Download or read book Sing for Your Life written by Daniel Bergner and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller about a young black man's journey from violence and despair to the threshold of stardom: "A beautiful tribute to the power of good teachers" (Terry Gross, Fresh Air). "One of the most inspiring stories I've come across in a long time."-Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review Ryan Speedo Green had a tough upbringing in southeastern Virginia: his family lived in a trailer park and later a bullet-riddled house across the street from drug dealers. His father was absent; his mother was volatile and abusive. At the age of twelve, Ryan was sent to Virginia's juvenile facility of last resort. He was placed in solitary confinement. He was uncontrollable, uncontainable, with little hope for the future. In 2011, at the age of twenty-four, Ryan won a nationwide competition hosted by New York's Metropolitan Opera, beating out 1,200 other talented singers. Today, he is a rising star performing major roles at the Met and Europe's most prestigious opera houses. Sing for Your Life chronicles Ryan's suspenseful, racially charged and artistically intricate journey from solitary confinement to stardom. Daniel Bergner takes readers on Ryan's path toward redemption, introducing us to a cast of memorable characters -- including the two teachers from his childhood who redirect his rage into music, and his long-lost father who finally reappears to hear Ryan sing. Bergner illuminates all that it takes -- technically, creatively -- to find and foster the beauty of the human voice. And Sing for Your Life sheds unique light on the enduring and complex realities of race in America.
Download or read book Black Opera written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.
Download or read book Opera 101 written by Fred Plotkin and published by Hyperion. This book was released on 1994-12 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an opera insider and featuring an introduction by Placido Domingo, here is a thorough, friendly, and truly complete guide to learning how to love and appreciate the opera. After a brief history of opera, the book includes a guide to operatic terms, a minute-by-minute listener's guide to 11 central works, a list of recommended books and recordings and much more.
Download or read book Opera Lives written by Linda Kitchen and published by Spiramus Press Ltd. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes an opera singer? And where in the making of a performance is the identity of the singer themselves? Linda Kitchen goes behind the scenes with prominent voices who have valuable insight about the world of opera, discussing what it means to be a performer, how they got into the profession and how who they are affects how they perform. Illustrated with photos of the artists in places that lend meaning to their lives by renowned photographer Nobby Clark. Contents Biographies - La favorite, Donizetti Prologue - Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Nyman Act One ‘Shoving us from the jetty’ Scene One - Family background The Captain’s Daughter, Cui Scene Two - School days The Wandering Scholar, Holst Scene Three - Defining moment Sonntag aus Licht, Stockhausen Scene Four - Singing study Les arts florissants, Charpentier Scene Five - Preparing Bang!, Rutter Act Two ‘Carry on – it’s going very well’ Scene One - The unfolding The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky Scene Two - Learning the score La Conquista, Ferrero Scene Three - Warming up La Sonnambula, Bellini Scene Four - The feeling of singing La Rondine, Puccini Act Three ‘No good playing Mime as if you’re Brad Pitt’ Scene One - Character, text, drama The Jewels of the Madonna, Wolf-Ferrari Scene Two - Body work The Nose, Shostakovich Scene Three - The essence The Lighthouse, Maxwell Davies Scene Four - Problems Trouble in Tahiti, Bernstein Scene Five - Humour Comedy on the Bridge, Martinů Intermission - by Thomas Allen Paradise Lost, Penderecki Act Four ‘Goodies and Baddies’ Scene One - People around you The Dangerous Liaisons, Susa Scene Two - Composers From Morning to Midnight, Sawer Scene Three - Conductors Der Corregidor, Wolf Scene Four - Directors Der Schauspieldirektor, Mozart Scene Five - Designers Powder her Face, Adès Scene Six - Agents Les Pêcheurs de Perles, Bizet Scene Seven - Reviewing reviewers War and Peace, Prokofiev Act Five ‘Bowls of sushi on a conveyor belt’ Scene One - Changing paths The New Moon, Romberg Scene Two - Legacy Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Monteverdi Scene Three - Family The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Nyman Scene Four - Life beyond the job Il rè pastore, Mozart Scene Five - The future The Medium, Menotti Scene Six - Advice Le donne curiose, Wolf-Ferrari Epilogue - Hänsel und Gretel, Humperdinck
Download or read book La Nilsson written by Birgit Nilsson and published by Northeastern University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published to wide acclaim in Sweden (1995) and in Germany (1997), the autobiography of opera legend Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005) is finally available in an English translation. From her humble roots in rural Sweden to her artistic triumphs in Stockholm, Bayreuth, Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera House, this candid and utterly charming memoir reveals the personality behind one of the great voices of the past century. Gracefully weaving together the private and professional, Nilsson chronicles her idyllic childhood in Vastra Karup, the early recognition of her unique natural abilities, and her first tentative steps into a wider artistic world. After achieving national acclaim in Verdi's Lady Macbeth, she went on to establish herself as the dominant Wagnerian soprano of her generation, appearing at the Bayreuth and Munich Festivals, and the Vienna and Bavarian State Opera Houses, creating, along the way, definitive performances of Sieglinde, Brnnhilde, and Isolde. The book details her rise to international stardom with behind-the-scenes recollections of her phenomenal triumph as Turandot at La Scala in 1958 and her headline-making Met premier in Tristan und Isolde the following year. Nilsson's long and illustrious career (she performed until 1984), her celebrated professional and personal relationships, her friendships and rivalries, are all recounted with a down-to-earth wit and an engagingly odd admixture of ego and selfeffacement. She tells it all: the legendary quips, the often prickly relationships with Met impresario Rudolph Bing and conductor von Karajan, the infamous story of the stalker "Miss N," and the touchingly rendered relationship with her beloved husband, Bertil Niklasson. What emerges from these pages is a diva in the old mold: a giant voice matched by an oversize personality, a professional who expected the same level of perfection from others that she demanded of herself, and a woman who loved and lived life with joy and good humor . . . and oh, that voice. Includes 56 photographs and a discography.
