CD REVIEW: Georg Friedrich Händel – MESSIAH (Polyphony, Britten Sinfonia, Stephen Layton; Hyperion)

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759) – Messiah, HWV 56: J. Doyle, I. Davies, A. Clayton, A. Foster-Williams; Polypony; Britten Sinfonia; Stephen Layton [recorded in St John’s, Smith Square, London, on 22 – 23 December 2008; Hyperion CDA67800]

The annual approach of Advent carries with it a certain dread for many musicians and music lovers for it is known that, in those days between American Thanksgiving and Christmas, virtually every chorister – amateur and professional – from Sydney to Seattle turns his attention to Messiah. Though he surely recognized the quality of the score he had produced, it is doubtful that even Händel at his most ambitious could have imagined the wide-ranging exposure his oratorio would enjoy in the centuries to follow its 1742 premiere in Dublin. Wherever English is spoken, Messiah is a part of the collective musical conscience, an integral element of a pervasive cultural ancestry that shapes artistic perceptions, whether native or adopted. Separated from its unique significance for English-speaking audiences and its Christian indoctrination, Messiah remains a landmark in Western music. However many Messiahs one has heard, a genuinely great performance reveals anew the power of Messiah to impress and move.

Still, a sense of Messiah fatigue is difficult to avoid, especially with the glut of recordings on the market. Particularly with the emergence of the Händel Renaissance during the past three decades, many conductors active in the field of historically-informed performance practices have committed their individual interpretations of Messiah to disc. The release of Christopher Hogwood’s L’Oiseau Lyre recording (using the 1754 Foundling Hospital version of the score) represented a turning point in the Messiah discography: with the exception of Sir Andrew Davis’ Toronto recording for EMI, the age of the big-boned, massive-force Messiah recordings was at its end. Messiah is problematic even for period-practice specialists because it exists in several versions that variously assimilate and discard changes made by Händel for different performers and venues. There is no single definitive version (or edition), ensuring varieties of approach and content among Messiah’s many recordings, but this cannot entirely eradicate the weariness of the saturated market. Thus, excitement at the release of a new recording of Messiah is an exceptionally rare commodity.

When hearing Hyperion’s new recording, a souvenir of the 2008 installment in Polyphony’s fifteen-year tradition of performing Messiah at St John’s, Smith Square during the Christmas season, twinges of excitement are undeniable. Conductor Stephen Layton clearly possesses both affection and respect for Händel’s score, qualities that are evident throughout this performance. Presiding over forces of proportions (twenty-four players, including harpsichordist and organist, and thirty-one choristers) that are likely similar to those employed by Händel, Maestro Layton offers an approach to Messiah that honors the scholarship of the past thirty years without carving away all the fat and forcing down the throats of his listeners a parched, dustily academic Messiah. Even with relatively small ensembles of players and singers at his disposal, Maestro Layton summons suitable swells of sound for the grand choruses; not the stirring cacophonies familiar from the legendary performances conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Malcolm Sargent, of course, but grandeur on a scale appropriate to the music in what might be taken for more or less its original form. Where Maestro Layton nods most perceptibly to the Grand Tradition of Beecham and Sargent is in choices of tempo. Rather than setting everything at a rapid pace after the manner of many period-practice specialists, Maestro Layton is unafraid of giving his singers – solo and choral – time in which to execute their divisions cleanly and crisply. Likewise, there is attention in Maestro Layton’s work to preserving momentum in numbers with slower tempi: ‘He was despised,’ for instance, is given a devoutly expansive performance that never threatens to lag. Maestro Layton perhaps proves most successful because he contributes to Messiah’s extensive discography a shapely, compelling performance that is not encumbered by any efforts at making an ostentatious ‘personal stamp’ on the score.

In the context of this recording, Polyphony seem to be an ideal ensemble for Messiah. Using both female and male altos and a careful distribution among singers that avoids over-prominence in any of the parts, Polyphony sing with secure, pointed tone and deliver the complex fugal passages with complete mastery. The ensemble’s hushed singing in a number like ‘Since by man came death’ is raptly beautiful, but they are also successful in summoning the tonal resources required to bring thrilling vigor to the famously extroverted choruses. Polyphony’s training and commitment are evident in the fact that no weak links emerge among any of the voices as the performance progresses. In this, they are superbly supported by the Britten Sinfonia, one of Britain’s busiest and most acclaimed chamber orchestras. The Sinfonia complement Polyphony with equal virtuosity and rhythmic accuracy, doubling the voices in fugues with perfect precision. Solo passages among the instruments are elegantly handled without compromising the integrity of the ensemble playing. The Sinfonia adapt their playing to the style of each number, bringing a particularly pleasing lightness to the Arcadian Pifa. Guided by Maestro Layton, both Polyphony and the Britten Sinfonia contribute music-making that honors both tradition and scholarship without making of Messiah a museum piece.

Encountered first among the quartet of British soloists, tenor Allan Clayton sings his opening recitative and aria with technical aplomb, the divisions sung with apparent ease. In his later, more contemplative arias, Mr. Clayton remains very impressive: the anguished ‘'Behold and see’ draws from him very expressive singing that vividly conveys the meaning of the text without jeopardizing the beauty of the voice. Mr. Clayton’s performance reveals an exciting young voice with first-rate potential.

Bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams commands attention and admiration in each of his contributions to the performance. His opening recitative, ‘Thus saith the Lord of Hosts,’ is delivered with powerful tone and astonishing technique. For a singer who displays such authority in the vocal intricacies of Baroque music, Mr. Foster-Williams possesses a rich and rolling voice, reminiscent (among his countrymen) more of the magnificent Gwynne Howell than any of the thinner-voiced, Baroque-specialist basses. In this recording, Mr. Foster-Williams sings with attention to the text and to the subtle nuances of Händel’s word-painting, coloring his tone to match the inflections of the music. Each of Mr. Foster-Williams’ arias is a feast, but his accounts of ‘Why do the nations’ and ‘The trumpet shall sound’ are of special note. In recent memory, only the young Samuel Ramey rivals Mr. Foster-Williams’ performance of his arias in Messiah for flair and vocal opulence.

Several recorded performances of Messiah have floundered with the use of a countertenor in the alto arias. This recording is fortunate, however, to include the work of young countertenor Iestyn Davies, who also recorded Messiah with Edward Higginbottom for Naxos. [Mr. Clayton, too, has previously recorded Messiah, in EMI’s set drawn from an April 2009 performance broadcast worldwide from King’s College, Cambridge.] In each of his arias, Mr. Davies sings with great assurance and remarkably even, beautiful tone. Many countertenors lack the tonal depth to fully convey the sorrow of ‘He was despised,’ but this aria is perhaps the most touching and purely lovely portion of Mr. Davies’ performance. His ornamentation of his arias is tasteful and stylish, and his alertness to the emotional progression of the music is uninhibited by its difficulty. Mr. Davies has not the slightest hint of the ‘hootiness’ that affects many countertenors, especially those trained in the British tradition, and he gives evidence in this performance not merely of an unusually fine voice but also of first-rank artistry.

Like her colleagues, soprano Julia Doyle sings with crispness and good diction, shaping her reflective arias with poise. Her great coloratura challenge, ‘Rejoice greatly,’ is met delightfully, the divisions tossed off with an apt sense of joy. Ms. Doyle also ornaments gracefully, crowning several of her solos with gleaming, interpolated top notes. Ms. Doyle conquers the soprano’s greatest test in Messiah, the radiant ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ with an approach free from affectation: giving full value to the breadth of the music, Ms. Doyle highlights the quiet exaltation of the text with the purity of her singing. Ms. Doyle’s performance makes a very positive impression and on the whole stands proud among her recorded rivals, whose ranks include many of the finest sopranos of the past century.

The version of Messiah performed for this recording essentially follows the sequence likely devised by Händel for use in London in 1750, when ‘But who may abide’ was substantially recomposed for the famous castrato Guadagni. ‘But who may abide’ and ‘Thou art gone up on high’ are therefore heard in their alto incarnations, while ‘But thou didst not leave’ is assigned to the soprano.

Scholarship is a tool necessary to any quest for understanding of the historical foundations and cultural significance of a particular score. Academics are not at the heart of Messiah, however, and this surely explains why, decades after their musical values have been discredited as antiquated and sometimes embarrassingly wrongheaded, many listeners cling with soulful devotion to their Messiah recordings that present the score on a Wagnerian scale. The stylistic nuts and bolts of an ensemble’s approach to Messiah are not as important as the spirit with which they take up the music. Hyperion’s new recording, offering an ensemble of conductor, soloists, choristers, and orchestra who all perform with unimpeded vitality, restores to Messiah its capacity to inspire without challenging the listener to a period-practice duel. It is the sort of performance about which one remembers the beautiful catharsis of the journey rather than the bumps and twists of every road.

CD REVIEW: Johann Sebastian Bach – SONATAS FOR FLUTE & HARPSICHORD (Joshua Smith, flute; Jory Vinikour, harpsichord; DELOS)

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750) – Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord, BWV 1020, 1030 – 1032; Partita for Solo Flute, BWV 1013: Joshua Smith, flute; Jory Vinikour, harpsichord [recorded in First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland, OH, during December 2008; DELOS DE 3402]

The visceral appeal of music is a marvel that cannot be fully explained with even the most eloquent words.  Physiologically, it is a function of synapses being engaged at an almost primordial level, of extraordinarily complicated series of responses to aural stimuli.  The metaphysics of music, though less tangible in a scientific sense, are more readily comprehensible.  A critical element of the natural grandiloquence of a memorable musical experience is surely derived from the fact that at its heart music is a triumph over the unexpected, over the listener’s fear of disappointment within the limitations of individual exposure.  Because it requires both a medium and an audience, music is never truly solitary and is always new.

Recordings are technological witnesses to listeners’ fears of musical betrayal.  There are those instances in which a listener, having lavished affection on an artist’s recordings, attends a performance by that artist and feels the excruciating deflation of a genuine respect when the artist in the flesh is not an unflawed copy of the artist familiar from records.  Conversely, there are artists of whose prodigious talents in live performance there are only glimpses on recordings.  Invaluable as efforts at preservation in the case of towering individual interpretations and conservation in the case of works that teeter at the edge of obscurity are, recordings are inevitably perilous for artists.  Making a superb recording is not the same enterprise as giving a memorably fine performance before an audience.  It is unfortunately frequent that audiences and listeners discern this before the artists themselves fully fathom the precariousness of their good intentions.

There is no shortage of recordings of the four sonatas for flauto traverso and cembalo offered on this disc by Joshua Smith and Jory Vinikour, with a multitude of versions from both popular concert flautists playing modern flutes and period-performance specialists playing Baroque instruments.  It would be disingenuous to suggest that these sonatas, even with their considerable discography, are standard-repertory fodder, however.  Perhaps, like so many Baroque works that have been revived during the past quarter-century, these sonatas – gems of form that reveal Bach at his apex as a composer of chamber music – have merely awaited discovery by artists who, in performance and on records, not only understand without exaggerating their musical significance but also regard them as their composer must have intended, as vehicles for artistic collaboration and exchange of the highest order.

Without understating the impact of the technical brilliance of the playing, it was obvious to the audience for their December 2008 recital [reviewed on this site] that followed the recording sessions that produced this disc that Mr. Smith shared with Mr. Vinikour completely natural affinities for the collaboration and exchange required by this music, along with an unforced artistic partnership that made their playing seem almost to emanate from two bodies drawing upon one soul.  In the case of that magical evening, it is not merely a poetic conceit to suggest that the soul that inhabited those two artists was Music itself.

Listening to this disc, not as a souvenir of that recital but as a performance with its own unique provenance, it is difficult to keep in mind the work that both artists devoted to this project.  Nothing is shirked, no challenge is met with anything other than absolute mastery, and yet the music-making is of such quality that there is no sense of effort.  For artists who enjoy the levels of virtuosity attained by Mr. Smith and Mr. Vinikour, the supreme difficulties of the music are in its interpretation.  Nevertheless, this appearance of ease should not distract from the incredible feats of technical execution that fill this recording.

