[Met Performance] CID:186960



Il Trovatore
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, January 27, 1961

Debut : Franco Corelli, Leontyne Price




Il Trovatore (320)
Giuseppe Verdi | Salvatore Cammarano
Manrico
Franco Corelli [Debut]

Leonora
Leontyne Price [Debut]

Count Di Luna
Robert Merrill

Azucena
Irene Dalis

Ferrando
William Wilderman

Ines
Helen Vanni

Ruiz
Charles Anthony

Messenger
Robert Nagy

Gypsy
Carlo Tomanelli


Conductor
Fausto Cleva


Director
Herbert Graf

Designer
Motley





Il Trovatore received fourteen performances this season.

Review 1:

Review of Harold C. Schonberg in The New York Times:

Grand opera, temporarily absent from the Metropolitan Opera, returned there last night with the season's first performance of Verdi's "Il Trovatore" and the simultaneous debuts of Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli. Grand opera means large scale, uninhibited, lusty opera, and that is what the customers heard.

Everybody sang out. Sometimes the singing was glorious, sometimes it was lacking in finesse, but at all times everybody was giving all he or she had. Thus nobody in the audience was bored. It was an exciting night.

The two debuts had been long awaited. Miss Price has sung here before, but more recently she has been having a triumph in opera houses throughout Europe. She has matured into a beautiful singer. Her voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the last bit of trouble.

She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has. And it is not all florid singing on her part. In the convent scene she took some fine-spun phrases in a ravishing pianissimo. And her top is exceptionally secure. She does not lunge for notes, attacking them from underneath and sliding into them.

As for Mr. Corelli, in one respect he goes against the law of nature that decrees all tenors must be short. The Metropolitan includes, among his statistics, the fact that he is 6 feet 2 inches tall, and he weighs 180 pounds. He tops off this physical appearance with a handsome head-something of a cross between John Barymore and Errol Flynn.

Can he sing, too? Well, it is a large-sized voice but not an especially suave instrument, and it tends to be produced explosively. It has something of an exciting animal drive about it, and when Mr. Corelli lets loose, he can dominate the ensemble. The nature of his upper register remains to be determined. He did take the D flat in the second act, but the ending of "Di quella pira" was transposed down, and he was unable to take the climactic note in one breath.

As a musician and an actor he did everything competently without ever being particularly imaginative about it. There is something about his work, however, that greatly excited the audience, pro and con. For at the end of the second and third acts, a scattering of boos was heard amid the cheers. The guess here is that Mr. Corelli could develop into an exceptional tenor, but his art does need some refining and polishing.

The two other principals, Robert Merrill and Irene Dalis, sang superbly. Seldom has Mr. Merrill been in better voice. His booming velvety baritone sounded simply magnificent, and in "Il balen" he poured forth a sustained example of legato signing that any singer in the world could envy.

Miss Dalis, aside from a few low notes-the role of Azucena goes down a shade too much for here-also sang with fullness of tone and complete security. William Wilderman, as Ferrando, was a worth member of the cast.

Taken as a whole, then, this was an exciting "Trovatore," with Fausto Cleva pacing the performance with his usual skill and understanding. It brought to the fore a brilliant new soprano-new to the Metropolitan, that is-and a tenor of great potential. Both will continue to be active this season, and to say that their appearances will be watched with interest is putting it mildly.

Photograph of Franco Corelli as Manrico by Louis M?lan?on.

Photograph of Leontyne Price as Leonora by Louis M?lan?on.

Photograph of Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli backstage with Rudolf Bing



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