Download or read book The Monster I Am Today written by Kevin Simmonds and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overture -- Performance -- Postlude.
Download or read book A History of Opera written by Carolyn Abbate and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.
Download or read book Lina Cavalieri written by Paul Fryer and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-12-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prominent star in both pre-Revolutionary Russia and New York, Lina Cavalieri, described as "the most beautiful woman in the world," was one of the most frequently photographed personalities of her time. The cabaret performer, courtesan, and international star is documented in this, her first English-language biography. Researched from Russian archive sources, the book details her career from her early experiences in cafe-chantant and variety theatre in Paris, London, and St. Petersburg, through a highly successful operatic career in which she sang in many of the world's leading opera houses with such celebrities as Caruso and Ruffo. In 1914, Cavalieri became the first great opera singer to appear in silent movies, making her debut in Manon Lescaut and continuing with a series of successful films. Her life was ended by an Allied air raid in World War II. The book includes excerpts from period reviews, programmes, posters, and many previously unseen photographs. Appendices include a bibliography, filmography, discography, and chronology of stage performances (dates, venues, work, cast, conductor).
Download or read book Opera in America written by John Dizikes and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 611 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text tells how opera, steeped in European aristocratic tradition, was transplanted into the democratic cultural enviroment of America. It includes vignettes of productions, personalities, audiences and theatres throughout the country from 1735 to the present day.
Download or read book Fifty five Years in Five Acts written by Astrid Varnay and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2000 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's greatest Wagnerian sopranos talks about an illustrious career that flourished for over five decades.
Download or read book Opera written by Piero Weiss and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Opera: A History in Documents, Piero Weiss presents a wide-ranging, vivid, and carefully researched tour of operatic history. A unique anthology of primary source material, this survey includes 115 chronologically organized selections--passages from private letters, public decrees, descriptions of first performances, portions of libretti, literary criticism and satire, newspaper reviews and articles, and poetry and fiction--from opera's late Renaissance infancy through modern times. This first-hand testimony allows students to experience the history of opera as eyewitnesses, offering an immediacy and validity unmatched by standard histories. Readers are transported to a Medici wedding in sixteenth-century Florence, to the Haymarket Theatre for a performance of Handel's Rinaldo, to Mozart at work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and to Bertolt Brecht's writing desk, among many other landmarks in opera's history. Weiss expertly guides students, providing highly accessible headnotes to each selection that both contextualize the excerpts and position them within the broader historical narrative. In addition, he offers original translations of more than half of the selections in the book, many of which appear here in English for the first time. Stage settings, costumes, portraits, contemporary playbills, and other illustrations enliven the text and help to recreate the feel of the era under discussion. Opera: A History in Documents is an intrinsically lively text that will enrich college courses on opera and delight any music-loving reader.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Opera written by Alison Kinney and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Opera is community, comfort, art, voice, breath, life. It’s hope.” All art exists to make life more bearable. For Alison Kinney, it was the wild, fantastical world of opera that transformed her listening and her life. Whether we’re listening for the first time or revisiting the arias that first stole our hearts, Avidly Reads Opera welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique—and, always, beautiful music. In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social activism. Avidly Reads Opera is a love letter to the music and those who love it, complete with playlists, a crowdsourced tip sheet from ultra-fans to newbies, and stories of the turbulent, genre-busting, and often hilarious history of opera and its audiences. Across five acts—and the requisite intermission—Alison Kinney takes us everywhere opera’s rich melodies are heard, from the cozy bedrooms of listeners at home, to exclusive music festivals, to protests, and even prisons. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Opera is an homage to the marvelous, sensational world of opera for the casual viewer.
