prohibition against women performing onstage. During the castrati’s decline rose a new group of tenors like Gilbert-Louis Duprez, with his high C from the chest, and Giovanni Rubini, “the king of the high Fs.” These singers’ popularity and heroic characters would turn audiences and composers’ attentions to them and their successors. Among the latter was Corelli, and here Zucker shares his extraordinary access to the star, reprinting wide-ranging interviews as well as various correspondences, most notably the singer’s letters to fellow Italian tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. Corelli recalls developing his voice—not just in his early years, but also across his long career—while discussing his numerous stage rivalries with the likes of Mario Del Monaco and Richard Tucker. Explicit facets of Corelli’s sex life are recounted in conversations with his mistresses and his wife, Loretta, and rumored flirtations are addressed. Despite or perhaps because of these deeply personal touches, this volume stands as an impressive resource for opera fans and scholars, with the author breaking down many of Corelli’s performances in detail, explaining vocal techniques and their origins. Those not well-educated in these concepts won’t find a teaching guide here, and readers who lack a background in music theory and stage singing will often find themselves lost. That doesn’t mean the volume is totally unapproachable, as its numerous (well over a hundred) photographs and illustrations are quite enthralling, and those interested in music history will find some useful trivia, from the technical aspects of castration to the drama between modern opera’s biggest names. Zucker also takes other Corelli biographies to task with a biting, decisive tone that only a true critic can execute so entertainingly.
The romance, passion, and competition of modern opera come alive in this sequel, aimed at aficionados.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-891456-03-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bel Canto Society
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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