Word: acters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Undramatic though the play is, the final trouble lies less with subject matter than with form. Had Silent Night been not a full play but a longish one-acter, it might have had a special appeal. It could, just long and lyrically enough, have chronicled a meeting and sustained a mood-and with no tossed-in newlyweds, no shaky final scene. Unfortunately, as a one-acter it would not fit the Broadway scheme of things, though as a full-length play it scarcely fits it either...
...such debts with his good friend, Pietro Mascagni (Cavalleria Rusticana) that the two of them got a map and inked out in red the sections of the city they could not walk through for fear of meeting creditors. Puccini scored a critical success with his first opera, a one-acter entitled Le Villi, but he did not win a large following until at 34 he collaborated with his two most successful librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, to produce Manon Lescaut. After that his popular success was secure...
Another youthful New York composer with a gift for vocal writing, Marvin Levy, 25, had his latest opera premiered at the Santa Fe Opera's amphitheater (TIME, July 15). Composer Levy's work, a one-acter entitled The Tower, tells how King Solomon imprisons his daughter after a prophet predicts she will marry the poorest man in the kingdom. Joash, dead-broke, is thrown into the same prison, promptly marries the princess, and in the end is accepted by his father-in-law and decked in royal robes. The score, as frothy as the libretto, played heavily...
...company's main attraction is Landowski's own one-acter. The Ventriloquist, which tells the story of a voice-thrower whose soul is tormented by two dummies representing love and hate. The tape-recorded orchestra accompanies the singers in fantasy scenes while a piano takes over during the here-and-now sequences. (Another of the company's productions, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Telephone, is accompanied entirely by piano.) The tape machine makes for some difficulties; e.g., singers sometimes have a hard time synchronizing their voices with the tape, and occasionally there are rests not written...
Having covered and re-covered the standard operatic repertory on LPs, e.g., ten complete and currently available Pagliaccis, seven Aïdas, five Butterflys, record companies have begun to dig for lesser known works. One of the happiest recent finds: Puccini's one-acter, II Tabarro, on an excellent RCA Victor LP. This somberly lyric tale of jealousy, betrayal and murder on a Seine River barge is sung with power and intensity by Baritone Tito Gobbi, Soprano Margaret Mas and Tenor Giacinto Prandelli, strongly backed by the Rome Opera's chorus and orchestra under Veteran Conductor Vincenzo Bellezza...