The disc opens with the B-minor Sonata (BWV 1030), perhaps the most technically demanding but also rewarding of Bach’s sonatas for flute.  Questions of authenticity surround much of the extant flute music in the catalogue of Bach’s output, but the B-minor sonata is indisputably the work of Johann Sebastian Bach.  In both this sonata and the A-major sonata (BWV 1032), the harpsichord lines are composed in full, a departure from the continuo style of accompaniment typically employed in sonatas for solo instruments by Bach and his contemporaries.  Though limiting the keyboardist’s opportunities for extemporaneous ornamentation, this structure elevates the harpsichord’s music to a stature equivalent to that for the flute, creating a true partnership that must be maintained by both players in order for the music to make its full effect.  The rare grace of the collaboration between Mr. Smith and Mr. Vinikour here bears its sweetest fruit.  With every technical requirement met, these artists explore the emotional niches of this sonata, revealing harmonic progressions that suggest psychological insights one might expect to encounter in the chamber music of Beethoven or Brahms.

The G-minor Sonata (BWV 1020) that follows is somewhat dubious in terms of both authorship and instrumentation.  There exists a version of the score which features a solo violin rather than a flute, and some scholars have suggested (though without offering any compellingly concrete evidence) that the sonata is partially or wholly the work of Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel.  The sonata is a fine work, whatever its origins may be, and it receives a lovely performance from Mr. Smith and Mr. Vinikour.

The E-flat major sonata (BWV 1031) has also been subject to conjecture concerning Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach having lent his hand to its composition, but the considerable quality of the music has ensured that the sonata has remained in the flute canon.  In this sonata, the harpsichord part is conceived more in the traditional continuo fashion of Bach’s time, but the roles are equalized to a great degree in the final movement.  It is the second movement, the Siciliana, that is truly exquisite, however, and Mr. Smith plays the flute’s expansive melodic lines with an ideal blend of freedom and control.  In this context, the Siciliana seems almost a vocalise, the flute taking on the qualities of a delightfully pure, melancholic voice.  The final movement is underlined by a sense of joy that is apparent in the performance it receives.

The last work on this disc is the A-major Sonata (BWV 1032), another piece that is slightly problematic.  Ironically, BWV 1032 was the only one of Bach’s flute sonatas that was preserved in Bach’s autograph manuscript, but this fell victim like so many priceless works of art to World War II.  Forty-six bars from the beginning of the first movement are thus lost to modern musicians, most of whom perform editions that employ a reconstruction utilizing existing thematic material.  Returning to the structure in which the harpsichord part is fully composed, Mr. Vinikour is given (especially in the opening movement) terrific opportunities to display his impressive skills for powerful, theatrical playing.  Pursuing melodic paths that are different but always complementary, both flautist and harpsichordist take parallel journeys that illuminate their individual strengths as prodigiously-talented musicians, their seemingly unflappable instincts for chamber playing, and Bach’s innate genius for injecting even small musical gestures with grandeur.

Mr. Smith completes the disc with a performance of the A-minor Partita for solo flute (BWV 1013).  Consisting of four movements derived from dance forms popular in the Baroque era (Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Bourée Anglaise), the Partita offers a compact but comprehensive treatise on Bach’s style of composition for the flute.  Phrases of serene beauty are joined comfortably with passages of bravura intensity, all of them played by Mr. Smith with his customary ‘singing’ tone and attention to detail.  It is worth restating in the context of the Partita that, when listening to this disc, it is easy to forget what a formidable technique is required in order to play the music at this level.

Thankfully, the flute sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach are sufficiently familiar to musicians and music lovers that Mr. Smith and Mr. Vinikour are spared the daunting task of rehabilitating them.  What they achieve in this recording is the revitalization of the music in a way that, rather than altering the presentation of the works, alters the listener’s perceptions of them.  Listening to this recording, there is the sense not of hearing these sonatas again but of hearing them anew, in a performance that is appropriate to the period in which they were composed but not encumbered by it.  It is Baroque, of course, but Mr. Smith and Mr. Vinikour allow the listener to appreciate through their playing that this is, foremost, music.  The recording is, just as their Cleveland recital was, a complete triumph over the unexpected.

ARTIST PROFILE: Andrew Foster-Williams, bass-baritone

When at last the clouds of war that obscured the European continent for much of the first half of the twentieth century cleared, it quickly became evident that artistic environments were changed almost as significantly as physical and political landscapes. In the entre-guerres generation, Wagner singing was the crowning glory of the world’s opera houses, with singers such as Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, and Friedrich Schorr setting standards of heroic vocalism that seemed insurmountable – and, to a large degree, remain unmatched even now. After World War II, during which these operatic titans and their contemporaries persevered despite extraordinary hardships and the disturbing Nazi annexation of Wagner’s music, it was undeniable that the musical world bore genuine scars of strife. The age of benchmark Wagnerians, of truly revelatory Brünnhildes and Isoldes – Martha Mödl, Birgit Nilsson, and Astrid Varnay excepted – was in its twilight. In opera as in nature, though, evening paves the way to dawn, and the mid-century sun rose on an era of great male singers, of tenors, baritones, and basses whose extraordinary artistry, versatility, and vocal quality spanned the standard repertory from Monteverdi to Menotti. It was perhaps easy for contemporary observers to underestimate the value of this lode of male vocal talent. These remarkable singers – Bergonzi, Corelli, del Monaco, Tagliavini, and Tucker; Bastianini, Gobbi, Merrill, Taddei, and Warren; Bruscantini, Christoff, Hotter, London, and Siepi – en masse formed an uncommonly reliable base in the pyramidal structure of opera, the foundation being so uniformly impressive that those few high-voiced singers who achieved the dizzy heights of the genre’s zenith shone with new brilliance. A wonder of the operatic world during the decades at the middle of the twentieth century was the way in which companies throughout the world could offer their audiences credible alternating casts of tenors, baritones, and basses in standard-repertory works. Metropolitan Opera audiences for the 1954 – 55 season’s revival of Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera were not badly served for having to choose between Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker as Riccardo or Josef Metternich and Leonard Warren as Renato. Though Herva Nelli sang Amelia in a Philadelphia performance by the MET forces, the main-stage Ballo in New York in the spring of 1955 had only one soprano heroine: Zinka Milanov. [It is worth noting that it was in this revival that, on 7 January 1955, Marian Anderson made her MET début as Ulrica. Slightly more than three weeks later, Renata Tebaldi made her house début as Verdi’s Desdemona, opposite Mario del Monaco and Leonard Warren and with the young James McCracken in the secondary role of Roderigo.] This production was typical of the era in which a rich field of male vocal talent could be harvested to provide suitably glamorous settings for the rarer stars among female singers.

Also as in nature, however, opera as a living art is cyclical. There are throughout opera’s history discernible vocal and dramatic patterns. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the pendulum swung again in the direction of high-voiced domination of opera, though with the added (and, from the perspective of the great tenors, baritones, and basses of the Mid-Century, surely unanticipated) participation of countertenors. Whereas the MET in 1955 could boast alternating casts of superb male artists to support a single star soprano (two, in fact: Roberta Peters sang Oscar), in 2009 the sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, and – it still seems unlikely, frankly – countertenors find themselves in something nearer to a wasteland among low-voiced singers. [Questions stemming from the obvious fact that, among the MET’s 2009 – 10 roster of celebrated and box-office-star female singers, there are no true successors to Milanov and Tebaldi, nor even the overused but underrated Herva Nelli, will be ignored in the context of this article.] The rosters of the world’s best opera companies include a plethora of sopranos experienced with Donizetti’s Lucia but display an unfortunate paucity of qualified Edgardos, Enricos, and Raimondos. This shift has also enacted an equivalent change in the focus of conventional operatic ‘stardom.’ It is now an atypically talented tenor, baritone, or bass who is a meteor darting through a darkened sky.

In this environment, perhaps it should not have been surprising that the most impressively memorable performance in Washington National Opera’s 2008 production of Händel’s Tamerlano – a production that featured an exceptional mezzo-soprano, a fine young soprano, perhaps the most famous of countertenors, and a tenor who holds the distinction after a long, triumphant career of being perhaps the only living opera singer whose name is almost universally known – came from a young British bass-baritone. In the secondary role of Leone, this remarkable singer rose to the challenge of his only aria, a transplant from another of Händel’s scores, with singing of the sort that regrettably is an endangered species among male singers of his generation. Fuelled by the success of his performances in Tamerlano, Washington National Opera are involved in negotiations aimed at bringing this exciting young artist back to their stage, and Washington-area audiences have reason to give thanks to the National Symphony Orchestra for the opportunity to again hear (as Alaouddin in concert performances of Albert Roussel’s Padmâvatî) the wonderful voice of Andrew Foster-Williams.

Born in Wigan in Greater Manchester, where he states that he ‘didn’t grow up with Classical music,’ Mr. Foster-Williams pursued musical studies that led him to London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Music, from which he graduated with top honors. In addition to being named an Associate of the Royal Academy, Mr. Foster-Williams won several important prizes during his studies, including the Royal College of Music’s Opera Award, the Flora Nielsen Recital Prize, and the Elena Gerhardt Lieder Prize. Mr. Foster-Williams also took second prize in the 1998 Kathleen Ferrier Awards. These studies and awards built the foundation on which Mr. Foster-Williams continues to build an impressive and stimulating career in both operatic and concert repertory. ‘I spent a lot of time [at the Royal Academy] learning how to sing and discovering the roots of what kind of performer I would like to be,’ he says. ‘I think it’s fair to say that I was a rather green young man when I left college.’

A vital aspect of Mr. Foster-Williams’ artistry is the way in which his performances combine vocal beauty with complete emotional engagement. An insightful attention to the nurturing of this blend was characteristic of Mr. Foster-Williams’ formative operatic experiences. ‘I was extremely influenced by my first singing teacher [Roy Dillon]. He had a profound impact on my life in many ways, and he was solely responsible for my initiation into the world of music. The lasting memory I have of him is his commitment and great love of the art of singing. He made all the hard work, learning, and preparation seem such a pleasure,’ he recollects. Recalling performances that he attended while he was a student at the Royal Academy, Mr. Foster-Williams notes, ‘Whilst I was studiously preoccupied in trying to analyze the vocal skills of the artists I was watching perform, it’s actually performances from the likes of Philip Langridge, Thomas Allen, and John Tomlinson that linger in my mind. These artists are more than great singers: they are masters of communication. They manage to make singing and acting a symbiotic whole. Even as a ‘vocal-obsessed’ student they managed to seduce me into forgetting about my conscious studies and just made me watch them and be immersed in their performance and, therefore, the piece as a whole. These are my kind of singers, and the kind of singer I strive to be myself.’ This goal of being a singer for whom both vocal poise and dramatic verisimilitude are paramount is central to Mr. Foster-Williams’ artistry. His progress in achieving this goal is immediately evident when hearing his singing, even on recordings.

An element of Mr. Foster-Williams’ success as a communicative artist of the first order undoubtedly stems from a quality conspicuously lacking in many young singers: a pervasive self-awareness, or an individual performing philosophy. Mr. Foster-Williams observes, ‘Singing is a deeply personal thing to do, and [singers] are required to ‘lay ourselves on the line’ and be vulnerable every time we do it. As a consequence, we probably spend more time analyzing ourselves, and our equilibrium with the world, than the average person does. When we have found peace with the practical headaches of the profession, and can embrace the magic of the situation we find ourselves in, then the perceptions we have of other things (like art and humanity) are equally positive and have an air of wonder about them. Each day in my work I am immersed in dialectic about love and grief, about faith and power, violence and pity, torment and ecstasy. I feel like my mind and eyes are open to all aspects and interpretations of art – because they have to be. Watching my colleagues create and achieve something exquisite as a daily occurrence is very humbling. This is privilege! Whilst I know I live in a world with much conflict, I feel that, in a small way, I am directly involved in reaching out to those who find some solace in the world of music and theatre.’ His dedications to self-reflection and thoughtful observation of the work of his colleagues are apparent in Mr. Foster-Williams’ singing. His interpretation of Golaud in Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells’ Pelléas et Mélisande revealed not only a very attractive timbre but honesty, vitality, and emotional directness that made this brutish character unusually moving, even at his most abusive, an accomplishment acclaimed by audiences and critics alike.

