Word: falstaffs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FALSTAFF (RCA Victor). With a princely cast that includes Geraint Evans, Giulietta Simionato, Mirella Freni and Rosalind Elias, Verdi's masterwork is sung better than ever before on records. But Conductor Georg Solti does not live up to the Falstaff achieved by Arturo Toscanini in his famous 1950 recording. His beat is too rigid to be helpful to his singers...
With Leonard Bernstein and Franco Zeffirelli making their Metropolitan Opera debut together in a new production of Verdi's Falstaff, the Met was sure of a sensation. What kind of sensation was a different matter. Bernstein, never one to conceal any possible hidden talents, had not conducted in a major opera house in nine years. Zeffirelli, whose last crack at New York was a disastrous Broadway flop (The Lady of the Camellias), had signed on as director, set designer and costumer in a house where all three jobs are notoriously difficult. But when the curtains parted last week...
Bernstein and Zeffirelli got along like Gold Dust twins. "We are of the same generation," the 38-year-old Zeffirelli would say, "and we see things in the same light." That meant seeing Falstaff, quite uniquely, as a tragedy-an expression of absurdity, an old man's revenge. "This is Verdi's monument to the ungenerosity of people," said Zeffirelli of Verdi's last opera and his only comedy.* "It really isn't funny...
...taken lightly. He turned Romeo and Juliet into reckless, bopping teen-agers for the Old Vic three years ago, and Rome is still absorbed in his beat vision of Hamlet: "To be or not to be-what the hell?" says Zeffirelli's sulky prince (TIME, Dec. 27). And Falstaff turned out to be the perfect candidate for the young director's fine Italian hand. Falstaff's metamorphosis from boozy squire to oily seducer to triumphant rube is a fine argument in favor of the Fat Knight's philosophy: if the world...
...movie, The Bargee, in which he plays a lock tender on a canal-he warms up with bolt after bolt of black velvet (champagne and stout). "Did they think I could fake it with bloody tea?" he asks. Almost by obvious right, the short, deep-voiced Griffith will play Falstaff next spring in Royal National Shakespeare Company performances commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth...