Word: flagello
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VERDI: REQUIEM (RCA Victor). The virtues of this new recording are the soloists. Carlo Bergonzi is good enough to make the listener forget Jussi Bjoerling's masterly reading of the Ingemisco. Birgit Nilsson is all fire; Lili Chookasian and Ezio Flagello both have big, warm voices. The difficulties stem from Erich Leins-dorf's conducting of the Boston Symphony. The pace is much too slow. The long, dramatic Otello-like lines enshroud the listener rather than move him. Tullio Serafin's interpretation of the Requiem (Angel) is still the best...
...made the musician, Jack Wilton (Robert Trehy), fall in love with a lady of the court. Queen Elizabeth (Blanche Thebom) ships Wilton off to Turkey to avoid permitting a misalliance with his inamorata Lady Anne (Doris Yarick). There the michievous Sultan (played to perfection by an appropriately ponderous Ezio Flagello) imprisons Jack in order to keep an excellent organ player. A Venetian damsel in distress named Dorina (actually not in a dress at all, but disguised as a janissary, afraid of the tortures of the Sultan's seraglio, joins Wilton and begs him to help her escape. Jack promises...
...Sultan of Turkey, played by Ezio Flagello, while hardly lecherous enough, flaunted his despotism and fat sufficently to be piquant. Ezio Flagello looks like a mean old sultan, and sings a professional bass...
...match the flogging power of the Shostakovich orchestration, a first-rate cast was called for, and the Met supplied it: Giorgio Tozzi, Ezio Flagello, Norman Kelley, Kim Borg, Blanche Thebom. The immense chorus sang the English text (by John Gutman) with both volume and admirable clarity. But the clear triumph of the evening belonged to Baritone George London in the title role. His Boris, which he sang with great success during his recent tour of Russia, was passionate, anguished, suffused with an almost unbearable sense of racking inner tensions. As London played it last week, it clearly belonged among...
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