Word: puccini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Delayed by the war, she made her first real splash in 1947 with the Stockholm Opera singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth. Gradually she developed a repertory that now includes all the Wagnerian soprano parts, many of the great roles of Verdi, Puccini, Richard Strauss, plus an assortment of contemporary roles. Two and a half years ago (TIME, June 3, 1957), her Isolde at Florence's Maggio Musicale was one of the great Wagnerian performances of the decade...
...Handel's Messiah and the Ames Brothers, a recording of Archibald MacLeish's J.B. and Elvis Presley's newest but possibly fading wails (see SHOW BUSINESS). Marek himself is a dedicated opera lover (among his books: The World Treasury of Grand Opera, an excellent biography of Puccini), but he is also the man responsible for an album called Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music. His conviction: If he can get customers started on "music, any kind of music," they will soon find they cannot do without it. "As the cigarette people believe, the habit...
Despite Boston's lack of adequate facilities for the presentation of grand opera, a recently-formed group of professional opera performers has inaugurated its second season with a production of Puccini's Tosca. Sarah Caldwell's troupe, which uses the slightly militaristic name of "Operation Opera," has moved from the small and incommodious Fine Arts Theatre to the large but equally incommodious Loew's State movie house, now the property of the Catholic Church and newly dubbed the Donnely Memorial...
Casting about for a suitable centennial opera last winter, Denver Symphony Conductor Saul Caston latched on to Puccini's "drama of love and redemption" in a California mining town, chiefly because it went well with Red Rocks' rugged mountain setting. Director Herbert Graf altered all references to California to read Colorado, hired Soprano Eleanor Steber to sing the role of Minnie the barkeep. To help fill his cavernous outdoor stage, he hired a covered wagon and a troupe of horses from a 4-H club. And to avoid frequent scene changes, he transferred the action in Acts...
...Soprano Steber walked out of the dress rehearsals after trying to sing over howling winds, and the chorus of miners, recruited from local choirs and glee clubs, groped for entrance cues. In the waning hours before the curtain, carpenters hustled about frantically shoring up scenery. But on opening night, Puccini's grand old horse opera went off with scarcely a hitch, moved a capacity audience to reverberating applause. The heroes of the evening, in the eyes of Director Graf, were without question the Western quarter horses. "They don't sing, they don't argue, they take directions...