Voix des Arts: A Voice for the Arts in North Carolina and throughout the World

ARTS IN ACTION: North Carolina native conquers the Metropolitan Opera

2012-01-01T22:00:00.001-05:00

Countertenor and Durham native Anthony Roth Costanzo, who made his début at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in December as Unulfo in Georg Friedrich Händel’s Rodelinda, enjoyed a second success with the Company on New Year’s Eve as Ferdinand in The Enchanted Island, Jeremy Sams’s ‘Baroque fantasy’ using music by Händel, Vivaldi, Rameau, Campra, Leclair, Purcell, Rebel, and Ferrandini. Created especially for the MET at the request of General Manager Peter Gelb, the production—a pasticcio after the fashion of composite works popular in the 18th Century—is conducted by Baroque specialist William Christie, founder of Les Arts Florissants, and features a superb cast including countertenor David Daniels, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, sopranos Danielle de Niese and Lisette Oropesa, bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni, and, in the rôle of the god Neptune, Plácido Domingo. Writing in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini praised Mr. Costanzo’s ‘sweet-toned Ferdinand.’ The Associated Press’s Mike Silverman was particularly impressed by Mr. Costanzo’s singing in the duet ‘I have dreamed you’ (with music lifted from one of Händel’s cantatas) with Ms. Oropesa, which he described as ‘sublime.’

An engaging young artist with an unusually beguiling timbre, Mr. Costanzo has proved his excellence throughout the United States and abroad in productions of repertory ranging from Early Music and Baroque to contemporary music. He is a welcome addition to the Metropolitan Opera’s roster and hopefully one who will be given another opportunity to shine when Thomas Adès’s celebrated The Tempest has its MET premiere in the 2012 – 2013 season.

IN MEMORIAM: Soprano Sena Jurinac, 1921 - 2011

2011-11-24T23:28:00.001-05:00

SENA JURINAC

24 October 1921 – 22 November 2011

The goal of writing for Voix des Arts which I pursue with both greatest pride and strongest zeal is that of objectivity. There are subjects about which even the most dedicated of writers cannot maintain objectivity, however, and for me one such subject is the wondrous soprano Sena Jurinac, who passed away on 22 November at the age of ninety. Few artists have shaped my musical perceptions or affected my understanding and appreciation of music as powerfully as Ms. Jurinac, whose voice will remain in my mind’s ear among the most priceless artistic treasures of the Twentieth Century.

I was only four years old when Ms. Jurinac gave her final performance and so never heard her ‘live,’ and I recall neither when nor in what music I first heard her voice. What I shall never forget, derived solely from recordings of her performances, is the impact of her focused, gorgeous tone in music by Mozart and Richard Strauss. As Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana, even singing in German, Ms. Jurinac combined the intellectual insights of Russian singers like Galina Vishnevskaya with vocal beauty and security seldom heard from Slavic singers. As Puccini’s Cio Cio San, she was all the more moving and ultimately pathetic for carrying herself with such dignity, like a true Japanese, and soaring over Puccini’s dense orchestration with sounds of doomed triumph. As Strauss’s Octavian, she poured out sound that was aurally equivalent to the gleam of the eponymous silver rose, proving the proud but passionate young aristocrat to the core. As Tosca, she was magisterial, nagging but frail and the consummate prima donna, and as Jenůfa she was tormented and ultimately transcendent.

In the music of Mozart, Ms. Jurinac offered in virtually every performance that she sang a veritable masterclass in the art of poised rendering of the Salzburg prodigy’s music. This affinity for the music of Austria’s most famous composer perhaps accounted in part for the affection for Ms. Jurinac that developed in music-loving Vienna, where she was for a generation one of the brightest stars of the Wiener Staatsoper and one of the artists whose brilliance resurrected the Company after the Second World War. As Ilia in Idomeneo, she was from the start a broken woman in search of healing through renewed hope and new love. As Elvira in Don Giovanni, she was too much in love to accept the betrayal she felt so keenly. As the Contessa in Le Nozze di Figaro, she was sustained by memories of the wooing of her Conte. In hindsight, what impresses most in Ms. Jurinac’s singing of Mozart repertory is her ability to be expressive, accurate, and unfailingly stylish without in any way altering the voice with which she sang the music of Beethoven and Wagner. A ‘period’ approach is not required when timeless artistry informs a singer’s work.

For me, to hear the voice of Sena Jurinac is to understand why, after nearly three thousand years, the myth of Orpheus remains meaningful. She was an artist for whom music was the natural expression of human emotion and the path to Olympus. The integrity and intensity with which she sang were remarkable even in an age of superb singers. On this day on which Americans express thanks for blessings of happiness, health, and comfort, fervent thanks are offered for the life and career of the irreplaceable Sena Jurinac.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Verdi’s IL TROVATORE (A. Palombi, L. Daltirus, D. Graves, M. Corvino) – Charlotte, NC; 23 October 2011

2011-10-25T00:34:00.001-04:00

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Il Trovatore – A. Palombi (Manrico), L. Daltirus (Leonora), D. Graves (Azucena), M. Corvino (Conte di Luna), K. Irmiter (Ferrando), J. Wright-Martin (Inez), B. Arreola (Ruiz); Opera Carolina Chorus, Charlotte Symphony Orchestra; James Meena

No one wants to be that guy who, after seeing the production that is the current rage, shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘I just didn’t get it.’ Even in America, where tradition retains a firmer grasp on operatic stages than elsewhere, there are numerous shrugs in the lobbies and stairways of opera houses. One of the most endearing aspects of Opera Carolina’s production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (designed by John Boeshe, directed by Jay Lesenger, and lit by Michael Baumgarten; seen at the Belk Theatre in Blumenthal Performing Arts Center) was that there were no conspicuous efforts at making the opera ‘relevant’ or ‘accessible’ as is now so often the case: this was merely an opera by Verdi, and a very good one whether or not one can embrace the much-criticized libretto, given a stirring performance. There was a clear message to operatic America: if you have tired of attending performances that you do not understand, of operas that you thought you like, come to Charlotte and renew your devotion.

Opera Carolina’s production made effective use of projection technology, employing projected backdrops with minimal physical scenery to conjure the scenic settings of Verdi’s drama. While this arguably went slightly too far on a few occasions, especially in the fiery projection that turned a beautiful canyon into what seemed a scene of horrific inferno during Azucena’s Act-Two description of her mother’s actions, there were evocatively beautiful scenes, not least the convent setting that occurred later in Act Two: the physical set, comprised of two large pillars flanking an enormous crucifix, framed projections of the cloister’s courtyard against a starry sky. The opera’s Spanish setting was always apparent, and the prison setting for the opera’s final scene was also especially beautiful. Costumes were stylish and appropriate, Azucena’s bohemian clothing suggesting both majesty and hardship and Leonora’s luxurious gowns evoking nobility and providing splashes of color in the fading world she inhabits. The production was refreshingly simple in its obvious aim at presenting Verdi’s opera as the composer intended.

The principal singers were given a firm foundation upon which to build a powerful performance. The Charlotte Symphony played with sensitivity and brio, with strong showings by the brass and woodwinds. The Charlotte audience deserve a reprimand for their collective failure in etiquette, though: a passage as beautiful as the prelude to Leonora’s scene that opens Act Four, gorgeously played, was virtually inaudible until its final bars because of the audience’s chatter. Maestro James Meena led a firm performance that mostly maintained order and produced good balance between stage and pit. Especially in the first half of the opera, tempi in certain passages lacked momentum and seemed unnecessarily cautious, though the performance avoided any sense of dragging. The Opera Carolina Chorus sang wonderfully throughout the performance, proving most effective in halves, as the nuns in the final scene of Act Two and the monks in the magnificent ‘Miserere.’ The celebrated ‘Anvil Chorus’ was suitably rousing, and from start to finish the choristers sang with security, control, and polish far superior to those typical of the house choruses of smaller companies.

The comprimario rôles of Inez and Ruiz were taken by singers active in Charlotte-area music education, soprano Jessie Wright-Martin and tenor Brian Arreola. Both proved effective performers, with Mr. Arreola appropriately bringing his finest singing of the afternoon to his brief scene with Leonora at the beginning of Act Four. Bass Kristopher Irmiter, announced as suffering from an indisposition, nevertheless sang firmly as Ferrando, capably launching the performance with his here’s-what-you-need-to-know aria.

Baritone Michael Colvino brought a convincingly frustrated and ultimately defeated stage presence to the Conte di Luna, his reaction to learning in the final bars that he has just sent his own brother to execution enacted with emotional legitimacy. Throughout the performance, Mr. Colvino sang with pointed, secure tone, giving his all with a voice slightly small for his assignment. Still, the Conte’s ‘Il balen del suo sorriso’—as demanding and rewarding an aria as Verdi (or any other composer) created for the baritone voice—was given a fine performance, the tricky ornaments and treacherous ascents into the highest register negotiated handily.

Arguably the production’s most provocative element was the presence of dynamic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Azucena. It cannot be denied that Azucena is an atypical and, in vocal terms, unusually challenging assignment for Ms. Graves. There were moments of obvious discomfort, notably in the extreme upper register (though a fine B-flat was summoned for the last bars of the opera), and some technical niceties of the role—the trills in ‘Stride la vampa,’ for instance—were unobserved. What cannot be underestimated, though, is the extraordinary richness and depth of Ms. Graves’s voice. Hearing her as Azucena was something like what it would be to hear Erda in Verdian guise: Ms. Graves’s voice, as awe-inspiring and mysterious as a glacial lake, seems almost like a primordial sound escaping from some chasm in the earth. When not under pressure, she produced some notably lovely tone, as in ‘Ai nostri monti,’ which was also phrased with great feeling. Azucena’s defiance of the Conte in Act Three was as monstrous as her unraveling in Act Four was dismaying, and the maniacal laughter with which she welcomed the realization of her vengeance was stirring if dramatically unnecessary. In Ms. Graves’s performance, it was more obvious than in many performances of the rôle why Verdi originally intended Azucena to be his opera’s central character.

With such a mother—biological or adopted—as Ms. Graves’s Azucena, Manrico could hardly have avoided being a brooding but explosive personality, and these qualities were brilliantly conveyed in the performance of Italian tenor Antonello Palombi. Opera Carolina are to be congratulated for bringing Mr. Palombi to Charlotte, for in doing so they introduced their audience to one of the finest Italian singers of his generation and a Manrico superior to almost any singing with the world’s major opera companies. A veteran of La Scala and many first-rank European houses, Mr. Palombi brought to Manrico a timbre that unconditionally qualified him for the rôle and an energy that never flagged. First heard from off-stage in the serenade ‘Deserto sulla terra’ (capped in the authentic Italian manner with an interpolated top B-flat, of course), Mr. Palombi’s voice filled the house with gleaming tone. Once seen, he was the hot-blooded Spanish lover to his core, singing with passion that never threatened to become vulgarity. Mr. Palombi sang Manrico’s difficult but entrancing ‘Ah sì, ben mio’ with considerable grace, a surprising and refreshing effort from a generally burly and high-spirited Manrico. ‘Di quella pira’ was sung manfully, with the kind of chest-thumping virility—and pulse-quickening top notes—that the music demands but so seldom receives in this age of ‘thoughtful’ productions. If there is anything that Verdi makes obvious about Manrico it is that he is a man of action rather than thought, and Mr. Palombi delivered on this premise in spades, giving a formidably accomplished and ringing performance of what seems, owing to its deceptive but unstinting melodiousness, an easy rôle; one that defeats many of the tenors who attempt it. Mr. Palombi triumphed.

The universal veracity of the aphorism suggesting that behind every good man there is a good woman will be left to debate, but it was beyond doubt that Opera Carolina’s magnificent Manrico was supported by a world-class Leonora. Soprano Lisa Daltirus, whose first Trovatore was sung only a few seasons ago for Connecticut Opera (the loss of which is one of the greatest blows of the current recession), sang with the poise, technique, and beauty of tone necessary for her rôle and for the Verdi soprano repertory in general. Given music that never relaxes in its technical demands, Leonora is one of the most difficult rôles in the soprano repertory, and Ms. Daltirus’s accomplishment was remarkable in making the music sound not easy, but natural. Few rôles offer entrance music as vocally perilous as Leonora’s ‘Tacea la notte,’ but Ms. Daltirus hit the musical ground running: shaping both her opening aria and cabaletta with elegance, she soared through the trio that closes Act One to a ringing interpolated top D-flat. Her singing in the Act Two finale was similarly impressive, but Ms. Daltirus rose to greatest heights in Act Four, in which Leonora’s demands are most daunting. In the exquisite ‘D’amor sull’ali rosee’ Ms. Daltirus phrased Verdi’s long lines and executed the trills with uncommon grace, and she drew the audience into her cadenza, which became an almost cathartic climax (and which quieted even the chattiest members of the audience). Both here and later, in her final scene, Ms. Daltirus’s singing of pianissimo passages in her highest register elicited audible gasps of admiration from the audience, especially in the melting tones of her singing of ‘Prima che d’altri vivere.’ Most remarkable was her singing during the ‘Miserere,’ one of Verdi’s most innovative and dramatically perfect scenes. Passionately interjecting into the solemn invocation of the off-stage monks, Ms. Daltirus sang with the kind of abandon and commitment to music and text that make issues of the relevance of opera unimportant and frankly idiotic: here was a woman, as real as any in Renaissance Spain or 21^st-Century North Carolina, her betrothed imprisoned and facing certain death, and the sacrifice of her own life at hand. Conveying this meaningfully through music is the achievement solely of a true artist, and Ms. Daltirus’s success was complete.

