Word: cilea
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...strong individual style. For all its harmonic piquancies and orchestral sleight of hand, the score of Francesca sounds derivative-a touch of Puccini, a sprinkle of Debussy, a pinch of Wagner. Further, it lacks a single memorable melody, the essential ingredient that keeps a relic like Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur on the boards. Its plot, however, is operatic gold. Based on a play by Gabriele d'Annunzio, it recounts an episode from Dante's Inferno. Francesca (Soprano Renata Scotto) is tricked into marrying the deformed Gianciotto (Baritone Cornell MacNeil) when his handsome brother Paolo (Tenor Placido...
...After the Met season ended, I was in a very small opera company in the Beacon theatre in New York which did Adriana Lecouvreur by Cilea. It was their first production and it showed. In the ball scene, the ballet dancer was supposed to float in on a platform through the smoke and dance around very ethereally. But they started the dry ice too early, so in the middle of the scene before, smoke started coming up from under the setting and flooding the stage. It was very pathetic. The company has not been heard from since...
...Italian arias, only one of which she had recorded before, bring generally good news of a still-shimmering voice. Not all the high reaches are easily secured, but her warmth, womanliness and pleading pianissimos are most touching in some of the other roles, notably that of the mother in Cilea's L'Arlesiana singing Esser madre è un inferno...
...mixed colorless Italian and Spanish songs with minor arias by Cilea, Caccini, Massenet, Lalo, Puccini, and Bellini, and since the Puccini was "E Lucevan le Stelle," which is barely music, Bellini was left as the tallest of the pygmies. An usher told me that Tagliavini has been singing these bleak, unimaginative programs for years...
RENATA TEBALDI, 39, is also singing less than she did several years ago, although not entirely by her own choice: when the Met announced that labor troubles last summer forced them to drop Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouweur, scheduled as a vehicle for Tebaldi, Italy's diva serena canceled her contract for the season. In the repertory she calls her own (Otello, Boheme, Tosca, Forza del Destino, Butterfly, Andrea Chenier) she still cannot be challenged for sheer lovely sound-a sound that when she is in proper form seems to lie in the center of the voice, with...