//www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G_J_sPfQHM
Donal Henahan in The New York Instances:
For the final couple of a long time … Mr. Zeffirelli’s curiosity in opera has centered across the superficial and the trivial. As his new Metropolitan manufacturing of ”La Traviata” confirmed conclusively on Monday night, he’s most charitably considered these days as a dressmaker and inside decorator quite than an opera director.
His staging of Verdi’s sentimental masterpiece proved to be one other in his Met sequence of overdressed, overproduced carnivals (from ”Antony and Cleopatra” to ”Turandot,” ”Otello,” ”La Boheme” and ”Tosca”) by which all theatrical values apart from the visible turn into secondary. Even the polished and scrupulously detailed conducting of Carlos Kleiber couldn’t carry this ”Traviata” a lot under the sensuous floor. Nor did the routinely vocalized, dramatically obtuse performances of the 2 principal singers, Edita Gruberova as Violetta and Neil Shicoff as Alfredo, supply compensation. The end result was a tasteless, antimusical ”Traviata” that seldom ventured close to the expressive core of the work: at its greatest merely an eyeful, at its worst, heartless.
Born on at the present time in 1962 baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QeKn6V2wag
On at the present time in 1972 conductor Henry Lewis made his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting La bohème on what was his fortieth birthday.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2jT5Uv8WHM
Birthday anniversaries of writers Oscar Wilde (1854) and Eugene O’Neill (1888); bass Guus Hoekman and baritone Gino Bechi (each in 1913); and mezzo-soprano Margreta Elkins (1930ish).
Photograph: Winnie Klotz
