Word: wozzeck
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...Dorothy Dow to record it. Erwartung's one-act story is somber, not to say macabre: a woman sings her innermost thoughts as she goes to a woodland tryst, stumbles over the dead body of her lover. The score sounds something like that of Alban Berg's Wozzeck, it is introverted and complex, but it succeeds in expressing terror and, surprisingly, tenderness. Soprano Dow, who comes from Texas, may not have so much Weltschmerz in her polished voice as Schoenberg had in mind, but she sings with great accuracy and lyrical ease. The orchestral part is played...
Milan's La Scala heard Alban Berg's atonal opera Wozzeck for the first time last week and, somewhat to its own surprise, was impressed...
Mitropoulos and La Scala had worked hard to make Wozzeck a success. When Italian sopranos showed little interest in learning the exacting role of Wozzeck's faithless mistress Marie, Mitropoulos gave it to Soprano Dorothy Dow, of Galveston, Texas. The part of the plodding, unhappy Wozzeck went to Italian Baritone Tito Gobbi. Milan admired them both. Another successful touch was the scenery; instead of going in strong for realism, Designer Gianni Ratto made his sets shadowy and changeable, to keep the audience under the emotional spell of Berg's music...
...chief trouble was the setting-admittedly difficult inasmuch as Wozzeck has 15 swiftly changing scenes. Designer Mstislav Dubojinksy's stage was a stylistic hash laid out on two levels, with more exits, real and imaginary, than the auditorium of City Center itself. Among other things, the lighting was not subtle enough to disguise the unlikely fact that the pond in which Wozzeck drowns is atop both the room where his girl Marie lives and the room where the sadistic Doctor experimented...
What did come off, despite all misfortunes, was Alban Berg's uniquely powerful score. Even the Daily News had to conclude that "the amazing thing . . . was to find Wozzeck so holding, in spite of the handicaps of its presentation...