Word: traviatas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Verdi: La Traviata (Soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Opera House, Rome, Vincenzo Bellezza conducting; Columbia, 30 sides, two albums). Apparently Columbia intends to catch the impatient, who don't want to wait for Toscanini's promised recording of Traviata. The recording is uneven, and Rome's postwar opera company is not all it should be. Performance: fair...
...sung for the Paris Opéra's younger and less gaudy sister, the Opéra-Comique. It was a performance to deter anyone with a less unrelenting ambition. In the heat and humidity, the Opéra-Comique's production of La Traviata was so languid that it threatened to expire with each bar. The tenor bleated woefully and the rest of the cast missed cues and acted with the decisiveness of a group of tourists lost in the sewers of Paris. Nor did it help that Edis sang the role of Violetta in Italian...
...hours, but for special programs, like his Roméo et Juliette broadcasts, he sometimes works over singers and orchestra from 2 p.m. until midnight. Afterwards he takes home recordings of the rehearsal, to check the orchestral balance. He allows radio engineers no easy tricks either. In La Traviata, a chorus is supposed to approach from afar. A simple way to get the radio effect was to have the chorus stand still and sing with increasing volume; Toscanini insisted that the chorus go off stage, approach gradually...
Last week, it was announced that Toscanini will shortly record two or more operas (probably La Traviata and La Boheme). If RCA Victor can beat Columbia Records to the draw (Columbia last month signed a five-year contract with the Metropolitan Opera), Toscanini's will be the first full-length opera ever recorded...
Opera Album: Mozart operatic arias,by the Metropolitan Opera's Basso Ezio Pinza (Columbia). Best single record: Verdi's Dite alia giovine (from La Traviata), by the Met's Licia Albanese and Robert Merrill (Victor...