Word: verdis
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...Metropolitan Opera showed last week why it is sometimes called the Metropolitan Museum of Opera: it presented Verdi's nearly forgotten Ernani. Unofficial reason for the revival: to provide a spectacular assignment for the Met's own longtime exhibit, Soprano Zinka Milanov, who has been buffeted by the triumphs of Italy's Renata Tebaldi and Maria Meneghini Callas. But the combination of early Verdi and late Milanov was simply painful...
...startling appearance, his long brown body bare except for a white bikini and a brilliant, feather-patterned headdress. In a primitive tribal dance that recalled his appearance last year in Broadway's House of Flowers, Holder leaped and writhed with a fierce catlike virility that more than matched Verdi's triumphal music...
...shoe accompaniment, leaving wide-open spaces for her graceful vocal glides and glitters. Soprano Dobbs sounded smooth as cashmere beside the tweedy textures of Tenor Jan Peerce and Baritone Leonard Warren. Her phrasing was always neat and true; in lyrical passages her voice floated with never an edge. In Verdi's showy old coloratura bits, e.g., Caro Nome, it glittered clear and bright as a glockenspiel in a football band. She was nervous at first-her vibrato was fast as a canary's, and she heaved her pretty bosom with each breath, which is not regarded good form...
...Famed Contralto Marian Anderson broke the singers' color barrier two years ago in the role of the Negro Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. Three weeks later, Baritone Robert McFerrin made his Met debut as Amonasro in Aïda. Ballerina Janet Collins was the first Negro ever to be featured at the Met (in 1951), also...
...with the girl with whom he did not wish to live. Norma is usually called a singers' opera, a triumph of bel canto, and it does have magnificent vocal passages, notably two duets for the two leading female singers. But (as Bernard Shaw once said of the young Verdi) Bellini's orchestra sounds like a giant guitar; it plinkety-plinks through embarrassing military airs, mindless rages and cloying romances...