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Wagner: Tristan und Isolde (Birgit Nilsson, Fritz Uhl, Regina Resnik, Tom Krause; the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Georg Sold; London, 5 LPs). This first complete recording of the opera in stereo comes close to equaling London's celebrated stereo recording of Das Rheingold. The sound of the orchestra is glowing and massive, and Nilsson's voice soaring through it and over it is a delight. For those anxious to peek behind the scenes, London has included a bonus recording of a rehearsal explaining how it was done...
...heavy hand of Dictator António de Oliveira Salazar's political police, the P.I.D.E., reached into every corner of the province. Some 150 Angolans were arrested and thrown in jail as politically suspect. Most conspicuous prisoner was the Roman Catholic vicar general of Angola, Msgr. Manuel Mendes das Neves, 70, a distinguished mulatto churchman whose principal crime was his outspoken sermons advocating African rights. All foreign newsmen are kept under surveillance, their phone calls tapped, their cables censored. Even foreign consulates are watched. Said one diplomat: "There is not a single local employee on my payroll...
...triumph at the Met, as it often has been elsewhere, was her Aïda. Moving about the stage with feline grace, passing with a kind of visceral instinct through moods that were supplicating and menacing, aggressive and sweet, she achieved one of the great Aïdas of operatic history. Sustaining all of the performances was the voice, unfurling like a bright banner from the stage and through the opera house...
...last week and suddenly made clear that, vocally, opera is in the midst of a new golden age. Soprano Leontyne Price, in Aïda, sang the famous O patria mia with such velvety beauty, such abundance of power, that she overshadowed most other recent Aïdas. Later in the same week, Birgit Nilsson sang Turandot's climactic scene in a way that will be remembered for years as the fulfillment of the opera's own description of its heroine: "Fire and ice." If two such performances can happen within five days, in addition to Joan Sutherland...
...masterpiece. Shot, cut and canned in 33 days of cost-trimming, brain-fagging labor, it is by all odds the best picture made by Italy's Roberto Rossellini since Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946). It restores Rossellini, after eleven years of private enterprise (Ingrid Bergman, Sonali das Gupta) and artistic calamity (Stromboli, A Trip to Italy, Europe '51), to his rightful but qualified eminence as a cinema natural who shoots movies the way other men shoot dice-when he's cold he just craps out. but when he's hot he can make his point...