‘I am very focused when I perform,’ Mr. Foster-Williams says. ‘I don’t allow myself to step out of the moment. I know that if I were to step out of the moment then it all becomes about ‘me’ rather than the music, drama, and audience. It is only when one is focused that one can truly call upon all the resources one has built up and learnt.’ The nature of the roles in Mr. Foster-Williams’ repertory – ranging from Rameau and Händel, through Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, and bel canto repertory, to Britten and Stravinsky – inspires him to refine his approach to vocal acting in order to meaningfully portray such an array of characters to whom, in their turns, virtually no emotions are foreign. ‘It’s about precision,’ Mr. Foster-Williams suggests. ‘It is necessary, sometimes, to portray an emotion in a ‘larger than life’ way in order for it to read on the back row. This should be fine as long as the action and intension [are] very specific, focused and precise. Any flailing around in an uncontrolled way will lose the concentration of the audience. When one is doing something intimate on stage - and the required objective is to ‘draw the audience in’ - then the actions, however minimal, still have to be very focused and with clear intent so that the audience can still read it properly. Precision and clarity must come first before they can give way to spontaneity and naturalness. One has to develop an innate feel for how the audience is reading your gestures and intensions and alter accordingly and constantly. A performer has to understand that the only acceptable performance is one that the audience indulges in.’

Considerations of ‘appropriate’ repertory might seem largely irrelevant in the case of a singer with Mr. Foster-Williams’ versatility. There are in the recent annals of operatic history many instances of very gifted young singers squandering their talents by taking on too many roles – or the wrong roles – too quickly, however. Artistic curiosity is a thoroughly admirable trait, but its mingling with ambition, whether self-imposed or resulting from external pressures, can be fatal for a young voice. To his credit, Mr. Foster-Williams displays an uncanny comprehension of the necessary balance between exploration and setting boundaries within the parameters of one’s own voice. ‘We have entered a potentially dangerous stage in the profession; one in which young singers with great talent are encouraged to do too much too soon,’ he says. ‘The more high-profile work young singers do, the more work they are offered: the eventual result can be disastrous. Lower voices take more time to settle and mature. In this hectic world, it can be frustrating to ‘take time’ (particularly if one is bright and wants to get one’s hands dirty), but strategic building is the name of the game. I have been lucky to have the support of several orchestras and opera companies who have understood the more measured path my voice needed to take.’ It is critical, Mr. Foster-Williams feels, that a young singer ‘is intelligent, trusts one’s own instincts, and aligns oneself with great managers, teachers, and coaches.’

To date, Mr. Foster-Williams’ operatic and concert performances have taken him to the principal musical centers of Europe and North America. On the horizon are débuts with the Detroit Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic, as well as his first performance in New York’s famed Carnegie Hall. Mr. Foster-Williams’ discography is expanded this month with the release of a new recording of Messiah with Stephen Layton and the Britten Sinfonia on Hyperion. His superb performance in Opera Rara’s studio recording of Mercadante’s Virginia will be followed by his work in the same label’s forthcoming recording of Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira. For Chandos, Mr. Foster-Williams has recorded the role of Lotario in Händel’s Flavio with Christian Curnyn, with whom he also recorded Ormonte in Partenope. [Click here to explore and purchase items from Mr. Foster-Williams’ extensive discography.]

The impact of Mr. Foster-Williams’ artistry was summarized with near-ideal focus by Nick Kimberley, writing in London’s Evening Standard of Mr. Foster-Williams’ performance in Messiah at St. John’s Smith Square in December 2008. ‘His bass light and flexible,’ Mr. Kimberley wrote, ‘he sang as if telling a story that he really wanted us to understand. That story may be ancient but here it had the urgency of tomorrow’s headlines.’ This eagerness to communicate with audiences through singing is indicative of the integrity with which Mr. Foster-Williams practices his craft. That his work successfully conveys to audiences the stories that he wants them to understand is indicative of the presence of a great artist.

‘The most gratifying element of singing for me has something to do with connection,’ Mr. Foster-Williams says. ‘When I know I have served a piece of music well, and truly connected to an audience, it is the most magical feeling!’ Experiencing Mr. Foster-Williams’ singing, it is apparent that this association between connection and magic is self-perpetuating: audiences connect with his performances because there is in his work that elusive and wondrous element of magic. The shimmering beauty of the voice commands the ears’ full attention, the emotional and intellectual involvement inspire the heart’s complete surrender, and ultimately one leaves the theatre with memories of both performance and performer. In the context of any performance in which he participates, the renown of his colleagues notwithstanding, Andrew Foster-Williams never goes unnoticed.

The author’s sincerest thanks are extended to Mr. Foster-Williams for his extraordinary grace, wit, and kindness in responding to questions for this article and for his assistance in providing the photographs used.

Click here to visit Mr. Foster-Williams’ official website.

Mr. Foster-Williams is represented in Europe by Maxine Robertson of Maxine Robertson Management and in North America by Carrie Sykes of Schwalbe and Partners.

CD REVIEW: Ludwig van Beethoven – SYMPHONY No. 9 (L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet; DECCA Eloquence)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827) – Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125: J. Sutherland, N. Procter, A. Dermota, A. van Mill; Choeur du Brassus/André Charlet, Choeur des Jeunes d’Église National de Vandoise; L’Orchestra de la Suisse Romande; Ernest Ansermet [recorded in Victoria Hall, Geneva, during April 1959; DECCA Eloquence 480 0397 (Australia)]

For a piece of such fame and wide-ranging appeal, it is bizarre to note how problematic Beethoven’s iconic Ninth Symphony has proved to be on records.  Seemingly, even conductors for whom the Symphony was a reliably successful concert piece were tempted to unleash distracting and damaging idiosyncrasies in recording studios.  Perhaps it is merely that a listener is carried along in the concert hall by the grandeur of the music, quibbles about the conductor’s approach to this or that passage being swept aside by the overall experience.  The Symphony’s discography is extensive, however, and any listener is virtually assured of finding a recorded performance – or, more likely for true connoisseurs, a group of performances, taken as a whole – that provides satisfaction.

In most instances, it is therefore of dubious interest except to the most obsessive completists when a particular performance of the Symphony is recovered from whatever graveyard there is for recordings, dusted off, and reissued.  Heard with cumulative exposure to nearly eight decades of recorded history, any performance from the archives, as it were, faces comparison with legendary recordings conducted by the greatest baton-wielding luminaries of the twentieth century: Toscanini, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Böhm, Karajan, Solti – an exceptional array of talent ranging from the avant garde late Romanticism inherited from Mahler to post-Impressionist modernism.  That the Symphony not only survives the varied styles of most of these musicians but thrives in some of them is indicative of the true quality of the score, one that in nearly two centuries of being trotted out for every occasion requiring festive music on a suitably grand scale teeters on the brink of imposed banality.  The Ninth may not be Beethoven’s finest symphony, nor indeed truly deserving of the prominent place it holds in the international concert repertory and in the hearts of even casual music-lovers, but it is an important work that manages to be more than a clichéd paean to humanity.

A vital element in a conductor’s successful mastery of the Ninth Symphony, especially on records, is the possession of an understanding that wrong-headed choices in the first three movements are not mitigated by strong work in the universally familiar final movement.  Towering as the final movement is, the Symphony is emphatically a symbiotic whole in which failures in any of the four movements vitiates the impact of the complete piece.  A key to the success of this performance by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, which admittedly has never been altogether absent from the shelves but is now granted a new lease on life in a fresh-sounding remastering from Australian DECCA’s Eloquence series, is that Ernest Ansermet displays an inherent comprehension of the fact that the Symphony is a score to be conducted with care and attention to detail from first note to last, without overinflating any of the movements beyond its natural place in the complex structure of the work.

In terms of interpretation and realization of his musical goals, Maestro Ansermet was very fortunate in recording his cycle of Beethoven Symphonies with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, an ensemble founded by Maestro Ansermet in 1918 and shaped by his artistic ideals during the forty-nine years of his tenure as the Orchestra’s director.  The unity of approach throughout the Ninth Symphony’s four movements is impressive, with no single movement being given greater emphasis.  The sonorities produced by the Orchestra are unique: from the very first note, the listener is keenly aware that this performance is not coming from Vienna or Berlin.  String and woodwind tones are thinner than in the famous German-speaking orchestras, and there is greater focus on producing a blended sound that encourages an anonymity of individual instruments except in solo passages.  This approach is similar but not identical to the way in which Maestro Ansermet conducted his remarkable recorded performances of modern French and Francophile repertory (de Falla, Ravel, Stravinsky, and the like).  There is a small concession to Viennese tradition, but the style remains very much Maestro Ansermet’s.  Despite sounding very different from most German orchestras and the imitative American and British ensembles that play the Symphony, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande play very well, facing every challenge with musical integrity that reveals to the listener that emotional engagement with the score is far more meaningful than virtuosity for its own sake.

Some critics have suggested during the past two decades that Maestro Ansermet’s conducting of Beethoven was ahead of its time in the sense that his work resembles that of the later breed of ‘historically-informed’ conductors who seek to restore nineteenth-century practices to modern performances of Beethoven’s music.  The inspiration for these observations is evident in the first movement [Allego ma non troppo, un poco maestoso].  There is a consistent drive for clarity among instrumental textures, with tempi gauged to generate momentum without sacrificing precision and rhythmic buoyancy.  Unlike many latter-day conductors who have justified similar approaches by citing scholars’ opinions, Maestro Ansermet undoubtedly drew his insights from the score.  Rather than consciously striving to pioneer a restoratively ‘informed’ performance philosophy, Maestro Ansermet was conducting as he felt that the music itself dictated.

The second movement, the complicated Scherzo [Molto vivace – Presto], likewise benefits from Maestro Ansermet’s efforts at preserving clarity and bounce.  This is a restrained performance that impresses with its poise, completely avoiding the sometimes exhilarating but more often tiresome sense of barely-averted catastrophe in many go-for-broke performances of the movement.  This performance reminds the listener that the Scherzo truly (for lack of a better word) swings.  This is music played as exciting, tuneful music and not as a string of tones that are primarily symbolic.

The lyrical third movement [Adagio molto e cantabile] finds Maestro Ansermet and his Orchestra at their best, the tempi faster than are often heard and the playing luminous.  Here, too, clarity is at the core of the performance.  Octaves from the strings in the course of the variations reveal minor infelicities of intonation, but the playing of the solo horn is eloquent.  Refusing to exploit the sentimentality of this movement, Maestro Ansermet exhibits an awareness of the notion that despair is not necessarily the impetus of the profundity of Beethoven’s slow movements.  Here, the movement is presented as contemplative rather than despondent, touching the heart as surely with its simplicity as other performances do with dolefulness.

It must be granted that Maestro Ansermet has at his disposal in the final movement an unlikely but uncommonly euphonious quartet of soloists: Dame Joan Sutherland (in her first of many recordings for DECCA), Norma Procter, Anton Dermota, and Arnold van Mill.  Both ladies sing with the beauty and security of tone familiar to listeners who know their contemporaneous work in Händel.  One knows instinctively that with Ms. Sutherland there is no need to fear the high lines of the soprano solos.  Mr. van Mill launches his recitative with obvious relish and rounded tone.  In the course of his contribution, a few instances of questionable German diction undermine the strength of his performance, but it is a strong piece of singing.  The eternally youthful Mr. Dermota is somewhat light of voice for his assignment (and perhaps seems more so when compared with the many performances in which erstwhile Heldentenors struggle with the music) but is steady and ardent.  The female choristers are given an especially hard task, the long-held top A’s revealing weaknesses among the sopranos.  On balance, though, the singing is capable and pleasing; indeed, rather more than that in the work of the solo quartet, who are among the finest on records.