Il Trovatore is one of those operas that audiences know that they are supposed to hate, with its heart-on-the-sleeve melodrama, implausible situations, and unrelenting tunefulness; or else it is an opera in which some elusive ‘deeper meaning’ must be sought. Opera Carolina did Verdi the favor of assembling an exceptionally top-drawer cast and offering Trovatore in a production that presented the story without exaggeration or psychological preening. Azucena, Manrico, and Leonora are not figures who ponder human evolution, the intricacies of Existential relationships, or world peace: they are simple people, blessed by the genius of Verdi with music of unforgettable beauty, and Denyce Graves, Antonello Palombi, and Lisa Daltirus gave them burning life.

CD REVIEW: Georg Friedrich Händel [attributed] – GERMANICO (S. Mingardo, M. G. Schiavo, L. Cherici, F. Fagioli, M. Staveland, S. Foresti; dhm 88697860452)

2011-07-26T23:27:00.001-04:00

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759) attributed: Germanico, Serenata a sei – S. Mingardo (Germanico), M. G. Schiavo (Agrippina), L. Cherici (Antonia), F. Fagioli (Lucio), M. Staveland (Celio), S. Foresti (Cesare); Chorus and Ensemble Il Rossignolo; Ottaviano Tenerani [recorded at Villa San Fermo, Lonigo, Vicenza, Italy, 9 – 19 November 2010; deutsche harmonia mundi/Sony 88697860452]

In 1706, the young Georg Friedrich Händel traveled to Italy, likely at the invitation of Gian Gastone de’ Medici, a member of the powerful and famous family whose influence and widespread patronage of the arts had established Florence as the musical epicenter of south-of-the-Alps Europe in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries. Before leaving Hamburg, where he had benefited from association with some of Teutonic Europe’s finest musicians, Händel composed his first operas, including Almira, the premiere of which was conducted by the accomplished composer Reinhard Keiser. It was in Italy that the fonts of opera—then an art form scarcely a century old—ran most bountifully, and it can be assumed that Händel’s encounters with musicians of the calibre of Arcangelo Corelli and the famed poet Antonio Salvi (whose libretti were set by Händel, Porpora, and Vivaldi) enriched his understanding of the union of music with text. Likewise, the young Saxon’s rumored liaison with the soprano Vittoria Tarquini surely—if it occurred—influenced his appreciation and knowledge of the operatic voice. It is also likely that Händel first heard the voices of castrati in Italy, there having been none of their kind in Hamburg. Ever quick to capitalize on his opportunities, in a matter of months Händel had composed his first genuinely Italian opera (making use of two castrati among the cast), Rodrigo, which premiered in Florence in 1707. Agrippina, now acknowledged as an early masterwork in Händel’s catalogue, followed soon thereafter, its first performance being given in Venice in 1709. Following the path that led to his greatest achievements, Händel traveled to London in 1710, where in the next year he composed Rinaldo, his first great masterpiece and the first opera in Italian written especially for the British stage.

What Sony and deutsche harmonia mundi offer in this recording is Germanico, a serenata a sei that is purported to be one of the earliest works composed by Händel in Italy. It is conceded by the conductor of the recorded performance, Ottaviano Tenerani, in his liner notes that there is no mention of Germanico or a similar title in any of the known Händel catalogues or correspondence. Maestro Tenerani summarizes his own examinations of the sources for the score, as well as the non-autograph manuscript which he discovered in the library of the Fondi Pitti Teatro at the Conservatorio ‘Luigi Cherubini’ in Florence. There is also commentary on the watermarks and binding of the manuscript, as well as extensive citing of an annotation of the manuscript as the work of ‘Hendl’ (a presumed Italian transliteration of Händel) in the same hand as is found in the manuscript itself. What there is not, unfortunately, is anything substantial or irrefutable that identifies this score as the work of Händel. Serenate were frequently pasticcio works assembled from the scores of different composers, and even an uncommon degree of musical continuity—which is not found in Germanico as recorded—is not always indicative of the work of a single composer. Händel was especially gifted at assimilating the music of other composers with his own. Even in Almira, there are flashes of the operatic composer that Händel would become in Rinaldo, Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Tamerlano: there is little in Germanico that is identifiably Händelian, though in fairness this could also be said of Rodrigo. The music of Germanico is very much that of the Italy of Bononcini, and even Cavalli is invoked in certain passages. It should have been wiser to have pursued the course traveled by Andrea Marcon in his concert tour and studio recording of Andromeda liberata, another serenata which, in its case, may or may not be wholly or partially the work of Vivaldi: assemble a committed cast, inspire everyone involved to give of his or her best, and allow the music to speak for itself. Sony and Maestro Tenerani largely succeed in these aims, but with all of their evidence concerning the music’s authorship being circumstantial at best it was decidedly irresponsible to choose to market Germanico as the exclusive work of Händel.

Whatever the merits of his scholarship, Maestro Tenerani presides over a performance that, despite stylistic challenges, is unfailingly musical. Secco recitatives are handled capably if inconsistently: some passages are approached as they might be in performance of later Händel operas, while others are shaped in a manner more akin to that heard in the operas of Steffani and other Italian composers of the later 17^th Century. It is impossible to judge the extent to which this is necessitated by the vocal line as indicated in the manuscript, but even this introduces a suggestion that the music was composed or compiled by several hands. Instrumental balances, which rely heavily upon the archlute, theorbo, and inauthentic guitar, are fine, as are tonal blends in ritornelli. The instrumental ensemble of Il Rossignolo play excellently throughout, with an especially fine showing by the trumpets in Germanico’s martial simile aria ‘Acceso dal lampo,’ which is also the aria that sounds most like mature Händel. The Il Rossignolo choristers, only twelve in number, sing well but—perhaps because of being recorded slightly too closely—are occasionally too much of a good thing. In a Serenata of this type, almost certainly intended for private performance in the palace of a nobleman, choral movements would have been sung by the soloists in coro. Here, the lusty singing of the chorus risks seeming more appropriate to Donizetti than to a Baroque serenata. It is encouraging to hear young Italian choristers singing with precision and crisp articulation, however.

A rewarding aspect of a serenata like Germanico is that, except in very rare cases, it was almost certainly composed to order, as it were, for a specific venue, a specific audience, and a specific ensemble of performers. Musically, this generally dictates relative equality among singers, though noblemen with the resources to commission works from the best composers of their times often also had favored singers who responded to invitations sweetened by prospects of significant financial compensation. Though—not surprisingly—what might be considered on balance the finest music in Germanico is assigned to the title role, what is immediately apparent as the score’s best aria (the lovely ‘Nuovi raggi e luci nove’) is for Celio, a tenor role. [It should be stated here that, as Maestro Tenerani’s liner notes make no mentions of transpositions, it can only be assumed that all roles are sung in the present recording in the appropriate registers as suggested by the manuscript. The recording, incidentally, is pitched at a’ = 415 Hz.] This is at least tangentially (or, perhaps, coincidentally) interesting when it is recalled that Händel launched his career as a composer of operas in Hamburg, where a legion of exceptionally-gifted tenors took the heroic roles assigned elsewhere in Europe—and most prominently in Italy—to castrati. Bravura demands in Germanico are fairly evenly-distributed, and in general the level of musical distinction is high. Apart from passing phrases, which the great Saxon could himself have borrowed from his contemporaries, there is nothing in Germanico that is unmistakably Händelian.

The lower-voiced male soloists make positive impressions. Tenor Magnus Staveland sings the aforementioned ‘Nuovi raggi e luci nove,’ in which Celio celebrates the new dawn heralded by Germanico’s victory over Arminius, with great care for its lyricism. This is the sort of aria that—like ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ in the legitimate Händel repertory—would benefit from an unornamented execution of its da capo: this Mr. Staveland does not supply, but his ornaments are largely tasteful and avoid unnecessarily (and unmusically) distorting the harmonic progressions. His voice is one of quality, and he enlivens his contributions to secco recitatives engagingly. Bass Sergio Foresti’s handsome voice does not truly encompass the lowest notes of Cesare’s (Tiberius, that is) music, but he sings powerfully. His command of his divisions is wonderful, and the combination of crisp diction, secure tone, and excellent technique make Mr. Foresti’s singing on this recording (and elsewhere) very enjoyable.

The sopranos, Maria Grazia Schiavo as Germanico’s wife Agrippina and Laura Cherici as his mother Antonia, are familiar from many productions of Baroque operas during the past decade. Both artists here acquit themselves admirably, singing with bright, forward tone and techniques equal to their tasks. Their timbres are sufficiently individual to make differentiating between them in secco recitative—and, indeed, in the rapid-moving progression of arias—easy. To Agrippina falls the beguiling aria ‘Dormite, sì, dormite,’ which Ms. Schiavo sings enchantingly, the rounded beauty of her tone and completeness of her phrasing counting for much. Both she and Ms. Cherici are well-versed in the idiom of the Händel-or-whomever music of Germanico.

The young countertenor Franco Fagioli, Argentine by birth, is quickly assuming his place among the finest singers of his Fach. Unlike those of many of his countertenor colleagues, especially those of the past, however, Mr. Fagioli’s voice is a true alto, his lowest notes shaped with hints of chest resonance without being baritonal and his upper register well-supported and mostly free from the ubiquitous countertenor ‘hoot.’ His début recital disc of music by Händel and Mozart, made after his victory in the 2003 Bertelsmann Competition, announced the arrival of a significant young artist, and his singing in Germanico furthers the progress of that artistry. Already having proved himself as an Händelian of considerable integrity in the studio recording of Händel’s Berenice (EMI/Virgin, conducted by Alan Curtis), Mr. Fagioli sings Lucio’s music in Germanico with the dignity and impeccable virtuosity required by the role. The aria ‘Bella sorte con destra felice,’ like a pair of Germanico’s arias offered on the recording in two slightly differing versions, draws from Mr. Fagioli exceptionally poised, beautiful singing. Hearing this performance whets the appetite for hearing Mr. Fagioli in the great alto castrato roles of Händel’s mature masterpieces, those composed for Carestini and Senesino.

Whether presenting music by composers famous or forgotten, any recording that offers an opportunity to hear the voice of Sara Mingardo is welcome. Simply put, Ms. Mingardo is one of the most interesting singers active today, and her voice is one of the finest of the past quarter-century. Furthermore, this is not an observation that requires an ‘Early Music’ qualification: whether singing Monteverdi or Mahler, Ms. Mingardo is an artist capable of exquisite achievements, the beauty of her voice being seconded by an astounding technique. Both elements of her singing, the tonal splendor and the technical mastery, are evident throughout her performance on this recording. Whether as passionate spouse, doting son, or triumphant warrior, Ms. Mingardo’s Germanico is convincing, the loveliness of the singing in no way detracting from the impression of masculinity. The first disc ends with the dramatic ‘Acceso dal lampo,’ a ripping martial aria worthy of comparison (no matter the identity of its creator) with the famous ‘Venti, turbini, prestate’ and ‘Or la tromba in suon festante’ in Rinaldo. Ms. Mingardo’s singing of this aria, the divisions negotiated with the kind of ease that wins the admiration even of listeners for whom this sort of vocal display seems superfluous, is magnificent, surpassing the work of almost all of her contemporaries and rivaling Marilyn Horne for technical aplomb and sheer tonal impact. Hearing a performance such as Ms. Mingardo gives on this recording, Händel might well have been proud to have composed Germanico.

Naturally, the looming question posed by this recording is whether Germanico is the work, solely or partially, of Händel. Is this the first operatic work that the young Händel composed in Italy or one to which he contributed to some extent? That is a question that cannot be answered, and unfortunately the value of this recording will be lessened in the views of some listeners by the fact that Sony are assiduous in at least suggesting that Germanico is an authentic Händel score. If this recording is approached as a performance of newly-discovered music from the time during which Händel was resident in Italy, however, it richly rewards the listener’s investments of time and interest. The talented cast sing with the commitment that they might have brought to a recording of what was confirmed to be a genuine, rediscovered Händel opera, and—with artists of the calibre of Sara Mingardo and Franco Fagioli—that alone makes recording Germanico a worthy enterprise. The recording and its marketing bring to mind Verdi’s response when asked about his opinion of tenors interpolating top Cs in ‘Di quella pira’ in Trovatore: ever protective of his own music, Verdi reluctantly endorsed the interpolations, provided that the tenors ensured that their top Cs were good ones. If a score of dubious authorship is to be recorded and marketed as something it cannot be proved to be, it is of paramount importance that the recording be a good one. In that regard, Germanico is thoroughly successful.

IN MEMORIAM: American baritone Cornell MacNeil, 1922 - 2011

2011-07-24T22:22:00.001-04:00

CORNELL MACNEIL

24 September 1922 – 15 July 2011

‘Sometimes an artist can plug along year in and year out without any breaks. Then, with a whoosh, he’ll go right to the top. Cornell MacNeil, Minneapolis-born baritone, has just taken that dizzying ride. On March 5 [1959] the thirty-four-year-old singer made his successful European début at La Scala in Milan [as Don Carlo in Verdi’s Ernani], and Saturday night [21 March 1959, substituting for Robert Merrill] he made an unexpected but equally well received Metropolitan début in the title role of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Mr. MacNeil came through superbly.’ It was thus that Eric Saltzman of the New York Times described the Metropolitan Opera début of baritone Cornell MacNeil, who passed away on 15 July in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Possessing a voice of exceptional size and range, Mr. MacNeil was destined from the beginning of his career for the great Verdi baritone roles. He was equally accomplished in verismo roles, however, not least Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca and Tonio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci: his singing (and recording) of the Prologue from the latter opera was indicative of the power and extension of his singing, the monologue unfailingly capped with a top A-flat rivaled only by Leonard Warren. As Scarpia, Mr. MacNeil could prove both seductive and sadistic without pushing the voice beyond its capacities. Likewise, as Rance in Puccini’s Fanciulla del West, Mr. MacNeil was the embodiment of the cynical sheriff of the American West, toughened by hardship but softened by his need for Minnie’s acceptance. It was in the music of Verdi, though, that Mr. MacNeil’s voice shone most brilliantly.

