Word: verdis
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Franco Zeffirelli said that she did as much as Verdi for Italian opera. Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini said, "It is no fabricated legend. In my entire experience of the theater, I know of no artist like Maria Callas." Her private life, much of it conducted in public, was also the stuff of legend. She had the iron whim and comet-like will, the greed, love and hatred of someone strong enough to overturn the laws of life...
...years from 1815 to the mid-1920s, from The Barber of Seville to Turandot. "All we contemporary composers, without exception, are so many pygmies beside this great master," Bellini said of Rossini. But he was wrong. Geniuses followed each other like monarchs in a royal procession: Bellini himself, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini. Opera lovers became so accustomed to dazzling new works that they thought the parade would never end, that the extraordinary had become the usual...
...Verdi: Rigoletto (Deutsche Grammophon, 3 LPs). In his first opera recording in a decade, Carlo Maria Giulini leads a performance that is a meditation on Verdi's musical drama...
When Opera Midwest burst onto the music scene two years ago with a glittering production of Verdi's La Traviata, the Evanston, Ill., company was regarded as something of a musical mystery. Its general manager and financial "angel," Stephen Griffeth, had been able to conjure up a first-season budget of $400,000, a stunning amount for a group of virtual unknowns. Its star soprano was Griffeth's wife, Myra Cordell, a Northwestern University voice graduate. The music director was a former security guard who had conducted a children's choir in West Germany. Even Griffeth...
...Verdi: Aïda (Mirella Freni, soprano; José Carreras, tenor; Agnes Baltsa, mezzo-soprano; Piero Cappuccilli, baritone; Ruggero Raimondi, bass; é van Dam, bass; Katia Ricciarelli, soprano; Thomas Moser, tenor; Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, conductor; Angel; three LPs). That old Ethiopian slave girl and would-be war bride finds a new and glorious incarnation in Mirella Freni, whose voice may not move pyramids but finds its way to the heart of the role. This is particularly true in the Nile Scene, where Aïda tussles with her passion for Radames...