Word: basilios
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Last week, San Francisco was learning fast enough who Italo Tajo is. As Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville, his booming and clowning had stopped the show-"the kind of show-stopping," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Critic Alfred Frankenstein, "which makes an unknown artist a star . . . Like Feodor Chaliapin before him, Italo Tajo could easily take to the road with a company playing nothing but The Barber of Seville...
Italo Tajo had sung Don Basilio only two days after arriving in the U.S., and after only one rehearsal. But he has been working up to it since he was 13. It was then that he heard Pagliacci in Milan. Before long, he was reading librettos behind his schoolbooks. His schoolwork suffered ("I was stupido"), but Tajo didn't care...
...been singing ever since-in Turin, Rome, London, Milan, and in 1946, briefly in Chicago. Now, at 33, he hopes to stay in the U.S., has. already signed with the Met. He is happy that he makes people laugh, but he wants to do more serious roles than Don Basilio or Leporello. Says he: "I do the comic role because I have the nerve. But I like Boris Godunov better...
...from the mediocrity of several of his singers. Robert Gay and Francis Barnard in the leading male roles of the Count and Figaro, respectively, lacked both the force and training essential to good Mozartean baritones. Luigi Vellucci, however, surprised with superb performances in two roles, the comic ones of Basilio and Curzio...
President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines, continuing in Miami his two-year fight for health and homeland, appointed Colonel Carlos P. Romulo his Secretary of Information and Public Relations, gave him the Distinguished Service Star of the Philippines in the presence of Philippine Chief of Staff Major General Basilio J. Valdes; the President's aide, Colonel Manuel Nieto; the President's doctor, Major Benvenuto R. Dino; and U.S. Army Intelligence's Lieut. Colonel R. C. Hornsby, security officer for Quezon...