Rigoletto, the role of Mr. MacNeil’s MET début, was a part for which he had particular vocal and dramatic affinity, making fullest use of his skills for conveying cruelty and compassion within the space of a single bar. Mr. MacNeil recorded Rigoletto twice, first opposite Dame Joan Sutherland and Renato Cioni and later—much differently—opposite Reri Grist and Nicolai Gedda. Both recordings preserve notable performances, the voice more youthful on the DECCA recording with Sutherland and the dramatic presence more impressive on the later EMI recording with Grist. In vocal terms, Sutherland and Grist were very different daughters, but Mr. MacNeil adapted his vocal resources to his surroundings, proving not only his vocal resilience but also his sensitivity to the requirements of a specific performance.

Criticized early in his career for haphazard treatment of Italian, a language that he did not yet speak, the opulence of Mr. MacNeil’s voice was never doubted. Fortunately, NAXOS recently reissued on compact discs the 1950 recording of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, the opera in which Mr. MacNeil made his professional operatic début, enabling listeners in the 21^st Century to appreciate the quality of voice that this singer possessed from the outset of his career. Mr. MacNeil once recalled in an interview that he had been singing since the age of twelve, however, his youthful voice having been heard often over the radio.

The extraordinary voice of Cornell MacNeil was last heard at the MET as Scarpia on 5 December 1987, a matinée broadcast performance in which his colleagues were Hildegard Behrens and Ermanno Mauro. Along with a number of fine recordings, studio and ‘pirated’ broadcasts, Mr. MacNeil leaves a towering legacy: in retrospect, he may indeed have been the last legitimate Verdi baritone heard at the Metropolitan Opera in the 20^th Century. That, eleven years into the new century, the emergence of a true Verdi baritone is still awaited, the passing of Cornell MacNeil is a new reminder of what has been lost in the past quarter-century.

CD REVIEW: Gaetano Donizetti – LINDA DI CHAMOUNIX (E. Gutiérrez, S. Costello, L. Tézier, M. Pizzolato, A. Corbelli; Opera Rara ORC43)

2011-05-08T23:25:00.001-04:00

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Linda di Chamouix – E. Gutiérrez (Linda), S. Costello (Carlo), L. Tézier (Antonio), E. Sikora (Maddalena), M. Pizzolato (Pierotto), A. Corbelli (Marchese), B. Szabó (Prefetto), L. Botelho (Intendente); Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Sir Mark Elder [recorded during concert performances in the Royal Opera House, 7 & 14 September 2009; Opera Rara ORC43]

First performed in Vienna in 1842, Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix has often been likened to Verdi’s Luisa Miller, the pastoral drama with which the older composer provided a valedictory summation of the grand art of bel canto. With its sense of bucolic order disrupted—or, rather, complicated—by intrusions of cosmopolitan ideals, the pangs of unexpected affections, unwelcome and unsavory attentions, and the inevitable operatic misunderstandings, Linda di Chamounix also has much in common with Bellini’s La Sonnambula, another beautiful score in which the clouds of a distracted mind clear in order to reveal a sun-drenched horizon at the final curtain. In its juxtaposition of Arcadian and urban sensibilities, Donizetti’s opera pursues a theme shared in operas as diverse as Verdi’s La Traviata and Mascagni’s Lodoletta: there are in these scores, and especially in Linda di Chamounix, prevailing senses of the inherent ‘goodness’ of the simplicity of rural life and the tempting ‘wrongness’ of the city. There is in Linda di Chamounix, as there is in Carmen, an endearing evocation of the maternal hearth as the shelter from pain, expressed by Donizetti in music of often exceptional beauty. Hearing this recording—which hardly enters a crowded field, the only other commercial recordings being the Philips set masterfully conducted by Tullio Serafin, a later effort with the marvelous Mariella Devia in the title role, and a Nightingale recording (taken from concert performances) with ‘house’ prima donna Edita Gruberova as Linda—inspires regret that Linda di Chamounix is not performed more frequently, in fact: though not comparable in terms of dramatic impact to Anna Bolena, Lucia di Lammermoor, or Roberto Devereux, there is in a sincere performance of Linda di Chamounix something quite touching, and the quality of the music reminds the listener that Donizetti’s skills remained tremendously impressive even when the composer’s inspiration was not at its greatest.

As ever with Opera Rara releases, the presentation of this recording of Linda di Chamounix, compiled from a pair of concert performances that, separated by a week, opened the Royal Opera House’s 2009 – 2010 season, is exemplary. The extensive liner notes by Jeremy Commons not only place the composition and first performance of Linda di Chamounix in historical context within Donizetti’s career as a composer but also, as is typical of booklets enclosed with Opera Rara releases, document critical reception to the opera’s first night, offer biographical information concerning the singers who created the leading roles, and evaluate musical discrepancies among printed editions of the opera and the score as it is known to have been performed in Vienna in 1842. Notes of the quality consistently provided by Opera Rara increase the listener’s enjoyment of the music at hand by providing insights that heighten the academic experience of hearing an unfamiliar score, and in times of crumbling financial support for artistic ventures Opera Rara are to be heralded for refusing to lower the standards of their productions.

It is upon the quality of the music and the accomplishment with which it is performed that the success of an opera recording is based, however, and in this regard it could be argued that Opera Rara’s new Linda di Chamounix faces its task with a considerable challenge. The Royal Opera House is a famously difficult venue in which to record, whether under studio conditions or in performance. Opera Rara posted their engineers at Covent Garden twice before, for their recordings of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien and Roberto Devereux, both—like Linda di Chamounix—performed in concert. In both of these instances, the balances achieved on the edited recordings were generally good, with the occasional lapses in focus that are virtually inevitable in recordings of live performances. The sound with which the choral singing and orchestral playing in Linda di Chamounix is reproduced is excellent, the many felicities of close harmony in the singing of the Savoyard youths who travel to Paris to seek their fortunes and the frequent bursts of color and eloquence in the orchestral scoring evident even at fortissimo. Throughout the performance, both the full Covent Garden chorus and the smaller ensemble extracted from their ranks for the voices of the Savoyard youths sing with passion and precision. Several of the solo lines for Savoyard youths reveal that some of these choristers are not yet ready for larger assignments, but they are unfailingly convincing as young, slightly awestruck country lads and lasses. Under the direction of Sir Mark Elder, one of Britain’s finest conductors of recent years, the Covent Garden orchestra play with the technical aplomb and care for sonorities expected of them since the beginning of their association with Antonio Pappano.

The most vital element of any performance of a bel canto score, no matter how elegant its orchestration or choral movements may be, is the solo singing. The smaller roles in this recording of Linda di Chamounix are all taken by capable singers, with a part as small as L’Intendente taken by Luciano Botelho, a young Brazilian tenor who has earned considerable interest in Britain, as well as having been lauded for his Giacomo opposite the Elena of Joyce DiDonato in a Swiss production of Rossini’s La donna del lago. Excellent as the Calvinist clergyman il Prefetto is Romanian bass Bálint Szabó, a compelling young singer with an impressive bel canto résumé to his credit (including a much-praised performance in Bellini’s Puritani in an Athens production that also featured Eglise Gutiérrez). Mr. Szabó is the modern sort of bel canto bass, which is to say that his voice is leaner and lighter in color and weight than basses of old, and there seemingly are restrictions on the reach and strength of his lower register. The security of his tone and ways in which he uses text meaningfully are impressive, however, and he produces gratifying sunbursts of sound at the upper extremity of his range.

Central to the drama of Linda di Chamounix are Linda’s parents, sung in this performance by mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Sikora and baritone Ludovic Tézier. Donizetti makes it clear that, to a great extent, Linda’s emotional security is reliant upon her relationship with her parents and especially her mother, whom she adores. Linda’s mother is far more significant to the opera dramatically than musically, but her lines are sung with involvement and beauty by Ms. Sikora. Mr. Tézier brings very handsome tone to Antonio, Linda’s father, and his voice has both the suavity and heft required by his music. Mr. Tézier is the most recent in a small but distinguished line of French baritones with voices truly suitable to Italian repertory, and he shares with an artist like Robert Massard a talent for adapting the nuanced delivery of text to the more open sounds of Italian vowels. Nonetheless, Mr. Tézier’s denunciation of Linda in Act Two and reconciliation with her in Act Three are not as touching as they could be: whether this is a result of the concert setting is debatable, but as bel canto singing Mr. Tézier’s performance cannot be faulted. Indeed, it is an uncommon joy in opera to encounter parents who sing attractively and without wobbling: how delightful it would be to have parents of the quality of Ms. Sikora and Mr. Tézier in a performance of Hänsel und Gretel!

Italian mezzo-soprano Marianna Pizzolato, still in the early years of an expanding international career, has thus far pursued a wide repertory, with excursions into Baroque music [a recording of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater in which Ms. Pizzolato sings opposite Anna Netrebko was released by DGG earlier this year] as well as bel canto and later Italian music. In this performance, Ms. Pizzolato sings Pierotto, the hurdy-gurdy-playing orphan who is Linda’s companion and confidant; a role surprisingly but memorably sung in the Serafin recording by the wonderful Fedora Barbieri. At heart, Pierotto is the quintessential Italian street urchin, as much a cousin to the organ-grinders who haunted Italian streets in the Nineteenth Century as the Savoyard youth the libretto stipulates him to be. Dramatically, his function in Linda di Chamounix is great: it is Pierotto’s song that leads Linda in her delirium from Paris back to her alpine home. Musically, Pierotto seems almost a brother of Cherubino, his contributions to ensembles of perhaps greater importance than his solo lines. Ms. Pizzolato, with an alluringly dark voice and a rapid vibrato that conjures aural reminders of mezzo-sopranos of the past, sings Pierotto’s music with unfailing energy and lovely, pointed tone. Perhaps most remarkable in a fine performance is Ms. Pizzolato’s singing in the scene in which Pierotto and Linda finally reach their native village after an arduous journey from Paris. By coloring the voice, Ms. Pizzolato expresses through Pierotto’s few words all of his frustration, annoyance, exasperation, and—finally—almost desperate relief at having reached his home. Ms. Pizzolato’s command of the requisite idioms, both musical and linguistic, is complete, and the completeness of her performance indicates that, for lovers of Italian opera, hers is a name to remember.

Alessandro Corbelli’s is a name already familiar to those who have heard performances or recordings of Italian opera buffa during the past twenty years. Especially celebrated for his performances of Rossini roles, Mr. Corbelli sings the role of the Marchese di Boisfleury in Linda di Chamounix, a lascivious roué whose designs on Linda are decidedly less than pure. Musically, the Marchese is related to Dulcamara and Don Pasquale, an obvious—and quite amusing—homage to Rossini. Mr. Corbelli’s tone is starting to loosen slightly, but he remains a genuine opera buffa stylist, his skill in singing complex patter unaffected by the passage of time. His performance in Linda di Chamounix is a feast. The comedy of the Marchese’s feckless wooing is fully realized without compromising musical integrity, with Mr. Corbelli singing firmly and sounding as though he is having a truly grand time. His Marchese is the classic, slightly-befuddled dirty old man, his mind racing with unholy intentions with which his body cannot quite keep pace but his heart ultimately good. Among many treasurable assumptions, this is one of Mr. Corbelli’s most enjoyable performances.

Cuban-American soprano Eglise Gutiérrez captured the attention of many American opera lovers with her singing of Amina in an Opera Orchestra of New York concert performance of Bellini’s La Sonnambula in 2008. The ease and fluidity of her coloratura singing impressed New York audiences, prompting Vivien Schweitzer to write in the New York Times that Ms. Gutiérrez ‘sang (often in a stratospherically high range) with graceful phrasing and dynamic control.’ Interestingly, grace and dynamic control are less apparent in Ms. Gutiérrez’s singing of Linda di Chamounix, in which role she made her début at the Royal Opera House. Ms. Gutiérrez certainly possesses a beautiful voice which, in moments of involvement during Linda di Chamounix, sparkles excitingly. Dramatically, though Ms. Gutiérrez is obviously an astute singer with a keen sense of the momentum of the music she sings, her performance suffers markedly from the effects of murky diction. In moments of heightened passion, often in duet with Carlo or Antonio, Ms. Gutiérrez’s words are suddenly clearer, and the voice rings out with something like the authority befitting a bona fide bel canto diva. Throughout much of the performance, and unfortunately in Ms. Gutiérrez’s extensive upper register, the sound has far less presence and even threatens to disappear in ascending passages. Comparing this with Opera Rara’s other recordings derived from concert performances at Covent Garden, it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which this can be attributed to the obstacles posed by recording in this venue. The heroines in Opera Rara’s other Covent Garden recordings—Nelly Miricioiu in Roberto Devereux and Vesselina Kasarova in Dom Sébastien—have very different voices and methods of vocal production, making any judgment concerning the effects of the space on the sound of Ms. Gutiérrez’s singing conjecture at best. Nerves are sure to have affected Ms. Gutiérrez on the occasion of her Covent Garden début, and it is possible that she was treading cautiously in a difficult aural environment. Whatever the factors that undermined her basically excellent singing were, Ms. Gutiérrez’s performance as a whole is not effective enough to inspire sympathy for Linda’s emotional struggles, though her famous aria ‘O luce di quest’anima’ and the innovative mad scene are managed with careful attention to vocal shading. Nevertheless, there is much good singing, and Ms. Gutiérrez remains an unusually promising soprano.