Download or read book From the Score to the Stage written by Evan Baker (Opera historian) and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little (and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in bringing an opera to life--by the stagehands who shift scenery, the scenic artists who create beautiful backdrops, the electricians who focus the spotlights, and the stage manager who calls them and the singers to their places during the performance. The first comprehensive history of the behind-the-scenes world of opera production and staging, From the Score to the Stage follows the evolution of visual style and set design in continental Europe from its birth in the seventeenth century up to today. In clear, witty prose, Evan Baker covers all the major players and pieces involved in getting an opera onto the stage, from the stage director who creates the artistic concept for the production and guides the singers' interpretation of their roles to the blocking of singers and placement of scenery. He concentrates on the people--composers, librettists, designers, and technicians--as well as the theaters and events that generated developments in opera production. Additional topics include the many difficulties in performing an opera, the functions of impresarios, and the business of music publishing. Delving into the absorbing and often neglected history of stage directing, theater architecture and technology, and scenic and lighting design, Baker nimbly links these technical aspects of opera to actual performances and performers, and the social context in which they appeared. Out of these details arise illuminating discussions of individual productions that cast new light on the operas of Wagner, Verdi, and others. Packed with nearly two hundred color illustrations, From the Score to the Stage is a revealing, always entertaining look at what happens before the curtain goes up on opening night at the opera house.
Download or read book The Grove Book of Opera Singers written by Laura Williams Macy and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering over 1500 singers from the birth of opera to the present day, this marvelous volume will be an essential resource for all serious opera lovers and an indispensable companion to the enormously successful Grove Book of Operas. The most comprehensive guide to opera singers ever produced, this volume offers an alphabetically arranged collection of authoritative biographies that range from Marion Anderson (the first African American to perform at the Met) to Benedict Zak (the classical tenor and close friend and colleague of Mozart). Readers will find fascinating articles on such opera stars as Maria Callas and Enrico Caruso, Ezio Pinza and Fyodor Chaliapin, Lotte Lehmann and Jenny Lind, Lily Pons and Luciano Pavarotti. The profiles offer basic information such as birth date, vocal style, first debut, most memorable roles, and much more. But these articles often go well beyond basic biographical information to offer colorful portraits of the singer's personality and vocal style, plus astute evaluations of their place in operatic history and many other intriguing observations. Many entries also include suggestions for further reading, so that anyone interested in a particular performer can explore their life and career in more depth. In addition, there are indexes of singers by voice type and by opera role premiers. The articles are mostly drawn from the acclaimed Grove Music Online and have been fully revised, and the book is further supplemented by more than 40 specially commissioned articles on contemporary singers. A superb new guide from the first name in opera reference, The Grove Book of Opera Singers is a lively and authoritative work, beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white pictures. It is an essential volume--and the perfect gift--for opera lovers everywhere.
Download or read book Space Opera written by Catherynne M. Valente and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 HUGO AWARD FINALIST, BEST NOVEL The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets the joy and glamour of Eurovision in bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente's science fiction spectacle, where sentient races compete for glory in a galactic musical contest…and the stakes are as high as the fate of planet Earth. A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented—something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding. Once every cycle, the great galactic civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix—part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past. Species far and wide compete in feats of song, dance and/or whatever facsimile of these can be performed by various creatures who may or may not possess, in the traditional sense, feet, mouths, larynxes, or faces. And if a new species should wish to be counted among the high and the mighty, if a new planet has produced some savage group of animals, machines, or algae that claim to be, against all odds, sentient? Well, then they will have to compete. And if they fail? Sudden extermination for their entire species. This year, though, humankind has discovered the enormous universe. And while they expected to discover a grand drama of diplomacy, gunships, wormholes, and stoic councils of aliens, they have instead found glitter, lipstick, and electric guitars. Mankind will not get to fight for its destiny—they must sing. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes have been chosen to represent their planet on the greatest stage in the galaxy. And the fate of Earth lies in their ability to rock.
Download or read book Fire Shut Up in My Bones written by Charles M. Blow and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A respected journalist describes the abuse he suffered at the hands of a close family relative, the effect this had on his formative years and how he overcame the anger and self-doubt it left behind.
Download or read book The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera written by Roger Parker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical survey of opera, from its beginnings in Florence 400 years ago, up to opera in the 1990s.
