Word: adriana
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...rare force, clarity and subtlety. The singers are all in fine voice-including amateur Baritone Toscanini, whose hoarse old bawling can be clearly heard accompanying the principals in several passages. Recording: excellent. A new recording of Tosco, (Cetra-Soria, 4 sides LP) is not so happy. Soprano Adriana Guerrini is shrill as Tosca, Tenor Gianni Poggi and Baritone Paolo Silveri only passable as Cavaradossi and Scarpia. Recording: good...
...Adriana Lecouvreur (Giacinto Prandelli, tenor; Carla Gavazzi, soprano; Saturno Meletti, baritone; Orchestra of Radio Italiana, Alfredo Simonetto conducting; 6 sides LP). A melodramatic love story by Francesco Cilèa (1866-1950) studded with romantic melodies and forceful scoring...
...Poor Adriana did not have her mother's business sense. She liked her work so much that the money was secondary, sometimes gave herself to her customers "out of physical exuberance." At times, she thought about a cute cottage, husband and kids (she had first been seduced by a chauffeur who promised her all that). But she thought just as often about "how I enjoyed love-making and money and the things money can provide...
...Clear Changes. Of Adriana's many men, three were especially destined to complicate her existence: a police official who loved her, a neurotic student whom she loved sincerely, and a murderer who got her pregnant. In a final blaze of violence all of them were wiped out of her life, but Adriana met terror, as she met all adversity, with a forthright philosophy: "I thought how [my baby] would be the child of a murderer and a prostitute; but any man in the world might happen to kill someone and any woman might sell herself for money; and what...
Novelist Moravia (who anomalously gives his unschooled protagonist his own clarity of thought and narration) has peppered The Woman of Rome with flashes of wisdom that seem like borrowed pearls as simple Adriana threads them: "We never get clear, definite changes in life; and those who do make hurried changes risk seeing their old habits come to the fore once again, still alive and as deep-rooted as ever." Those who want to read universal meanings into this couch-worn tale will have to do it at the level of amorality where only the Adrianas of the world can move...