The irony of the performance is that, in the end, sympathy for Linda is inspired, principally because the singing of American tenor Stephen Costello—who also sang at Covent Garden for the first time in these concerts—is so superb that it seems inhuman to fail to share Carlo’s affection for his disillusioned paramour. Carlo has in Act Two the romanza ‘Se tanto in ira agl’uomini,’ an aria that is as languidly beautiful as any that Donizetti composed [during a famous La Scala production, Alfredo Kraus was compelled to encore the romanza in every performance], and Mr. Costello rises to this challenge with a voice that combines strength with plangent beauty, singing in broad phrases that highlight the Bellinian scope of the melody. In his love duet with Linda, reprised in the final scene to deliver her from her madness, Mr. Costello is the very model of a young man burning with love, longing for an embrace from his beloved, and sighing pensively when she shyly repulses him. The heartbreak that Carlo expresses when he returns to Linda’s village and learns of the grief and suffering his actions have caused her, a scene reminiscent of the final act of I Puritani, is touchingly conveyed by the ardor of Mr. Costello’s singing. In more extroverted music, his swagger and vocal accuracy are thrilling, revealing a young man who may be deeply in love with a peasant girl but who is also a proud aristocrat. There are passing moments of strain and caution born of nerves and instances in which top notes are approached from below in a sort of vaulting exercise familiar from the singing of many sopranos, but even when there are suspicions that the voice is being pushed rather hard there is great enjoyment to be had from Mr. Costello’s singing. In opera, there are singers who sing very well and those who sweep an audience along with them in experiencing the drama of a score, even in a concert performance: singers who achieve both of these accomplishments are very rare, but in this recording Mr. Costello achieves this with singing of beauty, security, and ringing sincerity.

Like so many of the operas revived and recorded by Opera Rara, Linda di Chamounix will almost certainly never replace more popular, financially-viable pieces like Lucia di Lammermoor and L’Elisir d’Amore in the repertories of the world’s better opera houses. It is significant that an artist as important to bel canto as Tullio Serafin felt it appropriate to conduct Linda di Chamounix and to record it for posterity, however. There is something to the opera that is deceptively charming. The charm is deceptive because a preliminary reading of a plot summary or the libretto raises concerns: this is surely just another insipid bel canto travesty with a crooning tenor and a soprano warbling away in her highest register in the obligatory mad scene. This recording, both engaging and slightly disappointing, does not overwhelmingly argue for an increase in the value of Linda di Chamounix within the Donizetti canon. The ears rejoice and the heart falters when Stephen Costello sings, though, and ultimately it should be almost impossible to dislike a performance with so many positive aspects that inspire an excellent young singer to give of the best of his art.

ARTIST PROFILE: Jonathan Blalock, tenor

2011-04-23T22:20:00.001-04:00

Alfredo Kraus, a paragon of bel canto grace and one of the most consistent artists of his generation, once said that ‘you have to make a choice when you start to sing,’ that you must ‘decide whether you want to service the music and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.’ Maestro Kraus was the rare artist who achieved both of the aims of which he spoke: possessing a technique that enabled him to sing not merely serviceably but superbly throughout a long career, he also earned the admiration of lovers of the tenor voice throughout the world, his repertory encompassing the operatic roles for which he was renowned and many of the tenor roles in the zarzuela repertory of his native Spain. There is in virtually every artistic genre a sense of the dichotomy of which Maestro Kraus spoke, however, especially in the environment that exists for the performing arts in the Twenty-First Century; the choices that face a young artists of whether to pursue a path that leads to a career as what might be termed a connoisseurs’ artist or one that leads to the perhaps more lucrative popularity of aggressive management and marketing. Despite his remarks, Maestro Kraus was among the ranks of those singers who are fêted by musical cognoscenti and commoners alike, the natural quality of his voice supported by the exceptional power of his technique. It was this latter quality that was developed in accordance with those choices at the start of his career of which he spoke. As anyone who attends performances at any of the world’s regional opera companies or conservatories could attest, it quite frankly is a myth that there are no good voices to be heard now. There may even be a greater number of promising young singers than at any time in past, especially in the United States, but it would be impossible to deny that there are fewer extraordinary talents and major careers now than, say, in the 1950’s, when Sir Rudolf Bing could call upon an uncommonly fine roster of American singers, old and young, to build casts around his foreign stars. It is therefore doubly exciting when a young singer emerges who possesses both a fine voice and evidence of a thoughtfully-formed technique. It is that excitement, along with hints of the vocal and technical acumen of the irreplaceable Alfredo Kraus, that greets performances by American tenor Jonathan Blalock.

Still in the early stages of his career, Mr. Blalock already has to his credit the creations of leading roles in a critically-acclaimed operas, Lázaro in Jorge Martín’s Before Night Falls and Stevie in Michael Dellaira’s The Secret Agent. The path that led Mr. Blalock to these accomplishment began, as he recalls, in utero. ‘I loved music from before the time I was born,’ he says. ‘My mother says that when I was still in the womb, I would kick to the rhythm of her piano playing.’ Opera and concert music were not important influences in Mr. Blalock’s formative years, however. ‘Music was a powerful force in my childhood. It was not the symphonies of the concert hall but the hymns of the neighborhood Baptist Church.’ This, along with having grown up in North Carolina, is an experience that he shares with the celebrated tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, whom Mr. Blalock cites as an invaluable influence on his decision to pursue a career as a singer. ‘My entire perspective turned around when I met Anthony Dean Griffey,’ he says. ‘His recital at UNCG absolutely changed my life. He only sang two songs, but he imbued them with more emotion than most performers can mine from three hours of music.’ Mr. Blalock recollects that his earliest musical goals, shaped by his experiences with singing in church, were centered on choral music. ‘My original goal was to be the next Robert Shaw, conducting choirs and possibly teaching college as well. I studied piano [during undergraduate studies], and I began training at UNCG for a Master’s Degree in conducting.’ It was important to Mr. Blalock that, in order to prove an effective choirmaster, he understand the voices over which he would preside. ‘I began studying voice with Dr. Carla LeFevre. She got some flack for teaching a non-voice major,’ he recalls. ‘It was sort of against the rules, but I’m glad she gave me a chance. At first she thought I was absolutely hopeless, but after a few months of frustration in her studio, she looked up at me and said—to her and my surprise,—“You know, I think I would actually pay money to hear someone sing like that.” I credit Dr. LeFevre with teaching me the fundamentals of singing. She is still a close mentor, a wonderful mix of teacher, sister, mother, and friend.’

Mr. Blalock reinvented himself as a novice singer at the age of twenty-three, an age at which—as he notes—he had already fallen behind many of his fellow artists. ‘Most of my peers had been studying voice for seven or more years at that point,’ he remembers. ‘I had a lot of catching up to do. I struggled with the thought of pursuing a career that seemed so absolutely egocentric.’ This was also a conundrum with which his encounter with Anthony Dean Griffey proved beneficial. ‘[Mr. Griffey] shared the story of how he grew up singing in a rural North Carolina church—like me—and originally pursued sacred music. He spoke of how he dedicated his life to encouraging young singers and to strengthening and preserving music in North Carolina Education for the next generation. He then ended his session the way he ends every one of his recitals, with a simple but beautifully heartfelt rendering of “This Little Light of Mine.” An hour in his presence not only made me want to be a better artist but also a better person. That event taught me that singing isn’t always a selfish art: it can actually cause the world to be a better place.’ This Mr. Blalock also learned from his work with Fort Worth Opera General Director Darren Woods and stage director David Gately. ‘Honestly,’ Mr. Blalock says, ‘I never had the chance to sing leading roles at UNCG. I was still so green, and other students in the program were much further along in their development. But Darren Woods had the guts to take a huge chance on me. While visiting UNCG to judge a competition, he heard me sing in a masterclass. He gave me a full scholarship and a huge role—Nico in Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata—at Seagle Music Colony.’ This experience contributed significantly to Mr. Blalock’s understanding of the importance of his stage deportment. ‘I learned a great deal about how to carry myself on the stage. I’m generally a laidback guy, but David Gately taught me how to be an Athenian warrior. It’s always wonderful when teachers and mentors will be honest with a young singer. While I was a studio artist at Fort Worth, [Mr. Woods] would shoot straight with me. He would say, “You’re flapping your arms around too much,” or, “You lost your focus and stared blankly with ‘singer eyes’ during that coloratura passage.” I’m always yearning to improve, but I can’t fix it until I know exactly what is broken.’

Emotional honesty is, in Mr. Blalock’s view, perhaps the most important single quality that a musical performance must possess in order to be truly meaningful—and, in a sense, one of those things that is often broken and in need of repair. ‘Sometimes I think [that] the best training takes place not in a studio but on the stage. Colleagues who have mastered their form have taught me by example. I’ve learned by watching the fragile, hypnotic manner in which Elizabeth Futral descended the staircase in Lucia’s mad scene or the indomitable Wes Mason’s depiction of Reinaldo Arenas as he bravely fought tyranny and sickness with such indescribable strength and passion.’ Building on these examples, Mr. Blalock sets as his foremost goal in singing the fostering of open, genuine communication with his audience. ‘In my opinion, it is imperative for a singer to know why he or she sings,’ he states. ‘My number-one goal is to communicate. It is a challenging task because too many nuisances can get in the way: fear, technical imperfections, health, language, etc. But my hope is to make every note I sing beautiful and honest enough so that, even if just for a few seconds, someone in the audience can connect with me, forget his worries, and experience deep joy.’ He adds, ‘The most meaningful compliment I’ve received after a performance hasn’t been, “Wow, I was so impressed by what your voice can do,” but, “Your singing touched me deeply.”’ The tools Mr. Blalock employs in pursuit of his goal of establishing communication with his audience are directly related to that core value of emotional honesty. ‘Before a performance, I always try to forget about everything else and just focus on keeping my singing free and expressive.’ Central to his focus on the freedom and expressivity of his singing is his understanding of the requirements of the music that he sings. ‘Every physical and musical gesture must have purpose,’ he suggests. ‘This past summer, before singing the role of Tonio [in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment], I coached some of it with Joan Dornemann [the repsected coach and Assistant Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, as well as co-founder and Artistic Director of of the International Vocal Arts Institute]. After I sang through the second aria [‘Pour me rapprocher de Marie’], she asked me why I was adding a high C-sharp at the end. Honestly, I didn’t have a good reason except that I liked it and thought it was impressive. But, after revisiting the piece, I realized that the text and the music didn’t call for a climax at that point: the intent should have been much more intimate in that moment. So I did something that was very atypical for a tenor: I decided not to sing the high note in the performance!’ It is this dedication to the emotional core of the music at the expense of the obvious effect that is surely at the heart of the choice of which Alfredo Kraus spoke and which Mr. Blalock makes for his commitment to offering audiences performances that convey an abiding sincerity.

Mr. Blalock cautions, too, that deriving personal joy from the thrill of performing cannot be the sole impetus for pursuing a career as a singer. ‘It’s not enough to love performing. You must also love the process,’ he says. ‘The road to the stage is a long one full of countless lessons, coachings, and stagings. It takes so much more hard work than I ever could have imagined. But in the end it provides a joy so overwhelming [that] I could hardly imagine doing anything else.’ That road to the stage is something of which Mr. Blalock is keenly aware and upon which he reflects with insight into his own development as an artist. ‘Lázaro [in Before Night Falls] was a stretch for me, but I worked extremely hard in my preparation, and I believed that I was up to the task. People always worry [about whether] a young singer is ready vocally, but most people never bother to wonder whether the singer is ready dramatically. Tony Griffey taught me the old mantra that says, “Don’t sing to impress: sing to express,” and [that is] possibly the most important lesson I’ve ever learned about performing.’ His senses of freedom, expressivity, and the desire to communicate, along with the security of his technique and plangent beauty of his timbre, have guided Mr. Blalock in choices of repertory. ‘The role in Before Night Falls provided a wonderful chance for me, but also the great operas of Händel, Rossini, and others provide limitless possibilities for innovative ornaments and cadenzas. It’s thrilling to sing something that is centuries old and surprise the listener with something never heard before,’ he says. ‘Comic roles such as Almaviva [in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia] have been wildly enjoyable for me,’ he continues. ‘Right now, my voice is most appropriate for the –ino and –ano roles in Mozart, Donizetti, and Rossini.’ ‘Secretly,’ he confides, ‘I would love to sing something tragic where I could bellow passionately and then die on stage. Something like Cavaradossi comes to mind, but my voice just isn’t the right fit for that. Hopefully, I’ll be able to eventually expand my repertoire to the lighter Puccini roles of Rinuccio and Rodolfo.’

The work of young singers will ultimately prove one of the most influential factors in the success of opera in the decades to come. Directors, especially during the past twenty-five years, have contributed to the debate about how best to shepherd opera through the perils of deteriorating economic conditions and ever-changing fads by creating operatic productions that have generated praise and derision in almost equal proportions, all in pursuit of an elusive ‘relevance’ that will ensure the survival of opera. Mr. Blalock believes that the future of opera is in many hands, with an examination of the reasons why opera has endured these past four centuries at its heart. ‘I believe that the viability of opera depends on a number of factors,’ he offers. ‘I think that opera companies should continue trying to find new ways of presenting the classics. It shouldn’t be just for the sake of being “hip,” but rather it should be an effort to continue to dig into those treasured old operas in search of new jewels of artistic creativity. On the other hand,’ he adds, ‘I always appreciate it when companies make an effort to educate their audiences. When looking at opera with a new perspective, we can truly see how timeless much of it is.’ Fortunately, it is apparent when witnessing any of Mr. Blalock’s performances or listening to his recording of Lázaro in Before Night Falls—an opera that, despite its dramatic situations that are unique to its time and place, is not at all unlike Idomeneo, Stiffelio, or Peter Grimes in its moving depiction of an individual’s isolation and suffering—that he recognizes that the single greatest assurance of the immortality of opera is the continuing collective effort of young singers to make composers’ scribbles on yellowing pages breathe in sighs and snarls that caress audiences’ ears and set their pulses racing.

