Word: scala
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...debut in London with only a minimum of operatic training, the tenor was shuttling between London's Covent Garden, where he sang Canio in Pagliacci, and Amsterdam's Nederlandsche Opera, where he sang the notoriously difficult lead in Otello. The months of additional study at La Scala had not spoiled Philadelphia-born Leonard del Ferro, 31. European critics call him one of the most exciting male singers to come their way in years...
Since then, Trenton-born Gussie Seit, better known as Gloria Lane, has all but adopted the role of Carmen, and Milan's La Scala has adopted Gussie. Last week fast-rising Mezzo-Soprano Lane demonstrated what it is about her favorite role that makes Latin blood rise...
...Scala's Carmen is a grandiose production featuring Todd-AO-sized sets, live horses and a chorus of hundreds. But when statuesque Mezzo Lane stepped onstage dressed in black stockings and a startlingly low-cut shirt ("I never wear a brassiere''), she stopped every eye in the house. Moving with feline grace, she developed a Carmen glittering with gypsy pride and animal excitement. "Singing with her," says a La Scala tenor, "can be pretty tough on a hot-blooded Sicilian like me." Even on La Scala's great stage, Mezzo Lane's voice was opulent...
Ballet at La Scala was for years behind the rest of the world, with choreography and staging sometimes below the level of New York's Radio City Music Hall. But Choreographer Leonide Massine's appealing work demonstrated that La Scala is trying hard to catch up. The ballet opened against a backdrop of black-and-white hotel exteriors reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans drawings; the story then moved to nightclub, courtroom and prison as it told of a girl who is wooed by a gangster, framed in a gangland shooting, sentenced to death, but liberated by a previous lover...
...thin that her fans call her "little spinach," "the dress was not exactly adapted to my physique." But at ballet's end, fans applauded through nine curtain calls, echoing the success she has found all over Europe in the four years since she emerged from La Scala's ballet school. The daily Avanti found that Carla "has now fully arrived as a prima ballerina," and one critic noting that she is related to Verdi, observed: "No wonder she's so good; she drinks her morning espresso out of a cup that once was Verdi...