Word: renata
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...Bell Telephone Hour (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Jose Iturbi, Renata Tebaldi and Shirley Jones, with Dancers Maria Tallchief and Erik Bruhn. Color...
Last week, at a performance of Verdi's La Forza del Destino, the first great ovation was reserved for Soprano Renata Tebaldi, making her first Met appearance of the season in the role of Leonora. But in the second act, Baritone Leonard Warren came on as Don Carlo and promptly mesmerized the great house in the famous duet with Tenor Richard Tucker as Don Alvaro. Later, dressed in the gold and black uniform of a Spanish grenadier, Warren soliloquized about his gravely wounded comrade-in-arms: "Morir! . . . Tremenda cosa!" ("To die! Tremendous thing!"). Finally he sang the great aria...
Based on a novel by Russian Symbolist Poet Valery Bryusov (1873-1924), the opera unfolds the story of a demon-haunted doxy named Renata, who grows up in 16th century Germany in the company of an angel, but loses her impulse to sainthood when she decides that she wants to be his mate. The angel disappears in an angry burst of flame, and Renata keeps looking for him until she at last runs afoul of the Inquisition and is sentenced to death at the stake. Part of the fascination of this murky Gothic tale is that most of it exists...
Prokofiev's music, written in the early '205, is taut, economical and superbly dramatic, consisting of almost continuous recitative, punctuated with an occasional soaring aria. The opera reaches its vocal and dramatic climax in the Inquisition scene, in which Renata. a group of nuns and the Inquisitor weave eleven different vocal lines into a complicated polyphony, terminated by a staggering explosion of brass and cymbals...
Star of the Spoleto performance was brilliant Turkish Soprano Leyla Gencer, who in the role of Renata demonstrated one reason why Flaming Angel (now available in a Westminster recording) is so rarely produced: the heroine, onstage and singing almost constantly, is required to deliver some of her most memorable lines while crawling on the floor or hopping in hysterical convulsions. Said Director Frank Corsaro plaintively about the work: "I want to move it to New York, but nobody wants...