As his comments suggest, Mr. Blalock’s voice at this time in his career is an even, ringing lyric tenor, possessing a richness that fills long bel canto lines with warmth and also a brightness that aids the singer in projecting the sound effectively. With the centered beauty of his voice complemented by his handsome appearance, Mr. Blalock is a compelling stage presence, and his acting is nuanced without being overcomplicated. Above all, his singing is an audible blend of natural talent, consummate artistry, and good sense.

‘I’ve seen the way the universal language of music can bring together people of different generations, disparate races, and various cultures,’ Mr. Blalock muses. ‘When all the elements of a performance combine effectively, it produces a joy so intense that it transcends boundaries of time, language, and religion.’ At the hands of an effective artist, that joy is shared equally by the artist and his audience. There is an eternal debate about what qualities contribute to the creation of a great artist. There are singers who possess great voices. There are singers who possess remarkable skills of interpretation. There are also singers who exhibit exceptional wisdom in choosing what in some cases may seem narrow repertories. Alfredo Kraus might have added that there are great singers and also popular singers. In the early morning of what seems destined to be a long, well-judged, and rewarding career, Mr. Blalock has already acquired the circumspection that inhabits the psyches of the greatest artists. ‘I think [that] a quote from my friend Jake Heggie’s wonderful opera Three Decembers sums up my feelings [about singing],’ he says. ‘”What I found on the stage is what every person desires: not escape, but connection. Greed, pride, and yearning dissolved by the power of dreams.”’ If the power of dreams if what is at the epicenter of singing for Mr. Blalock, it is the power of transcendence that his voice brings to those who hear him. There is another passage from the work of Jake Heggie that is apt, these lines from his song ‘Facing Forward,’ recorded by Frederica von Stade and Joyce DiDonato: ‘Let it go. Let it out of your heart. Set it free. Let it be a part set apart and maybe then you will see.’ It is with the skill of a master technician and the heart of a great artist that Jonathan Blalock sets free the sparkling tones nature has given him, and it is through hearing that his listeners are made to see.

The author’s heartfelt gratitude is extended to Mr. Blalock for his kindness, as well as the candor and thoughtfulness with which he responded to the questions that formed the basis for this article. Thanks are also due for Mr. Blalock’s kind permission to use the photographs featured in this article.

Please click here to visit Mr. Blalock’s Official Website.

Mr. Blalock will return to North Carolina in December 2011 to sing in Händel’s Messiah with the Winston-Salem Symphony. Performances are scheduled for 13 and 14 December at 7:00 PM.

CD REVIEW: CIRQUE–Songs by Auric, Milhaud, Poulenc, & Sauguet (Céline Ricci, soprano; Daniel Lockert, piano; Sono Luminus DSL-92125)

2011-04-13T22:07:00.001-04:00

GEORGES AURIC (1899 – 1983), DARIUS MILHAUD (1892 – 1974), FRANCIS POULENC (1899 – 1963), HENRI SAUGUET (1901 – 1989): Songs – Céline Ricci, soprano; Daniel Lockert, piano [recorded at Skywalker Sound, Marin County, California, 19 – 20, 22 August 2009 and 23 – 25 August 2010; Sono Luminus DSL-92125]

Comparing the vocal recital discs released during the first eleven years of the new millennium with those that shaped the course of the first century of sound recording is a largely dispiriting undertaking. It would be easy to suggest that the proportion of recital discs with artistic rather than commercial goals has decreased or that the goals of recital discs and those who plan and create them have changed as the dynamics and demographics of audiences receptive to such discs have evolved, and indeed compelling support for these arguments could be produced without difficulty. To apply a less complex analysis to the situation, it might said that the joy has gone out of recording recital discs. When one hears recordings of art songs by Adelina Patti, of Brahms Lieder by Elisabeth Schumann, or—more recently—of overlooked Verdi songs by Dame Margaret Price, it is impossible to imagine these artists as commercially-minded businesspeople with one eye on the till. These recitals were evocations of the qualities that made the singing of these artists memorable and also valuable souvenirs of their personalities as both performers and individuals. Except in some few rare cases, it is this essence, the intangible but always audible sense of the mirth of singing, that is missing from vocal recital discs now. Delightfully, Cirque, this recital of Twentieth-Century French mélodies by soprano Céline Ricci and pianist Daniel Lockert, is one of those exceptions, a remarkable recital in which the experience of performing the music included on the disc is approached with the same direct, uncomplicated delight that might accompany one’s walk along the Seine in the early morning, turned out of a café at the closing hour, the last chill of night clinging to the river, and the smell of baking bread spilling into the streets.

A few words of caution are necessary when approaching this disc. Listeners wanting or expecting the safe, uninflected singing and cautious, easily-ignored playing heard on so many recent recital discs will be disappointed or surprised in turn. The singing offered in this performance by Céline Ricci, an exciting French soprano now resident in San Francisco, is authoritative without being stilted or inaccessible for the casual listener. One lesson learned from recent recital discs is that a Francophone name on the cover does not ensure the elegant phrasing and placement of vowels expected in the heady days of Régine Crespin, Michel Sénéchal, and Gérard Souzay. In the case of Ms. Ricci, however, the art of French singing as exemplified by the great French-speaking artists of the past, including the inimitable Edith Piaf, not only survives but thrives. In her singing of each song on this disc, Ms. Ricci displays the instinctive marriage of music to text that is crucial to the effective singing of French mélodies. Especially impressive is her mastery of the incredibly difficult—even for native speakers of French—application of nasalization as a function of inflection rather than mere pronunciation, a skill that eludes many fine singers but which in Ms. Ricci’s singing sounds disarmingly natural. Furthermore, Ms. Ricci possesses precisely the sort of forward, bright timbre that unpretentiously reveals the nuances of this music without making of each song a grandiose act of artistic piety. The Passions of Bach are perhaps meant to be revered: the songs on this disc, gems of their genre though they are, are surely meant to be experienced, to be sung if not actually in the cabaret then with its irrepressible ebullience. In that regard, Ms. Ricci’s performance is as delightful, intoxicating, and slightly stinging as fine champagne.

The songs and vocal music of Milhaud and Poulenc are hardly unknown, both on recordings and in recital halls. It is especially welcome to hear the songs offered in this recital (and, outside of France, to hear vocal music by Poulenc that is not associated with nuns en route to the guillotine), however, and the songs of Auric and Sauguet are very welcome, especially in performances as spirited as those offered by Ms. Ricci. The texts of these songs, composed to verses by poets of the stature of Jean Cocteau (and at this juncture a few words of praise are due to Sono Luminus for the excellent—and sadly atypical—articles in their liner notes about the poets whose words are sung in this recital), are uncommonly fine, equal in linguistic richness and dramatic impact to the Goethe and Heine texts beloved by Teutonic composers. In a recital that has no misfires, Ms. Ricci’s singing of Auric’s ‘Huit Poémes de Jean Cocteau’ is a superb traversal, both vocally and dramatically, of a sequence of songs that explores the emotional space of a Winterreise with simpler gestures and far more smiles. In his five-song sequence ‘La Voyante,’ Sauguet proves himself the equal of Poulenc in shaping musical structures around the points made by spiky texts.

Wonderfully pulse-quickening is Daniel Lockert’s account of Erik Satie’s previously-unrecorded ‘Rag-Time Parade,’ a barnstorming piece that will inevitably conjure for American listeners aural memories of the music of Scott Joplin. Throughout this recital, Mr. Lockert accompanies Ms. Ricci with the symbiosis required to enrich the musical experience. One danger of this music is that its approachability somehow creates a mirage that suggests that these pieces are easy to play: the unencumbered virtuosity of Mr. Lockert’s playing does not dispel the confusion, his command of the idiom so complete as to make this seem to be music that merely happens rather than having to be rehearsed and performed. When one is virtually unaware of the diligence and skill deployed in a pianist’s playing, not least in the context of his accompaniment of a vocal recital, one is hearing the work of a first-rate artist.

One need not be a connoisseur of Twentieth-Century French vocal music in order to enjoy this recital. Admittedly, this is not repertory that one is likely to hear sung by the over-promoted, just-off-the-Tarmac singers whose recitals delight their followers and whose bland recordings win praise in the press. There is the sense in every note of this recital that this was a very personal journey for Ms. Ricci, one not so much of nationalistic identity but more of individual artistic curiosity and temperament. This is unquestionably among the finest vocal recital discs of recent years, its novelty and caution-be-damned attitude as thrilling as the firecracker brilliance of Ms. Ricci’s singing. Most vitally, this disc is simply great fun.

IN MEMORIAM: Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price, 1941 - 2011

2011-01-31T22:21:00.001-05:00

Dame Margaret Price

13 April 1941 – 28 January 2011

From the fertile land of Wales that reared Sir Geraint Evans and Dame Gwyneth Jones grew one of the most arrestingly beautiful voices ever heard in the music of Mozart, Schubert, and Richard Strauss; that of Dame Margaret Price, whose passing on 28 January not only silenced a glorious voice but also extinguished a warm, unpretentious spirit.

Born in Blackwood, Wales, Ms. Price endured a childhood malady of her legs that caused her pain throughout her life, and she often took on the care of her handicapped brother. It is impossible to know the extent to which music was a comfort to Ms. Price during the difficult earliest years of her life, but her formal studies of music were begun before her sixteenth birthday, and she became a member of the famed Ambrosian Singers during her time at the Trinity College of Music.

Initially trained as a mezzo-soprano, Ms. Price made her formal operatic début as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro at Welsh National Opera in 1962. Her career at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where her progress was impeded by Sir Georg Solti’s reluctance to entrust leading roles to Ms. Price, was solidified by another performance as Cherubino, one in which she substituted on short notice for the celebrated Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza.

Following her success at Covent Garden, Ms. Price established herself in Germany, where she formed an artistic partnership with Otto Klemperer that led to her first leading role in an opera recording, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte. Mozart roles remained central to Ms. Price’s repertory throughout her career. She eventually recorded a poised, ethereally beautiful Contessa in Le Nozze di Figaro for Riccardo Muti and a sterling Pamina in Die Zauberflöte for Sir Colin Davis, along with a refreshingly dignified Donna Anna in Don Giovanni for Sir Georg Solti—for whom, ironically, she made several superb recordings. On records, Ms. Price also proved an exceptionally touching exponent of the role of Wagner’s Isolde, recorded for Carlos Kleiber but never sung in the theatre. Equally remarkable was her singing on several recordings of music by Händel, especially a sublime performance of Saul conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. It might be argued by purists that Ms. Price’s voice was not an ideal instrument for the music of Händel, but by which period-specialist soprano have the vocal lines of the Saxon master been more exquisitely sung?

Despite an operatic career that took her to the Metropolitan Opera, where she débuted as Verdi’s Desdemona on 21 January 1985, La Scala, and the Wiener Staatsoper, it was in Lieder repertory that Ms. Price’s voice perhaps shone most resplendently. In the Lieder of Brahms, Schubert, and Richard Strauss, the tonal beauty and emotional sincerity in Ms. Price’s performances proved irresistible, both in recital halls and on records. None of Ms. Price’s Lieder recordings displays her voice more fittingly or impressively than her account of Schubert’s ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.’ Easily meeting the demands of the song’s difficult, two-octave tessitura, from a resonant lower register to a ringing, unforced top B that would be an uncommon blessing in many performances of Fidelio, Ms. Price renders every nuance of the turbulent text with understated brilliance.

Possessing a voice that was a full, centered lyric soprano, Dame Margaret Price was an artist whose commitment to technically-secure, meaningful music-making rivaled the standards set by legendary sopranos of the past: Maria Müller, Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Lisa della Casa, for instance. She was among the greatest artists of her generation, and her voice will surely reveal to future generations the dignity of Mozart heroines who smile through tears and the inner peace that supports the soaring melodies of Richard Strauss.

CD REVIEW: SOL Y LUNA–Sephardic Music performed by Brio (J. Lemos, S. Rosenberg, M.A. Ballard, D. Mallon; Dorian Sono Luminus DSL-92118)

2011-01-16T00:12:00.001-05:00

SOL Y LUNA: Sephardic music performed by Brio – J. Lemos (countertenor), S. Rosenberg (guitars, recorder, Persian flute), M.A. Ballard (viola da gamba, rebec), D. Mallon (percussion) [recorded at Ayrshire Farm, Upperville, VA, 10 – 12 March 2010; Dorian Sono Luminus DSL-92118]

It is now to the mists of time and—perhaps worse—the dictates of conjecture that the precise origins of Sephardic music are lost. Likely stemming from roots cultivated among the Jewish communities of medieval Spain and having as a primary impetus in its development the expulsion of Jews from Spain by the Inquisition in 1492, the tradition of Sephardic music developed during the five subsequent centuries to incorporate cultural elements from virtually the entire Mediterranean basin. Scholars debate the influence of Muslim musical traditions on Sephardic music, especially in Turkey and north Africa, and recently some few scholars have postulated that much of the known Sephardic repertory may be inauthentic in the sense that the songs were composed to conform with perceptions of Sephardic tradition rather than having sprung organically from it. This distinction is potentially of an historical significance, of course, but to what extent is the musical integrity of the Sephardic repertory undermined? The concerti composed by the violinist Fritz Kreisler and initially presented as works by Vivaldi are now accepted and admired as Kreisler’s own work. How many opera-goers cover their ears or flee the auditorium when, say, the arias in La Cenerentola that were not composed by Rossini are sung? Should Brahms’s Symphonies be less important works of art were it discovered that they were actually composed by a struggling conservatory student rather than the master composer in his full maturity? This is not to dismiss the importance of a work’s—or, in this case, a repertory’s—genesis, but the true value of music surely depends more upon its effect on those who hear it than upon the circumstances under which it was created. Applying this criterion, the body of Sephardic music available to modern performers and listeners is especially deserving of preservation, presentation, and enjoyment, whether the individual songs were composed by men or women performing and writing in the shadows of cathedrals, mosques, or synagogues.

