Word: berganza
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...canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini, and demonstrated that bel canto embellishments could be used to impart new and exciting interpretations to a role. She has since been followed by Sutherland, and in the past few years virtually every major young singer to appear, including Teresa Berganza Marilyn Home and Montserrat Caballe' has performed in bel canto operas...
...Teresa Berganza, the young Spanish mezzo-soprano, carried on this tradition in particularly disheartening fashion last Thursday night, filling the entire second half of her recital with a remarkably undistinguished lot of songs by Granados, de Falla, Montsalvatge, and the Brazilian Villa-Lobos. There were cradle-songs and tormented Flamenco--like songs, and two or three varities of that hardy perennial of the concert platform, the "delightful" song about a timid or a talkative lover, which ends with an exasperated little yelp from the singer (and polite titters from the old ladies in the audience). On a balmy night...
...fairness to Miss Berganza, it must be said that she did her best work of the evening with these songs. She has a fresh and lovely Mezzo-soprano, bright in color and quite brilliant at the top, though without the excitingly "chesty" low notes that are the stock-in-trade of so many mezzos. Her singing of the Spanish group was of course expert--all done with lovely tone, the right moods struck and the vocal difficulties encompassed. Yet there was none of that real vibrance and passion which alone can make these songs engaging, none of the personal excitement...
Excitement was missing, too, from the 18th century arias with which Miss Berganza opened her recital: she sang them very nicely indeed (except for a disastrous trill in Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga), but instead of the grand manner and absolute command of style so necessary for Alessandro Scarlatti or Cherubini, she provided a good deal of hand-clasping and those imploring looks to the heavens which ought to be banned forever from the concert stage. In Rossini's Non Piu mesta (from La Cenerentola)--and Miss Berganza has something of a reputation as a Rossini specialist--one again...
...Miss Berganza improved in a short group of French songs, and was especially touching in Debussy's Noel des enfants qui n' not plus des maisons. This was the closest thing to a great song on the program, and, had there been more music of this substantial sort in her Thursday night concert, we might have been able to appraise Miss Berganza as the fine artist she seems to be, rather than merely as the "excellent singer" she obviously...