Great Stars of Opera - Telecasts from the Bell Telephone Hour 1959-1966
The most spectacular of the 21 operatic excerpts on this two-hour  collection ofBell Telephone Hourtelecasts is the last and longest--Joan  Sutherland singing the Mad Scene fromLucia di Lammermoor--more than 13  minutes of incredible vocalizing, still as fresh and technically dazzling as it  was when it was televised in 1962, shortly after her Metropolitan Opera debut in  that role. In a sense, video recording was not Sutherland's best medium. She was  not a great actress or a conventionally beautiful woman, but the video  representation of her slightly awkward stage presence makes her vocal grace and  agility sound all the more impressive. Equally historic is a scene fromBoris  Godunovmelodramatically sung by George London shortly after his triumphant  Bolshoi debut in that role (though one wishes he had been allowed to sing it in  Russian for his American audience). A discovery of sorts is Risë Stevens's  performance of a long monologue fromNatoma, a long-forgotten opera by  Victor Herbert.Leontyne Price looks very young and extraordinarily talented in selections fromIl trovatoreandAida; Birgit Nilsson produces great sounds in  music fromTurandotandGötterdämmerung. The list could go on much  longer. The names on the cover of this disc are (except for the unfortunate  absence of Maria Callas) virtually a who's who of the leading Metropolitan Opera  singers of the late 1950s and early '60s. It would be pleasant to have Galina  Vishnevkaya, Christa Ludwig, Cesare Siepi, and Walter Berry as well, but their  careers blossomed elsewhere and we must be thankful for what is here--thankful,  in particular, that there were once programs on commercial network television  that presented material of deep and permanent value.--Joe McLellan