Word: rossini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...third opera put on at Dallas was a repeat of Rossini's rarely performed romp, L'ltaliana in Algeri, introducing 23-year-old Spanish Mezzo-Soprano Teresa Berganza. The possessor of a silvery, dulcet voice, she acted the title role (an Italian girl imprisoned by a libidinous bey) with a kind of fresh, provincial charm. A onetime pianist, Mezzo Berganza has toured Europe in recitals but has had little operatic experience. The Dallas News's Critic John Rosenfield noted that L'ltaliana in Algeri had "ended up as a love affair between prima donna and patrons...
...studying voice. In 1940, when she was 18 and on a Christmas visit to her aunt in Pesaro, she got her big break: an audition with famed Soprano Carmen Melis, venerated in Italy as one of the great Puccini singers of all time, and then a teacher at the Rossini Conservatory. Melis took on Tebaldi as a fulltime pupil, made her into the kind of singer she is today. Melis worked on voice placement, taught Tebaldi the piano singing to which her voice is naturally adapted. As models, Melis pointed to the sweetness and purity of Muzio, the powerful middle...
...Rossini: The Barber of Seville (Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Luigi Alva, Nicola Zaccaria, Fritz Ollendorff; Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Alceo Galliera; Angel, 3 LPs). Callas' adroitly wrought Rosina strikes a precarious balance between bubbly naivetè and a subliminal Latin wisdom as shrewd as a fishwife's eye. The Callas voice is in soaring form, buttressed by Baritone Gobbi's smooth, superbly flexible rendering of the role of Figaro and Basso Zaccaria's sumptuous, tomfoolish Basilio. Conductor Galliera provides the coherence and dramatic drive necessary to Rossini's comic frenzy...
...Rossini: Le Comte Ory (Sari Barabas, Cora Canne-Meijer, Juan Oncina, Michel Roux; the Glyndebourne Festival Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Vittorio Gui; Angel, 2 LPs). "A collection of diverse beauties," said Berlioz of Rossini's next-to-last opera, "which would make the fortune not of one but of two or three operas." The melodic beauties are there in full measure, as this first recording of Le Comte demonstrates, but linked together they constitute not three operas but a splintered fragment of one. The work has some rich ensemble climaxes and some rippling solo parts, but after...
...conventions of the genre are utilized with unabashed audacity. The recitative and aria da capo turn up all over the place with genuinely satiric twists, as well as cadences which would have sent Rossini right out of the auditorium. The proceedings were further disrupted by the intrusion of a full-fledged jazz number. Mr. Perkins has an especially disarming command of dissonance, which he uses tastefully and moderately to underline the humorous aspects of the music...