Word: puccini
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...Later in the day, in one or another of the marble-and-crystal salons in Newport's stately mansions, the offerings included chamber and vocal music by operatic composers, excerpts from other unfamiliar 19th century operas (including the "other" La Boheme, composed by Ruggiero Leoncavallo only months after Puccini's), and a program of knuckle-breaking operatic paraphrases by Franz Liszt, played by Guest Pianist Raymond Lewenthal...
...hear in some works dull products of a routine exercise of expert craftsmanship. Accepted opinion holds some symphonies and concertos of Brahms to be works of tremendous profundity; I hear in them only the pretension to profundity." Tchaikovsky, Berlioz and Mussorgsky rank higher with Haggin than with most authorities. Puccini and Ravel he dismisses as perpetrators of "slick trash...
Well, face it: 1763 was a very dull year anyway. It hardly holds a candle to 1924, for example. That's when insecticide was introduced; Juan Gris lectured at the Sorbonne; Bloch wrote his piano quintet; Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue; Puccini, Turandot; Schoenberg, Erwartung; Forster, A Passage to India; Galsworthy, The White Monkey; Shaw, St. Joan; Mann, The Magic Mountain. It was also the year that Woodrow Wilson and Lenin died, that Hitler got out of prison, Coolidge was elected President, China, Britain and France recognized the U.S.S.R., Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, as everyone no doubt...
...grand old man has been exercising his vocal cords only as a lecturer since his retirement in 1950. But when former Metropolitan Opera Tenor Giovanni Martinelli, 81, arrived in Seattle, the head of the Seattle Opera persuaded him to sing some of the old songs again, playing in Puccini's Turandot. In his younger days, Martinelli portrayed the swain Calaf, but now, costumed like a mandarin Lear, he sang the aged emperor. He was still in good voice, and the audience gave him two standing ovations. Was he satisfied with his performance? Of course not, said Martinelli...
...PUCCINI: LA BOHÈME (2 LPs; Seraphim). The recording dates from 1956, a wonderful year to catch Soprano Victoria de los Angeles as the purest of Mimis, Tenor Jussi Bjoerling as the most poetic of Rodolfos, and Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham as an expressive Puccinist. The album was produced by the European firm EMI and originally sold by RCA Victor in the U.S. When EMI severed ties with Victor, the album was dropped from Victor's catalogue, only to be resurrected now with its new trademark of little seraphim wings. Mono only...