Word: verdis
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GREAT SOPRANOS OF OUR TIME (Angel). Sutherland and Callas again, and out to draw blood. Callas plays Verdi's Lady Macbeth, chilling in the sleepwalking scene, and Sutherland is Donna Anna, crying vengeance on Don Giovanni at the top of her voice. The other reigning sopranos in this international exposition are Sweden's Birgit Nilsson singing Beethoven, France's Regine Crespin singing Wagner, Germany's Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Mozart, and Spain's Victoria de los Angeles singing Verdi and Gounod...
FALSTAFF (RCA Victor). With a princely cast that includes Geraint Evans, Giulietta Simionato, Mirella Freni and Rosalind Elias, Verdi's masterwork is sung better than ever before on records. But Conductor Georg Solti does not live up to the Falstaff achieved by Arturo Toscanini in his famous 1950 recording. His beat is too rigid to be helpful to his singers...
Gold Dust Twins. Bernstein had the very touch Zeffirelli needed to complete a chef-d'oeuvre: under his baton, Verdi's wit and whimsy seemed ironic and sharp. He brought modern accents and strong colors to the aerial delicacy of Verdi's score, and drove the Met's orchestra at a pace that left the superb cast flushed and breathless...
...Zeffirelli got along like Gold Dust twins. "We are of the same generation," the 38-year-old Zeffirelli would say, "and we see things in the same light." That meant seeing Falstaff, quite uniquely, as a tragedy-an expression of absurdity, an old man's revenge. "This is Verdi's monument to the ungenerosity of people," said Zeffirelli of Verdi's last opera and his only comedy.* "It really isn't funny...
Fear of Flops. Zeffirelli had planned to match Verdi's canny humor by having all the scenery jerked away in the opera's final moment while the cast tore off their wigs and pointed mocking fingers at the audience. "This is a very disturbing opera, and you should be reminded at the end that it is disturbing," he argued. "Everything is a big joke! You've all been cheated!" But Met Manager Rudolf Bing didn't get it-he figured it would look like a grotesque error by the boys backstage. So he spared his audience...