Word: bassos
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Manhattan has seen many of them but last week it recognized the first good one in a long time. Nearly every classic Italian comic opera has a basso buffo, a comic bass. He wears a false nose, false belly, or both, and is not expected to have much of a voice. Fourteen years ago, when Arturo Toscanini conducted Milan's great La Scala opera, he asked one of his young bassos, Salvatore Baccaloni, to specialize in buffo roles, so that La Scala need not rely on rickety-voiced oldsters...
Chicago and San Francisco have known and appreciated Basso Baccaloni, but not until last month did he make his debut at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, singing a minor comic role in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. Fortnight ago he took the centre of the stage, in the title role of Donizetti's Don Pasquale: a waddling, foolish old party, so much put upon that when he got slapped by a soprano minx he touched real pathos. Last week Baccaloni waddled again, this time as walrus-mustached Sergeant Sulpice in Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment...
Besides Soprano Pons and a competent though none too handsome tenor, French-Canadian Raoul Jobin, The Daughter of the Regiment boasts, in the role of Sergeant Sulpice who foster-fathers Marie, a notable new singer, Italian Basso Buffo Salvatore Baccaloni. The Met's production ends with everyone singing La Marseillaise*-an idea contributed by Mme. Pons's band-leading husband, Andre ("Kosty") Kostelanetz...
Married. Ezio Pinza, 48, big, curly-haired Italian basso of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, who used to be a six-day bicycle racer; and Doris Neal Leak, 22; at Larchmont...
...Bartered Bride. Managed by tall, lean C. David Hocker, musically directed by short, swart Sylvan Levin, the Philadelphia troupe has 22 singers, average age about 27, all but one homegrown. The simple fooleries of The Bartered Bride, set to simple, polka-dotted tunes, showed off some notable young talent: Basso Luke Matz (music supervisor in the Unionville, Pa. public school), as a jovial village marriage broker; Soprano Frances Greer (Philadelphia church singer), as the unwilling betrothed of the village simpleton (Tenor John Toms, voice teacher); Tenor Edward Nyborg (Philadelphia tailor's helper), as the boy who finally gets...