Word: donizetti
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...delicately demented ladies she plays so often in 19th century operas. Despite Sutherland's mien of being constructed of equal parts dignity and marble, friends and colleagues have often hinted that the Australian diva has a healthy streak of lunacy herself. But it took a new production of Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week to prove that Sutherland can camp, shriek, mug and stomp about in boots delightfully without missing a gruppetto or smudging a staccato...
...Fille, composed in 1840, is a tale about a lowly orphan girl who is brought up by a regiment of soldiers, then, turning out to be nobly born, goes to live in a castle and tries to become a lady. Not even Donizetti took the story very seriously. He doused it in music that falls considerably short of such masterpieces as Lucia di Larn-mermoor and L'Elisir a" A more, often seeming to be merely a chain of inconclusive finales. Before the ultimate one, though, there are limitless opportunities for the prima donna to cut up and rattle...
MASSENET: MANON, 4 LPs; DONIZETTI: LUCIA Dl LAMMERMOOR, 3 LPs (both ABC). When operatic tastes are weighed, the soprano who tips the scales-and the trills and roulades and fioritura-in favor of the French lyric and Italian bel canto repertories is Beverly Sills, here in two exemplary roles...
This month alone, she has already performed a trilogy of operatic queens at the New York City Opera that amply confirms her own regal gifts: Elizabeth I in Donizetti's Roberto Devereux (see cover), Shemakha in Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or and Cleopatra in Julius Caesar. Starting this week she and the New York City Opera will recreate all three during a three-week guest stand in Los Angeles (planned for next spring is a new production by Beverly and the company of another Donizetti queen, Maria Stuarda). Early next month, she will give two performances of Lucia...
...shown since 1966 is that an American singer can take up where Maria Callas left off. Callas, now virtually retired, had a soaring, flexible voice that projected a matchless dramatic intensity. In the 1950s, among other roles, she almost singlehanded revived the ornate bel canto repertory of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. (Bel canto, literally "beautiful singing," more properly applies to the whole vocal art of making the fiendishly difficult sound easy.) It is this repertory that Beverly and her chief coloratura rival, Joan Sutherland (see box, page 81), have since then mastered. Beverly comes by the bel canto tradition...