OP1223. CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA, recorded 1953, w.Cellini Cond. RCA Ensemble & Robert Shaw Chorale; Zinka Milanov, Jussi Björling, Robert Merrill, Carol Smith, etc. (E.U.) Naxos 8.110261. Transfers by Mark Obert-Thorn. Final copy! - 636943126127

CRITIC REVIEWS:

“Milanov's movement was all from emotion, never from thought. If you could get into her frame of mind, she could actually be quite moving. If not, you found it more of the silent film variety of acting, in which pantomime had to make up for the lack of sound. But of course Milanov had the advantage of the sound to go with the pantomime, and her acting and her singing were of a piece. She always knew what the character’s situation was emotionally, and she could convey it so rightly in the sound, the inflection—she had the greatest dynamic range, from soft to loud, of any singer perhaps there has ever been. She was nonetheless difficult to work with because if you told her something that went against how she felt a certain moment, there was resistance, often, I might say, terminal resistance.…About the time you were so exasperated that you couldn’t go on, she would sing something so magnificently that it didn’t matter at all what she did at the same time. I am the director, and I state that heresy. So very often people who moved more fluidly, more realistically, did not have in the sound, in the voice, the real meaning. They were no less lacking than the singer who was not a first-rate actor.”

- Dino Yannopoulos



“I would make any concession for a voice such as hers, absolutely any.”

- José Quintero