Gian Carlo Menotti: Amahl and the Night Visitors-The Historic 1955 Telecast
2008; Routledge; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2769-4046
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoGian Carlo Menotti: Amahl and the Night Visitors-The Historic 1955 Telecast. Amahl: Bill Mclver; Mother: Rosemary Kuhlmann; Kaspar: Andrew McKinley; Melchior: David Aiken; Balthazar: Leon Lishner; Page: Francis Monachino. Symphony of the Air. Thomas Schippers, conductor. (VAI 4400; 80:10) review before you marks a fairly significant and temporary departure from this column's typical focus on recordings devoted to art songs and arias as well as documentaries about professional singers and voice pedagogy. Reviews of complete opera recordings are abundant in other publications and are not the typical purview of The Listener's Gallery. What prompts your reviewer's interest in this video of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors-as well as the editor's quick and enthusiastic endorsement of such a review in this space-is the name that graces the top of the cast list. Anyone with even a cursory acquaintance with the recent history of NATS will recognize Bill McIver as a past president of our Association and one of our most highly regarded voice teachers, prior to his regrettably untimely death in 2003. This priceless memento of his superb performance as Amahl, recently released to the public for the first time, surely will spark a flood of enthusiastic praise and thanksgiving from reviewers everywhere, but it is only fitting that the Journal of Singing join such a chorus of praise with its own tribute. Not many operas require so little introduction as Amahl and the Night Visitors, commissioned by NBC Opera Theater and first seen via a live network telecast on Christmas Eve, 1951. work actually was composed in some haste, even though the commission had been made some eighteen months before. What was most likely a case of procrastination turned writer's block was finally broken in late 1950 when Menotti saw one of the world's most famous nativity paintings, The Adoration of the Magi, by Hieronymus Bosch, while visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a burst of inspiration, was able to formulate the story of his opera very quickly and the exquisite score followed thereafter, although the liner notes remind us that singers were still receiving some final passages of the score just days before the broadcast. A blurry kinescope of that world premiere telecast survives, but has been available to the public only in various pirated recordings. (An audio recording with the original cast was released by RCA early the following year.) To view that priceless document is to see a bit of operatic history being made, for never before had an opera been created expressly for television. It was an extraordinary achievement, and the response of the public was such that the opera was repeated in a second live telecast the following Easter and on every subsequent Christmas Eve for the rest of the decade. No opera composed since Amahl has claimed such a cherished place in our collective hearts, and by some estimates it remains the most frequently performed opera in the world. Those annual live telecasts on Christmas Eve featured the same adult singers in the roles of the Mother and the Three Kings, but, of course, could not feature the same boy soprano as Amahl. original Amahl, Chet Allen, departed the production after the first two telecasts; an interview on the DVD says it was because he lost his voice, which may or may not refer to the thirteen-year-old's voice changing, while the liner notes state that left in order to embark on a film career which never materialized. At any rate, Chet Allen's exit marked the entrance of young Bill McIver, who went on to perform the role of Amahl for four consecutive Christmas telecasts, more than any of his counterparts did. It is the last of his four telecasts, Christmas Eve 1955, that is captured in this new release from VAI. It is a remarkable and moving document so many respects. First, it takes us back to a time when the arts had a very significant presence in this new medium called television. …
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