Word: arias
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CARLO BERGONZI, 33, a thickset, muscular Italian tenor who paces the stage as he winds up for a big aria, is well worth hearing when he finally stands still and left loose. His voice is warm, strong and sure. Good tenors are never in plentiful supply; with Fellow Newcomers Labo and Gedda, Bergonzi makes the Met unusually rich in the tenor department...
...outstanding roles, and one of the most challenging in the repertory. As Norma, the Druid priestess, Callas came before her audience looking strikingly handsome in flowing robes, her dark hair aglitter with silver leaves. Midway in the first act, when she launched into the opera's most famed aria, Casta Diva, the house was hushed in taut expectancy. All of the familiar intensity was there, and the first notes were luminously clear. But as the aria moved into the upper registers, the voice seemed to darken and tremble. The audience responded with a mixture of hisses and bravos. Callas...
...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...
...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...