Word: francos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scene can be slid forward onto the stage as another is hauled off to the side. (I assume that the interminable intermission waits at La Gioconda were due to the fact that the turntable had been broken the previous week, when the director of Antony and Cleopatra, Franco Zefferelli, loaded it with five times the weight it was designed to hold.) There are hardly any partial view seats in the new Met and the standees have padded arm rests...
...orchestra and singers sounded incredibly clear and uncannily near. A far cry, as they say, from Lincoln Center's State Theatre, where people sixteen rows back in the Orchestra shouted "Louder!" at Paul Schofield in King Lear. Cornell MacNeil stole the show in La Gioconda, and his duet with Franco Corelli brought down the house. Neither Renata Tebaldi nor Cesare Siepi were quite as brilliant, but the singing all around was fine. The Met is an avowed showcase for stars, and it was the stars who put over this museum piece...
...opera itself had no trouble competing for spectacle. The night belonged to Franco Zeffirelli, who designed the sets and costumes and directed the whole shebang. His scenery was framed and overhung with scrims that looked like free-form Venetian blinds-around and through which appeared massed armies, a massive moon, a massive sphinx, a massive pyramid, a massive throne, and just about every other eye popper that Cecil B. de Zeffirelli could imagine, not forgetting three live horses, three live goats, one live camel, and three fake asps...
...greatest roster of international talent in a longer season than any other opera house. Nowhere but at the Met, for almost any given performance, could two complete casts be mustered that would boast such operatic deities as Sopranos Renata Tebaldi and Leontyne Price, Tenors Richard Tucker and Franco Corelli, Baritones Robert Merrill and Tito Gobbi, Bassos Cesare Siepi and Nicolai Ghiaurov-not to mention a bevy of most attractive younger sopranos such as Anna Moffo, Teresa Stratas and Mirella Freni...
...flipping a coin (Bing won) or in putting Birgit Nilsson at ease before a performance by bursting into her dressing room wearing a Beatle wig (Nilsson screeched). The unexpected, the outrageous are among his chief weapons. On a recent tour in Cleveland, Bing desperately wanted to persuade an exhausted Franco Corelli to substitute for an ailing tenor. He went to Corelli's hotel, got his room number, went upstairs, knelt in a prayerful attitude before the door and rang the bell. The door opened. A disheveled woman squawked in astonishment. Hmmm, wrong room. Begging her pardon, Bing dusted...