Word: ballo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...just love my nose-goes with the setting," said the masked guest, tilting his twelve-inch rubber proboscis toward the Tiepelo frescoes on the ceiling of Venice's Palazzo Ca' Rezzonica. It was the season's gaudiest Ballo in Maschera (masked ball), and more than 500 of the plumiest knights and dames of the international round table had donned their most expensive armor to dance, taste champagne, guess each other's identities and incidentally raise money for the Venetian artisans still suffering the effects of last November's widespread floods. When the masks came...
...entire evening of full chorus and orchestra would be a dubious effort on only seven weeks of rehearsal, Schmidt wisely reduced his voices to madrigal size for part of the concert. Not surprisingly, the most sensitive performances came from these smaller ensembles. Monteverdi's Tirsi e Clori, a ballo concertato for two soloists, strings and chorus, was performed with taste and elegance. The solos were handled creditably by Jacqueline Goodspeed and Henry Gibbons...
VERDI: UN BALLO IN MASCHERA (RCA Victor: 3 LPs). Masked Ball's libretto is strictly crackplot, but Verdi's tunes justify the onstage bewilderment. The opera has an ominous history: the day Verdi brought his score to Naples, assassins tried to murder Napoleon III. Frightened Bourbon censors forced the composer to switch the locale of his rather gloomy tale (about the assassination of Sweden's 18th century King Gustav III) to exotic Massachusetts and to dramatize instead the assassination of the "Governor of Boston." Conducted appropriately by Boston's Erich Leinsdorf, this version stars the lush...
MONTEVERDI: IL BALLO DELLE INGRATE (Nonesuch). This musical play of 1608 taught the ladies of the Duke of Mantua's court a moral: Make love or you will go to Hades. As horrible examples, Pluto brings up from his dark kingdom an eternally damned bevy of pale beauties who, when on earth, "ungrateful, held every lover at a distance." Edwin Loehrer and the chorus and orchestra of the Società Cameristica di Lugano give the embryonic opera a convincing performance...
Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera (Birgit Nilsson, Carlo Bergonzi, Cornell MacNeil, Giulietta Simionato, Sylvia Stahlman, Fernando Corena; Chorus and Orchestra of L'Accademia di Santa Cecilia conducted by Georg Solti; London). A rather studied approach and over-resonant sound take some of the flash out of this performance, but Soprano Nilsson and Mezzo Simionato remain joys to the ear, and Tenor Bergonzi sings with distinction...