Word: sembrich
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...early years, the Met removed the seats, held charity balls and a flower show on the orchestra floor. When Impresario Henry Abbey lost $600,000 in the house's first season, he recouped some of his losses by tossing in a special variety show at which Soprano Marcella Sembrich played a violin concerto, moved to the piano to rip off a Chopin mazurka, and sang Ah! non giunge from Bellini's Sonnambula...
...that, the records offer invaluable testimony to the student of singing on the style, range and phrasing of such otherwise unrecorded golden-agers as Jean De Reszke, Albert Saléza and Georg Anthes, and such better-preserved stars as Lillian Nordica, Emma Eames, Johanna Gadski, Marcella Sembrich and Antonio Scotti. Every so often, the patient listener is suddenly rewarded by hearing the great voices shine through the surface fog-Scotti in Act II of Pagliacci, Melba in the Lucia di Lammermoor Mad Scene-with a beauty and authority that no failings of Mapleson's recording technique can mask...
Soprano Callas has yet to face the ordeal of her Metropolitan debut next week. It is an ordeal that has yielded severe criticisms for such famed prima donnas as Melba. Sembrich, Nordica and Farrar, and conceivably could be a bitter experience for her as well. But Callas has faced bitter experiences before and triumphantly survived them. "People would like to see me flop, just once," she admits. "Well, I can't and I won't. I will never give any satisfaction to my enemies...
...anniversary made 67-year-old John Totten reminiscent. He could say one thing of all the musical greats he had known: "Every one of them was a showman." Polish Soprano Marcella Sembrich always meticulously arranged her own bouquets of flowers before concert time, then, when they were presented to her at intermission, gathered them to her ample bosom with expressions of pleased surprise. No performer likes listeners to walk out early, but Pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski once set something of a Carnegie Hall record for displeasure. Spotting a woman leaving while he was playing, he left the piano in midphrase...
...Eames, 86, last of the great divas* of the "golden age of opera"; in Manhattan. Famed for the technical excellence of her voice and her "Botticellian" beauty, Soprano Eames sang in French, German and Italian opera at the Metropolitan from 1891 to 1909 with such glamorous colleagues as Caruso, Sembrich, Schumann-Heink and Melba...