Word: verdian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...studied opera seriously for 2½ years while working nights at a Bulova Watch plant making analogue digital computers. With some misgivings, he finally gave up his $200-a-week job with Bulova to become a regular member of the New York City Opera. MacNeil now specializes in Verdian roles, plans at last to learn Italian. "Once," he recalls ruefully, "I was singing Traviata and flung my hand out because the music felt like it. Then I was afraid to pull it back because I didn't know what my lines meant, so I just stood there with...
...career, saw it fail at the box office and later agreed with the public that it was a "monotonous and cold'' work. Nevertheless, he returned to it after 25 years and extensively revised it. Not often performed, the revised Boccanegra is a fascinating melange of early Verdian flamboyance and late Verdian depth. In this LP version a superb cast kindles enough vocal splendors, especially in the ensemble passages, to suggest Boccanegra as a candidate for frequent restaging...
Leonard Warren, 47, baritone. Bronx-born Singer Warren was a runner in the garment district, studied advertising at Columbia, sang in the Radio City Music Hall chorus, won the Metropolitan Auditions of the Air in 1938. A burly man (6 ft., 218 Ibs.), he restricts himself largely to Verdian roles. His big, mahogany-hued voice is unmatched by any other baritone in the world. He virtually owns the role of Rigoletto, both vocally and dramatically...
...Cerquetti, 26, has one of the most sumptuous voices to soar out of Italy since Tebaldi. Large-volumed and agile of voice, she scored her first major success in Bellini's Norma at Verona four years ago, has since become a widely acclaimed guest singer of the standard Verdian repertory. Her voice has appealed to most critics as a cross between Tebaldi's "silky elasticity" and Callas' bite and thrust. Big-boned and fleshy-faced, she has been most often criticized for carrying too much weight to put across the dramatic illusion her roles call for. "When...
...with the King of Spain, an old grandee, and the woman who is desired by all of them. Amidst a welter of prayers, supplications, pageants and credos, nothing occurs resembling a human relationship. Similarly, the score, composed when Verdi was 30, sounds like a not very funny satire of Verdian music that put listeners in mind of the gaudy decorations on an old merry-go-round...