Word: carmen
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Last year, New York's bargain-priced City Opera Company broke opera's rigid color line by presenting Todd Duncan of Porgy and Bess fame in Carmen and I Pagliacci (TIME, Oct. 8). and followed it this year with Negro Soprano Camilla Williams as Madame Butterfly. Says 32-year-old Ellabelle Davis: "I want to prove that a Negro artist doesn't have to stay in his own backyard. In a singer, it is the color of the voice and not of the face which matters. If I'm a success...
...Sovietskoe Iskusstvo (Soviet Art), recently denounced by Pravda because its critics were too polite to Soviet artists. Last week Iskusstvo crawled for three whole columns: "To our sorrow, very often an objective critical analysis of a work was replaced by out-of-place praise. In articles about some plays, Carmen for instance ... we wrote in delightful tones. But it was a quite ordinary performance...
...Jeritza hit the Metropolitan Opera like a tidal wave. She sang the Vissi d'arte aria from Tosca lying flat on her face, the Seguidilla from Carmen flat on her back. In The Girl of the Golden West she rode a bronco on stage, and as Thai's she once celebrated her conversion to Christianity with a record high-jump that landed her in the hospital. All this musical whoopla endeared Jeritza to her public, if not to her fellow artists. Snorted Soprano Lilli Lehmann: "If you're a real artist you don't have...
...Bizet: Carmen (Rise Stevens, Nadine Conner, Raoul Jobin and Robert Weede, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, George Sebastian conducting; Columbia, 10 sides). A pedestrian presentation, in which the best efforts are Stevens' Habanera and Baritone Robert Weede's bully Toreador Song. Performance: fair...
...keep it glittering. The Met got a third of its funds from radio fans in its last appeal for help. Curious to know its radio fans' taste in opera, the Met asked 123,000 of them to pick their favorite operas. The choices: 1) A'ida, 2) Carmen, 3) La Traviata. Among operas less frequently heard, listeners picked Hansel and Gretel, Boris Gudunov, and Der Rosenkavalier. (The Met promised to broadcast all six next year.) Notably unchosen: Wagner...