Instrumentally, there are misfires in the final movement, some of which result from Maestro Ansermet’s pacing.  A listener might easily be forgiven when hearing the blatancy of the brass fanfares that launch the movement for imagining that he sees Silver and his ubiquitous rider silhouetted by the rising sun in some high Alpine pass.  As in the preceding three movements, conductor and players make considerable efforts to avoid lapsing into the saccharine murk of facile passion, but there are moments in the final movement in which a more expansive approach would be welcome.  Tempi remain well-judged, but there is a sense of the constant preservation of clarity being at odds with the committed singing of the choristers.  None of the small points of inconsistency throw the performance off course, but the total impact of the final movement is very slightly lessened.  After three unconventional but delightfully challenging movements, the performance of the fourth movement emerges as something of an anticlimax.  It is nonetheless a vibrantly imaginative and rousing performance.

With the boon of an orchestra of his own creation, Ernest Ansermet enriched DECCA’s legacy not only with groundbreaking recordings of ‘new’ repertory but also with a series of Beethoven’s Symphonies that remains competitive because of the conductor’s uncomplicated but poetic manner.  This performance of the Ninth Symphony crowned the superb achievement of that series, and it is impossible to believe when listening to the DECCA Eloquence release that the recording is now fifty years old.  Maestro Ansermet inspired his players and singers to give a performance for the studio microphones that is redolent of the concert hall, quirks marginalized by the persuasive power of the music.  Heart and genuine respect for Beethoven’s coveted score prove more inspiring than oversized musical gestures and Viennese sophistication for conductor, players, and listener.

CD REVIEW: Pietro Mascagni – L’AMICO FRITZ (R. Alagna, A. Gheorghiu, L. Polverelli, G. Petean; DGG)

PIETRO MASCAGNI (1863 – 1945): L’Amico Fritz – R. Alagna (Fritz Kobus), A. Gheorghiu (Suzel), L. Polverelli (Beppe), G. Petean (David), Y. Kang (Federico), H.-W. Lee (Hanezò), A. Fernández (Caterina); Chor und Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin; Alberto Veronesi [recorded during a concert performance at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 20 September 2008; DGG 477 8358 9]

To many English-speaking audiences, the name Mascagni inspires thoughts almost solely of Cavalleria rusticana, the brilliant success of the composer’s youth that inspired him later in life to lament having been ‘crowned before [he] was king.’  It is unquestionably upon Cavalleria rusticana that Mascagni’s enduring international reputation rests, but he in fact composed a further sixteen works for the stage, many of which were tremendously popular in the years following their first performances.  Some of the finest of these – Iris, Isabeau, Lodoletta, and Il piccolo Marat – have retained their attractiveness to Italian audiences and are still performed in Italian theatres, even without luring the finer singers of our age into participation.

An exception to this neglect by famous singers has to some extent been enjoyed by L’Amico Fritz, Mascagni’s setting of an idyllic but discreetly ironic love story drawn from a French novel by Émile Erckmann and Pierre-Alexandre Chatrian.  First performed on 31 October 1891, the début cast included Fernando De Lucia (remembered by record collectors as a brilliant interpreter of bel canto arias) and Emma Calvé.  During World War II, L’Amico Fritz became a congenial vehicle for Ferruccio Tagliavini and Pia Tassinari, whose popularity in their roles facilitated the opera’s first recording in 1942.  After the passage of twenty-six years, L’Amico Fritz found another pair of ideally-matched interpreters, two young singers who were acquainted virtually from their shared infancy in Modena, Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni.  Following a successful production of the opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, EMI captured the charm and freshness of Pavarotti’s and Freni’s performances in the recording studio, producing a lovely, touching, and superbly-sung performance that introduced worldwide audiences to the finest qualities of L’Amico Fritz.

Taken from an almost absurdly acclaimed concert performance at Deutsche Oper Berlin, Deutsche Grammophon’s new recording of L’Amico Fritz both succeeds and fails as a representation of what might be termed a twenty-first century approach to the score and as a successor to the 1968 EMI recording.  Sonically, the DGG set has the clear advantage of modern, digital sound, an advantage that is only very slightly compromised by the ‘live’ circumstances of the recording.  In fact, the Berlin audience for this concert performance were very quiet (or, else, have been very carefully edited), and the ambient noises that affect even the most controlled of ‘live’ recording situations are minimized.  The orchestra of the Deutsche Oper play with tone that, while not idiomatically Italianate in the manner of the formidable La Scala ensembles of previous generations, combines precision with involvement.  Instrumental blends are judged with attention to Mascagni’s often lively and original tonal palette.  The chorus sing with intonational and rhythmic accuracy that do not always avoid conjuring memories of the grand Germanic liturgical traditions, but their diction is generally clear and scarcely encumbered by north-of-the-Alps accents.  As with some of the famous recordings of Italian scores made with Teutonic orchestras by Herbert von Karajan, a measure of authentically Italian chiaroscuro is sacrificed, but the integrity of the music-making by both chorus and orchestra is rewarding in its own right.

Presiding over this performance and contributing to what DGG are promoting as a sort of Verismo Series (following his conducting of the label’s studio recording of Puccini’s Edgar with Plácido Domingo), Alberto Veronesi brings a lively musical intelligence and seemingly genuine interest in the music to this performance.  Concert performances can prove more challenging than staged productions for conductors in that animation and engagement among cast and musicians can be elusive, but Maestro Veronesi shapes the performance in a way that evokes subtle dramatic action.  Though there are instances in which the pacing of individual melodic phrases seems forced, on the whole Maestro Veronesi conducts with grace and an ear for the score’s nuances, avoiding the idiosyncratic missteps of many of today’s operatic conductors but also lacking the complete mastery of the idiom remembered from pre-war conductors.

An obvious advance beyond previous recorded performances boasted by DGG’s new recording is in the casting of secondary roles, which benefit here from several fine voices.  Completely surpassing her recorded rivals is Italian mezzo-soprano Laura Polverelli as the violin-playing gypsy Beppe.  Considerable experience in Baroque and bel canto scores has perhaps provided Ms. Polverelli with a special talent for adapting her lovely tone to male roles.  In this performance, Ms. Polverelli gives Beppe a winsome, even slightly mischievous profile, singing with charm and emotional honesty.  Only occasional bouts with unsteadiness prevent Ms. Polverelli’s performance from being beyond reproach, but she brings to Beppe both a voice and a performance more ingratiating than those of her predecessors.  David, the wily village Rabbi (a kinsman of Alfonso in Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Kecal in Smetana’s Prodaná nevěsta), is sung with assurance and firm tone by the young Romanian baritone George Petean: what is missing is a sense of genuine connection with the character.  David is not, in the context of L’Amico Fritz, a character study of Shakespearean proportions – no Shylock, he – but there are elements of rustic charm, sly but well-intentioned manipulation, and self-effacing humor that are short-changed in this performance.  With a David understated to the point of insignificance, the ironic undertones of the opera are ignored: in short, the opera becomes another unexceptional story of boy and girl overcoming adversity, of a decidedly inert nature in this case, in order to develop a love that has seemed pre-ordained since the curtain went up on the first scene.  None of this is meant to suggest that Mr. Petean’s vocalism is in any way poor, but David is one of those strangely numerous roles in opera in which merely good singing does not carry the day.  The opera’s other, smaller roles are taken by capable singers whose performances do not hide the fact that Mascagni and his librettists (Nicola Daspuro and Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti) gave them few opportunities to make themselves noticed.

Certainly, the primary focus of any listener who purchases or elects to spend ninety minutes with this recording will be on the star couple in the leading roles of Fritz and Suzel.  It is sadly ironic that this recording of an opera in which two reluctant lovers are brought together is released at the same time at which its stars have publicly confirmed their separation and intentions for divorce.  Nonetheless, personal issues were held at bay for those ninety minutes in Berlin, and we are given a persuasive, even touching account of blossoming love.  It could be argued that the role of an ingénue like Suzel is no longer ‘right’ for Angela Gheorghiu.  She proved herself during the past two Metropolitan Opera seasons to remain effective as Donizetti’s Adina and Puccini’s Mimì, however, and she ultimately proves effective as Suzel, as well.  Ms. Gheorghiu’s voice is darker and less mobile, particularly in the upper register, than it was when her shimmering lyric soprano first captured the attention and appreciation of audiences, but she has developed measurably as an interpreter – rather than merely a singer – of music.  The role of Suzel does not engage the fiery dramatic sensibilities Ms. Gheorghiu has fostered during the past decade of her career, but she is a sensitive and sensible singer who understands the value of letting music of lyrical melodic beauty make its effect without overloading the line with dramatic histrionics.  Still, Ms. Gheorghiu’s approach to Suzel is vastly different from that employed by Mirella Freni, who sang and recorded the role very early in her international career.  Ms. Gheorghiu’s is a more aware, less naive Suzel, one for whom love is a less frightening and embarrassing emotion.  To her credit, Ms. Gheorghiu resists any temptations to artificially lighten or adjust her voice to the requirements of Suzel’s music but also avoids allowing the dark patina of her timbre to create an impression of sluggishness or indifference.  Ms. Gheorghiu sings with passion on an appropriate scale and surpasses her work on several recent recordings, including the much-discussed Madama Butterfly.  Ultimately, it is possible to debate whether Ms. Gheorghiu’s performance amounts to a wholly successful account of Suzel, but her performance impresses when evaluated on its own merits.

There can be little debate about the success of Roberto Alagna’s singing in the title role.  Not unlike Ms. Gheorghiu, Mr. Alagna has developed into an artist of greater subtlety than he was in the early years of his career, the voice gaining thrust but losing some of the pliancy with which he conquered audiences in lyric roles.  As with Plácido Domingo at an equivalent point in his career, Mr. Alagna’s experience in heavier roles is audible, not so much in wear to the voice as in a discernibly ‘larger’ approach to singing in general.  Significantly, some of Mr. Domingo’s finest performances of lighter roles such as Nemorino (a staple of Mr. Alagna’s early career) were sung after his assumption of Verdi’s Alvaro, Don Carlo, and Otello.  There has always been with Mr. Alagna a slightly worrisome notion of very fine natural vocal material being used with imperfect technique.  There have also been numerous instances like those of his two MET performances of Gounod’s Roméo in December 2007, in which, contrary to logic, Mr. Alagna has achieved sublime heights of musical and dramatic eloquence.  If this performance of Fritz does not represent Mr. Alagna at his absolute best, the deviation from that high standard is very slight indeed.  In terms of liquid ease in vocalizing, Mr. Alagna compares unfavorably with Luciano Pavarotti, who – like Ms. Freni – recorded his role in L’Amico Fritz in the early years of his career.  In portraying a rounded character whose emotional responses to the action are inherent in his singing, however, Mr. Alagna is second to no other Fritz on records.  Mr. Alagna brings a stronger tone to Fritz than either Tagliavini or Pavarotti, and this fits ideally with the darker tones of Ms. Gheorghiu’s Suzel.  Most compellingly, Mr. Alagna is completely inside his role, even in the context of a concert performance, using diction and projection to compensate for the elements of lightness and playfulness that may have been reduced by time and a rigorous career.  In moments of stress (which, to be frank, are less plentiful than might be imagined), great care is taken to maintain correct pitch and sustain lines.  It is possible to feel that, taken as a whole, Mr. Alagna’s performance increases Fritz’s importance beyond what can be musically justified, but the quality of the singing and vocal acting are wonderful.  Ms. Gheorghiu’s Suzel is an improvement on some of her recent recorded performances because those showed her beautiful voice subjected to pushing and dramatic overstatement.  Mr. Alagna’s Fritz is among his best recorded performances because it preserves an occasion of committed, emotionally-charged singing from a very fine voice on form.

