Word: lucia
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...charge that he sometimes miscasts his operas, Bing says: "Casting an opera at the Met is easy. If you want to do a Lucia, then you know you have to get Sutherland. If it's Turandot, then you get Nilsson. Ah, but if you're trying to cast Lucia in Magdeburg, Germany, and you have six sopranos who can sing it, then you have to know something about music." More reasonable is the complaint that Bing has failed to bring along enough first-rate conductors. He contends that "there are few really distinguished conductors around, but the shortage...
...Serse, or Xerxes, which begins with the famous aria Ombra mai fu, generally called Handel's Largo, a song of praise to a plane tree. The deep, dark, mellifluous voice of Alto Maureen Forrester as the Persian king is set off by the light, bright vocal acrobatics of Lucia Popp, a rising young Czech soprano. Brian Priestman is the conductor, using the Vienna Radio Orchestra and Chorus and an excellent harpsichord accompanist...
...senior Al Makaitis, who won two bouts against N.Y.U. this year, is out with a back injury. But Harvard, led by lettermen Paul Profets and Bob Damus, should come out on top anyway with its superior depth and experience. C.C.N.Y.'s only first-rate sabre man is sophomore Al Lucia, son of Coach Ed Lucia...
...Some come as cultists: just as bullfight aficionados find macabre joy in waiting for the matador to be gored, operagoers can wait in horrible human fascination for the soprano to go flat at the end of Vissi d'arte or to fall downstairs in the mad scene of Lucia. In its own way, by the nearly impossible demands it makes on singers, opera, like the corrida, pits man against nature...
...Gluck (1714-87) said that it was silly not to have "realistic" characters in opera-so he created Orfeo and Euridice, with their set, face-front arias. Bellini (1801-35) and Donizetti (1797-1848) thought Gluck's characters were insufficiently real-so they created the stylized Norma and Lucia. Wagner (1813-83) avowed the same sentiment-and created Lohengrin and his swan. Puccini (1858-1924) proclaimed a brand of truthfulness he called verismo -and created Turandot, the princess of a China that could never have existed anywhere...