Word: verdis
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...opera probably should have been called Verdi's Radames instead of Aida. Never mind that more important roles are assigned to the eponymous soprano heroine and her mezzo nemesis, Amneris. In San Francisco last week, the attention and the money (up to $750 for scalpers' tickets) was on the tenor. Of course, the man who was singing Verdi's Egyptian captain for the first time in his career was no ordinary performer: it was the portly mink-coat model, frequent guest on the Tonight show, American Express-card pitchman, would-be movie star and, these days, part...
...considering Picasso merely a Spanish painter, or Joyce a parochial Irish Catholic writer. The best British composers speak an international language-inflected, to be sure, by characteristic clipped accents and at times marked by a stiff-upper-lip emotional restraint-as surely as do the German Beethoven, the Italian Verdi, the Frenchman Debussy or the Russian Tchaikovsky: men who transcended the boundaries of their birth and made fellow countrymen out of the world's citizens...
...opinion the loveliest sounds in all opera occur in the final act of Verdi's Tommaso Jefferson, when the desolate exile sings an aria to a lost ladylove in America: "O, Susannah, non piangere per me!"(O, Susannah, don't you cry for me!). But I am an old man and I digress. If you want to know more about these colorful characters, you can purchase my book Romantic Rebels, which is a mere ?4.9 at the Coop...
...cello in a warm Russian bear hug as he dashed off two movements of a Haydn concerto. Violinists Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern were on hand too, the picture of collegial conviviality in a Vivaldi double concerto. Soprano Leontyne Price, the diva di tutte le dive, sang arias by Verdi, Richard Strauss and Puccini with resplendent warmth and freshness. And there was Pianist Rudolf Serkin, happily singing along as he performed in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. At the end, Isaac Stern struck up Happy Birthday, and 2,600 fashionably dressed folk in Symphony Hall joined...
...improved thematic development-represent the mature second thoughts of a composer who had already completed ten of the 15 symphonies he was eventually to write. But as a rule, first impulses tend to be more vital and visceral: Hindemith's first version of Cardillac, for example, or Verdi's original Don Carlos. The same is true of Lady Macbeth. As staged by the enterprising San Francisco Opera, which gave Katerina Ismailova its U.S. premiere in 1964, Lady Macbeth showed a power and raw urgency that was weakened by its later revision...