Word: freni
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...illustrates the composer's remarkable capacity for turning great poetry into sentimental salon entertainment. Furthermore, the performance was sadly deficient in the French accent, both in words and music. Franco Corelli nearly strangled on every attempt to produce the pure Gallic B-flat, while all of Soprano Mirella Freni's undeniable charm was defeated by the pallid music she was asked to sing. New Director Paul-Emile Deiber grouped his singers around Rolf Gerard's workaday sets in a series of static tableaux that had little to do with Shakespeare, Gounod, or anything in that vast area...
DONIZETTI: L'ELISIR D'AMORE (2 LPs; Angel). The Elixir of Love is an 1832 comic opera that is a delightful collection of bouncy silliness couched in florid melody. Mirella Freni and Nicolai Gedda reproduce their entrancing Metropolitan Opera performances of two seasons ago, and they are complemented by the astonishing bass of Renato Capecchi, who combines unbelievable agility with mahogany-like richness in the role of a quack selling a love potion...
...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...
...explains Bing, "so I have to cope with the names of their dogs listed as secretaries, and of their wives as managers." Birgit Nilsson once paid Bing a double-edged tribute by listing him on her income-tax report as a dependent. At all events, as Italian Soprano Mirella Freni says, "The Met is marvelous experience, a theater where one works with tranquillity in a warm, almost friendly atmosphere without nervousness. In Italy you can feel this nervousness all around...
...exodus of name singers, the Italian audiences can in part blame themselves. "They hiss or whistle too easily," says Soprano Mirella Freni. "I like a certain battle climate, but in Italy every evening is a graduation exam...