MARIA EWING PLAYLIST 23 great video clips

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: MARIA EWING PLAYLIST   
• Composer: various  
• Libretto: various    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: various  
• Recorded: various
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Maria Ewing, Placido Domingo, Luis Lima, Kiri Te Kanawa
• Conductor: various  
• Orchestra: various  
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: OoV  
• Date Published: 2024  
• Format: Unknown
• Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
• Subtitles: nosubs  
• Video Recording from: YouTube     FULL VIDEO
•  

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

Maria Louise Ewing (March 27, 1950 – January 9, 2022) was an American opera singer. In the early part of her career she performed solely as a lyric mezzo-soprano; she later assumed full soprano parts as well. Her signature roles were Blanche, Carmen, Dorabella, Rosina and Salome. Some critics regarded her as one of the most compelling singing actresses of her generation.

Ewing began her professional life as a lyric mezzo-soprano. Her debut was as Rosina in an English-language production of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Detroit in 1970, staged by a company now known as the Michigan Opera Theatre. (She returned to the role many times, including at Houston Grand Opera in 1976 and 1983, at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1981 and 1982 and at the Metropolitan Opera in 1982.) After three years of gradually building a career as a recitalist, concert artist and opera performer, she made her first appearance at a high-profile venue on June 29, 1973, when she starred at the Ravinia Festival singing a program of songs by Alban Berg accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Levine. “I cannot remember a young singer who has excited me more on a first hearing”, wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Thomas Willis. “Still in her early twenties, she has the clear stamp of greatness in every movement and tone”.

The first leading opera company that engaged Ewing was San Francisco’s. She was their Mercédès in Carmen in 1973, and their Sicle in Francesco Cavalli’s Ormindo in 1974. In 1975, Santa Fe Opera presented her in Così fan tutte as Dorabella,[13] one of the parts with which she became most closely associated: she was highly praised in the role both at Glyndebourne in 1978 and at the Metropolitan Opera, with Levine on the podium, in 1982. In his history of Glyndebourne, Spike Hughes remembered Ewing’s Dorabella as “a particular joy, with a natural gift of timing and an enchantingly comical face”, while for Levine, Ewing was “the funniest, most stylish Dorabella you could imagine, absolutely sensational”.

It was as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro that Ewing first appeared in Europe, playing the farfallone amoroso at Salzburg in 1976; she repeated the role there in 1979 and 1980. It was as Cherubino too that she first sang at the Metropolitan Opera on October 14, 1976, in a production to which she returned in 1977. In his autobiography, the director Lotfi Mansouri remembered Ewing at this stage in her career as “an alluring mezzo who could convince audiences possibly better than anyone else that her enchantingly sung Cherubino was really a boy”. She offered another Mozart trousers role in 1977, when she sang Idamante in his opera seria Idomeneo at the San Francisco Opera. In 1980 and 1984, she appeared in his second da Ponte work when she was Zerlina in Don Giovanni at the Geneva Opera and the Met respectively. Her other bel canto mezzo-soprano role was Angelina in La Cenerentola (Houston Grand Opera, 1979; Geneva Opera, 1981).

As Ewing’s career in opera progressed, her choice of parts became ever more eclectic, spanning the gamut from seventeenth century works by Monteverdi and Purcell to twentieth century pieces by Shostakovich and Poulenc. Ultimately she went so far as to adventure beyond the boundaries of her mezzo Fach and sing as a soprano too. Among the parts that she assumed were the title role in La Périchole (San Francisco Opera, 1976; Geneva Opera, 1982 and 1983); Blanche in Dialogues des Carmélites (Metropolitan Opera, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1987); Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande (La Scala, 1977; San Francisco Opera, 1979); Charlotte in Werther (San Francisco Opera, 1978); the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos (Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 1981;Metropolitan Opera, 1984 and 1985); Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro (Geneva Opera, 1983; Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1987); Poppea in L’incoronazione di Poppea (Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 1984 and 1986[9]); the title roles in Carmen (Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 1985 and 1987; Metropolitan Opera, 1986; Royal Opera House, 1991[22]), Salome (Los Angeles Opera, 1986; Royal Opera House, 1988; Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1988; San Francisco Opera, 1993), Die lustige Witwe (Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1986 and 1987), Tosca (Royal Opera House, 1991) and Madama Butterfly (Los Angeles Opera, 1991); Didon in Les Troyens (Metropolitan Opera, 1993 and 1994); Katerina Ismailova in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Metropolitan Opera, 1994); Dido in Dido and Aeneas (Hampton Court, 1995); Marie in Wozzeck (Metropolitan Opera, 1997); the title role in Fedora (Los Angeles Opera, 1997); and the Queen of the Fairies in Iolanthe (Gielgud Theatre, London, 2008). It was for her performance in Salome that she attracted the warmest plaudits, not least for the succès de scandale that she achieved in the opera’s notorious Dance of the Seven Veils. At Los Angeles in 1986, she ended Salome’s strip-tease with her modesty protected by a gold lamé G-string, but at Covent Garden two years later, she dispensed with even that minimal concession to prudery and became one of the few opera singers to dare full-frontal nudity. “I felt the G-string was vulgar,” she said. *I think the nudity is more pure. It’s a mixture of purity and decadence, that’s what’s so fascinating.”

The non-operatic music that Ewing performed was as diverse as her theatrical repertoire: it included Berg’s Sieben Frühe Lieder, Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, Debussy’s La damoiselle élue and Trois ballades de François Villon, Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor and Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri. She could be as dramatic in concert as when performing as a singing actress—the conductor Simon Rattle recalled her interpretation of Ravel’s Shéhérazade as “easily the most X-rated Shéhérazade you can imagine”. Her recital repertoire extended from an aria by Handel to art songs by Debussy, Duparc, Schubert and Wolf. As regards genres of music outside the classical realm, she had an especial affection for jazz ever since being introduced to it by Dave Brubeck’s Take Five at the age of eight; she sometimes spent an entire night compulsively listening to one jazz record after another. During the BBC Proms festival of 1989 she performed cabaret numbers with Richard Rodney Bennett, and her videography includes a DVD of her performing with the band Kymaera at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London.

Quoted from Wikipedia