Word: scala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...season 1954 shows few signs of a real Wagner boom, either in the U.S. or abroad. The favorite operas, Lohengrin, Tannhduser and Tristan are lucky to get three or four performances a month at La Scala, Paris and London. The 13-hour Ring cycle (Rheingold, Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung) is all but impossible to mount in small theaters, gets its chief performances nowadays at the Wagner shrine in Bayreuth. Like many German opera houses, the Vienna Staatsoper was bombed out, will not attempt the Ring cycle until rebuilding is completed in 1956. Covent Garden's policy: no Ring until another...
Besides, she gives concerts, appears on TV, has made a movie (Tonight We Sing), and has an invitation to sing at Milan's La Scala. Finally, she still manages to cram in a voice lesson every...
Among the operagoers who heard Italian Tenor Mario Del Monaco sing at Milan's La Scala last week was a blind woman named Irene Meyer, 33, from Gaithersburg, Md. Two years before, she had heard him sing Radames in Aïda at Manhattan's Metropolitan. Stricken with incurable diabetes, Irene told friends in Gaithersburg that what she wanted most of all was to hear Del Monaco once again. What happened could have happened only in the U.S., where people 1) form committees, 2) believe that dreams come true. Irene went to Milan on funds donated...
Conductor Leonard Bernstein was in a swivet. Traveling in Italy, he had agreed to conduct a regular performance of Milan's proud La Scala opera, a thing which no American had ever done before. He had five days in which to learn the score-Luigi Cherubini's Medea-but he had never conducted grand opera in his life and never even heard of Cherubini's Medea. To make things worse, he had a case of bronchitis. Finally, the score with which he had to work dated from 1797, and, like most old books, it gave off dust...
Nevertheless, the rehearsals went well. "The orchestra and I leaned the opera together," he says. Opera authorities gave him every break, canceled a conflicting rehearsal of Rigoletto to give him more time. A few hours before his curtain last week, Lennie was gripped by sinusitis, but La Scala medicos fussed over him, and the 35-year-old maestro apparently thrived on their treatment...