Word: puccini
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...Puccini: La Bohème (Bidu Sayao, Richard Tucker, and others with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Giuseppe Antonicelli conducting; Columbia, 26 sides). No mistaking this for the Met; some nice singing, and a great deal that is ordinary, uneven and sometimes shrill. Recording: good...
...Deum. When Verdi heard him play it, he patted him on the back, said: "Splendid! That is just how I heard it in my mind." "Why didn't you write it that way?" asked Toscanini. Said Verdi: "I was afraid it would be exaggerated." Said Giacomo Puccini of Toscanini, who had conducted the world premiere of his La Boheme: "Toscanini conducts a work not just as the written score directs, but as the composer had imagined it, though his hand failed him when the moment came to write down what he heard so clearly in his head...
Gian-Carlo Menotti has a talent for making small things go over big. He has even been overpraised as a new Puccini. Last year, a pair of his chamber operas, The Telephone and The Medium, were a surprise Broadway hit (TIME, March 3, 1947). Last week, Menotti gave New York a look at two of his earlier operas, and proved again that a night at the opera can be almost as much fun as a circus...
...this work in progress would culminate this week in the Met's first new opera of the year. The new work is Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, and no opera written since the days of Puccini has had so much advance praise...
Metropolitan Opera (Sat. 2 p.m., ABC). Puccini's La Bohème, with Ferruccio Tagliavini, Bidu Sayao...