Sopranos Best Quotes

That's what being a boss is. You steer the ship the best way you know. Sometimes it's smooth. Sometimes you hit the rocks. In the meantime you find your pleasures where you can.

Who are you? Where do you fit into poetry and myth? Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business. You don't know what that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna -- always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor. "So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody's death if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices. Are you Fifth Business? You had better find out.

Compared to you,” said the Klavar soprano, “humans are joyful rosebushes bouncing through the stars. If you ever stopped napping long enough to escape Earth, you would sweep across this galaxy like nothing before, an endless wave of carnage. You would hunt our worlds one by one and ruin everything we’ve built. Only your laziness protects us.” Capo hopped down off the railing. She lifted her tail in the air haughtily and glanced back over her furry shoulder. “Most likely,” she purred. “Best keep mum, don’t you think? Wouldn’t want to wake us u

When light shines on a leaf, or a daub of paint, or a lump of butter, it actually causes it to rearrange its electrons, in a process called "transition." There the electrons are, floating quietly in clouds within their atoms, and suddenly a ray of light shines on them. Imagine a soprano singing a high C and shattering a wineglass, because she catches its natural vibration. Something similar happens with the electrons, if a portion of the light happens to catch their natural vibration. It shoots them to another energy level and that relevant bit of light, that glass-shattering "note," is used up and absorbed. The rest is reflected out, and our brains read it as "color.".... The best way I've found of understanding this is to think not so much of something "being" a color but of it "doing" a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering - or dancing or singing, the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe - in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red - meaning paradoxically that the "red" tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance - absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.

In the early '90s a beautiful young Russian soprano who loved music was studying opera at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. She told us how despite her single-minded focus on developing her voice, her teachers thought that perhaps, at best, one day she could sing in a chorus somewhere. But the soprano wasn't going to let her teachers' low opinion of her stop her from achieving her goal. While becoming a part-time janitor may not seem like a brilliant career move for an aspiring opera star, she took a job mopping floors at St. Petersburg's Kirov Opera, the greatest opera company in Russia. Still working hard in the conservatory, she earned the chance to audition for the Kirov and was accepted into the ensemble. During rehearsals, when the lead singer became ill, the stage director asked the soprano if she knew the part. "Of course I knew it", she told us. "I knew all the parts. I was ready." She had worked hard; she had worked smart by putting herself in the right place at the right time. And she performed well. Her once-skeptical teachers never could have imagined the career that the soprano, Anna Netrebko, would go on to have, becoming an operatic superstar and the reigning diva of the twenty-first century.

1973 was the year when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Union, the year when Watergate helped us with a name for all future scandals, Carly Simon began the year at number one with ‘You’re So Vain’, John Tavener premiered his Variations on ‘Three Blind Mice’ for orchestra, the year when The Godfather won Best Picture Oscar, when the Bond film was Live and Let Die, when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, opened, when Sofia Gubaidulina’s Roses for piano and soprano premiered in Moscow, when David Bowie was Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed walked on the wild side and made up a ‘Berlin’, Slade were feeling the noize, Dobie Gray was drifting away, Bruce Springsteen was ‘Blinded by the Light’, Tom Waits was calling ‘Closing Time’, Bob Dylan was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, Sly and the Family Stone were ‘Fresh’, Queen recorded their first radio session for John Peel, when Marvin Gaye sang ‘What’s Going On’ and Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, when Morton Feldman’s Voices and Instruments II for three female voices, flute, two cellos and bass, Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style for violin and piano and Iannis Xenakis’s Eridanos for brass and strings premiered, when Ian Carr’s Nucleus released two albums refining their tangy English survey of the current jazz-rock mind of Miles Davis, when Ornette Coleman started recording again after a five-year pause, making a field recording in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, when Stevie Wonder reached No. 1 with ‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, when Free, Family and the Byrds played their last show, 10cc played their first, the Everly Brothers split up, Gram Parsons died, and DJ Kool Herc DJed his first block party for his sister’s birthday in the Bronx, New York, where he mixed instrumental sections of two copies of the same record using two turntables.

Manaus is famous for its hulking Amazonas Theater, an opera house built of Italian marble and surrounded by roads made of rubber so the carriage clatter of late arrivals wouldn’t interrupt the voices of Europe’s best tenors and sopranos.

The past can also be a trap. Dwelling on history can not only interfere with enjoying the present, it can easily dredge up bad feelings best left alone.

Suicide’s Note: An Annual I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that I couldn’t today name the gods you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d roast in Hell poor suffering bastards like you, unable to bear the masks of their own faces. With words you sought to shape a world alternate to the one that dared inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you could not, could never fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you inherited. More than once you asked that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your death feel like failure to everybody who ever loved you as if our collective cpr stopped too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten. I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite your best efforts you are every second alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons. We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain. Source: Poetry (September 2012)

I probably did come off as an arrogant asshole,” he said. “But you had to be. We were bucking a system. And the reason I slept fine at night, despite having all these terrible wars and knowing how resentful they must have been, was that it was in the show’s best interest and, ultimately, the network’s best interest. I always felt that part of my job was protecting them from themselves.

the unfolding waves of sound are like an underwater orchestra or the endless improvisation of a jazz band. On the Great Barrier Reef, the humpback whales sing the soprano melody. Fish supply the chorus: whooping clownfish, grunting cod, and crunching parrotfish. Sea urchins scrape, resonating like tubas. Percussion is the domain of chattering dolphins and clacking shrimp, who use their pincers to create bubbles that explode with a loud bang. Lobsters rasp their antennae on their shells like washboards. Rainfall, wind, and waves provide the backbeat. To get the best seat, you would have to attend the concert in the middle of the night at the full moon, when fish chorusing typically crests. But you wouldn't necessarily need to have a front row seat: mass fish choruses can be heard up to 50 miles away, and whale sounds resonate for hundreds of miles.

