Word: bellini
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PURITANI (3 LPs; London) is the last and loveliest of Bellini's operas, a story about the Roundheads and the Stuarts in the days of Cromwell incongruously drenched in Italian melody and sunlit harmony. Only singers skilled in bel canto, such as Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, dare try it. In the new recording, Sutherland is the demented Elvira, and when she sings Vien, diletto in a deluge of perfectly matched and sparkling runs and trills, she embellishes even the embellishments. Maria Callas (on Angel's earlier version of I Puritani) has no such quicksilver in her voice...
Especially appealing: William Blake's watercolors (through May 24), Houdon's perfectly balanced terra-cotta sculpture of Diana the Huntress, Bellini's St. Francis in Ecstasy, Holbein's Sir Thomas More, La Tour's Education oj the Virgin, Fragonard's series of canvases representing "The Progress of Love," commissioned and rejected by Madame Du Barry...
FRICK COLLECTION-Fifth Ave. at 70th. Handsomely hung in the spacious surroundings of the mansion are most of the 159 masterpieces in the collection by such master painters as Titian, Bellini, El Greco, Goya, Fragonard, Gainsborough and Turner...
...needle everyone into proper trim for her production of Bellini's 1 Puritani, Caldwell was working 20 hours a day with the cast and crew of her Boston Opera Group. She had read armloads of 17th century histories. She had studied the score and plugged herself into her nocturnal-education tape recorder so often that I Puritani had seeped down into her subconscious and kept drifting out all day in soft, idle humming. In pursuit of her ideal of "vital musical theater," she had directed acting, lighting, costuming, singing and playing through weeks of strenuous rehearsal...
...concert season to prepare for her U.S. stage debut in the role. Through artful cajolery and the promise of a creative hand in the production, Caldwell had both Sutherland and her husband, Richard Bonynge, working at double time. The results showed it: though normally a phlegmatic actress, Sutherland made Bellini's gloriously mad Elvira anguished and giddy, impish and frenzied, wild-eyed and playful. Showing a new command of her coloratura range, Sutherland moved against shifting configurations of chorus and cast until the audience erupted in gasps and bursts of applause...