Word: rossini
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...mine-scarred mountains west of Denver, had come briefly to life during the annual Play Festival in its 63-year-old, stonewalled Opera House. This year the festival is operatic. The summer's operas, scheduled for 25 performances, are Gluck's classic Orpheus and Eurydice and Rossini's comic Barber of Seville...
Last year, when inconvenient railroad schedules in New England and the South annoyed him no end, Barnstormer Wagner got a new idea for barnstorming tours. He decided to take opera to smaller U. S. cities by the busload. Picking Rossini's oldtime Barber of Seville as the most portable opera (two scenic sets, chorus optional) that he could think of, he chartered a big, shiny Greyhound-type bus, remodeled its roof to accommodate a ten-foot pile of scenery, and started signing up a busworthy crew of singers from Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. He called his new venture...
Died. Alessandro Bonci, 70, onetime tenor for the Metropolitan, Manhattan and Chicago Opera Companies, temperamental rival of the great Enrico Caruso; in Rome. Famed for his roles of Rodolfo in Puccini's La Boheme, Don Ottavio in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Count Almaviva in Rossini's Barber of Seville, diminutive Bonci was long on technique, short on volume, made up in lyrical effect what he lacked in lung power...
...they are energetic and tuneful--and for modern ears, unusual. Finishing off with the boisterous drunkards' chorus from Moussorgsky's "Kovantschina," and the sparkling finale of the "Gondoliers," the program leaves the listener, relaxed on the grass, in a peasant frame of mind--or more so, than would Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle, a Frescobaldi motet, or the Mahler "Resurrection" Symphony...
Whatever else one feels about this problem, one has a right to expect that a majority of the music in a symphony orchestra's concert will be substantial works which one can take seriously. Light works like Rossini's La Gazza Ladra and Tchaikovsky's Italian Caprice are expected occasionally, for they add a great deal to the attractiveness of a concert and serve as "breathers." However, when this type of music makes up half of a program, and the Reger variations weigh down the other half, one suspects that whoever planned the concert did not think much...