Word: flagstad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
...Spoleto. Last week she received the most cherished honor of all: an invitation to sing with the Metropolitan Opera. Next season, Met Manager Rudolf Bing announced, null will be cast in the title role of Gluck's Alcestis. an opera last heard at the Metropolitan at Kirsten Flagstad's emotion-packed farewell performance in 1952. Said Soprano Farrell"I guess there wasn't anyone else around who could...
Less rare than any of these items, but never before recorded in full, is Das Rheingold, Wagner's thunder-throated masterpiece, presented by London (3 LPs, mono and stereo) in a superb performance. Conductor Georg Solti leads the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with anvil-stroking power; Kirsten Flagstad sings with serene beauty; and George London's Wotan towers with granitic strength. The majestically rolling accompaniment of the gods' procession to Valhalla is sure to lift almost any listener out of his seat...
Rodzinski opened his return visit with a performance of Tristan and promptly scored a triumph that recalled his now legendary performance of the same work with Kirsten Flagstad and the Chicago Symphony eleven years ago. This time Rodzinski was hampered by scant rehearsal time and by the fact that the Lyric Opera's orchestra is a competent but far from first-rate pickup group. But he kindled a performance of ravishing warmth and coloration, better by far than anything previously heard from the Lyric Opera's pit. With Soprano Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Tenor Karl Liebl as Tristan...
...Home. The Met survived the Depression on the box-office pull of Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior. Now doing better business than ever under General Manager Rudolf Bing, the yellow brewery ranks with La Scala and the Vienna Staatsoper as one of the Big Three of the operatic world. The Met is hampered by a physical plant that was antiquated in 1910 (to be abandoned in three years for the Met's new home in Lincoln Center) and by the difficulties of competing for top talent with the state-supported European houses. But in addition to its European stars...