Word: scala
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Verdi: Excerpts from Falstaff (Mariano Stabile, baritone; Afro Poli, baritone; Vittoria Palombini, mezzo-soprano; Giuseppe Nessi, tenor; Luciano Donaggio, bass; La Scala Orchestra, Alberto Erede conducting; Capitol-Telefunken; 6 sides). Baritone Stabile, now 61, was the best Falstaff in the business when these recordings were originally made before World War II. Capitol's repressing job is good...
Milan's La Scala has been going for 171 years. And for most of that time it has been one of the world's greatest opera houses. Its audiences had heard premieres of the operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Puccini. The greatest singers-Patti, Melba, Caruso, Chaliapin, Gigli-all graced its stage. From 1921 to 1929, under Arturo Toscanini, La Scala seemed to have reached a golden plateau. But last week even the proudest Milanese were admitting that something was very wrong with their great opera house...
...trouble was the singers. As La Scala's great Conductor Victor de Sabata put it: "In the old days we picked our singers; now we take what the impresarios have to offer." And with such Italian singers as Ezio Pinza, Salvatore Baccaloni, Italo Tajo, Licia Albanese and the Tagliavinis lured to greener U.S. pastures, Italian impresarios did not have much to offer...
...last week La Scala Manager Antonio Ghiringhelli brought someone else in. For the season's first performance of Bellini's I Puritani, a Milanese favorite, Manager Ghiringhelli brought back U.S. Tenor Eugene Conley, for whom I Puritani was revived last season. When another singer sang flat in the first act, the audience groaned. But by the time Tenor Conley topped off the difficult third-act duet with a ringing D-flat above high C, audience and critics alike got off their hands...
...advanced much beyond "O.K.," Perlea speaks four other languages and has no trouble at all talking to the Met musicians. "The strings and woodwinds-German: the brass-Italian: and what's left -French." He is enthusiastic about the quality of the orchestra, says it would take La Scala's orchestra six rehearsals to accomplish what the Met's can do in two. As for the rest: "Every opera performance is a compromise. If you can accomplish 15% of what you intend, you are all right; if you accomplish 50%, you are terrific...