Word: arias
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...Roundheads, but in the process is forced to abandon his betrothed, Elvira, who goes insane. Soprano Sutherland's triumph last week was that she made her audience overlook the opera's gothic absurdities and focus on its moments of real beauty, including Elvira's pre-wedding aria, "Son vergin vezzosa," and her splendid "Qui la voce sua soave," which introduces a mad scene every bit as effective as the more famous one in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Her voice was precise, agile, light-textured and luminous. The London Observer praised her "extraordinary beauty of tone...
...Toscanini's absorption in the music is nowhere better demonstrated than when he raises his cracked old voice in song. During the Traviata rehearsals he is sometimes the ardent young Alfredo, singing the aria De' miei bollenti spiriti, sometimes the gravely dignified Germont, making his moving plea to Violetta-Pura sic-come un angelo. In the most fascinating section of all, the old man launches into Violetta's famed Sempre libera, sounding hoarse, wildly off key, but somehow convincing in the aria's feverish abandon...
...promptly mesmerized the great house in the famous duet with Tenor Richard Tucker as Don Alvaro. Later, dressed in the gold and black uniform of a Spanish grenadier, Warren soliloquized about his gravely wounded comrade-in-arms: "Morir! . . . Tremenda cosa!" ("To die! Tremendous thing!"). Finally he sang the great aria, "Urna fatale del mio destino" ("Fatal urn of my destiny"), giving it the flooding warmth of color and the vibrant depth of feeling that only he could command...
...gesture was as familiar to Metropolitan Opera audiences as the gold curtain itself: arms flung wide, massive head tilted to the galleries, the barrel-chested man with the thin legs would stand at the conclusion of a great Verdi aria, waiting with a lordly air for the homage due the world's finest dramatic baritone...
These famous words, written by Bartolomeo Vanzetti shortly before his execution with Nicolo Sacco in 1927, may well be sung before long from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House-and quite an aria they would make for Leonard Warren or Giorgio Tozzi. Last week the Met announced that it has taken an option on a Sacco-Vanzetti opera by 55-year-old Composer Marc Blitzstein, to be written on commission from the Ford Foundation...