Word: aria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Callas appeared, shimmering and glowing in a Venetian-gold gown with diamonds glittering at her ears. Behind her was a black-bordered set with a sky-blue backdrop, creating the effect of an immense shadow box. Callas had committed herself to a murderously difficult concert of eight operatic arias. All week she had kept trying to cut the number down to three, but Impresario Kelly held firm, and eight it was. She opened with a Mozart aria from The Abduction from the Seraglio, which she did in harsh, mediocre style. With two arias from Bellini's I Puritani, Callas...
...Callas appeared in a black lace sheath and a blazing diamond necklace. She sang the final aria from Donizetti's Anna Bolena, in which the wronged queen, about to be beheaded, forgives all her enemies. At the last exultant phrase ("Only my blood is lacking to finish the crime, and this will be shed!"), Callas took a single step forward-so dramatic that people all but jumped. She raised a commanding hand over her head, then threw her arms wide and sent that last full note straight up through the roof...
...French aria and Negro spirituals-and more than fulfilled the sponsoring State Department's hopes that she would reap good will for the U.S. along with the applause. Last week Singer Anderson reached New Delhi and learned that she was already a sellout attraction. Music lovers had scrambled to snap up the 1,200 available tickets that filled New Delhi's biggest concert hall to capacity...
...quite mad hunting scene. As the flighty duchess, Helen Hayes -if not wholly French-is very often wholly delightful, alternating an actress' skill with a vaudevillian's liveliness. Richard Burton plays a prince who is more bored than bereaved with a fine sullen dash; and his verbal aria on how sad it is to be rich is far more piquant than anything of Saroyan's on how jolly it is to be poor. Susan Strasberg makes a very pretty but monotonous-voiced milliner, and Sig Arno a capital headwaiter...
...drama. Saroyan's words are too many and too vague; the dialogue, at moments, even sounds as if the actors were unsure of their lines. As it happens, the actors are extremely good. As staged by Carmen Capalbo, the production provides lift: Barry Jones makes a fine-flowing aria of his unhappiness, Eugenie Leontovitch a bright nonsense piece of her stage memories...