Word: irion
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Topaze (adapted from the French of Marcel Pagnol by Benn W. Levy; produced by Yolanda Mero-Irion & the New Opera Company) triumphed on Broadway just 18 years ago. Returning last week, it looked like a genuine theatrical relic. It still had traces of gay cynicism, Gallic sprightliness and wit. But it wheezed, wobbled, and seemed all the sadder for trying to look jaunty...
Produced by Yolanda Mero-Irion's New Opera Company (TIME, Nov. 9, 1942), Helen Goes to Troy has a revised book and a slightly altered cast of Olympians, including a seminude Venus who really earns her apple. The melodic champagne of its original score has been spiked (by Composer Erich Korngold) with heady draughts from a dozen other Offenbach operettas, including the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman. Its Helen is sung by chestnut-haired Czech . Soprano Jarmila Novotna, one of the few opera stars who can fill the eye as well...
...only woman opera impresario in the world last week launched the freshest, most bumptious U.S. opera troupe on its second Manhattan season. The impresario is Hungarian-born Yolanda Mero-lrion of the youthful New Opera Company. For openers, Impresario Irion chose The Opera Cloak, Walter Damrosch's latest one-acter, and The Fair at Sorochinsk, a rollicking opus by Russia's rum-nosed Immortal, Modeste Moussorgsky. Eighty-year-old Composer Damrosch conducted his curtain raiser without drowning out the audience's spirited conversation. But for The Fair at Sorochinsk, they sat up, shut up and pounded their...
Dynamo that turns this enthusiasm into operatic production is intense, thickset, greying Yolanda Mero-lrion, wife of Hermann Irion, a Steinway Piano Co. executive, now a Washington dollar-a-year man. Impresario Irion first came to the U.S. in 1909 as a well-known concert pianist. After touring the world on a piano stool for 20 years, she settled down on her husband's estate in Rockland County, N.Y. During the depression Yolanda Irion discovered that 60% of unemployed musicians were singers. With wealthy Socialite Mrs. Lytle Hull, Mrs. Irion outlined a plan which would 1) put singers...
...Yolanda Mero-lrion takes personal credit or blame for every move her 100 singers. 90 musicians and 20-odd conductors and technical executives make. Says she, in her Magyar-tinged English: "Only one cook can spoil this broth. I have to do everything myself." So far, critics agree, Impresario Irion has spoiled nothing...