Word: siciliani
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pointed to a disaster. The work was little known, and had been dismissed by earlier generations as inconsequential. The intended conductor, C. William Harwood, died unexpectedly last April at the age of 36, and the lead soprano withdrew. During the dress rehearsal, Tenor Barry McCauley objected to Conductor Allesandro Siciliani's tempos and stormed off, while Siciliani threatened to take the next plane back to Italy. Peace was restored, but two hours before the curtain, a can of drain cleaner exploded in the face of the orchestra's harpist; a hasty search was undertaken for a substitute...
...established stars. And it also has Mikhail Baryshnikov, ballet's reigning superstar. Last week the company gave the world premiere of a showcase for some of the explosive talent: Jerome Robbins' The Four Seasons, set to snippets of Verdi ballet music, most of it from I Vespri Siciliani. There is nothing very deep here, but the work is a flashy hit. Ballet, like opera, is a virtuoso art. There are a lot of high Cs for the young dancers who portray the seasons of the year, and for Baryshnikov the scale steps up to paradise...
...Judith Blegen, soprano; Chicago Symphony; James Levine, conductor; RCA, $6.98). There appears to be little that James Levine, 31, cannot do, except perhaps play Scott Joplin on the tuba. The remarkable new music director of the Metropolitan Opera already has several superlative operatic recordings to his credit (notably / Vespri Siciliani on RCA and Joan of Arc on Angel). This version of Mahler's Fourth, a genial pastoral masterpiece, has a flowing line rarely matched in current interpretations and an intimacy that, comes close to Bruno Walter's incomparable recording of the 1940s. The formidable Chicago Symphony sounds somewhat...
...Vespri Siciliani is the kind of work with which grand opera has frequently made a spectacle of itself, in more ways than one. Written by Giuseppe Verdi for the Paris Opera in 1855, it had something to please every vagary of the self-indulgent French musical taste of the time-five acts, a lengthy ballet, historical fireworks, huge choruses, soulful solos. The story is set in 13th-century Palermo, where the French colonists are oppressing the Sicilian natives. Arrigo, one of the principal revolutionaries, discovers to his horror that he is the illegitimate son of the chief oppressor, Montforte...
Predictably, Italian critics did not spare their barbs at the once tempestuous diva. "A boring and costly family party" was how one described the first-night folderol. Critic Duilio Courir tartly suggested that I Vespri Siciliani, as one of Verdi's most complex works, was "surely not advisable for beginners...