WilliamM

I was able to exchange my "La Traviata" Ticket for this afternoon for the same opera and cast on Dec. 29. I am still suffering from a concussion. Didn't know the Met has such liberal exchange policies.

Nancy Wilson in 2010. She performed American standards, jazz ballads and a variety of other numbers with a heightened sense of a song’s narrative.CreditCreditChad Batka for The New York Times By Jim Farber New York Times Dec. 14, 2018 + Nancy Wilson, whose skilled and flexible approach to singing provided a key bridge between the sophisticated jazz-pop vocalists of the 1950s and the powerhouse pop-soul singers of the 1960s and ’70s, died Thursday at her home in Pioneertown, Calif. She was 81. Ms. Wilson’s death, which came after a long illness, was confirmed by her manager, Devra Hall Levy. In her long and celebrated career, Ms. Wilson performed American standards, jazz ballads, Broadway show tunes, R&B torch songs and middle-of-the-road pop pieces, all delivered with a heightened sense of a song’s narrative. “I have a gift for telling stories, making them seem larger than life,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1993. “I love the vignette, the plays within the song.” Some of Ms. Wilson’s best-known recordings told tales of heartbreak, with attitude. A forerunner of the modern female empowerment singer, with the brassy inflections and biting inflections to fuel it, Ms. Wilson could infuse even the saddest song with a sense of strength. ADVERTISEMENT In her canny signature piece from 1960, “Guess Who I Saw Today,” a woman baits her husband by dryly telling him a story in which he turns out to be the central villain. In her 1968 hit, “Face It Girl, It’s Over,” Ms. Wilson first seems to throw cold water in the face of a deluded woman who fails to notice her lover has lost interest in her. Only later does she reveal that she is the benighted woman scorned. The latter number, an epic soul blowout, became one of the singer’s biggest chart scores, making the Top 30 of Billboard’s Pop chart and Top 15 on its R&B list. Her biggest hit came in 1964, when “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am,” a rapturous R&B ballad delivered with panache, reached No. 11 on Billboard’s Pop chart. A hardworking and highly efficient singer, Ms. Wilson released more than 70 albums in a recording career that lasted five decades. She won three Grammy Awards, one for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording for the 1964 album “How Glad I Am,” and two for Best Jazz Vocal Album, in 2005 and 2007. For her lifelong work as an advocate of civil rights, which included marching in the 1965 protest in Selma, Ala., she received an award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in 1993, and an N.A.A.C.P. Hall of Fame Image Award in 1998. In 2005, she was inducted into the International Civil Rights: Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. In 1967, Ms. Wilson became one of the few African-Americans of the day to host a TV program, the Emmy-winning “Nancy Wilson Show” on NBC. “As an artist then, taking such a political stand came with professional risks,” she told the blog Jazz Wax in 2010. “But it had to be done.” Nancy Wilson was born on Feb. 20, 1937, in Chillicothe, Ohio, the first of six children born to Olden Wilson, a supervisor at an iron foundry, and Lilian Ryan, a maid. Her father introduced her to records by mainly male artists, like Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine and Jimmy Scott, when he sang with Lionel Hampton’s Big Band. “Much of my phrasing is so similar to Jimmy Scott’s,” she told the The Los Angeles Times. From the age of 4, Ms. Wilson sang avidly, and by the time she was 10, she was the lead singer in the local choir. She had no formal training. “It’s all natural,” she told Jazz Wax. ADVERTISEMENT As a teenager, Ms. Wilson became entranced by the female singers she heard on a local jukebox, especially Dinah Washington, whose ear for irony, and keen sense of drama, affected her deeply. “The general humor is a lot of Dinah,” the singer said of her style in an interview for the National Endowment for the Arts’s website