The two previous commercial recordings of L’Amico Fritz presented listeners with youthful accounts of love blossoming like the vines on Fritz’s estate.  The new DGG recording, largely thanks to the singing of Mr. Alagna and Ms. Gheorghiu, gives a perceptibly more mature view of the score, emphasizing the expansive nature of the emotions at the core of the work.  L’Amico Fritz was Mascagni’s second opera, composed when its creator was in his mid-twenties.  Perhaps the seeming depth of this performance is not altogether faithful to the spirit of Mascagni’s score, but it is thoroughly refreshing to encounter a performance of a heart-on-the-sleeve romantic opera in which it is clear that love is a serious business in which there inevitably are casualties.

Poetry Corner / Coin de Poésie

 To a distant friend on his birthday (a Sonnet)

Were this the day when our smiles could meet

Over a table strewn with street-vendor flowers

Rather than across continents and seas

And skies separated by ten trillion stars,

I would laugh at the solemn hours

Of whispering your name to carved-stone saints,

Rejoicing at what even for a stolen moment is real.

But the deep does not part under prayers

That I might run, cavalries of cares at my heels,

To buy at a corner stand some silly thing to say

All I feel but shall never speak,

So I watch as the moon dims her gaze

And hope that turned from me she winks at you

As if to say, ‘He remembers.’

CD REVIEW: Gaetano Donizetti – PARISINA (C. Giannattasio, J. Bros, D. Solari, N. Ulivieri, A. Taylor; Opera Rara)

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Parisina – C. Giannattasio (Parisina), J. Bros (Ugo), D. Solari (Azzo), N. Ulivieri (Ernesto), A. Taylor (Imelda); Geoffrey Mitchell Choir; London Philharmonic Orchestra; David Parry [recorded in Henry Wood Hall, London, during December 2008; Opera Rara ORC40]

In his extensive liner notes accompanying this recording, typical of Opera Rara’s inimitably high standards of scholarship and presentation, Jeremy Commons suggests that Parisina’s failure to claim a permanent place in the international repertory can be attributed in part to ‘the fact that the great sopranos of the Donizetti revival, Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland [patroness of Opera Rara], did not include it in their repertories.’ For all her remarkable and unprecedented contributions to global understanding and acceptance of bel canto in general, Maria Callas’ exploration of the Donizetti canon was confined to three operas: Lucia di Lammermoor (hardly a forgotten score when Callas revitalized the dramatic profile of the title role), Anna Bolena (in which Callas was truly revelatory), and Poliuto. Dame Joan Sutherland took on a greater number of Donizetti heroines, but Parisina’s tessitura is slightly low to have been completely suitable for the Australian prima donna. Montserrat Caballé, Spain’s queen of bel canto, did sing Parisina, however, and her 1974 concert performance at Carnegie Hall is widely considered not only a great personal triumph but also one of the truly significant nights in the history of that venue. As Mr. Commons also notes in his article, Donizetti composed a number of meritorious scores that continue to slumber in obscurity, especially as the bel canto Renaissance has in the past two decades been mostly supplanted by a revival of interest in Baroque music. If, as Opera Rara strive to prove with this new studio recording, Parisina is an opera as satisfying and musically rewarding as, say, Partenope, the advocacy of an artist of Caballé’s ilk should have proved an important boost in the score’s fortunes. That Parisina remains largely unknown arouses curiosity about what has been missed – or, in a less flattering sense, what the opera itself is missing.

Despite having justly earned Donizetti’s exasperation with its long-delayed gestation, Felice Romani’s libretto for Parisina is among the finest of the bel canto period. Romani famously lamented that his verses for Parisina, the value of which he shrewdly sensed, were set by Donizetti rather than Bellini (for whom Romani provided seven libretti, including those for Norma and La Sonnambula). Opera Rara have provided Romani’s complete libretto, including passages that were not set by Donizetti. Reading the libretto both with and without Donizetti’s excisions, it is apparent that the composer’s judicious editing rendered Romani’s libretto both more dramatically effective and more ingratiatingly poetic. Metaphors likening human emotions to natural phenomena abound, providing Donizetti with ample and mostly creatively-seized opportunities for tone painting. In the scene in which Azzo (the aging, jealous husband who denounced a previous wife for imagined infidelity, with fatal consequences for the hapless bride) observes Parisina (Azzo’s current wife, faithful despite having loved another man since their shared youth) as she sleeps and hears her utter in the course of her dreams Ugo’s name (he being the requiting object of Parisina’s innocent passion), both Donizetti and Romani attained the zeniths of their respective arts. With music of thrilling tension and deceptive beauty, Donizetti fully revealed the brilliance of Romani’s verses and presaged the exhilarating and heart-wrenching final scene of Verdi’s Otello.

Despite many passages that are recognizably Donizetti at his finest and a duet for the lovers that resembles in structure, dramatic function, and thematic development Lucia’s and Edgardo’s ‘Verranno a te sull’aure,’ Parisina lacks the easily memorable tunes that have doubtlessly played a significant role in keeping Lucia di Lammermoor and L’Elisir d’Amore in the affections of audiences worldwide. Even if one loathes these scores and their heart-on-the-sleeve sentiments, melodies like the main themes of ‘Verranno a te,’ Lucia’s great Sextet, ‘Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali,’ and ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ are not easily expunged from the memory. Though possessing ensembles that rival the best in any of Donizetti’s scores and in ‘Sogno talor’ an aria as hauntingly beautiful as any solo number in nineteenth-century opera, Parisina ultimately impressed most with its grandiose but never vulgar drama and the dignity of its utterance. Parisina is a worthy sister to Anna Bolena, Lucia, and Maria Stuarda, her lines in some instances even more finely-crafted than theirs but wanting the melodic individuality that forever stamps the recollection of a character’s plight upon a listener’s mind.

Opera Rara make with this recording a persuasive case for Parisina, as indeed they do with virtually every score that they commit to disc. At the podium, David Parry adds another jewel to his crown of achievements in bel canto repertory, presiding over a performance that ideally blends grace with fire. Tempi are carefully judged with a masterful touch for shaping musical progression naturally, speeds in lyrical portions of the score expansive without languishing and those in the more overtly melodramatic passages wonderfully propulsive without leaving the singers gasping behind. Maestro Parry’s winning approach is magnificently abetted by the singers of the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir, under the direction of Renato Balsadonna, and the players of the London Philharmonic. The choristers give little evidence of being Britons, and the integrated tone they bring to both intimate and boldly extroverted passages is ringing and impressive. The Philharmonic players execute their music on a level that matches the work of the world’s best orchestras, playing with dash when required and, following Maestro Parry’s lead, accompanying the soloists with subtlety and attention to detail. More so than in some of Donizetti’s more celebrated scores, the orchestra in Parisina have a significant part in developing the opera’s drama, and this is vigorously realized. Maestro Parry again proves his idiomatic suitability for bel canto repertory and surpasses by a considerable margin the current international standard for what is thought to be ‘stylish’ conducting of bel canto scores.

The only ‘small’ role in Parisina is that of Imelda (Parisina’s confidante), though even she makes significant contributions to the drama. The role is cast from strength in Opera Rara’s recording with mezzo-soprano Ann Taylor, a fine singer whose varied experience ranges from Händel and Gluck to contemporary music. In this performance, Miss Taylor discloses a pleasing voice and a technique capable of facing the modest hurdles Donizetti set for her; that is, modest but debilitating to many underprepared singers who might sign on expecting only a few lines in recitatives and doubling of the top lines in choruses. Dramatically, Miss Taylor enacts all of Imelda’s concern for her mistress through coloration of the voice, darkening her vowels in moments of stress to underline Imelda’s terror and foreboding. Remembering all the poor singing that can be heard on recordings and in staged performances in a crucial supporting role such as Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor, it is of great solace to hear an artist of Miss Taylor’s accomplishments as Imelda.

Ernesto, Ugo’s adopted father (it is revealed in the course of the opera that Ugo is none other than the unknown son of Azzo and his cast-off wife, Matilde), is a bass role cut from the same cloth as Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor. Ernesto’s roles as the distressed father-figure and voice of reason and conscience are shared with Raimondo, and their vocal lines are likewise similar. Ernesto is sung in this performance by bass Nicola Ulivieri, and – as with the Azzo and Parisina – it is beneficial to hear a native Italian singer in the role. Mr. Ulivieri is attentive to the innate profundity of Ernesto’s pronouncements and sings throughout the performance with firm and pointed tone, producing a superb high note in the scene in which he reveals to Azzo that Ugo is his natural son. Mr. Ulivieri’s singing produces the suspicion that his vocal center of gravity is at the higher end of the bass spectrum, however, occasionally compromising Donizetti’s intended effects in Ernesto’s lower register. Only rarely does this impede the resolution of a phrase, and Mr. Ulivieri minimizes the impact of the relative weakness of his lowest notes by leaning into the text as his vocal lines descend, compensating for lack of sheer heft with closely-judged dramatic emphasis. In Mr. Ulivieri’s performance, Ernesto’s concern for his adopted son’s predicament is palpable, his singing shaped by alertness to the meaning of the text. On the whole, Ernesto is a more interesting character, musically and dramatically, than Lucia’s Raimondo, and he is admirably portrayed by Mr. Ulivieri.

Azzo shares many similarities with Alfonso in Donizetti’s Lucrezia di Borgia (not least that both of them are Dukes of Ferrara) and Verdi’s Conte di Luna. A deeply insecure man whose almost psychotically jealous nature has already resulted in the repudiation of his first wife (Ugo’s mother), Azzo is consumed at the start of Parisina with suspicions of his current wife’s presumed infidelity. These suspicions are the dramatic core of the opera, and tragedy is precipitated by the reality that the devotion between Parisina and Ugo is born of a pure love, the product of their shared childhood. His unyielding menace notwithstanding, Azzo is the most vividly-drawn character in the opera, and Donizetti shaped the role with music of impressive range and vitality. That vitality is brought to the fore by the committed singing of Italian baritone Dario Solari. Mr. Solari reveals in this performance a solid voice of middle weight, the timbre dark without jeopardizing vowel placement or the clarity of his diction. In terms of vocal weight, Azzo is a step further than Lucia’s Enrico towards the towering baritone roles of middle-period Verdi. It is easy to suspect that a successful Rigoletto would likewise prove an effective Azzo. Combining a thoughtful but voracious approach to the role with a voice on good form, Mr. Solari is a thoroughly successful Azzo. If it is more difficult to imagine him proving a completely effective Rigoletto, this can be attributed in part to Mr. Solari’s possession of a good baritone voice of the modern sort; vowels open and on the breath and consonants rounded to minimize impact on legato. Dramatically, Mr. Solari convinces as a relentlessly threatening character whose few moments of lyricism are undermined by doubts. In a sense, the final scene in which Azzo has his son murdered and heartlessly reveals the corpse to Parisina represents a pre-Freudian psychotic break, and Mr. Solari rises to the challenges of both this scene and that in which Azzo overhears his sleeping wife utter Ugo’s name. Listeners familiar with Caballé’s Carnegie Hall concert performance of Parisina may have been spoiled by hearing the wonderful Québécois baritone Louis Quilico (a justifiably famous Rigoletto) as Azzo, but Mr. Solari brings off the full measure of the role on his own scale.