Founded in 2002 by Early Music specialist and Chairman of the Music Department of the College of Charleston Steve Rosenberg, Brio is a chamber ensemble dedicated to thoughtful performance of Sephardic songs and what might be called the medieval ‘troubadour’ repertory. To this music, Brio bring both historical circumspection and decidedly modern perspectives, audibly putting forth the notion that, whatever their collective provenance, these songs are living, breathing organisms, not relics of antiquity that must be approached with gloves and hushed tones of reverence. The philosophy employed by Brio would seem to be that Sephardic music is best celebrated by performing it full on, without the artificial shows of historical accuracy that pass for appropriate ‘style’ in many camps, and focusing on the emotional immediacy of each song. The dividend paid by this investment of artistic resources is that most prized of traits: relevance of the musical experience to the Twenty-First-Century listener. In Brio’s hands, these are not songs of medieval Spain, of expelled and reviled people, or of any specific times or places: these are songs of love and loss, beauty and pain, and the shared emotional reactions of humanity to common predicaments. The validity and musical merit of this approach have never been more apparent than in Brio’s new disc of Sephardic songs, Sol y Luna.

From the opening notes of the first song on the disc, ‘Yo m’enamori,’ the listener is transported to Andalucía, the finely-detailed playing of the guitar, the rattling of the castanets, and the seductive cadence of the voice suggesting the whirl of the wind in the caves of Sacromonte. It would be impossible to select any of the tracks on the disc, instrumental or vocal, for particular praise, so high is the quality of the performances in general. Whether wistful or exuberant, the mood of each song is evoked through vocal and instrumental nuances derived unpretentiously from the text. When performing music conveying such vital passions, there is always the danger of seeming quaint, of seeming to sing of these sentiments rather than from them. In this recording, there is no doubt that the emotions of this music are felt, and thus the psychological environments of these songs are palpable to the listener.

Playing recorder, Persian flute, and an array of Renaissance guitars, Brio’s founder Steve Rosenberg shapes each song with ears, mind, and heart focused on reflecting the poetic twists of the texts in sound. Each song is given a distinct profile, a ‘sound world’ that honors its origins, whether Spanish, Israeli, or Turkish, but also creates a refreshing vitality. Mr. Rosenberg’s playing is technically astute and possesses the rhythmic ‘snap’ that is required to draw the listener into each song. The bass lines of the songs are drawn with complementary intuition by Mary Anne Balllard, playing viola da gamba and rebec, a bowed instrument derived from Arab models and popularized in Europe during the Renaissance (a scene in Don Quijote depicts a shepherd’s serenade accompanied by a rebec). To these ingredients are added the aromatic spices of the sounds made by a veritable orchestra of percussion instruments played by Danny Mallon, whose mastery of the castanets is particularly impressive. The sounds created by this trio of exemplary musicians combine to create a dialogue that interacts with the vocalism rather than merely supporting it.

The voice of South American countertenor José Lemos is marvelously ambiguous: both smoky and almost celestially pure, the timbre of Mr. Lemos’s voice seems specially-tailored for the troubadour and Sephardic music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. When expressing fervent piety, the voice glows with radiance. Songs of sadness and loss inspire elements of darkness and heaviness despite the downy lightness of Mr. Lemos’s vocal technique. Love songs draw from Mr. Lemos’s voice a smoldering, almost scandalous sensuality. Singing in the ‘composite’ language (influenced by both Spanish and Jewish dialects, with contributions from hosts of other linguistic idioms) Ladino, the crispness of Mr. Lemos’s diction is very rewarding in this music, and only the absence of the distinctive consonant formations of Castilian reveals that he is not a native Spaniard. Mr. Lemos’s accomplishments in operatic repertory, ranging from the operas of Lully and Händel to Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, are unfailingly memorable, and he brings the same vocal focus and dramatic precision familiar from his operatic roles to the music on this disc. These songs are not conceived in his performance as operas in miniature, however: in complete accord with Mr. Rosenberg, Ms. Ballard, and Mr. Mallon, Mr. Lemos presents each song in this recording as a moment in life, some of them to be proclaimed in sunny plazas, some to be carried by the breeze on moonlit nights, and some to be whispered into ears under cover of darkness.

That Sephardic music is an underexplored vein of artistic gold is evident from the splendid music-making on this recording. Perhaps the greatest achievement of this disc, though, is the unique spontaneity of the singing and playing, making a tradition that may be as old as the Alhambra seem not just new but perceptibly evolving. The performances by Brio brim with energy and the joy of uniting the threads of common cultural and emotional exchanges inherent in the diversity of music. Stevie Wonder famously sang that ‘just because a record has a groove don’t make it in the groove.’ Whether heard as an expressive account of music in a centuries-old tradition or as a vital experience of a new, ever-changing genre, Sol y Luna is gloriously in the groove.

CD REVIEW: Antonio Vivaldi – ERCOLE SUL TERMODONTE (R. Villazón, R. Basso, P. Ciofi, D. Damrau, J. DiDonato, V. Genaux, P. Jaroussky, T. Lehtipuu; Virgin 6945450)

2011-01-02T14:35:00.001-05:00

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678 – 1741): Ercole sul Termodonte, RV 710 – R. Villazón (Ercole), R. Basso (Teseo), P. Ciofi (Orizia), D. Damrau (Martesia), J. DiDonato (Ippolita), V. Genaux (Antiope), P. Jaroussky (Alceste), T. Lehtipuu (Telamone); Coro da Camera ‘Santa Cecilia’ di Borgo San Lorenzo, Europa Galante; Fabio Biondi [recorded in the Teatro della Pergola, Florence, 24 – 31 July 2008, 2 – 6 January 2009, 6 – 7 June 2010; Virgin 6945450]

It was in the summer of 2006 that Spoleto’s Festival dei Due Mondi seized the attention of opera lovers worldwide with a production of Vivaldi’s forgotten—and previously-lost, or at least disassembled—Ercole sul Termodonte by British director John Pascoe, a production in which some fine singing by a young cast was outshone by the startling visual concept of Mr. Pascoe’s design, which was reliant upon phallic imagery and nudity among the principal singers. It was the ill fortune of the cast, and especially of those singers who took the lead roles, to look at least as handsome as they sounded, so despite a DVD release of the production the effect of Vivaldi’s musical score was decidedly secondary. The Spoleto production was an adequate and effective introduction to Ercole, however, and rumors circulated almost immediately that a studio recording of the opera was planned, featuring Italian violinist and conductor Fabio Biondi (whose editorial work produced the score that is performed on the present recording) and Europa Galante.

It is a testament to the dedication of Maestro Biondi and the potential of his lead tenor, Rolando Villazón, that the making of this recording—sponsored by Rolex—went ahead in the troubled economic times during which the sessions were held. As is often the case with operatic recordings, there was much gossip about which singers would accept the challenges of Vivaldi’s music for the recording. Europa Galante presented concert performances of Ercole throughout Europe with a cast similar to that of the recording, with Italian tenor Carlo Allemano an idiomatic, suitably heroic Ercole. When the news that Rolando Villazón, whose ‘experimental’ disc of Händel arias proved one of the most-discussed recital discs of recent years, would sing the title role in the Biondi recording was confirmed, interest in the recording expanded beyond the usual pool of connoisseurs of Baroque opera. It was easy to suspect that the presence of Mr. Villazón would unbalance the performance, but Virgin have assembled as starry a cast for this recording of Ercole as, comparatively, has ever been fielded for any operatic recording.

The libretto of Vivaldi’s Ercole, the work of Antonio Salvi despite having long been misattributed to Giacomo Francesco Bussani, is obviously drawn from Greek mythology as recorded by the historians Apollodorus and Justin. The basis of the plot is the ninth (as ordered by Apollodorus) of the labors assigned to Hercules by Eurystheus as the demi-god’s penance for having slain his own children, the theft of the magical girdle possessed by Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Salvi’s libretto adapts the myth in a manner typical of Eighteenth-Century opera, incorporating amorous intrigues and shifting alliances. Accompanied in the pursuit of his task by the Greek heroes Theseus, Telamon, and Alceste (a king of Sparta not to be confused with the princess employed operatically by Lully, Händel, and Gluck), Hercules and his band encounter the noble Amazonian women, and the conquerors become the conquered as the Greeks surrender their hearts to the beautiful, brave Amazons. The plot is contrived, offering little that modern audiences might consider ‘relevant,’ but as with the libretti by Salvi that were set by Händel there are moments of dramatic tension and poetic conceits that possess genuine distinction. For all that the score was constructed from component parts extracted from the composer’s other operas, Salvi’s libretto for Ercole provided Vivaldi with ample opportunities to exercise his fondness for simile arias. The music of Ercole largely matches the moods of the libretto, whether martial or romantic, and the editorial notes in the booklet provided with this release are very detailed in their identifications of the sources from which Vivaldi drew his music for the opera and upon which Maestro Biondi relied for his edition of the score. [The Spoleto production, conducted by Alan Curtis, used a different edition of the opera, reconstructed by Alessandro Ciccolini.] The recitatives used in the recording are adapted or newly-composed by Maestro Biondi, a practice that is hardly bothersome considering that the composition of recitative was often left to apprentices, novice composers, or an opera company’s maestro di cembalo from Vivaldi’s time well into the Nineteenth Century. It is very interesting to note that a Papal ban on female performers in Roman theatres at the time of the first performance of Ercole meant that Vivaldi’s female roles were sung by castrati: how ironic that these Amazons, the most fiercely feminist figures of antiquity, were impersonated by men! The ladies in this performance might legitimately be said to make amends on behalf of their mythological counterparts, however.

Musically, the recording begins on sound footing and maintains its gait until the final chord has sounded. The choristers of the Coro da Camera ‘Santa Cecilia’ di Borgo San Lorenzo, eleven ladies under the direction of Andrea Sardi, sing incisively, bringing excitement to their limited contributions to the opera. Europa Galante have emerged as one of the most consistently excellent period-instrument bands on the Early Music scene, and they play in this performance with the accuracy and power that are the marks of advocacy. The continuo—consisting of harpsichord, theorbo, and ‘cello—is effectively deployed throughout, with especially eloquent shaping of contemplative secco recitative. Being an earnest champion of Ercole, Maestro Biondi presides over the performance with obvious affection for the score, but he never allows zeal to distort the balance between egotistical heroism and tenderness that is at the heart of the opera. Tempi are for the most part sensible, with nothing stretched beyond its breaking point and the singers reliably given paces at which they can approach their vocal hurdles comfortably.

Coping very comfortably indeed with his role as Telamone is Topi Lehtipuu, a rare tenor whose voice combines great flexibility with genuine beauty. His role in Ercole does not give him a great deal to do, but everything that he does is accomplished with considerable aplomb and dramatic awareness. Drama is likewise at the center of Patrizia Ciofi’s portrayal of Orizia, the belligerent sister of Antiope. The slightly husky timbre of Ms. Ciofi’s voice, especially in its lower register, nicely contrasts her with the recording’s other high-voiced soprano. Ms. Ciofi spits out her music with delightful vehemence, and when her lines soar above the ledger lines the voice soars brilliantly in tandem. She seizes every musical opportunity and makes an indelible—and resolutely positive—impression.

The first pair of lovers is sung by soprano Diana Damrau as Martesia (who is made Antiope’s daughter by Salvi, rather than her sister) and countertenor Philippe Jaroussky as Alceste. Ms. Damrau, whose typical repertory includes the bel canto heroines of Bellini and Donizetti, proves a very capable singer of Baroque music. This is not to say that she alters her vocal technique to approximate the style of singing that is regarded by some scholars as appropriate to Baroque repertory: in fact, there is in this performance not the slightest hint of the white-toned honking and tweeting that is often deemed ‘stylish.’ Ms. Damrau approaches Martesia’s music with the same technical foundation with which she might sing Gilda or Lucia, and that is all to the good. Also to her credit is the fact that the voice is uncommonly lovely throughout its range, and Ms. Damrau apparently has musical good sense in spades. Whether shuddering with terror or tingling with new-found love, Ms. Damrau’s tone unfailingly conveys Martesia’s state of mind, and her phrasing is exemplary. Mr. Jaroussky also masters some excellent, long-breathed phrasing, and his voice is also beautiful. What it is not, alas, is masculine, and the dramatic profile of Alceste suffers. Mr. Jaroussky is dramatically alert, however, and he works hard to bring to his performance the heroic fire and romantic ardor that his soft-grained voice lacks. Musically, Mr. Jaroussky’s performance is superb, though occasional signs of stress in the upper register introduce a suspicion that Alceste’s music is, at least in part, slightly too high for Mr. Jaroussky (and, indeed, perhaps for countertenors in general). United by their characters’ passions for one another, Ms. Damrau and Mr. Jaroussky sing compellingly.

The real firebrand of the opera is Antiope, the most overtly bellicose of Vivaldi’s Amazon queens, and her venomous hatred of the male sex is vividly portrayed in a take-no-prisoners performance from mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux. The patina of Ms. Genaux’s voice is dark, like aged bronze, but there is a brilliant edge to her singing of coloratura passages, underpinned by what is by any appreciable standard an astonishing technique, that is thrilling. Hercules was perhaps the ancient world’s greatest hero, but from her first note Ms. Genaux establishes that in Antiope he has encountered an equal. Capable of executing the most fiendish and bizarre feats of vocal pyrotechnics with complete ease, Ms. Genaux impresses most when she softens the focus and allows the voice to glow with simmering passion. As her Amazonian sisters yield to love’s persuasion, Antiope prefers to die rather than submit to men, and Ms. Genaux’s singing meaningfully conveys her character’s nobility and determination. In a sense, Antiope is the most one-dimensional character in the opera, unbending in her quest to maintain the power of her race, but in a performance as wonderful as Ms. Genaux’s she is also the most interesting character. It would be tremendously difficult to resist the allure of Ms. Genaux’s performance, for there is always the promise when she starts to sing that there is something spectacular to be heard.

