Word: carusos
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...Cover) It was the emotion-packed end of Act I of Pagliacci, and the clown's heart was broken; the sob-racked notes of Vesti la Giubba soared out of the phonograph, quivered through the cluttered den of Mario (The Great Caruso) Lanza's Beverly Hills home. An exuberant young man with the face of a choir boy and the frame of a prize bull let the vibrations pour over him until he could stand it no longer. His bright black eyes glistened. "Oo, Mario," he cooed lovingly, "you can sing like a sonofabitch ! " Both the voice...
...Year. Though he has sung in only one opera (two performances of Madame Butterfly in New Orleans), his phenomenal drawing power in appearances was matched around the U.S. in the past season only by Britain's Sadler's Wells Ballet. His third and latest movie, The Great Caruso, an aria-studded pseudo-biography of another pretty good tenor, broke a record in Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall by piling up $1,500,000 in ten weeks...
...Girl of the Golden West (Carla Gavazzi, soprano; Ugo Savarese, baritone; Vasco Campagnano, tenor, and others; chorus and orchestra of Radio Italiana, Arturo Basile conducting; Cetra-Soria, 6 sides LP). Puccini's "western" may have been rip-roaring stuff at its premiere at the Met in 1910, with Caruso singing and Toscanini conducting, but it sounds pretty flat now. Performance and recording: good...
...Great Caruso (M-G-M), a quasi-biography of the late great tenor, is weak on facts and weaker as fiction, but as a well-recorded pops concert featuring the impressive voice of Mario Lanza (TIME, March 19), it is a tidy package of entertainment that music lovers can enjoy with their eyes shut...
...plot, which barely holds its franchise in the time left by 27 songs and operatic excerpts, draws on Caruso's life for whatever can feed the Hollywood formula, ignores or twists whatever does not. Thus it skips a longtime love affair that gave the real Caruso two illegitimate children, skimps on colorful details of his florid personality, compresses his tragic physical decline and death (of peritonitis, in Naples) into a sudden collapse on the stage of Manhattan...