Word: christoff
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...Metropolitan Opera's Jerome Hines conducted a hit-and-run seminar in psychology some years ago and concluded that Boris was a hysteric and a manic-depressive. Boris' death, Hines has decided, is from cerebral hemorrhage, and he induces it onstage by temple-pounding. Bulgarian Basso Boris Christoff sees the tortured Czar as a man who "dies of his own sin, his own dishonesty-not heart trouble or mental illness." At the Met this season, operagoers have seen George London's Boris die twice (broken by the weight of genius); last week's schedule brought Giorgio...
Outside Paris, Christoff is generally considered the best Boris, and his new recording (Angel) is unquestionably the top. London has also recorded the opera's great arias (Columbia), but his claim to the role is more in acting than in voice; his basso register is weak; his voice is a shade too high and light for Boris' thundering miseries. Cesare Siepi sang an unforgettable Boris at the Met for years, but his Mediterranean approach to the role introduces the irrelevant question of Whom Does Boris Love...
Boris' death scene gives every basso the dramatic treat of getting to pitch himself down a flight of stairs if he cares to. In Europe, Christoff and Petrov die quietly, as if by surprise, but the Met's staging invites a good fall. London, the intellectual Boris, dies intelligently-a heave, a cry, a little gasp, and he's gone, rolling gently down the stairs. Hines, though, plays it for all he's worth. Clawing the air, grasping his heaving chest, he cries his final line ("Forgive me! Forgive me!") and pitches himself headlong down...
...while Corelli's extracurricular antics-he punched a spectator he thought had insulted him, stabbed Basso Boris Christoff with a stage sword-drew attention away from his sizable gifts as a singer. His large, solid dramatic tenor is darker than most, has almost a baritone's quality; at his best Corelli uses it with an animal vitality and drive that leave no audience bored. In Italy bobby-soxers periodically mob him at the stage door, and there is every evidence that he may do for tenors what Ezio Pinza did for bassos. Says he: "I attract mostly young...
...also has a sizable reputation as an amateur swordsman: last year he leaped into a box at the Naples San Carlo Opera House during a performance of Il Trovatore to attack a heckling spectator. Two years earlier, at the Rome Opera, he crossed swords with Basso Boris Christoff, who, he claimed, was upstaging him, wounded Christoff in the finger and was slapped with a damage suit...