The second pairs of lovers, Ippolita (Hippolyta) and Teseo (Theseus), is sung by mezzo-sopranos Joyce DiDonato and Romina Basso. As suggested by her acclaimed explorations of the music composed by Rossini for Isabella Colbran, Ms. DiDonato is a singer whose voice is perfectly placed between the conventional ranges of mezzo-soprano and soprano. She has complete command of a silvery lower register, but gleaming top Cs likewise hold no terrors for her. Vivaldi’s music for Ippolita inhabits the higher end of this vocal spectrum (the role was first performed by the soprano castrato Farfallino, who was said to have a compressed range but a very beautiful high register), and the attractiveness of Ms. DiDonato’s tone in this portion of her voice is remarkable. She also demonstrates an innate understanding of the art of using vocal coloration to make dramatic points. Musically, she faces nothing to which her technique is not wholly equal. Ms. DiDonato has developed the enviable habit of being the undoubted star of every recording in which she participates, and only the high level of overall achievement in this performance prevents her from running away with the laurels in Ercole. Contributing powerfully to that overall achievement is Ms. Basso, a singer whose voice enthralls with its smoky beauty. In this performance, Ms. Basso reveals herself to be what might be termed a ‘singers’ singer,’ one for whom complete mastery of her music is an expectation rather than an exception. Nothing in Ms. Basso’s performance is showy or extravagant for its own sake, but the prevailing cumulative perception of her performance is that she has delivered as complete a performance of a Vivaldi operatic role as one is likely to hear. There is a beguiling sensuality in Ms. Basso’s singing, along with a credible sense of Teseo’s masculinity, that suggests that this hero is one whose love-making is as legendary as his war-waging. Ms. Basso’s intensity is the perfect foil for Ms. DiDonato’s gossamer femininity: these two singers, giving magnificent performances, prove that the sort of operatic passion that makes naïve young listeners blush was not an invention of the Nineteenth Century.

If he is not the principal raison d’être for this recording of Ercole, the presence of Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón is sure to be the foremost focal point of interest in this recording. Mr. Villazón’s vocal problems have been widely debated in recent seasons, and his disc of Händel arias conducted by Paul McCreesh proved divisive, both among aficionados of Baroque music and in the wider opera-loving public. What is immediately apparent when hearing his performance in Ercole is that, if Mr. Villazón’s has recently been a voice in crisis, that crisis was largely abated during the sessions that produced this recording. The voice is arrestingly dark and baritonal, yet there is also the suggestion—especially in secco recitative—that Ercole’s vocal lines take Mr. Villazón slightly beyond the lower boundary of his vocal comfort zone. The voice is not large as recorded, but the dark tone makes an imposing, bitingly heroic effect. Anyone who did not hear the Händel recital disc will likely be surprised by Mr. Villazón’s faculty for negotiating Ercole’s bravura passages, which are approached full-on and without hesitation. The highest notes often sound disconnected from the rest of the voice, but the tone is secure throughout the range required by Ercole’s music. Mr. Villazón’s performance is not a paragon of historically-appropriate singing as it is presently understood, but he sings in a manner that meets the demands of Vivaldi’s music without ever condescending to it and, all things considered, offers a performance that is a credit to himself, his colleagues, and the composer.

It is only rarely that Vivaldi achieved the exalted level inhabited by Händel as a musical dramatist. Vivaldi’s operas are enjoyably innovative and musically rich without reaching the depths of emotion that are present in Händel’s best operas. It would be dishonest to suggest that Ercole is one of the scores in which Vivaldi genuinely rivaled Händel, but the Italian composer was an adept man of the theatre who knew how to make a vivid impression. It is a vivid impression indeed that is made by Ercole, one that has been carefully reconstructed and lovingly rearticulated by Maestro Biondi. He is extraordinarily fortunate to have been joined in his task of breathing new life into Ercole by a cast without a single weak link. Ercole does not leave the listener with the sort of cathartic experience that is possible when hearing one of Händel’s best operas, but this recording leaves one with the gratification of having heard a marvelous performance of an opera with many moments of fascinating beauty and power.

CD REVIEW: Gioachino Rossini – STABAT MATER (A. Netrebko, J. DiDonato, L. Brownlee, I. D’Arcangelo; EMI 6 40529 2)

2010-12-03T22:09:00.001-05:00

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Stabat Mater for Soloists, Choir, and Orchestra – A. Netrebko (soprano), J. DiDonato (mezzo-soprano), L. Brownlee (tenor), I. D’Arcangelo (bass); Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; Antonio Pappano [recorded in Sala Santa Cecilia, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome, 20 – 23 July 2010; EMI 6 40529 2]

When Rossini completed Guillaume Tell, his final opera, in 1829, he was in the thirty-eighth year of a life that would extend for seventy-six years. Compared with the scores of its composer’s youth, Guillaume Tell was virtually a revolutionary score: running for more than four hours without cuts, the opera was typically Rossinian—which is to say Italianate—in its melodic grace and flamboyant orchestration, but the French Grand Opera of Meyerbeer and Halévy was equally in evidence in the music. Perhaps sensing the transition in Italian music from bel canto to the Romanticism that would hold sway by the middle of the Nineteenth Century—the premiere of Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, was only a decade in the future at the time at which Rossini was composing Guillaume Tell,—the composer of Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Tancredi, pinnacles of their genres, ceded the field to his younger colleagues, principally Bellini and Donizetti. From the time of the first production of Guillaume Tell in 1829 until his death in 1868, Rossini composed no more operas.

It was early in this self-imposed retirement, however, that Rossini began composition of his Stabat Mater, a setting of the Thirteenth-Century versified evocation of the sorrow of the Virgin Mary as she observes the crucifixion of Christ. Drawing inspired settings from both Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Joseph Haydn, and even Schubert, the Stabat Mater commanded an influence in liturgical music that was propelled through the Nineteenth Century by settings by Rossini, Verdi, and Dvořák. Commissioned in 1831 by an official of the Spanish government to compose his setting of the verses, Rossini set to work almost at once but was ultimately prevented by illness from completing the score in fulfillment of the commission. At Rossini’s request, the Italian composer Giuseppe Tadolini (husband of Eugenia Tadolini, one of Donizetti’s favorite sopranos) completed the score, and it was in this composite version that the work was first performed in Madrid in 1833. After a legal fracas resulting from what Rossini deemed an unauthorized publication of the composite score, Rossini composed replacements for the movements composed by Tadolini, publishing the score in the now-familiar form, with all movements by Rossini, in 1841. Announcement of the first performance of the completed score, which took place in Paris on 7 January 1842, drew mixed responses from critics throughout Europe, one of the most vitriolic in expressing his disapproval being Richard Wagner. Both the Parisian premiere in January and the Italian premiere in Bologna in March, conducted by Donizetti, were tremendously successful, however, and the Stabat Mater has remained among Rossini’s most enduringly popular works.

It is not now and should hardly have been surprising to critics and audiences in 1842 that Rossini’s Stabat Mater is, though far removed from his operas, an operatic work. The negative response of Teutonic musicians and critics to this aspect of Rossini’s work is slightly perplexing, especially considering that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach—the Titan among Germanic composers of liturgical music—was largely forgotten until the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Several of Händel’s oratorios are very similar in form and substance to his operas and indeed are now often performed in staged productions with great success. The mature liturgical works of both Haydn and Mozart employ the same concertato techniques familiar from their own operas and the religious compositions of contemporary Italians such as Cimarosa and Salieri. Whatever charges were made against Rossini’s Stabat Mater at the time of its creation and in subsequent generations, the score contains music of great quality, worthy of its composer at his best. Verdi’s Requiem—said by some critics to be Verdi’s greatest opera—builds upon the foundation laid by Rossini in the Stabat Mater; a not inconsiderable legacy for a work by a composer in retirement.

Expectations for this new recording of the Stabat Mater have been very high, not least because of the accomplishments of its conductor, Antonio Pappano, in his native Italian repertory at the Royal Opera House. It is, in fact, Maestro Pappano’s conducting that is the recording’s first obvious attraction. His pacing of the score is deliberate but thoughtful, especially in the sense of approaching the music on its own terms: Maestro Pappano leads a performance that reveals the grandeur of Rossini’s music without seeming calculated to redeem an unjustly-criticized masterpiece. Maestro Pappano is fortunate in having at his disposal a quartet of vocal soloists for whose sake no allowances must be made in choices of tempi, with the result that the paces at which individual numbers progress seem natural and well-judged. Cumulatively, though, the performance lacks cohesion, a condition that is more damaging to the dramatic effectiveness of the piece than to the music. A wonder of Maestro Pappano’s musical work is the excellent singing and playing that he draws from the choristers and instrumentalists of the Chorus and Orchestra of Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the ensembles that in decades past sometimes struggled to maintain basic levels of professionalism in made-on-the-quick opera recordings. Singing and playing in this performance with precision and passion that would withstand comparison with La Scala forces, both Chorus and Orchestra—recorded with excellent clarity and balance by EMI’s engineers, it should be said—contribute thrillingly.

In her first phrases, the beautiful Russian soprano Anna Netrebko seems ill-suited to this music. The voice sounds blowsy and slightly wobbly, which can likely be attributed to the actual sound of the voice rather than to its use or condition. Little is made of the Latin text. In ensembles, Ms. Netrebko does not consistently blend well with the other soloists. She improves in the duet with the mezzo-soprano, ‘Quis est homo,’ however, the voice taking on greater focus. In her aria with chorus, ‘Inflammatus et accensus,’ Ms. Netrebko comes into her own, relishing the opportunity to take command as her vocal line ascends over the choir and providing top notes that ring out brilliantly. In the closing movement, Ms. Netrebko adapts her singing more sensitively to that of her colleagues in the solo quartet, ending the performance with greater feeling and fluidity.

Undermining Ms. Netrebko’s effectiveness in ‘Quis est homo’ to a degree is the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who approaches even the most stringent demands of her music with complete assurance. With floods of warm tone, a florid technique equal to the greatest coloratura singers past and present, and a trill seemingly inherited from Dame Joan Sutherland, Ms. DiDonato sings with easy splendor throughout this performance. Blending beautifully with her colleagues, Ms. DiDonato’s contributions to ensembles are touching, and the security with which she sings her cavatina, ‘Fac, ut portem Christi mortem’ is extraordinarily impressive. It is solely in the sense that the work of a truly great singer is invariably all the more apparent in the company of merely very good colleagues that Ms. DiDonato distorts the equilibrium in ‘Quis est homo.’ It has been the mezzo-soprano soloist who has let down many performances and recordings of the Stabat Mater, a misfortune completely avoided in this recording.

The most familiar movement of the Stabat Mater is the tenor’s ‘Cujus animam gementem,’ an unapologetically operatic aria that, with its climactic top D-flat, has proved irresistible to virtually every tenor capable of singing it—and to more than a few incapable of singing it. Though his lines in ensembles are a credit to Rossini’s skill as a composer of four-part polyphony, the aria is the tenor’s only opportunity to emerge from his surroundings, as it were, and with singing of bright, soaring immediacy the American tenor Lawrence Brownlee emphatically claims his moment. The fluency of Mr. Brownlee’s bel canto technique is compellingly displayed in ‘Cujus animam,’ the lilting principal theme of the aria delivered smoothly and with deceptive ease. Bravura passages managed handily, the aria is capped with a lovely top D-flat that is sustained comfortably but not long enough to seem vulgar. Throughout the performance, Mr. Brownlee sings with the sort of finesse that confirms his reputation as one of the leading Rossini tenors of his generation.

The Italian singer Ildebrando D’Arcangelo impresses in his aria, ‘Pro peccatis suæ gentis.’ Though billed in this performance as a bass, Mr. D’Arcangelo is decidedly more of a bass-baritone than a true bass, and his tone weakens significantly at the bottom of his range, risking inaudibility in the descending lines of ‘Eja, Mater, fons amoris.’ Mr. D’Arcangelo’s instrument is sturdy and attractive, however, and his singing exhibits a native understanding of Rossini’s idiom. Despite the limitations of his lower register, Mr. D’Arcangelo provides an effective foundation in ensembles.

Considering the poor quality of so many performances and recordings of operatic and concert music in recent years, it is encouraging that a recording of this quality has been devoted to Rossini’s Stabat Mater. Though neither infrequently-recorded nor poorly-served on records, the Stabat Mater is a work of which there is no single definitive recording: many recordings have inimitable qualities that are balanced or even undone by weaknesses. The present recording is not perfect. There are recorded performances that explore the drama of the Virgin Mother’s sorrow with greater immediacy and emotional impact despite weaker singing, for instance. Especially with the performances given by Ms. DiDonato and Mr. Brownlee, however, this recording documents a standard of Rossini singing that makes this performance one that should be heard by all who treasure the rarefied art of bel canto.

