Metropolitan Opera Archives

Also in the Italian wing, "Aida" held the stage for many a night in the late fall. Heard December 11, it was led by James Conlon in an open, honest performance that had vitality and musicality if tending to extremes of fast and slow. In the title role, Rita Orlandi-Malaspina looked and sounded like a real throwback to the 1930s with her sizable soprano and physique. Her voice has metal and true volume, but crudities of technique give her pitch problems and difficulty in scaling down her sound or in achieving evenness in doing so. Still, the stentorian top and brilliant sound often gave pleasure. Bianca Berini's lifeless Amneris had no low tones and offered swallowed tone through the range, relying only on an overdeveloped top - this last seems endemic as far as current mezzos in the Italian repertory are concerned. Giorgio Lamberti now has only a shell of a tenor left, with diminished ring and heft, and Ingvar Wixell paraded his healthy Amonasro. Luigi Roni's Ramfis sounded big and wobbly, Julien Robbin's King, small.

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