Word: arrigo
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Fausto Cleva, not the Met's liveliest conductor, this time set his singers a brisk pace, never permitted any sagging in the supple vocal line that Verdi skillfully stitched through Arrigo Boito's libretto. As Othello, Tenor Mario del Monaco sailed onstage in full joyous shout in his "Esultate," and from there on through his Act III explosion of jealous rage, never pausing to be subtle, kept the house ringing and the stage dark with passion. Baritone Leonard Warren as lago proved again his ability to soar dramatically or modulate to a mahogany pianissimo, invested his role with...
...alter his verdict. Giraldo Cinthio's story of the Moor of Venice, his ensign Iago and his wife Desdemona has, in fact, been the source of several superlatives: it gave us Rossini's Otello, his finest serious opera; it gave us the best of all Italian opera libretti (by Arrigo Boito), which, when set to music by Verdi, became the supreme Italian tragic opera of the Romantic century; and it gave us Shakespeare's unequaled, Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and Richard II, and from his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). It gives...
Third item in this batch of operatic rarities: Arrigo Boïto's Mefistofele, newly recorded by RCA Victor on 2 LPs (with Boris Christoff, Giacinto Prandelli, Orietta Moscucci; Orchestra and Chorus of the Rome Opera conducted by Vittorio Gui). Known chiefly as a poet and mighty librettist (Verdi's Otello and Falstaff), Boïto always remained an interesting oddity as a composer; he premiered his version of Goethe's Faust at La Scala in 1868 only to see it booed off the stage after two performances because of its experimentation with Wagnerian techniques. Intellectually more...
...makes most of the popular stops on the grand-opera highway, e.g., Carmen, Aïda, La Bohème. But San Francisco takes peculiar pride in traveling the byways as well. For its opener last week, San Francisco characteristically chose a seldom-heard version of the Faust legend, Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele, instead of Gounod's war horse, Faust...
Conley was cast in the difficult role of the Sicilian patriot Arrigo, and at first his small but silvery tenor seemed hemmed in by the sumptuous sounds of Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas (also U.S.-born) and the rumbling bass of Bulgarian Boris Christoff. But by the second act his voice had warmed up, and so had the elegant and traditionally indifferent first-night audience. When the final curtain came down on the blood-bathed stage, Milanese were shouting "Conelay, Conelay" from their carnation-decked boxes...