Word: otello
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...trick in Otello, the great tragic opera of Verdi's old age, is to pile into Scene 1 at full emotional gallop and to keep at it without nagging for three hours. Both vocally and dramatically, it is one of the most difficult works in all opera, as Verdi himself acknowledged ("This lago," he said grandly, "is humanity"). Last week, after a lapse of two years, the Metropolitan Opera tackled Otello and achieved a performance that did justice to Verdi's looming vision. It also served as a reminder that the Met is having a brilliant season...
...Wagner; Munich had Richard Strauss. Partly because they wanted a :omposer who had written enough to feed the festival for years, the Augsburgers aicked Verdi, and reminded visitors that :he city was once Germany's gateway to Italian commerce. This year Augsburg is offering Verdi's Otello and his rarely performed Battle of Legnano on an open-air stage with the city's famed medieval Red ate as a backdrop...
...letters Thomas Macaulay. And nothing, I think, has happened in the century since to alter his verdict. Giraldo Cinthio's story of the Moor of Venice, his ensign Iago and his wife Desdemona has, in fact, been the source of several superlatives: it gave us Rossini's Otello, his finest serious opera; it gave us the best of all Italian opera libretti (by Arrigo Boito), which, when set to music by Verdi, became the supreme Italian tragic opera of the Romantic century; and it gave us Shakespeare's unequaled, Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo...
...Maestro's last word on Aïda ranks with his recording of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff as his operatic testament. The NBC Symphony plays with brilliant coloring and syllable-sharp instrumental detail ; the singers-some less than top drawer-are whipped almost beyond their powers to high moments of musical exaltation. The Met's Tucker, singing the full dramatic tenor role of Radames for the first time, has big, ringing power when he needs it, joined to a fervent, melting lyricism. Titian-haired Herva Nelli, Toscanini's favorite soprano, sings perhaps the finest...
...this batch of operatic rarities: Arrigo Boïto's Mefistofele, newly recorded by RCA Victor on 2 LPs (with Boris Christoff, Giacinto Prandelli, Orietta Moscucci; Orchestra and Chorus of the Rome Opera conducted by Vittorio Gui). Known chiefly as a poet and mighty librettist (Verdi's Otello and Falstaff), Boïto always remained an interesting oddity as a composer; he premiered his version of Goethe's Faust at La Scala in 1868 only to see it booed off the stage after two performances because of its experimentation with Wagnerian techniques. Intellectually more challenging than Gounod...