Word: katia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PUCCINI: Turandot. Eva Marton as Turandot, Jose Carreras as Calaf, Katia Ricciarelli as Liu. Lorin Maazel conducting the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. MGM/UA Home Video, $79.95, stereo. Stage Director Harold Prince's stylishly barbaric 1983 production grimly captured the fairy tale's bloodthirsty, amoral ! quality with striking imagery: the gruesome severed head of the luckless Prince of Persia is held high on a stake, impassive masks hide the faces and emotions of Turandot and her retinue, and the ice princess makes her entrance in Act II down what must be the longest staircase in operatic history...
...stern wife (Genevieve Mnich) lectures Monsieur fondly on his latest painting-"Put a cat on the divan; a cat is always nice"-and Monsieur replies with a smile that might be a wince. His two grandsons make an ordinary nuisance of themselves. His granddaughter, the lovely Mireille (Katia Wostrikoff), watches today's dinner spin on its fireplace rotisserie and gets caught up a tree. Suddenly, like a sunburst in the middle of a daydream, Monsieur's daughter Irène (Sabine Azema) motors in, abustle with gaiety and impish reproaches. She takes her papa to a country...
...Alice Ford, Soprano Katia Ricciarelli sang with a lustrous tone that matched her resplendent blond beauty and sparkling stage presence. Hers is a voice that can both beguile with gentle lyricism and blaze with the incandescence of a high-spirited diva. Other noteworthy performances came from American Mezzo Brenda Boozer, who made a lively Meg Page, and Soprano Barbara Hendricks and Tenor Dalmacio Gonzalez, who sang touchingly as the young lovers. British Director Ronald Eyre kept the action crisp; he was correctly content to execute the composer's wishes, rather than impose a fashionably idiosyncratic view...
Verdi: Aïda (Mirella Freni, soprano; José Carreras, tenor; Agnes Baltsa, mezzo-soprano; Piero Cappuccilli, baritone; Ruggero Raimondi, bass; é van Dam, bass; Katia Ricciarelli, soprano; Thomas Moser, tenor; Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, conductor; Angel; three LPs). That old Ethiopian slave girl and would-be war bride finds a new and glorious incarnation in Mirella Freni, whose voice may not move pyramids but finds its way to the heart of the role. This is particularly true in the Nile Scene, where Aïda tussles with her passion for Radames...