Ugo, the object of Parisina’s innocent affection, is sung by Catalan tenor and bel canto specialist José Bros. Mr. Bros has to his credit an impressive array of successes in bel canto in the world’s opera houses and on records, not least in the title role of Opera Rara’s recording (taken from a pair of concert performances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. Though heavier than some bel canto tenor roles, Ugo was composed for Gilbert-Louis Duprez, the first tenor known to have taken top C’s from the chest (and who, five years after the premiere of Parisina, created the role of Benvenuto Cellini for Berlioz), ensuring the role’s prominence and high tessitura. Ugo indeed has much distinguished music despite the lack of a set piece of the unforgettable impact of Edgardo’s Tomb Scene in Lucia or Roberto’s Prison Scene in Roberto Devereux. In theory, it could be argued that Mr. Bros possesses a voice that bears distinct similarities to contemporary accounts of Duprez’s. During the past few years, the bright patina of Mr. Bros’ voice has dimmed somewhat, but he retains an attractive, slender tone that can take on a metallic, somewhat nasal edge as he ascends into his highest register. As Ugo, he sings with no shortage of involvement and sensitivity to the text (though words containing the letter ‘z’ often receive a decidedly Castilian rather than a idiomatically Italian pronunciation). As ever, the reach and technical accomplishment of Mr. Bros’ singing are impressive, and there are many moments of beauty in Ugo’s lyrical passages. Ugo’s expressions of confusion with his adopted father, frustration and defiance with Azzo, and tenderness with Parisina are meaningfully contrasted. Mr. Bros endeavors manfully to avoid placing the voice under pressure unduly, raising the suspicion (as elsewhere among the cast) that a slightly larger voice would be more apt for the role, but he cleverly puts instances of stress to dramatic use. These qualities contribute to a sense that Mr. Bros has the role well in hand, and he easily outclasses his only recorded rivals in Ugo’s music.

Donizetti conceived the title role of Parisina for Caroline Ungher, the Austrian singer who was the contralto soloist in the first performances of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Ninth Symphony (and who, tradition would have it, performed the sad duty of turning the deaf composer to face the frenzied applause of the audience at the Symphony’s end). In addition to Donizetti’s Parisina and the aforementioned Beethoven parts, Ungher also created the roles of Isoletta in Bellini’s La Straniera, Antonina in Donizetti’s Belisario, and the title role in Donizetti’s Maria de Rudenz. The variety of these roles suggests that Ungher was, like her nineteenth-century counterparts Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran (and, in the twentieth century, Maria Callas), an artist whose voice could not be accurately assigned to any one Fach. In Parisina, she faced music of wide range, coloratura complexity, and lyrical richness. In twenty-first century performances, roles such as those composed for Ungher present casting challenges in that the tessitura is frequently too low for coloratura sopranos (as in the case of Dame Joan Sutherland, noted at the start) and uncomfortably high for modern mezzo-sopranos. In this regard, Opera Rara cast Parisina with a gifted singer whose voice is a seamless compromise between mezzo-soprano and soprano ranges, the Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio (who also made a significant impression as Elena, a role with similarly uncertain tessitura, in Opera Rara’s concert-performance recording of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago). The timbre of Miss Giannattasio’s voice is not immediately identifiable, at least not in the manner in which a listener instantly recognizes the voice of Callas or Sutherland, but hers is a lovely, shimmering voice that survives Parisina’s music without audible distress. In moments of greatest emotional anguish, Miss Giannattasio covers the tone slightly, tempering the voice’s natural sheen without decreasing its beauty or purity. From the perspective of technique, Miss Giannattasio is a much better singer than many of the sopranos singing similar repertory throughout the world, and she makes a fascinating effect in Parisina’s great aria ‘Sogno talor di correre.’ Central to her dramatic suitability for the role, Miss Giannattasio displays the admirable acumen to convey the tragic maturity and weight of Parsinia’s sorrow while retaining an obviously youthful vocal profile. The incensed terror of her responses to Azzo’s eavesdropping on her slumbering utterance of Ugo’s name heighten the foreshadowing of the related scene in Verdi’s Otello and prove thrilling in the context of Parisina. Miss Giannattasio’s contributions to the final scene, in which she collapses in the arms of her ladies-in-waiting after being shown the corpse of the murdered Ugo, are wrenching, the tone both ethereal and febrile. In this performance, Miss Giannattasio proves – despite a less-imposing voice – a legitimate rival to Caballé as Parisina and gives further evidence of what seems a very promising career in bel canto.

Perhaps the single finest collective achievement of the cast (including chorus, orchestra, and conductor) of this recording of Parisina is that, in the long-standing tradition of Opera Rara, there is not even the faintest suggestion of condescension to what is, by twenty-first century standards, a blood-and-thunder melodrama ripe for parody. Every participant in this performance gives every appearance of complete dedication, not to a task but to the presentation of a neglected masterwork. Parisina deserves this luxury treatment far more than most of the Baroque and bel canto works unearthed during the past three decades, and Opera Rara have lavished on the score the resources and commitment major labels brought to the mainstream Verdi and Wagner operas a generation or two ago. Bel canto endures because its emphasis is (or should be) pure beauty: this recording of Parisina, preserving fine work from all its contributors, reveals that Opera Rara understand this as fully now as when their first recording was released thirty-two years ago.

ARTIST PROFILE: Stephen Costello, tenor (winner of the 2009 Richard Tucker Award)

On 7 September, the 2009 – 10 Royal Opera (Covent Garden) season will be launched with the first of two concert performances of Gaetano Donizetti’s rarely-performed opera semiseria Linda di Chamounix, seemingly absent from London stages since a 1963 performance at the St. Pancras Town Hall.  Boasting an exciting cast including Cuban-American soprano Eglise Gutiérrez (in her Covent Garden début), Mariana Pizzolato, Ludovic Tézier, Alessandro Corbelli, and Luciano Botelho, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, the concerts will be recorded for commercial release by Opera Rara.  Making his Royal Opera House début in the role of Carlo will be one of the finest young tenors presently before the public, Stephen Costello, 2009 recipient of the prestigious Richard Tucker Award.

A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Costello graduated in 2007 from that city’s renowned Academy of Vocal Arts after having already earned an incredible plethora of distinctions: First Prize in the 2006 George London Foundation for Singers Competition, First and Audience Prizes in the Giargiari Competition, and First Prize in the Licia Albanese Puccini Foundation Competition, in addition to the Academy of Vocal Arts’ Opera Club Award.  Surely the most precious prize Mr. Costello earned during his studies at AVA is the hand of his beautiful wife, soprano Ailyn Pérez, with whom he frequently performs.

Prior even to his graduation from AVA, Mr. Costello achieved considerable successes within a six-month period in 2006 with his début in staged opera as Rodolfo in La Bohème at Fort Worth Opera and his European début at Opéra National de Bordeaux as Nemorino in L’Elisir d’Amore.  Since that time, Mr. Costello’s repertory has expanded with critically-acclaimed performances of roles by Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Mascagni, and Puccini, and even the Steuermann in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (opposite the towering Holländer of James Morris).

Mr. Costello first captured the collective attention of the American opera-going public on 13 November 2005 at Carnegie Hall with his swaggering account of the Fisherman (who, in the spirit of the score, has his share of top C’s) in an Opera Orchestra of New York concert performance of Rossini’s sprawling Guillaume Tell.  Critic Robert Levine wrote in a review of the performance on ClassicsToday.com that Mr. Costello ‘was graceful as a fisherman who sings a lovely serenade in the first act (with its own pair of high Cs!).’  The journey of one of American’s most beautiful voices was launched.

Among even the finest native-born American singers of previous generations, the road to the Metropolitan Opera almost invariably wound through dozens of smaller European houses and regional companies in North America.  Instances such as that encountered on 6 December 1941, in which at short notice the young Astrid Varnay made her MET début as Sieglinde in a performance of Die Walküre opposite the Brünnhilde of Helen Traubel, are rare, a sort of cosmic alignment of destiny and necessity.  Far more often, the young American singer’s entrance into the MET roster is less heralded, like that of James McCracken as Parpignol in the Company’s 21 November 1953 performance of La Bohème.

The MET’s 2007 – 2008 season began on 24 September 2007 with the premiere of Mary Zimmerman’s much-discussed new production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.  Singing the name-part for the first time at the MET was French coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay, whose flight from sanity was brought on by her slaying of Lucia’s arranged husband Arturo, sung by Mr. Costello in his MET début.  Anthony Tommasini wrote in the 26 September edition of the New York Times that ‘an appealing young tenor, Stephen Costello, had a solid Met debut as the well-meaning Arturo.’  Writing on MusicalCriticism.com, John Woods expanded on Mr. Tommasini’s thoughts, noting that ‘a very strong impression was made by the young Stephen Costello as Arturo, which is no mean feat in such a small role.’  Freelance writers, bloggers, and listeners who heard the performance on the MET’s Sirius radio channel echoed this praise and took note of the MET début of an important artist.

Much as in the case of Astrid Varnay more than six decades earlier, destiny and necessity aligned on 25 October 2007, when neither of the tenors headlining the Zimmerman Lucia (Marcello Giordani and Giuseppe Filianoti) was contracted to sing his role.  Young California-born tenor Todd Wilander made his MET début as Arturo, and Mr. Costello was promoted to the role of Edgardo.  The evening’s performance was likewise broadcast over the MET’s Sirius radio channel, relaying into homes across America and throughout the world the emergence of a remarkable artist.  Singing opposite the ethereally beautiful Lucia of the astonishingly gifted French soprano Annick Massis, an artist whose warmth of voice and personality created a Lucia very different from Natalie Dessay’s embodiment of the role, Mr. Costello rose magnificently to the challenge of singing such an important role at such a young age with America’s most significant opera company, sounding nowhere in the score finer than in Edgardo’s Tomb Scene at the end of the evening.  From that evening, Mr. Costello’s career has spanned the globe in an array of electrifying performances in a myriad assortment of roles.

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking with Mr. Costello concerning the progress of his career to date, his musical interests and inspirations, and some of his future plans.

The first things that are apparent, both from hearing Mr. Costello sing and from speaking with him even briefly, are his genuine affection and enthusiasm for singing.  The contrasting wit and humility with which he speaks of his approach to singing reveal not only an astute musical mind but also an unwavering commitment to the art of bel canto, whether in Donizetti, Verdi, or French repertory.

Perhaps it is cruel to suggest that many singers do not exhibit the same intelligence that Mr. Costello exudes in performance and in conversation.  [How gladdened was the heart of this literary scholar to learn that Mr. Costello prepared for his performances as Cassio in Verdi’s Otello at Salzburg by re-reading Shakespeare’s play!]  Jibes about cognitive disabilities among opera singers aside, Mr. Costello’s comments disclosed perhaps the most vital knowledge that should be possessed by any singer, that of the management of his own voice.  The lure of Werther is powerful, for instance, but the title role is safely stored away for future consideration.  Verdi’s Otello is regretfully conceded as an impossibility, even for some point on the distant horizon of Mr. Costello’s career.  [This might seem an obvious distinction, but it eluded Luciano Pavarotti, whose voice was similar in size and reach to Mr. Costello’s: Pavarotti at least confined his attempts at Otello to concert performances.]

Fresh from having enjoyed great success in June as Rinuccio in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at the Festival dei due Mondi at Spoleto (Italy), Mr. Costello looks forward to reprising the role at Covent Garden in October, again opposite the Schicchi of Sir Thomas Allen, whom he describes as a ‘fantastic’ performer who brings great slyness and vigor to his interpretation of Schicchi.  [An interview from Italian television in which Mr. Costello shares his insightful thoughts on the role of Rinuccio in Woody Allen’s production, seen at Spoleto, is posted at the end of this article.]  Mr. Costello also spoke glowingly of a recent Ancona production of Rigoletto in which he was reunited with the ‘wonderful and kind’ Annick Massis, and of working with legendary (and legendarily divisive) conductor Riccardo Muti in the Salzburg production of Otello.  ‘I wonder how he will be received at the MET,’ Mr. Costello said of Maestro Muti, who will conduct for the first time at the MET in February in a new production of Verdi’s Attila.  ‘He is amazing.’

As he considers the next five years of his international career, bel canto continues to have a large presence in Mr. Costello’s diary, supplemented by later and contemporary repertory.  He will return in March 2010 to Dallas Opera, scene of his triumphs as Leicester in Maria Stuarda and the title role Roberto Devereux, to sing Ishmael in the world premiere of Jake Heggie’s opera Moby Dick.  He will take on the challenging role of Sir Riccardo Percy in another of Donizetti’s ‘British’ operas, Anna Bolena, to open the MET’s 2011 – 12 season (opposite, as it is rumored now, Anna Netrebko), following performances of the role in Dallas.  Débuts are scheduled for San Francisco Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and the Wiener Staatsoper (in another of his fine bel canto portrayals, Nemorino in L’Elisir d’Amore).  Mr. Costello remarked that singing bel canto ‘feels comforting for [his] voice.’  He continued by saying, ‘I wake up in the morning after singing bel canto and feel good.’  The seasons ahead offer many opportunities for good mornings.

