As those of you on my blog announcement list know, I’ve been forced (well, not forced, but I don’t want to cheat the material) to postpone Chaliapin, Phenomenon: Part Three for one week. It will appear next Friday, Apr. 26. In our guise as publisher of Opera as Opera, we’ve had to cope with the bankruptcy of our long-established printer, a change of distributor (with no interruption to orders, fortunately), and associated issues—a drain on time and energy. More happily, I spent a couple of highly enjoyable and stimulating days to take part in a symposium hosted by Dean Fred Bronstein down at Peabody Institute, and to work a bit with some of the very talented students in the Opera Theatre class there. The symposium conversation was live-streamed, and will join the video archive of this ongoing series. I’m told it will take a couple of weeks to edit the video, but I will post a link to it on my media page and announce it here when it’s ready.

There were several interesting responses to my Samson et Dalila post of two weeks ago:

The first comes from David Stein, regarding the Samson highlights record with Risë Stevens, Jan Peerce, and the NBC Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski, originally an RCA Victor LP and now available on a Cala CD. I had noted that on the LP, Robert Merrill (as the High Priest) appeared only in the Act 3 “Gloire à Dagon” duet. But Mr. Stein informs us that on the simultaneously released 45-rpm version, the Act 2 scene between the High Priest and Dalila, beginning at “La victoire facile,” was included, and is on the Cala re-issue as well. That would make the CD, in any case recommendable for preservation of the exciting performance of the Bacchanale, even more desirable. Merrill was no great French stylist, but he did sing this part in the early ’50s, and one will surely not often hear it so handsomely vocalized.

While I’m at it—and since Chaliapin as Boris Godunov is coming up—I might mention also Stokowski’s disc of Boris extracts from the early ’50s. This is rather like some of the “symphonic synthesis” versions of operas (particularly Wagner’s) that Stokowski loved to cobble up, except that Boris’ big solo scenes are sung by Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, with incidental contributions from a couple of other singers. Rossi-Lemeni was a formidable singing-actor talent whose fine bass voice turned woolly all too soon. But this recording, done at the time of his San Francisco Opera debut in this role, caught him at his best, and is comparable to the splendid Filippo he sings on the Cetra Don Carlo. No, it isn’t Stokowski with the NBC, but the San Francisco Opera orchestra and chorus sound quite fine, and it is Stoki doing Rimsky. I have this performance on a Dell’Arte LP re-issue of the RCA Victor original, and I see from the old Myers & Hill Record Ratings that it, too, was issued in 45-rpm format—so perhaps some additional material lurks there. This, too, is available on Cala in its Stokowski Society series.