Word: otello
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...Gentele quickly changed that: it will be a brand-new Carmen starring Marilyn Horn, with Leonard Bernstein conducting and Gentele himself directing. Bing also spent a probable $700,000 on his swan song, last March's new and spectacularly good production (by Franco Zeffirelli) of Verdi's Otello, when the nine-year-old and commensurately splendid Eugene Berman production was in perfectly good shape. That indulgence (including 100 costly costumes that were never used) will not help Gentele at all in the current labor negotiations he must settle by this summer if the Met is to open...
With Figaro, Davis also seems to be declaring a middle-ground approach to repertory between battered war-horses and uncompromising avant-garde works. He intends to balance what he considers the true classic tradition-operas like Otello, Boris Godunov and the Ring-with occasional forays into the new and experimental. Next July, he will offer Taverner, a harshly dissonant new opera about a 16th century composer. Written by one of England's leading young composers, Peter Maxwell Davies, the work will be produced by Film Director Ken Russell (The Devils, The Boy Friend...
...Opera is first and foremost a singers' house, or what the managers on 57th Street like to call a bella voce theater. Its basic operating premise is that what counts is glorious singing. The only trouble is that no amount of fine vocalizing will make an opera like Otello or Wozzeck work without a steady, compelling baton on the podium. Yet it is difficult to get, let alone keep, good conductors in a house where singing stars have virtual veto power over their maestros. As a result, good conducting has been almost as elusive at the Met as good...
...Department of Agriculture in Philadelphia. Until he started lessons at Philadelphia's Settlement Music School at the age of 26, he had done most of his singing in church choirs and shower -stalls. Instead of a Wagnerian selection, he sang an aria from Verdi's Otello, impressing the judges with his brooding intensity and naturally rich, dark-timbred voice. A good thing, too, because Otello "is the only role I really know...
...West Coast's two major companies meanwhile survived a pair of backstage cliffhangers and got their seasons smoothly under way. The sets for Seattle's Otello had somehow got onto the wrong ship from Italy, and were put in place only 30 minutes before curtain time. San Francisco Opera Soprano Regine Crespin was forced out of the first-night Gioconda with a throat infection, and Substitute Leyla Gencer (who in past Coast seasons has filled in for Callas and Tebaldi) had to learn one of opera's cruelest roles in less than two weeks...