in 2004. As the inspiration for her glamorous presentation, she cited Lena Horne. At 15, while she was still a student at West High School in Columbus, Ohio, Ms. Wilson entered a talent contest held by the local television station WTVN, which led to a twice-weekly gig on its show “Skyline Melodies.” Until her graduation, she sang at nightclubs, sometimes with the 18-piece band Sir Raleigh Randolph and His Sultans of Swing. Ms. Wilson spent one year at Central State College in Ohio before dropping out to pursue music full time. Still, she took care to hone her skills over a long period, touring continuously in the Midwest and Canada with Rusty Bryant’s Carolyn Club Big Band, with whom she cut her first recordings, for Dot Records. Seven years passed before she felt ready to move to New York in 1959. She came armed with a mandate to achieve three goals: to get signed by a key jazz manager, John Levy, who worked with Cannonball Adderley and George Shearing; to be signed by Capitol Records, which was then known for singers like Nat King Cole and Peggy Lee; and to have her first album produced by David Cavanaugh, who worked with those singers. Within five months she fulfilled all three goals, despite holding down a day job as a secretary at The New York Institute of Technology. A high-profile gig at the Blue Morocco club had led to the contract with Mr. Levy, who got her the label deal, which connected her with Mr. Cavanaugh to produce her debut in April 1960. With splashy arrangements by Billy May, the album, titled “Like in Love,” was pure jazz, though, in the style of the day, it passed as pop. For an early album, “Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley,” she paired with the titular saxophonist to create a jazz touchstone. Her style impressed the critics. Writing in Downbeat in 1965, Leonard Feather hailed her performance at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles as an “extraordinary demonstration of the attainment, by a splendid singer, of an almost unprecedented mixture of commercial appeal, physical and music charm, and artistic integrity.” Live performances, particularly in intimate nightclubs where audiences could see her gestures, became a hallmark. “Audiences want to see a song as well as hear it,” Ms. Wilson told Jazz Wax. “Part of what I do is in my body language, my hands, my arms. You miss a lot by just hearing my voice.” At the same time, Ms. Wilson worked tirelessly in the studio, releasing three albums in a single year during her prime. She also made many guest appearances on TV shows, singing on variety programs (like “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show”) and acting in hit series (like “I Spy” and “Room 222”). She used her high profile to break down racial stereotypes. “That’s what I loved about doing ‘The Carol Burnett Show,’” she told Jazz Wax. “I didn’t have to play ‘black characters.’ I could just do comedy, which I loved.” Over the years, Ms. Wilson’s music moved with the times. She cut songs written by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder on her 1966 album “A Touch of Today,” and later incorporated disco and modern R&B styles before moving back to jazz on her later albums, culminating in 2006’s “Turned to Blue.” Throughout her career, Ms. Wilson kept the focus on music rather than celebrity, while making sure to carve out time for her private life. She married the drummer Kenny Dennis in 1960, divorcing him a decade later. In 1973, she married Wiley Burton, a Presbyterian minister with whom she remained until his death in 2008. She is survived by her three children, Kacy Dennis, Sheryl Burton and Samantha Burton; two sisters, Karen Davis and Brenda Vann; and five grandchildren. Ms. Wilson remained proud of her holistic approach to music, preferring to call herself a “song stylist” rather than a follower of any genre. “I don’t put labels on it, I just sing,” she told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s all in the ear of the listener. Let them decide.” Comment: Nat King Cole and Peggy Lee may have been better know, but Nancy Wilson was a wonderful singer, as good, or better, than Cole or Lee.

