Word: donizetti
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Stand Up & Sing. Tne music of Nabucco was different from anything the earlier giants of Italian opera-Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti-had ever attempted. The choral writing was stronger, the general style more impassioned. Already Verdi was using his subsequently famous technique of writing sprightly, almost gay tunes for the grimmest situations and somehow getting away with it. Nabucco's weakness is that it has in its score little dramatic unity and that it tends to bog down in mere declamation ("It's one of those stand-up-there-and-sing operas," says Baritone Cornell MacNeil...
...word. Italians want to under stand what's going on." The biggest hit of the festival last week was the world première of a 143-year-old one-acter titled Pygmalion, composed not by a modern twelve-toner but by a talented local boy named Gaetano Donizetti. Written in 1817, when Donizetti was 19, the forgotten opera was rediscovered by Missiroli in an orchestrated version in a box of manuscripts found in Donizetti's house in Bergamo. Equipped with a spirited libretto, it had a fine, rich overture and enough tuneful arias to satisfy any Donizetti...
...said Maria Callas, "but you owe something to me, you know. After all, I persuaded you to sing roles like Lucia." She was speaking to a big, square-jawed Australian woman named Joan Sutherland, a former secretary who has won a sudden but solid reputation in the Bellini-Donizetti territory that Callas calls her own. Last week Soprano Sutherland, 33, was appearing at Britain's stylish Glyndebourne Festival in Bellini's I Puritani. On the lawn at intermission, as they were consuming their hamper-packed chicken-in-aspic suppers, members of the black-tied audience buzzed that Joan...
...audience overlook the opera's gothic absurdities and focus on its moments of real beauty, including Elvira's pre-wedding aria, "Son vergin vezzosa," and her splendid "Qui la voce sua soave," which introduces a mad scene every bit as effective as the more famous one in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Her voice was precise, agile, light-textured and luminous. The London Observer praised her "extraordinary beauty of tone,'' and the Daily Mail found in her performance an "almost intolerable poignancy...