Word: verdis
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...Opera. But much of its scenery is hideous, most of its stagecraft pompous, hidebound, stodgy. In Europe, opera is everywhere sung in the language of the land, whereas the Met's official tongue is Anything-but-English. Next week the Metropolitan will open its season with some hurdy-Verdi in Italian (Un Ballo in Maschera), a new sponsor for its Saturday broadcasts (Texas Co.), its annual promise of more oomph. Meanwhile last week some other U. S. operas delivered the oomph...
Tradition has always pictured Verdi as a sunny oldster dandling children on his knee. In "The Life of Giuseppe Verdi", a script-writer's florid fancy and an actor's indecisive acting are diligently at work portraying bearish youth mellowing into crochety old age. Inconclusive in its characterization, the picture meanders shapelessly through the minor crises in the composer's life, in a disjointed course that lacks both interest and conviction. A weak-kneed attempt to build up Verdi as a nationalist idol bogs down in conventional heroics. In a last desperate effort at unity, the director drags...
...blurbs promise a musical feast, but what is actually offered are the more hackneyed numbers from the Verdi repertoire, indifferently performed and badly integrated with such plot as there is. Gaby Morlay's sensitive acting provides the only stable note in this flabby drama, which amounts, at best, to a tolerably exact biography...
...Verdi: Otello (Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Wilfred Pelletier conducting, with Lawrence Tibbett. Giovanni Martinelli, Helen Jepson and other artists; Victor: 12 sides). A much abridged edition of Verdi's great Shakespearean opera, so well recorded that you can almost hear the dust blowing off Tenor Martinelli's aging vocal chords...
...long festival designed to cabbage some of the Salzburg trade. Biggest tourist bait, as he was last summer, was Arturo Toscanini, whose European pond has shrunk rapidly in recent years. He was down for five concerts, including two performances of a work from which he generates much heat, the Verdi Requiem, to be done in Lucerne's old Jesuit Church. Four concerts were to be broadcast, and Toscanini's son-in-law, Vladimir Horowitz, able pianist, was scheduled to make one of his rare concert appearances under the maestro. The other festival conductors were also extra-Axis: England...