Word: verdis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...This summer offers two special magnets for U.S. attractions: the Brussels World's Fair (highlights: the American Ballet Theater, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Louis Armstrong) and Italy's Festival of Two Worlds, organized by Gian Carlo Menotti (three new ballets by Choreographer Jerome Robbins, a new production of Verdi's Macbeth conducted by the Met's Thomas Schippers). At many other festivals and in countless solo appearances around the world, the U.S. will display an impressive roster of artists. Among them...
...trick in Otello, the great tragic opera of Verdi's old age, is to pile into Scene 1 at full emotional gallop and to keep at it without nagging for three hours. Both vocally and dramatically, it is one of the most difficult works in all opera, as Verdi himself acknowledged ("This lago," he said grandly, "is humanity"). Last week, after a lapse of two years, the Metropolitan Opera tackled Otello and achieved a performance that did justice to Verdi's looming vision. It also served as a reminder that the Met is having a brilliant season...
Fausto Cleva, not the Met's liveliest conductor, this time set his singers a brisk pace, never permitted any sagging in the supple vocal line that Verdi skillfully stitched through Arrigo Boito's libretto. As Othello, Tenor Mario del Monaco sailed onstage in full joyous shout in his "Esultate," and from there on through his Act III explosion of jealous rage, never pausing to be subtle, kept the house ringing and the stage dark with passion. Baritone Leonard Warren as lago proved again his ability to soar dramatically or modulate to a mahogany pianissimo, invested his role with...
When Maria Meneghini Callas, in a gleaming white hoopskirt gown, stepped demurely before the Metropolitan Opera's golden curtain after the first act of Verdi's La Traviata last week, plainclothesmen planted themselves at the head of the aisles near the stage. Nobody was sure who was supposed to be protected from what, but the cops' presence was clearly unnecessary. On her first Met appearance this season, Soprano Callas carried the house from the moment she lifted her first note across the orchestra...
Young Dumas' famed novel, The Lady of the Camellias (made into a play by Dumas himself and into a grand opera-La Traviata-by Verdi) was based on his love for Courtesan Marie Duplessis. She supplied him with "intoxicating orgies of the flesh"-and he, in return, struggled to reform her, adored her most when she "played the part of the repentant Magdalene." Marie died of consumption at 23, and young Dumas never forgot her glamorous, terrible life. He became "The Man in Flight from Temptation," began to write plays in which seducers were condemned with such cold precision...