A theme that I have often examined as both a writer and a musician is that of the solitude endured by the artist in the pursuit of his art.  Viewing this as a matter of the proportions presented in Schubert’s Winterreise is perhaps to overinflate the significance of the issue, but every great artist makes sacrifices in order to give of himself.  In many instances, these sacrifices are most poignantly felt in the inherent difficulties of forming, nurturing, and maintaining meaningful relationships when one or all parties are frequently away or mired in work.  I was very touched in speaking with Mr. Costello by his comments regarding his wife.  Their careers separate them for occasionally extensive periods of time: he is here and she is there, but they are nonetheless always with one another emotionally.  Such support and contentment is at the heart of a truly sublime artistic partnership, and the happiness that results cannot fail to find voice in Mr. Costello’s singing.

The tradition of American singing that produced Eugene Conley and James McCracken, Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker, George Shirley and Vinson Cole is gloriously continued in Stephen Costello.  Possessing a voice with a bright but plangent timbre, even throughout a considerable range that extends to a refulgent upper register, and laden with darker undertones, Mr. Costello already enjoys a career marked by accolades from both critics and audiences.  With both a voice brimming with potential and genuine insightfulness to his credit, he is poised to be the leading tenor of his generation.

Sincerest thanks to Mr. Costello for his time, kindness, and candor.

Thanks also to Neil Funkhouser of Neil Funkhouser Artists Management, by whom Mr. Costello is managed.  Click here to view Mr. Costello’s official profile on the website of Neil Funkhouser Artists Management.

CD REVIEW: Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky [Чайко́вский] – YEVGENY ONEGIN [Евгений Онегин] (Y. Mazurok, T. Milashkina, V. Atlantov, Y. Nesterenko; alto)

PYOTR ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY / Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский (1840 – 1893): Yevgeny Onegin / Евгений Онегин, Op. 24: Y. Mazurok (Yevgeny Onegin), T. Milashkina (Tatyana), V. Atlantov (Lensky), Y. Nesterenko (Gremin), T. Sinyavskaya (Olga), T. Tugarinova (Larina), L. Avdeeva (Filippyevna), L. Kuznetsov (Triquet), V. Yaroslavtsev (Zaretsky); Chorus and Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow; Gennady Cherkasov [recorded in Radio Studio 5, Moscow, in 1984(?); alto 2007]

In 1979, the officially sanctioned record label of the Soviet Union, Melodiya, brought together four of the Bolshoi Theatre’s leading singers – Yuri Mazurok, Tamara Milashkina, Vladimir Atlantov, and Yevgeny Nesterenko – with Mark Ermler, a popular conductor at the Bolshoi who would briefly serve as the Company’s Music Director two decades later, to record Tchaikovsky’s towering masterwork of lyric theatre, Yevgeny Onegin.  Both Mazurok and Atlantov had recorded their respective roles before, along with Tamara Sinyavskaya’s Olga, in a studio recording of Onegin conducted by the great ‘cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and featuring his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, as Tatyana.  Critical response to the Melodiya recording was largely unfavorable, particularly when the new set was compared with the Rostropovich recording and the 1956 performance conducted by Boris Khaikin in which the unsurpassed Tatyana of the youthful Vishnevskaya was preserved.  The circumstances under which the present recording was made therefore remain somewhat mysterious.  Released, according to the accompanying liner notes, for the first time outside of Russian by the alto label in an indisputably good mastering by Paul Arden-Taylor, this Yevgeny Onegin may be fresh to the field despite its vintage.

An examination of the forces involved in the recording and the venue in which the performance is said to have been recorded introduces further questions.  An admired professor at the Moscow Conservatory for nearly fifty years, Gennady Cherkasov (1930 – 2002) was for an extended period the de facto artistic director of the musical enterprises of USSR Radio and Television, and the bulk of his recordings were made either with USSR Radio forces or the Moscow Philharmonic.  The matter of the provenance of this recording is further complicated by the fact that the choral and orchestral forces of the Bolshoi Theatre, the cited performers in this performance, were most often recorded in that Theatre, their manners of singing and playing having been trained specially for the acoustical ambience of the Bolshoi.  If truly recorded in Moscow’s Radio Studio 5 under Maestro Cherkasov’s baton, it would be far more likely that the chorus and orchestra would have been those of the USSR Radio.

There remains, too, the obvious question of why another recording of Yevgeny Onegin with the same principals recorded by Melodiya in 1979 (three of whom, as previously noted, had recorded their roles in 1970 for Rostropovich) would have been thought artistically necessary or commercially viable.  A compact-disc reissue (from LP transfers) of the 1979 Yevgeny Onegin by an independent European label erroneously cited Gennady Cherkasov rather than Mark Ermler as the conductor of that recording, a mistake detected and revealed to the record-buying public by the French publication Diapason.  Is it possible, then, that a similar unintentional corruption is responsible for the ambiguous information concerning the present release?  Even if this is the case, what information suggested to the editorial staff of that small European label that Cherkasov could have been the conductor of the performance in question?  Unfortunately, information concerning the recording’s principal artists is sketchy at best, as is often the case with singers whose careers were mostly made in theatres in the Soviet Union, and comprehensive discographies of Yevgeny Onegin offer few clues.

Sadly, the Rostropovich Yevgeny Onegin, originally recorded for EMI, was available only briefly on compact discs in France in a transfer by the Chant du Monde label, a release that was likely quite limited and is now virtually impossible to find.  Though Melodiya have recently reissued many of their classic operatic recordings, the 1979 Ermler Yevgeny Onegin has thus far been passed over in justifiable preference for the Khaikin recording with Vishnevkaya’s near-ideal Tatyana.  Having heard only murky-sounding excerpts from Ermler’s recording on a compact disc clandestinely transferred from a scratchy LP is a poor standard for comparison when trying to determine whether the performance issued by alto is, in fact, the Ermler recording in another guise.  There is, after all, a precedent for this sort of duplicity in Melodiya’s catalogue: the voice of George London was dubbed over the master tapes of an earlier recording of Boris Godunov with Ivan Petrov, conducted by Alexander Melik-Pasheyev, in order to manufacture a souvenir of London’s triumphant Bolshoi performances as the troubled tsar.  Comparing those dim-sounding excerpts from Ermler’s performance with the present recording, there are reference points that suggest both that the two recordings do indeed contain the same performance.  Whatever the truth concerning this ‘new’ Onegin from alto may be, the recording presents the casual musical detective with a muddle of which Dame Agatha Christie could have been proud.

If this is the 1979 Ermler recording, resuscitated and re-attributed to Gennady Cherkasov, the performance proves more interesting than critical response to the original Melodiya issue indicated.  Though a national institution, it must be admitted that the Bolshoi forces are not to Russian repertory what the orchestras and choirs of La Scala and the Wiener Staatsoper are to their respective national traditions.  Precision of attack and accuracy of intonation are not always readily evident in Bolshoi performances, but instances of sloppiness are often easily forgotten when the results of imperfect execution are exciting, idiomatic performances.  Except perhaps in the ball scene and the final confrontation between Onegin and Tatyana, Yevgeny Onegin is not a score in which overt excitement is paramount.  An element of the irony inherent in the score is found in Tchaikovsky’s juxtaposition of the passionate emotional tempests that rage internally with the pastoral scenes, quaint country manners, and courtly demeanors that mask them.  Even a scene as poignant as the duel in which Onegin kills Lensky is stark and bitter rather than outwardly impassioned.  The Bolshoi forces understand this irony, the chorus taking particular care to sing with refinement and understatement that are not always obvious weapons in their arsenal.  A few instances of suspect intonation and haphazard balance aside, the orchestra play very well indeed, the woodwinds especially making amends for many of the sins of their Soviet predecessors.  Above all, the singing and playing are quintessentially Russian, a valuable quality even in a score by a composer as innately cosmopolitan as Tchaikovsky.

Based upon his pedigree, there is no reason to think that Maestro Cherkasov should not have had Yevgeny Onegin well in hand.  His recorded work reveals a capable technician with a flair for handling complex orchestrations on large scales.  Whether it is his work or Ermler’s, there are many fine points to this performance.  The great third-act Polonaise is paced superbly and is integrated into the flow of the performance – as it rarely is – as music ideal for dancing.  Atypically, the listener very much gets the sense of the curtain rising on a ripping party in progress.  Prince Gremin’s aria also stays within the natural progression of the performance, avoiding the common pitfall of being an action-stalling star turn.  The final scene builds momentum gradually, reaching its climax without running out of steam or seeming vulgar.  Earlier on, there are occasional lapses in judgment: far too much is made of the couplets of Monsieur Triquet, for instance, which in this performance are treated almost as exalted utterances from a Gluck opera.  The sense that tragedy looms is palpable, but the humor – ironic or otherwise – of the scene is lost, as well as its charm.  Fortunately, such missteps are infrequent and largely afflict moments of lesser importance.  If the Letter Scene is somewhat deliberate, it at least avoids the almost hysterical rushing heard in many performances.  The performance as a whole, whether it is conducted by Ermler or Cherkasov, is effective and enjoyable without being exceptional.  It gracefully avoids the idiosyncrasies imposed on the music by ‘star’ conductors, however.  Despite some truly memorable vocal performances in the opera’s recorded history, it is interesting to note that no single maestro lingers in the memory as the ideal conductor of Yevgeny Onegin.

Smaller roles on this recording are mostly entrusted to capable artists, producing assured performances.  Mezzo-soprano Tamara Sinyavskaya, another Onegin veteran, is a rather fruity Olga but one well within the drama, complementing her sister Tatyana rather than audibly seeking to outshine her.  Tatyana Tugarinova and Larisa Avdeeva are authoritative as Larina, Olga’s and Tatyana’s mother, and Filippyevna, their nanny, as only singers immersed in the Russian tradition can be.  As Monsieur Triquest, tenor Lev Kuznetsov sings his music as though auditioning for the Simpleton in Boris Godunov, but his voice is steady and pleasant.

The Prince Gremin of Yevgeny Nesterenko is less ostentatious than is often the case.  In particular, Nesterenko sings the beautiful third-act aria with tenderness that, for once, meaningfully depicts the aging Prince’s affection for his young wife.  Nesterenko’s voice is in good condition, and as with so many Slavic artists he is perceptibly more in his element here than in his recordings of non-Russian repertory.  Nesterenko’s is not a Gremin who touches the heart with special insights or uncommon dignity, but the performance is refreshingly free of the disproportionate grandstanding that is as common among recordings of the role as among theatrical performances.

The Onegin of Polish-born baritone Yuri Mazurok is a well-documented creation: recorded in the studio for Rostropovich and Ermler, perhaps for Cherkasov, and again for Vladimir Fedoseyev (for Moscow Radio) and Emil Tchakarov, it is impossible to have explored the Onegin discography in the final quarter of the twentieth century without encountering Mazurok’s interpretation of the title role.  In this performance, Mazurok’s seasoned familiarity with his role is evident, and admittedly an element of routine is discernible.  Mazurok’s voice is well-proportioned for his music, however, and he does not over-sing the role.  Onegin is a dangerous part in that it demands a careful balance of intellectual involvement and easy, beautiful vocalism: lured into the trap of focusing his attention solely or mostly on ‘interpreting’ the role, a baritone can easily overlook the fact that Onegin’s music is quite demanding.  Though it is possible to question why Mazurok’s portrayal of Onegin merited preservation on so many recordings, it is a well-considered, idiomatic performance that, in this recording at least, impresses.  The requisite arrogance is there, but not in quantities great enough to render the character unredeemably off-putting, and the abandon with which Mazurok sings the final scene appropriately conveys Onegin’s desperation.  If not a bar-raising Onegin, this is nonetheless a very good one that outclasses performances by many baritones more famous for the role in the West.

