Word: aria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Joining her for the first part of the recital was violinist David Hurwitz. After a nicely balanced performance of a Bach aria with obbligato, they presented Gustav Holst's Four Songs for Voice and Violin. Holst wrote these to please a friend who said she liked to sing as she fiddled, but on presenting them to her the composer was told, "I can only hum when I play." As long as two performers are necessary, Holst could have wished none better than Hurwitz and Miss Smith to present his simple, modal settings...
...Scarpia's den looking like the Queen of the Night in her black velvet and ermine gown and glittering tiara. Her lip curled shrewishly at Scarpia's overtures, but she staggered when she heard her lover's tortured screams. She wound up her big show-stopping aria, Vissi d'Arte, on her knees just in time to receive the ovation that greeted it. Meanwhile, Mitropoulos, silhouetted against the stage lights, was kneading, soothing, irritating, roiling his orchestra, bouncing around in the climaxes like a marionette on a string. With a start, Callas took the knife from...
...Count Almaviva, Malcolm Ticknor handles his small voice nicely in his arias but tends to get drowned out in the ensembles. His acting is particularly effective in the second act when he pretends to be a drunken soldier. Margaret Russell sings Berta's aria rather pleasingly...
...acting was of a uniformly high order, with Ronald Gerbrands' protrayal of Basilio setting the pace. His big aria "Start a Rumor" (La Calumnia) stopped the show. William Nethercut sang and acted Figaro without straining, and the result was a characterization that helped hold the entire performance together. Robert Cortright looked noble as Count Almaviva, but found the role too high in pitch and too ornate for his basically sympathetic tenor voice. Arthur Anderson also has vocal difficulties as Doctor Bartolo, but he acts the old stodge convincingly. In smaller parts Laurence Chvany and Grace Lewis are excellent, and Noel...
Once, her enemies began to heckle as she got to the high notes of her second aria in Traviata. Callas tore off her shawl, stepped to the front of the stage, glared directly at her tormentors. With reckless ferocity, she lit into one of opera's most perilous arias. If she had made a mistake, it would have been fatal. Instead, she sang with immaculate and unearthly beauty. Five times she was called back by the deliriously happy audience, five times she stood, stony and arrogant, before turning away. On the sixth call, she relented, bowed to everybody except...