Carnival Cruise Lines has its own successful way of doing things, which in this case involved creating a musical group called “The Hot Shots!” The word “Fantastic” comes to mind when thinking of this musical group! Each member auditioned separately at the Carnival rehearsal facility in Miami and then rehearsed as a group until they were ready for the big leagues aboard ship. Fortunately for me and my team, which includes Jorge Fernandez, a former guitar player from Cuba and now a top flight structural engineer in the Tampa Bay area, who helps me with much of my technical work; Lucy Shaw, Chief Copy Editor; Ursula Bracker, Proofer, and lucky me Captain Hank Bracker, award winning author (including multiple gold medals), were aboard the Carnival Legend and were privileged to listen to and enjoy, quite by chance, music that covered everything from Classical Rock, to Disco, to Mo Town and the years in between. Talented Judith Mullally, Carnival’s Entertainment Director, was on hand to encourage and partake in the music with her outstanding voice and, not to be left out, were members of the ship’s repertory cast, as well as the ship’s Cruise Director. The popular Red Frog lounge on the Carnival Legend was packed to the point that one of the performances had to be held on the expansive Lido deck. However, for the rest of the nights, the lounge was packed with young and old, singing and dancing to “The Hot Shots!” - a musical group that would totally pack any venue in Florida. Pheona Baranda, from the Philippines, is cute as a button and is the lead female singer, with a pitch-perfect soprano voice. Lucas Pedreira, from Argentina, is the lead male singer and guitar player who displayed endless energy and the ability to keep the audience hopping! Paulo Baranda, Pheona’s younger brother, plays the lead guitar to perfection and behind the scenes is the band’s musical director and of course is also from the Philippines. Ygor, from Israel, is the “on the money” drummer who puts so much into what he is doing, that at one point he hurt his hand, but refused to slow down. Nick is the bass guitar player, from down under New Zealand, and Marina, the piano and keyboard player, hails from the Ukraine. As a disclaimer I admit that I hold shares in Carnival stock but there is nothing in it for me other than the pleasure of listening to this ultra-talented group which cannot and should not be denied. They were and still are the very best! However, I am sorry that just as a “Super Nova” they unfortunately can’t last. Their bright shining light is presently flaring, but this will only be for a fleeting moment and then will permanently go to black next year on January 2, 2020. That’s just the way it is, but my crew and I, as well as the many guests aboard the Carnival Legend, experienced music seldom heard anywhere, any longer…. It was a treat we will remember for years to come and we hope to see them again, as individual musical artists, or as perhaps with a new group sometime in the near future!

ethnic groups, but to say that we don’t divide each other into races would be to ignore thousands of years of human history. Not to mention the fact that white people drive a car like this: Fig. 3 While black people drive a car like this: Fig. 4 Despite increasing globalization and intermarriage, or “miscegenation,” there are still distinct and important differences between members of the different races. Since the subtlety and scope of those differences are far too complicated to be helpful to us in everyday life, we employ certain heuristics, or “stereotypes,” to better understand and more comfortably interact with those different from ourselves. Like the Maori. Such stereotypes are sometimes controversial, because they can oversimplify the differences between individuals. Every person is different, and it is rare for someone to fit a stereotype perfectly. Except for so-called “walking stereotypes,” like Carson from Queer Eye.2. Others don’t have any of the characteristics ascribed to their race in such stereotypes. It’s an imperfect science at best. For example, just because the Maori are, in general, lazy, selfish, and long-winded, that does not mean that noted Maori opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa is any of those things. In fact, she is only two of them, because she is a soprano, and sopranos tend to be very succinct. Even so, stereotypes can be very useful in our everyday social interactions and decision-making. They are actually a kind of survival instinct—a crude form of received inductive reasoning that can help us make snap judgments in situations where we don’t have all the facts. When entering into a business deal with someone of Roma descent, for instance, I am very careful of my possessions. Knowing the stereotype that gypsies are tramps and thieves,3. I am able to better protect myself when coming into contact with them,

This is perhaps the biggest departure from the science fiction norm. We do not have ‘the cocky guy,’ ‘the fast-talker,’ ‘the brain,’ ‘the wacky alien sidekick’ or any of the other usual characters who populate a space series. Our characters are living, breathing people with all the emotional complexity and contradictions present in quality dramas like The West Wing or The Sopranos. In this way, we hope to challenge our audience in ways that other genre pieces do not. We want the audience to connect with the characters of Galactica as people. Our characters are not super-heroes. They are not an elite. They are everyday people caught up in an enormous cataclysm and trying to survive it as best they can. “They are you and me.