Word: verdis
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...when tempos dawdled indulgently, singers postured in front of improbable sets and acting was of the clutch-sob-and-stagger school. But by sticking to the 19th century Italian repertory and putting it over with some splendidly full-throated singing, the company also evoked the good old days, when Verdi and Puccini called La Scala home, when such singers as Enrico Caruso and Adelina Patti blossomed there and Conductor Arturo Toscanini whipped its performances to a peak of fire and finesse...
PUCCINI: LA RONDINE (2 LPs; RCA Victor). Magda, Puccini's sad "swallow," is close kin to Verdi's Violetta, the "wayward one." Puccini's little courtesan also leads a gay, cynical life in Paris until she meets her one true love, with whom she flees to the peace of a country villa. Then, to the strains of a rending melody, she leaves her lover when she realizes that her scarlet past would shock his proper parents. Anna Moffo illuminates the most lyrical and substantial elements in her poignant role, and her characterization is nicely...
premieres of two of his works formed a sort of parenthesis within the Metropolitan Opera's Verdi Festival (TIME, Sept...
...Prince, but also a fullscale, splashy setting of Novelist Graham Greene's spy fantasy, Our Man in Havana. Finding the proper operatic text is a huge problem. "I need something I can destroy," Williamson says, "a play that I can take apart and rebuild my own way. Verdi got this kind of thing from the trashy plays of his fellow romantics, adapted by saintly and compliant librettists. It's not so easy any more." Probably for this reason, the libretto for The Happy Prince is his own. And probably all the better because...
Digging Deep. Much of this material had to be dug out of the murk. One of Verdi's finest songs is the poignant Pieta, Signor, composed at the end of his career and reflecting much of the same hushed awe of his Manzoni Requiem; not mentioned in the standard Verdi catalogue, the song was flushed out of an obscure Italian library by Verdi Scholar David Stivender. Other long-lost scores, such as the charming and perky Wind Quintet by Ponchielli (of La Gioconda fame) were found in editions long out of print...