Word: scala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Through the grey streets early the following morning, a crowd walked behind the hearse to La Scala where 20,000 people were waiting. For two hours, housewives, dignitaries, workingmen, schoolboys, aged musicians filed through the gleaming foyer past the coffin lying in state under La Scala's crystal chandeliers. Then the visitors left and silently clustered about loudspeakers outside; inside the vast empty house, La Scala's 120-man orchestra played the Funeral March from Beethoven's Eroica for its old master. Later, the coffin rested in the glow of candles and the glare of television...
Interviewed about Lennie, I said I admired greatly his guts and nerve, which some of the Philharmonic musicians called hutzpa. This, for instance, he displayed when conducting (probably for the first time in his life) Puccini's La Boheme at La Scala and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the orchestra and chorus of Santa Cecilia in Rome. I did not make any remarks about Bernstein's hip movements while conducting Beethoven's Ninth...
...Orietta Moscucci; Orchestra and Chorus of the Rome Opera conducted by Vittorio Gui). Known chiefly as a poet and mighty librettist (Verdi's Otello and Falstaff), Boïto always remained an interesting oddity as a composer; he premiered his version of Goethe's Faust at La Scala in 1868 only to see it booed off the stage after two performances because of its experimentation with Wagnerian techniques. Intellectually more challenging than Gounod's lovely but un-Faustian version, more dramatic than Berlioz' rambling opéra de concert, it suffers from a tendency to bombast...
...wartime experience in the resistance, he turned increasingly to more austere works, three years ago undertook an opera based on the late Georges Bernanos' reverent drama The Dialogues of the Carmelites. In one of its rare premières of modern opera, Milan's La Scala put Poulenc's Dialogues on display...
...quiet cloistered walls to the reverberating streets of revolutionary Paris. The opera's most touching scene occurs in Act I, when the Carmelite Mother Superior (movingly sung by Gianna Pederzini) reveals on her deathbed to the sorrowing nuns her fear that God has abandoned her. Aided by La Scala's magnificent sets, the opera builds from that point to a dramatic third-act climax in which Blanche's calm recitation of Deo Patri Sit Gloria is counterpoised against the offstage thuds of the guillotine and the screams of the hysterical mob. The reaction of first-night critics...