Word: puccini
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...atomic landmarks, celebrates instead the city's lantern-lit nightclubs and restaurants (specialties: sugared shaddock, peeled loquats), its 17th century Dutch colony and the Nipponese-Gothic mansion, built on a hilltop by a British tycoon in 1850, that Nagasaki fondly identifies as the "original home'' of Puccini's Madama Butterfly...
...Barber. Gallery spokesmen met with Conductor Basile and insisted: "We don't want the impossible, just the listenable." But in Parma, where almost everybody knows the operas of Verdi and Puccini by heart, and where youngsters pack the galleries instead of going to football games, the "listenable" is not easy to achieve. Tenors Corelli and Del Monaco, Sopranos Callas, Tebaldi and Stella, among others, have failed to achieve it. Famed Baritone Tito Gobbi fell so far short in a performance of The Barber of Seville that the opera was booed to a halt after the second act. Newspapers...
After months of surrealist palavers, the princes finally met last week in the capital city of Vientiane. But the meeting settled nothing, and more than ever the Three Princes recalled, in their operatic futility, the Three Ministers in Puccini's Turandot -Ping, Pong and Pang...
There's a new Messiah out this year (no surprise), but don't buy it. Joan Sutherland is its major attraction, and Sir Adrian Boult its conductor. And unfortunately, Sir Adrian is one of those who thinks that Miss Sutherland can only sing well when she is singing Puccini (a palpable falsehood). Consequently, Sir Adrian has ripped Handel's oratoria from its century, making it as operatic and as nineteenth-century as he can. The result is a sprawling, unkempt orchestra, bawling, dyspeptic singers, and crawling, inept tempos. (London A 4357--you'll recognize the album by the ugly crucifix...
...reason that Fanciulla failed to catch on permanently is that it was not truly a singer's opera: moving in the direction of Turandot, Puccini at the time was experimenting with more complex harmonies, increasing the importance of the orchestra and giving the singers fewer of the swooning set pieces that illuminated works like Boheme. And although the libretto is no more farfetched than that of many another opera, it falls strangely on American ears attuned to Hollywood and TV westerns...