Les Contes D'Hoffmann.(Metropolitan Opera)(Radio Program Review)

BROADCAST OF JANUARY 15, 2005, 1:30 P.M. THE METROPOLITAN OPERA INTERNATIONAL RADIO NETWORK THE 2004-05 METROPOLITAN OPERA BROADCAST SEASON IS MADE POSSIBLE BY GENEROUS GRANTS FROM THE ANNENBERG FOUNDATION AND THE VINCENT A. STABILE FOUNDATION

LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN

Music by Giuseppe Verdi Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre

Historic broadcast of February 7, 1959

The Hoffmann matinee of February 7, 1959, was the Metropolitan Opera's ninety-seventh performance of Offenbach's opera. The production, directed by actor Cyril Ritchard (Captain Hook to Mary Martin's Peter Pan on Broadway and on television) and designed by Rolf Gerard, was first seen on opening night of the 1955-56 season. George London (1919-85), the dark, intense bass-baritone from Montreal who sang the four villains, was a Met star for fifteen seasons, beginning with his 1951 debut as Amonasro. Especially celebrated for his Don Giovanni, Nozze Almaviva, Eugene Onegin, Scarpia, Wotan and Dutchman, London retired in 1967 to begin a second career as a teacher and administrator. Stockholm-born tenor Nicolai Gedda (b. 1925), the Hoffmann, made his Met debut in 1957, as Gounod's Faust, which was to be his most frequent role for the company during his twenty-four seasons there. An aristocratic, incisive interpreter of a repertory that ranged from Don Ottavio and Tamino to Sandor Barinkay in Der Zigeunerbaron, Gedda created Anatol in the world premiere of Barber's Vanessa at the Met in 1958. Gedda's Olympia, soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs (b. 1925), was a native of Atlanta who studied with Lotte Lehmann and Pierre Bernac before making splashy debuts at Glyndebourne (Zerbinetta) and Covent Garden (Queen of Shemakha in Le Coq d'Or). Dobbs's eight-season Met career began as Gild& in 1956. Rosalind Elias (b. 1929), the Massachusetts-born mezzo who sang Giulietta, made her Met debut as Grimgerde in Die Walkure in 1954. A vivid, versatile singing actress, still active today as a performer and director, Elias has made 685 Met appearances in thirty-five seasons. This broadcast of Hoffmann marked the twenty-seventh of the forty Met Antonias sung by Lucine Amara (b. 1927), the only 1959 holdover from the first cast principals of the Ritchard production. Amara arrived at the Met in 1950, as the Celestial Voice in Don Carlo, and stayed for thirty-six seasons, a tally unequalled by any other female principal ...