Word: tajo
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Last week, San Francisco was learning fast enough who Italo Tajo is. As Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville, his booming and clowning had stopped the show-"the kind of show-stopping," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Critic Alfred Frankenstein, "which makes an unknown artist a star . . . Like Feodor Chaliapin before him, Italo Tajo could easily take to the road with a company playing nothing but The Barber of Seville...
...nights later, when he played Leporello in Don Giovanni, the operagoers cheered again. Critics found Tajo a first-rate singer; audiences took to him because he was also a first-rate comedian...
...Italo Tajo had sung Don Basilio only two days after arriving in the U.S., and after only one rehearsal. But he has been working up to it since he was 13. It was then that he heard Pagliacci in Milan. Before long, he was reading librettos behind his schoolbooks. His schoolwork suffered ("I was stupido"), but Tajo didn't care...
Mozart: Requiem (Pia Tassinari, Ebe Stignani, Ferruccio Tagliavini, Italo Tajo; orchestra and chorus of the E.I.A.R., Victor de Sabata conducting; Cetra-Soria, 16 sides). Mozart began writing this masterpiece in the last few months of his life, for another's memorial. Finished by his pupil Sussmayer, it has since served well as Mozart's own memorial. This is a recording of the magnificent performance in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome on the 150th anniversary of his death (1941). Recording: good...
...singers at close range when they are as engaging to look at as most of these Italian opera stars. All of them are more than adequate within their tradition, notably the Metropolitan's Ferruccio Tagliavini (the Count), handsome Tito Gobbi (the Barber), the smoothest actor, and Comedian Italo Tajo who, as the guardian's villainous henchman, suggests a demented Lionel Barrymore...