Word: arias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...soprano is absolutely enormous, solid and brilliant throughout its considerable range, but especially stunning at the top. Mme. Crespin launched into the treacherous Gluck aria with no more visible effort than if she had been singing a Faure chanson. She did, in fact, sing some Faure later in the program, and very nicely, too, but my grosser sensibilities craved another of those absurd and wonderful scenas for dramatic soprano something like "Ozean, du Ungeheuer" from Weber's Oberon...
Excitement was missing, too, from the 18th century arias with which Miss Berganza opened her recital: she sang them very nicely indeed (except for a disastrous trill in Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga), but instead of the grand manner and absolute command of style so necessary for Alessandro Scarlatti or Cherubini, she provided a good deal of hand-clasping and those imploring looks to the heavens which ought to be banned forever from the concert stage. In Rossini's Non Piu mesta (from La Cenerentola)--and Miss Berganza has something of a reputation as a Rossini specialist--one again...
...toward success, but Director Ducreux had apparently forgotten that Marseille audiences are a strange breed. Fiercely proud of their opera house, they resent outside interference; they doubt any operatic judgment but their own. A Marseille fisherman or barber may buy a third-balcony seat, show up for his favorite aria and leave immediately, either exalted or enraged. Director Ducreux might have anticipated trouble because of his new, untraditional production, his largely imported cast, or the presence of a socialite audience flown in for the occasion by chartered plane from Paris...
Only the formula is Lanza's-a mixture of show tunes, sentimental Italian love songs and an occasional operatic aria. At Luigi's nightclub in Atlantic City last week, Stuarti was first heard as an offstage voice throbbing out Yours Is My Heart Alone; by the time he sailed into the last bars he was standing in a lavender spot, stage center, teeth gleaming to the glow of applause. After that, in a handsome dramatic-tenor voice, Stuarti worked through such standards as If Ever I Would Leave You, Arrivederci, Roma, Sorrento, Three Coins in the Fountain...
...salvaged its suggestiveness in spite of frequent lapses in enunciation by the cast. Mr. Laughlin also helped to give a bit more rounded portrait of Millay by introducing five minutes' worth of her lyrical poetry, read with widely varying effect by five readers before the stage was brightened for Aria da Capo...