Word: verdis
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...GINE CRESPIN (Angel). Soprano Crespin has the distinction of being both the finest operatic voice of France and one of opera's leading Wagnerians. Here she sings arias from Tannhüiuser together with Verdi's Otello and Il Trovatore, Rossini's William Tell and Berlioz' Damnation of Faust, and seems equally at home in all four styles and all three languages...
Toscanini to Pucci. The Italian presence is ever more inescapable in modern-day Argentina. Statues of Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Columbus populate large urban plazas. Street names run from "Venecia" and "Milán" to "José Verdi" and "Arturo Toscanini." Newsstands are thick with Italian magazines, bars flow with Campari, coffee shops with café alia italiana, and restaurateurs serve up steaming hot pizzas, ravioli and pasta frolla-even if they cannot always spell the names. Argentine men favor Italian-style stovepipe trousers and moccasins; many women are forsaking French styles for designers like Simonetta and Pucci...
...shells; Katherine Dunham firmly fixed a rhinestone in every navel within reach and made her debut as a Met choreographer nothing more than a tawdry reminder of her old Haitian dance suites. Uniformly brave performances and sensitive conducting by Georg Sold were not enough to counteract such problems, and Verdi's tragedy sank into the goo without a tear...
...singers soon lost their pitch, and the boys in the orchestra joined them in helpless cacophony as the audience went wild in fury. Only the night sticks of the carabinieri induced peace after the melee, and everyone went home agreeing that it was a lousy evening-but viva Verdi, anyway...
Repeat performances scheduled for last week were canceled in the shambles of the opening night. But there remained a good question as to why Il Corsaro was chosen in the first place. Except for his disastrously bad Alzira, it represents Verdi's single lapse from musicianship and inspiration, and the preposterous libretto, inspired by Byron's The Corsair-the story of an Aegean pirate whose ill-starred romance leads to murder and suicide-scarcely helps matters. The one pleasing aria and the single engaging duet could hardly be expected to mollify a fastidious audience. Even the most pious...