By the time of this recording, whether it was 1979 or 1984, Vladimir Atlantov had a decade of experience in heavy dramatic tenor roles behind him.  Atlantov was for nearly two decades the Bolshoi’s leading portrayer of Verdi’s Otello, a role he performed at the MET on three memorable occasions in the spring of 1994.  Following in the tradition of the brilliant (if politically unsavory) Georgi Nelepp, Atlantov emerged in the early 1970’s as Russia’s finest spinto tenor, his voice blessed with an Italianate ring and a thrilling upper extension.  Hermann in Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya Dama, a role considerably more demanding than Lensky, was perhaps Atlantov’s finest role.  Lensky, usually the property of more lyric voices (not least the fine Russian tenor Ivan Kozlovsky and, especially in German-language performances, the great Slovenian tenor Anton Dermota), was nonetheless a frequent role for Atlantov during the early years of his career in Russia.  His singing in this performance is slightly too large for the music despite laudable efforts at reducing the thrust of the voice, particularly in the upper register.  Unfortunately, this conscious attempt at singing the role on an appropriate scale leads to occasional insecurity and reliance on falsetto: to his credit, Atlantov knows that Lensky should have a modulated, honeyed tone in precisely the part of the voice in which Atlantov’s power and squillo were so impressive in dramatic roles.  Atlantov’s Lensky is without question more passionate than poetic, but he is a credible presence in the drama.  Though neither the great second-act aria nor the duel scene finds Atlantov at his best, his contributions to the scene in which Onegin incites Lensky’s jealous anger, leading to the duel, by flirting with Olga – Lensky’s most declamatory music in the score – are exhilarating.  Though falling short of the standard of the finest lyric tenors in the role, Atlantov’s Lensky in this recording is an alert, convincing performance by one of Russia’s greatest singers.

This recording of Yevgeny Onegin brought Atlantov together with his wife, Tamara Milashkina, an accomplished and admired soprano for whom Tatyana was a frequent role during her Bolshoi career.  Most of the critical commentary by Western observers throughout Milashkina’s career – or what was known of her work through her Melodiya recordings whilst she sang behind the Iron Curtain – was harsh, with writers objecting even in considering her early recordings to a voice that they heard as dull, matronly, and worn.  She was a favorite with Soviet audiences, however, and in addition to earning acclaim in the expected Russian roles was for more than a decade the Bolshoi’s Tosca of choice.  [She was, in fact, twice  recorded as Tosca; in Russian in either 1964 or 1967, depending upon which source one consults, and in Italian in 1976, opposite Atlantov’s Cavaradossi.]  Milashkina’s voice (as recorded, at least) was not an exquisitely beautiful instrument after the models of Marcella Pobbe and Renata Tebaldi, but her recordings are almost entirely free of the ‘Slavic wobble’ that infests the singing of many sopranos born east of the Danube.  Like her colleagues in this performance, Milashkina approaches her role honestly and with complete preparation.  The tingling intensity of Yelena Kruglikova and the young Vishnevskaya is absent, but subtlety informs Milashkina’s singing throughout the performance.  If Tatyana does not undergo in Milashkina’s hands either the sexual awakening depicted by Kruglikova or the intellectual transformation so vividly portrayed by Vishnevskaya, she is a less reticent girl from the start, a slight hint of slyness asserting itself in the more inward moments.  Milashkina does not attempt to create a complicated psychological drama in the Letter Scene but instead focuses on observing all of Tchaikovsky’s instructions and loading the voice into her lines with precision.  Here and elsewhere in her performance a tendency to deliver expansive lines as a series of individual phrases is bothersome, and there is a slightly pallid quality to the highest tones (though this may result as much or more from the engineering than from Milashkina’s vocal estate).  What Milashkina offers is a Tatyana sung without gimmicks, a straightforward performance that holds few surprises but also few disappointments.

As recently as forty years ago, opera aficionados expected to hear Russian operas sung in Russian only by Russian-born or –trained singers.  Record collectors knew the classic Melodiya recordings sung in Russian and otherwise enjoyed local performances of Russian repertory in their own vernacular languages.  This was likewise the case in Russia, where all performances at the Bolshoi – regardless of the origins of the scores – were sung in Russian until virtually the end of the Soviet era.  Increasingly since the cultural and political liberation of the Eastern Bloc, however, artists from all nations, trained after a fashion that minimizes nationalistic distinctions, sing operas from all sectors of the operatic repertory in their original languages.  Compelling arguments exist on both sides of the issue of preferring original-language performances in major opera houses, but there is an undeniable benefit in hearing an opera like Yevgeny Onegin sung in Russian, the linguistic rhythm of the music honored.  A significant measure of the stylistic integrity of the score is lost when it is performed by non-Russian singers singing in Russian, no matter how well they sing or how meticulously they have worked out their diction.  With that consideration in mind, this recording of Yevgeny Onegin is valuable as one of the last examples of the once-plentiful performances derived from the nationalistic, repertory-based system prevalent in the first three quarters of the twentieth century.  Hopefully, the sophistication gained from the newer, international method of singing means that Soviet-era recordings are no longer summarily dismissed as provincial.  There are to this recording of Yevgeny Onegin whiffs of the steppes and perhaps even of bourgeois frustration, but these would not have been foreign to Tchaikovsky.  A committed performance such as this, idiomatically sung and enacted by singers who both knew their music and how to sing it, proves surprisingly competitive.  All that remains is for some musical Miss Marple to sort out the precise details of the Who, What, When, Where, and Why.

IN MEMORIAM: Hildegard Behrens, German dramatic soprano (9 February 1937 – 18 August 2009)

As even her most frenzied admirers accepted in the final years of the 1970’s that Birgit Nilsson’s dominance in the Hochdramatische repertory – especially Strauss’ Elektra and Färberin and Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Isolde – was drawing to its natural close, both opera lovers and the managers of the world’s opera houses searched the ranks of young singers for a suitable successor to Nilsson in German dramatic repertory.  The protean vocal abilities of Nilsson seemed, and indeed have proved to be, not merely once-in-a-generation but once-in-a-century.  Nonetheless, musical voices as significant as Elektra’s and Brünnhilde’s could not fall silent upon Nilsson’s retirement.  During the last two decades of the twentieth century, there surely were respectable, idiomatic performances of German dramatic operas throughout the world, but among the heroines of those performances the undoubted mistress of the Hochdramatische repertory was Hildegard Behrens, who passed away unexpectedly in Tokyo on 18 August.

Born on 9 February 1937 in the town of Varel in Lower Saxony, Behrens pursued a career in jurisprudence before devoting herself to singing.  Initially studying voice in Freiburg, Behrens made her formal operatic debut there in 1971 as the Contessa in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, inauspiciously launching an important career in dramatic roles with success in Mozart.  Following further acclaimed performances in Freiburg, Behrens was invited to join the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, where she gradually progressed to larger, more dramatic roles, culminating with Marie in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, a role with which she remains associated.

It was while rehearsing Wozzeck in Düsseldorf that Behrens first encountered the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, the galvanizing force behind the developments and destructions of several noteworthy operatic careers.  Impressed by Behrens’ Marie, Karajan invited her to Berlin to audition for the 1977 Salzburg Festival production of Strauss’ Salome.  Rewarded with the title role, Behrens enjoyed a triumph at Salzburg and took her success into the recording studio.  Behrens’ Salome on EMI, with Karajan stalwarts José van Dam and Agnes Baltsa as Jochanaan and Herodias, remains after more than thirty years one of the finest entries in the opera’s competitive discography.

In the meantime, Behrens made her formal debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on 15 October 1976 as Giorgetta in Puccini’s Il Tabarro, part of a complete performance of Il Trittico in which Neil Shicoff also made his MET debut (as Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi).  [Behrens had first appeared at the MET two weeks earlier, on 1 October, in a ‘MET Marathon’ gala concert in which she sang Elisabeth’s ‘Dich teure Halle’ from Tannhäuser.]  A further 169 performances followed during the next two decades, ranging from Mozart’s Elettra and Donna Anna and Beethoven’s Leonore, through Santuzza and Tosca, to Brünnhilde in all three of her guises, Isolde, and Berg’s Marie.  It was as Marie that Behrens bade farewell to the MET a decade ago, on 24 April 1999.

Despite myriad successes in Wagner and Strauss roles throughout the world, not least in Munich and Vienna, it is likely as the centerpiece of Otto Schenk’s legendary MET Ring Cycle – on stage, on records, and on video/DVD – that Behrens will be most  remembered, at least in Wagner repertory.  Though it might seem cruel to suggest that a singer’s interpretation of a role was largely unchanging throughout her career, in Behrens’ case this is indicative of the fact that she had thoroughly prepared the role (or, in the case of Brünnhilde, the three roles) prior to offering her interpretation to the public.  In Die Walküre, Behrens’ Brünnhilde bounded onto the stage in the second act, the very vocal and dramatic embodiment of the young, impetuous favorite daughter of a god.  Few Brünnhildes have been more magisterial without being matronly in the Todesverkündigung, and few have expressed the girl’s heartbreak at being cast off by her father more pathetically or with greater sincerity.  In Siegfried, it is virtually impossible to name a Brünnhilde, remembering even Florence Easton, who awakened to love with greater wonder and tonal beauty.  Enduring what she perceives as shattering betrayal and sacrificing herself to union in death with her consort, Behrens’ Brünnhilde became in Götterdämmerung both the archetype and that thing she represents: the Eternal Feminine who offers herself as an instrument of redemption.  Both Nilsson and Varnay sang the three Brünnhildes with greater vocal abandon (and, to be frank, more voice), but Behrens meaningfully personified the post-modern Brünnhilde, first and always a sensitive, emotionally intense woman.

Fortunately for posterity, Behrens was recorded in most of her finest roles: Agathe in Weber’s Der Freischütz (DECCA; Kubelík), Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio (DECCA; Solti), Strauss’ Elektra (Philips; Ozawa, and Naïve; Layer) and Salome (EMI; Karajan), Wagner’s Isolde (Philips; Bernstein) and Brünnhilde (all three roles – DGG; Levine, and EMI; Sawallisch), and Berg’s Marie (DGG; Claudio Abbado).  It is my personal opinion, however, that no recording captures the essence of Behrens as a performer more thrillingly than Sir Georg Solti’s studio recording of Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten, in which Behrens sings the fascinatingly complicated role of the Färberin.  In this performance, Behrens’ Färberin progresses with rare eloquence and psychological directness from the petulant shrew of her first appearance to the woman who understands herself and accepts her role as the divinely-blessed procreator in the final scene.  Behrens conjures many moments of brilliant, richly touching singing, the voice responding with complete commitment to the intricacies of her interpretation and the upper register gleaming and free.  A vital component to an audience’s reaction to the Färberin is that, for all her faults, we must respect her, strive to understand her motivations, pity her, and ultimately embrace her (the role was based to an extent on Strauss’ wife Pauline, after all).  Even in the impersonal environment of the recording studio, Behrens creates a multi-dimensional character who exasperates and intoxicates but inspires genuine affection.  Such was the nature of Behrens’ artistry.

The position that Hildegard Behrens will occupy in the line of great Hochdramatische singers is a matter for debate.  What is more certain is that Behrens was for a generation of opera lovers the definitive Brünnhilde.  For me, Behrens was my first Brünnhilde, the intriguing impetus who inspired me to explore the earlier Brünnhildes of Flagstad, Traubel, Varnay, Mödl, Nilsson, and Dame Gwyneth Jones.  It is not merely sentimentality that secures for Behrens a prominent place in my affections.  Even when singing with a voice less imposing than those of many of her finest older rivals, Behrens possessed the endearing ability to aim her performances squarely at the collective hearts of her audiences, and she rarely missed her mark.  In our digital age, legacies are increasingly insignificant, but it is comforting and exciting to imagine that another magnificent voice now rings through Walhalla.