Word: donizetti
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...CANTO (2 LPs; London). A festive addition to the current revival of "beautiful singing," these 23 arias, duets and trios are by familiar composers (Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Handel) as well as unfamiliar ones (Piccinni, Lampugnani, Bononcini, Shield). Joan Sutherland is the heroine of the album, her brilliant voice describing perfect arabesques in the stratosphere. Richard Conrad's flowing tenor blends beautifully with hers, and there is also ample opportunity to judge the fast-rising Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Home, whose range, power and flexibility are formidable but who is not yet in the same galaxy as Sutherland...
Some 20,000 people turned out to hear her, as she performed the role that has made her famous-the Mad Scene from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. The attendance made Soprano Sutherland one of the most popular female performers ever to appear at the Stadium (one who topped her: Marian Anderson, who drew 23,000 in 1940). Sutherland's crowd was a notch above last year's high (19,500 for Pianist Van Cliburn) and not far behind Trumpeter Louis Armstrong's (21,000 in 1957). But she was still an octave or two behind...
...American accolade, a sustained roar that lasted for twelve minutes and through ten curtain calls. Never, confessed the Commander later, had she "heard such sound from the throats of an audience"-and rarely had a modern audience heard such sound from a singer. In her triumphant Met debut-in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor-Soprano Joan Sutherland demonstrated even to the doubters that she is the most accomplished technician in all opera...
Curiously, Sutherland came to Donizetti and Bellini from a background in Wagner, a reversal of the process that usually finds a singer moving from lighter to heavier roles. Sydney-born, the daughter of a tailor, she concentrated at first on Wagnerian roles because "I had the build for it" (she stood 5 ft. 9 in., weighed 224 Ibs., now weighs 170). Eventually, on the advice of her husband, Australian Pianist Richard Bonynge, she decided that the bel canto repertory was where she belonged. She put in seven years at Covent Garden while developing the voice that would lead...
MARIA CALLAS, 38, has been in semi-retirement for three years, but her fans hope that she may emerge from it. Only last year she was welcomed back to La Scala in an emotion-laden performance of Donizetti's Polinto. Recently she has had cordial correspondence with the Met's Director Rudolph Bing, who canceled her contract three years ago but who now would gladly take her back. How much of her original accuracy, agility and control Callas retains is uncertain; and the Callas voice, even in its finest days, was never the equal of Sutherland...