Word: verdis
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...this new project include Marian Anderson, Leonard Warren, Rosa Ponselle, Tito Schipa and Jussi Bjoerling. The Warren disk is an oddity, recorded live on a 1958 tour of the Soviet Union, where the baritone's dark, sexy voice knocked 'em dead. Ponselle's sublime vocal poise lights great Verdi arias and ditties like When I Have Sung My Songs to You, I'll Sing No More. Easily the most joyous singer is Schipa, with his diaphanous tenor tones and fluent ornamentation. There was a real nap on the operatic velvet back then...
...John Falstaff. Stuffed into a hamper of dirty laundry to escape a jealous husband, the portly knight gets ignominiously flung into the Thames. "Oh, oh, oh," he finally cries as the supposedly merry wives of Windsor burn him with their tapers. In setting this black comedy to music, Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, degrade the hero still further. "Lord, make him impotent," the women chorus as everyone flails and pummels the fallen hero. And yet after his punishment on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, a wonderful thing happened. Falstaff mysteriously rose above his tormentors...
...intensely personal drama, clearly sexual and even slightly sadistic. "Hold your paunch, celebrate it," he instructed Maxwell at one point during rehearsals. "For Falstaff, it is not grossness, it is greatness, virility." Bearing out Epstein's point, the modest dimensions of the BAM theater enabled Stein to stage Verdi's last masterpiece as a kind of chamber work, with the stage action fast-moving and intricately choreographed. The closeness of the proceedings also gives added prominence to Richard Armstrong's intense and hard-driving conducting of what is perhaps Verdi's most complex orchestral score...
...there is tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the 19th century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them...
Anyone who wonders what is wrong with American opera in general and the Metropolitan Opera in particular need look no further than Manhattan's Lincoln Center, where the Met last week uncrated its elephantine new production of Verdi's Aida. Can the nation's leading opera house really be serious about offering this animated comic book as art? While not a disaster on the order of last season's catastrophic Il Trovatore, the new Aida represents all that ails the company these days...