Word: tenore
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...coat, Arturo Toscanini walked into NBC's Manhattan Studio 8-H and launched a Robert Shaw-trained chorus and a handful of soloists into the music he loved: Verdi's melodramatic, tearfully tender Aïda. With cajolery, threats and sarcasm ("Mr. Tucker," he inquired scathingly of Tenor Richard Tucker, "do you love a woman?"), he shaped a magnificently precise and passionate performance, presented to NBC televiewers and listeners in the spring of 1949. When RCA Victor decided to cut records from the broadcast tapes, Toscanini returned from retirement in 1954 to conduct at Carnegie Hall portions...
...Otello and Falstaff as his operatic testament. The NBC Symphony plays with brilliant coloring and syllable-sharp instrumental detail ; the singers-some less than top drawer-are whipped almost beyond their powers to high moments of musical exaltation. The Met's Tucker, singing the full dramatic tenor role of Radames for the first time, has big, ringing power when he needs it, joined to a fervent, melting lyricism. Titian-haired Herva Nelli, Toscanini's favorite soprano, sings perhaps the finest Aïda of her career with rare intensity in a voice both sweet and sure...
...first act to the flexible, bitter-sweet lyricism of the last, Tebaldi superbly defined Violetta's stirrings and renunciation; moreover, she avoided flawing the role with more than the necessary touches of sentimentality and melodrama. Baritone Leonard Warren was splendid as a resonant-voiced Germont. As Alfredo, Tenor Giuseppe Cam-pora had neither enough power nor presence to hold the stage, but to appear with Tebaldi in last week's production would not have been easy for any singer. The Met crowd was clearly there to render personal homage to Tebaldi, and at the end, there were...
Ellington at Newport (Columbia). An audible report on the highly charged performance of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, which set Newport bloods to stomping up the aisles last summer. Most notable: the supple solo by Tenor Saxman Paul Gonsalves, who lovingly rocks through no fewer than 27 choruses...
...parking lot.") The Communist paper L'Unitaá meanwhile played the story as the tragedy of the poor workingman forced to foot the bills for "the luxuries and extravagances" of opera stars paid $1,500 a performance (actually a lot less than was paid 30 years ago). Tenor Mario Del Monaco volunteered to accept a pay cut "if other singers will do likewise." There were no takers, but one blunt comment from Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas: "La Scala can close down as far as I am concerned; I will never lack for a stage...