Word: liu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hand. If they fail, awaits them. So far, twenty have died. Prince Calef, serts his exiled father Timur Turandot's questions, is in answering them. How princess still refuses him. roposes that if she find out before dawn she can dis him as she sees fit. Liu, the vant of Timur who has re faithful to him, claims that knows Calaf's name and suicide rather than reveal before her death, Liu tells Turandot that she has died for Calaf because she loves him. Turandot, moved by Liu's simple, honest love now succumbs to the ardent prince. Humanized...
There are three fairly distinct types of characters and music in the work: the super-heroes, Calaf and Turandot, who sing extremely high, barbarically exciting melodies; the pathetic educators, Liu and Timur, who are alloted simple, quite moving themes reminiscent of earlier Puccini; the commentators, the chorus and Turandot's amusing Chancellor, Ping, Pang and Pong, whose music abruptly shifts from lyric to comic to barbaric. Calaf and Turandot are conceived as opposing extremes. Calaf, the epitome of virility, is adventurous, aggressive, passionate and egocentric. The princess, frigidity personified, is similarly egocentric, but she is fearful of change, defensive...
...insincere" work. The super-heros are accused of inhuman conduct--which was precisely what Puccini had intended. (In one of his many letters to Giuseppe Adami, the librettist, Puccini had called Calaf and Turandot "almost super-human beings.") However, their inhuman conduct was to become humanized through Liu's example. Calaf's cruel desertion of Liu and Timur and Turandot's vicious behavior towards her subjects and suitors alike was not condoned by Puccini. During the final duet (the part he never completed), the composer intended Calaf and Turandot "to descend through love to the level of mankind." They would...
...Timur, Giorgio Tozzi brings so much sincerity to the part that I can only regret that he did not perform in the Metropolitan revival which I saw a few weeks ago. In his beautiful scene after the death of Liu, Tozzi evokes Timur's peculiar mixture of frustrated power and deep affection with especial effectiveness. Renata Tebaldi has recorded Liu once before, for a London release, and time seems to have lessened the appropriateness of her great voice for this role. Today, she sounds more like a dramatic Verdian heroine, than a pitiful slavo girl. But her extremely sensitive phrasing...
Erich Leinsdorf elicits a stirring performance from the Rome Opera House Orchestra. The somewhat slow tempi he chose for the first act arias of Liu and Calaf seems to have proved a bit difficult even for Bjoerling and Tebaldi to sustain. But certainly the finale of that act becomes more effective at that pace. The Rome Opera House Chorus is positively magnificent; even their highest-lying passages in the second and third acts seem to pose no problem for them...