Word: scala
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...Scala's Claudio Abbado, 34, is a stern, urgent pursuer of the long musical line, a Toscanini-like stickler for both fine-mesh detail and overall coherence. Imperious and intensely concentrated, he spurs an orchestra on with a clean, incisive beat, often achieving a surging pulse and crackling inner tension. He excels with the original texts of operas, giving them what one critic calls an "electric-shock treatment...
...Israel, he created a tempest in a tea glass when he tried-unsuccessfully-to get the Israel Philharmonic to do a piece by Richard Wagner, whose music was so enthusiastically embraced by the Nazis that it still disturbs many Jews. In Italy, he flustered musical circles by picketing La Scala with musicians who were protesting a cut in state subsidies for opera. A few weeks ago, he outraged the New York musical establishment by vehemently rejecting any possibility that he might become Leonard Bernstein's successor as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. "Artistically it would...
Died. Victor de Sabata, 75, longtime (1929-53) artistic director of Milan's La Scala Opera; of heart disease; in Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy. Conducting, he once growled, "is a beastly profession." But no one approached the podium with more single-mindedness than this long-armed maestro who treated orchestras to operatic rages and audiences to athletic conducting, ever disdaining-like his predecessor, Toscanini -the use of a score...
...Scala's novelty for this tour was Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, a bel canto relic that the company recently revived after a century of relative neglect. A retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story that owes little to Shakespeare, Capuleti, with Bellini's intimate scale, pervading sweetness and utter predictability, is a distinct contrast to Verdi's powerful, primitive themes and vaulting imagination. But the company -notably the two leads, Tenor Giacomo Aragall and Soprano Renata Scotto-traded the flawed gusto of its Trovatore and Nabucco performances for restraint and quiet artistry, making...
...Scala struck a magnificently old-fashioned note at Expo. In this age of realistic music-drama, far-out staging and intellectual musical analysis, La Scala's reaffirmation of the Italian faith in the power of positive vocalizing was both quaint and oddly persuasive. The company may never fully awake from dreams of its own past glory, but the question is, does anyone really want...