Word: ruggero
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...that following the rules is hard/If you don't love me, I love you/And if I love you, then be on your guard." And with these lines from "Habaneras" the stage is set for the fateful love triangle involving gypsy Carmen, Don Jose (Placido Domingo) and the bullfighter Escamillio (Ruggero Raimondi...
Verdi: Aïda (Mirella Freni, soprano; José Carreras, tenor; Agnes Baltsa, mezzo-soprano; Piero Cappuccilli, baritone; Ruggero Raimondi, bass; é van Dam, bass; Katia Ricciarelli, soprano; Thomas Moser, tenor; Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, conductor; Angel; three LPs). That old Ethiopian slave girl and would-be war bride finds a new and glorious incarnation in Mirella Freni, whose voice may not move pyramids but finds its way to the heart of the role. This is particularly true in the Nile Scene, where Aïda tussles with her passion for Radames...
When I read that Ruggero Raimondi's Don Giovanni was passionless, I, as one of many whose bones turned to water watching his performance, knew the reviewer...
...Ruggero Raimondi's Don is a middle-aged, thin-lipped, white-faced sadist, a man more easily pictured flogging cats than seducing women. Raimondi fits in well with Losey's class-conscious interpretation of Da Ponte's text--he sees Don Giovanni as the consummate self-indulgent aristocrat. There's nothing wrong with coloring the opera this way, but Raimondi and Losey paint over and obliterate the other half of Don Giovanni's character, the youthful embodiment of unbounded energy who mesmerized the romantics. They do Mozart and Da Ponte an injustice by simplifying the libretto's psychological tangle...
...cynical, depleted ancìen régime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer on film since Fellini's curiously chilly portrait of Casanova a couple of years...