Lucille Ball was quoted as saying, "Why is Hepburn calling me?. She ignore me when we made a few movies together. But, now I am "Lucy."

How many people are interested in a play about Hepburn (other than the author)?

MUSIC Nézet-Séguin Impresses in His Met Debut, with La Traviata By DANIEL GELERNTER The New Observer December 7, 2018 6:30 AM Diana Damrau as Violetta and Juan Diego Flórez as Alfredo in Verdi’s “La Traviata.” (Marty Sohl/Met Opera)Under his baton, the glorious music made up for so-so staging and ugly costumes. This year has seen a major changing of the guard in New York, with new music directors arriving both at the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. The Philharmonic made a questionable choice with Jaap van Zweden, though it could be argued that after Alan Gilbert’s seven-year tenure, there was nowhere to go but up. The Met faced the more difficult problem of replacing James Levine, whose epic 40-year run was largely successful until it came crashing down in 2018 after allegations of sexual misconduct. The Met’s choice of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who will also continue as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, is singularly fortunate. Nézet-Séguin, who is just 43, has done exceptional work in Philadelphia and is deservedly considered one of the greatest conductors today. He is no stranger to the Met and has guest-conducted there since 2009. He reflects his style in his movement on the rostrum: Graceful and lyrical, he is utterly bound up in the music. If it seems obvious common sense that any conductor must have a deep and consuming love for his music, such conductors are not so easy to find as one would think. For his debut as music director, Nézet-Séguin chose Verdi’s La Traviata (The Fallen Woman). It’s an eminently defensible and safe choice, a staple of the repertoire and a consistently popular member of the Italian school. As an artwork, it is less valuable than the Alexandre Dumas novel on which it is based: Camille is a first-rate romance. La Traviata is more histrionic than subtle, but it manages a number of superb moments, especially in the second and third acts. Besides which, Verdi had a gift for writing catchy tunes — almost everyone recognizes the Act I song “Libiamo ne’lieti calici” (“Let’s drink from the joyful cups”), if only from some ad for pizza or tomato sauce. The new music director was also premiering a new production, so it was a real gala night at the Met. So gala, in fact, that every single member of the audience received a small bottle of prosecco on his way out the door: a handsome green split with an orange label. There is no question these days of the Met doing less than a first-rate job with anything on the logistical end. They have one of the most sophisticated and powerful stages in the world and can make any designer’s dream of scenery and any director’s dream of movement a reality. Some aspects of this brand-new La Traviata were nonetheless disappointing. The direction by Michael Mayer was so-so. It included several silly flourishes, such as the perpetual on-stageness of the eventual deathbed, or the addition of a superfluous, silent, and non-existent character for dramatic effect. The set by Christine Jones was adequate, though there was only one set for the three acts. But a fine lighting job by Kevin Adams made the most of it. The gaudy costumes by Susan Hilferty appeared to have been designed after binge-watching all the cocktail-party scenes from The Hunger Games. No one could possibly have looked good or natural in those outfits, with the possible exception of Willy Wonka. And the choreography by Lorin Latarro was worse. Her ballet sequence in the second act was gratuitously ugly. To take such evidently talented dancers and have their every movement appear so graceless and awkward and lumpen demands a genuine anti-talent. But all this was redeemed by the music. More than this could have been redeemed by the music. Nézet-Séguin’s tempi might have been a touch slow at times, but the quality of the performance was amazing. The main triad of singers was brilliant — Diana Damrau as the fallen Violetta, Juan Diego Flórez as the lover Alfredo, and Quinn Kelsey as the father Gremont. Damrau’s soprano has exceptional purity and clarity — a flawless diamond of a voice. And she made the best of the generally ham-handed stage direction. Kelsey’s baritone is beautiful. In a sea of baritones, his voice is uniquely rich and penetrating and is absolutely distinct: So round, so firm, so fully packed (exactly the opposite of the Lucky Strike cigarette whose slogan that used to be). The Damrau-Kelsey duets in the second act brought down the house. COMMENTS After the opera, as is traditional at a premiere, first the singers and then the director and designers and finally the conductor appeared onstage. Nézet-Séguin’s arrival was trumpeted by the explosion of golden streamers of confetti, which may have been a bit much, but which he stood with good grace. And then he did something unusual (I have never seen it at any opera before): He invited the orchestra, all 60-odd pieces, including a “cimbasso,” to come onstage out of the pit and take a bow. It was a gentlemanly gesture that served to remind the operagoers where their invisible soundtrack had come from.

A Little Early For Christmas