CD REVIEW: Jorge Martín – BEFORE NIGHT FALLS (W. Mason, J. Blalock, J. Garcia, S. Mease Carico, J. Abreu, J. Hall, C. Ross; Albany Records TROY 1226/27)

2010-11-14T23:29:00.001-05:00

JORGE MARTÍN (1959 – ): Before Night Falls – W. Mason (Reinaldo Arenas), S. Mease Carico (Victor), J. Garcia (Ovidio), J. Hall (Mother, the Sea), C. Ross (the Moon), J. Blalock (Lázaro), J. Abreu (Pepe), C. Trahan (Port Official, Visa Official); Fort Worth Opera Chorus, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra; Joseph Illick [recorded in Fort Worth, TX, during Spring 2010; Albany Records TROY 1226/27]

There are in virtually every age of humanity those individuals and situations that capture the popular imagination, whether within the limited scope of specific places or on a global scale. Through oral traditions and, eventually, the endeavors of artists, these figures of collective importance are subjected to a kind of etherized immortality in which they are indefinitely preserved but are not unchanging: as the years pass, there are many cases in which the ideals for which a person is remembered become more important in the context of mythological consciousness than the facts that contributed to the legend. There was, for instance, Cleopatra VII Philapator, the Greek queen who was Egypt’s last fully legitimate Pharaoh regnant, a woman who during her life wielded as much power and influence as did any woman on earth. Within a century of her death, however, she was rather than an exceptional woman a figure in fanciful histories, a character in the drama that was Rome in the years before its collapse. To a generation of American opera-lovers, Cleopatra was Beverly Sills, her Hellenic authority taking the form of brilliant displays of coloratura and interpolated top notes that shone like the summer sun on the surface of the Nile. For lovers of cinema, Cleopatra was Elizabeth Taylor, a beguiling seductress whose lavender eyes could bend the will of Rome. Before either Georg Friedrich Händel or Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted Cleopatra to their artistic ends, William Shakespeare had endowed his Antony and Cleopatra with a female heroine so monumental as to seem almost caricatured and scornful but whose suicide was depicted with extraordinary tragic grandeur, an Elizabethan Liedestod. Though undoubtedly an exceptionally cunning and educated woman to whom Homer would have been as familiar as to the greatest scholars of the European Renaissance, Cleopatra VII Philapator was almost certainly neither the graceful consort nor the timeless beauty artistic depictions of her have introduced into pseudo-historical perceptions. The extent to which these well-intended artistic prevarications have affected the cultural legacy of Cuban dissident poet Reinaldo Arenas, the subject of Cuban-born composer Jorge Martín’s opera Before Night Falls (taken from the English title of Arenas’s posthumously-published 1992 autobiography Antes que anochezca) whose life has already been explored in a film with the same title that featured an Academy Award-nominated performance by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, is perhaps more difficult to ascertain than with a figure from the distant past like Cleopatra. The best sources of information about Arenas, who took his own life in 1990 after a draining battle with AIDS, are his own writings, many of which are at least allegorically autobiographical and decry the atrocities of Fidel Casto’s Cuba. The libretto of Before Night Falls, the work of the composer and Dolores M. Koch, is commendably faithful to Arenas’s own writings. Determining whether the Reinaldo Arenas we meet in Mr. Martín’s opera is the man as he actually was can only be left to history, but what the poet’s writings and the opera establish is that Arenas was one of those men whose life, whatever the gilding of legend will make of it, was both of his own time and for all time.

Mr. Martín’s and Ms. Koch’s libretto must be commended at the start for never getting mired in the post-Revolution politics of Cuba in the Twentieth Century. This is an opera built upon the foundation of a compelling central figure rather than an abstract political manifesto. Politics lurks in every dark corner of the drama, of course, but the listener’s attention is focused on the impact of the political machinations faced by Arenas and the other characters in the opera. Equally essential to the psychological construction of the opera is the issue of Arenas’s homosexuality, something that was especially dangerous in his native Cuba and remained contentious even in the United States during the final years of his life. Mr. Martín as both composer and librettist, along with Ms. Koch, is to be praised for approaching the subject of Reinaldo Arenas with a sensitivity and honesty that elude many directors of recent productions of operas such as Billy Budd and Peter Grimes, in which characters’ implicit or presumed homosexuality has been artificially given greater importance than their humanity. It is of considerable significance to his legacy that Arenas was a gay man, and as an aspect of his cultural genesis this story should and must be told. As with the untold numbers of gay artists who were tortured and killed by the Holocausts wrought by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russian, though, what is most important, indeed most poetic, about Arenas is that he was, all else aside, a man, equally remarkable and unremarkable. The lasting meaning of Arenas’ plight as an artist is in his humanity, not his sexuality, and the valiance with which he bore his own persecution and the exasperating sorrow with which he witnessed the suffering of his fellow men. Arenas would likely have agreed that his sexuality was an element of his life rather than its impetus, and Mr. Martín integrates Arenas’s sexuality into the opera in a manner that, without politicizing any aspect of the drama for the sake of sermonizing, honors the sense of love as an abiding necessity in the life of any man, regardless of his sexuality. Before Night Falls is not a social treatise in operatic form charged with altering perceptions: operating within the parameters of traditional forms, Mr. Martín’s opera examines Arenas’s struggles as those of one man united with Everyman, like Rigoletto’s, Wotan’s, or Boris Godunov’s. The libretto of Before Night Falls is, like Arenas’s own writings, colloquial and unfailingly eloquent. One hears the voice of a beautiful, tormented man in words that he might have written himself.

Musically, Mr. Martín’s score is tonal without ever seeming dated and makes clever, understated use of many rhythms native to Reinaldo Arenas’s Cuba. Rey’s first extended solo is sung over an engaging habanera, and even contemplative passages benefit from thoughtful rhythmic underpinning. Unlike many of the operas written during the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, Before Night Falls is unquestionably an opera after the models of history, its tonal palette expansive and far removed from contemporary musical theatre. It is audibly an opera of its time but none the worse for that. There are, in fact, many passages of great beauty in the score, not least in the first-act trio for Ovidio, Rey, and Pepe, ‘Oh, our unhappy island,’ and the Epilogue, Rey’s death scene. There is often an almost Mozartean grace in the ensemble writing, and Mr. Martín shares with Benjamin Britten the skill for making male voices, even when dominant within the aural landscape, individual and sharply characterized. The composer largely leaves musical evocations of Cuba in the orchestra, contrasting the often-complex dance rhythms with vocal lines that are both melodically appealing and conducive to pointed delivery of the text. Successful both musically and dramatically, Before Night Falls is among the sadly few genuine operas composed during the first decade of the new millennium that not only deserved a studio recording of its premiere production but also deserves a place in the repertories of the world’s important opera houses.

That premiere production, the result of espousal of the opera by Fort Worth Opera General Director Darren K. Woods, led to a recording that, as a document of the creation of an important opera by a cast of committed, talented young artists, is superb. Produced for Albany Records by John Ostendorf, himself one of America’s finest singers and a veteran of many excellent recordings, the recording has excellent sound quality that preserves theatrical ambiance without sacrificing tonal or verbal clarity to reverberation. The effect is similar to being in the first tier of an acoustically bright house, with the balance among orchestra, chorus, and soloists ideally achieved. Mr. Martín employs the chorus almost as they would be used in a Greek tragedy: the chorus of Rey’s embittered Aunts, though tonally distant, is not unlike choruses of Furies in the operas of Gluck. Whether as these complaining crones, as jubilant revolutionaries, or as oppressed prisoners, the Fort Worth Opera choristers, thirty-one in number, sing very well throughout the performance. Likewise, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra play with precision and verve. Presiding over the performance is conductor Joseph Illick, Fort Worth Opera’s Music Director. Conducting with the zeal of advocacy that never gets in the way of the kind of straightforward music-making that lends a genuine sense of occasion to the performance, Maestro Illick brings extensive experience in mainstream repertory to his pacing of Mr. Martín’s opera. Maestro Illick is the sort of conductor whose quiet mastery of operatic timing and the difficult balance between stage and pit is so welcome in America’s regional opera houses and, with only a few notable exceptions, so conspicuously absent in America’s larger houses. It is evident in every note on this recording that Maestro Illick, Mr. Woods, and the Fort Worth Opera forces were as committed to Mr. Martín’s opera as the composer was to honestly and touchingly portraying his subject.

In the opera’s female roles, sopranos Janice Hall as Rey’s mother and the Sea and Courtney Ross as the Moon bring firm, lovely voices to their music. Ms. Hall is especially moving in the aria for Rey’s mother, ‘Promise me, child.’ Mr. Martín’s music for the Sea and the Moon, symbolic figures who essentially serve as Rey’s muses, is often ethereally beautiful, reminiscent in spirit of Richard Strauss’s music for the nymphs in Ariadne auf Naxos. The lullaby sung by the Sea and the Moon in the final moments of the opera, following Rey’s death, also conjures the Strauss of the final trio of Der Rosenkavalier and the final scene of Capriccio. As the Port and Visa officials, Corey Trahan discloses a lovely, light tenor voice of the type that, since the heady days of Hugues Cuénod and Michel Sénéchal, has become steadily rarer.

A quartet of gifted young singers take the roles of the four men whose lives intersect most meaningfully with Rey’s in the opera. As Victor, a commandant in the revolutionary force that ousted Fulgencio Batista and swept Fidel Castro into power in Cuba, bass-baritone Seth Mease Carico sings with the dark authority required to convey in vocal terms alone the oppression imposed upon Rey and other Cuban dissidents. Mr. Carico is especially commanding and powerful in the Interrogation Scene that occurs after Rey has been imprisoned at the infamous Castillo el Morro, a scene that in its dramatic effectiveness and emotional impact brings to mind the scene for the title heroine and the Zia Principessa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, as well as the tense Interrogation Scene with piano accompaniment for Giordano’s Fedora and Ipanov. Vocally and dramatically, Mr. Carico’s Victor is rather like a young, very dangerous Scarpia.

Rey’s deliverance unto Victor and the revolutionary forces is accomplished when he is betrayed by Pepe, his childhood friend. Sung by Puerto Rican tenor Javier Abreu, Pepe emerges as a conflicted figure whose denunciation of Rey is an act of self-preservation rather than one of direct malevolence. Mr. Abreu possesses a lovely lyric tenor voice that brings a suggestion of sadness to even his most exuberant lines and blends beautifully with the voices of his colleagues in ensembles. Though Pepe’s actions set in motion the horrors that pursue Rey during his last years in Cuba, Mr. Martín’s music portrays Pepe in a largely sympathetic way, and Mr. Abreu’s vocal elegance shapes a Pepe who is a decent but scared young man.

Mr. Martín and Ms. Koch elected to create a composite character to serve as Rey’s poetic mentor, a figure whose role draws upon the qualities of several important artistic influences in Arenas’s life. This role, Ovidio, is sung by tenor Jesus Garcia, whose performances as Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann’s Broadway production of La Bohème were widely acclaimed. Mr. Garcia brings to Ovidio, a role that in its determined and stern but benevolent philosophizing is not unlike Seneca in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, a voice that is both youthful and suggestive of experience: there is the resignation of knowledge and understanding in his singing, a quality reinforced by Mr. Garcia’s world-weary inflection of the text. The vigor of Mr. Garcia’s singing makes an apt impression in his role, the burnished tone with which he sings his lines suggesting the very essence of poetry.

Rey’s companion during his final years in New York is Lázaro, a man whom he befriended before his successful escape from Castro’s Cuba. It is to Lázaro that Rey makes the shattering revelation that he has been diagnosed with AIDS, and it is Lázaro who cares for Rey during his illness. Compared with the other characters in Rey’s life, Lázaro is a simpler man, his motives clearer and more emotional than cerebral. As sung by young tenor Jonathan Blalock, however, Lázaro is as central to Rey’s development and ultimate transfiguration as an artist as any of the other influences in his life. The tenderness with which Mr. Blalock sings in his scenes with Rey is immensely moving, as is the despair that floods his voice in the final scene, when his final statements of ‘Farewell’ as he is seen casting Rey’s ashes into the sea have the impact of Rodolfo’s singing of the dead Mimì’s name in the final moments of La Bohème. Mr. Martín infuses Lázaro’s role with music of lyrical grace, and the ardent beauty of Mr. Blalock’s singing gives his performance an abiding authenticity. With excellent diction and a voice that shimmers with a bright patina, Mr. Blalock’s performance as Lázaro gives Before Night Falls and its depiction of Rey’s isolation and decline what is finally needed for the opera to truly work: the profound expression of love, even when it is unspoken, that is required as the impetus of genuine tragedy.

In order to bring the troubled, terrific man at the center of this work to life, a singer of great charisma is required, and the premiere production was fortunate to have engaged Wes Mason, one of America’s most promising young baritones. From his first note, Mr. Mason simply becomes Rey, enveloping himself in the role in a way that is refreshingly uncomplicated. This is not a trick of method acting applied to singing: for two hours, Mr. Mason uses his voice to communicate Rey’s thoughts and words as though Reinaldo Arenas were taking the stage himself. This Mr. Mason achieves not with histrionics or suspect melodramatic devices but with open-hearted, open-throated singing. Mr. Mason’s is a powerful voice, the focused tone and vibrato sounding destined for leading roles in large houses, but this singer is also capable of disarming intimacy without seeming precious. Vocally, Rey’s music is especially demanding in what is, overall, an arduous score, and Mr. Mason not only copes but excels. In his exchanges with his colleagues, and particularly with Mr. Blalock, Mr. Mason is alert to the nuances of his own text and to the changing moods of the opera in general. Mr. Mason possesses the vocal charisma necessary to impersonate Mr. Martín’s Rey, and he recreates in sound the poetry that Arenas constructed of words.

It is likely that, had he contemplated an opera about his life premiering twenty years after his death, Reinaldo Arenas would have been surprised that this musical legacy would greet a world in which Cuba remains under the fists of Castro and in which a man’s sexual preference and manner of exiting this life are still controversial. Though he is sixteen years Arenas’s junior, perhaps Jorge Martín also would not have envisioned this in 1990, five years before he acquired the rights to set Arenas’s memoirs musically. What Mr. Martín accomplishes in Before Night Falls is a sterling example of the fact that, no matter how horrific, debilitating, and unscrupulous the human and inhuman obstacles a man faces are, it is the dignity of the man as he faces them that are of permanent value. It is human nature that a man who dies bravely is remembered whilst a man who lives weakly is forgotten, and there is no doubt that Reinaldo Arenas lived courageously, loved extravagantly, and died resolvedly. All of this is evident in Mr. Martín’s score, in which the ugliness of oppression, pain, and terminal illness is omnipresent, but as an environment in which life goes on until it simply cannot go on any longer. Mr. Martín has composed a wonderful opera that never preaches or wallows: it merely sings of what there is to be sung about a man who, like Tosca, suffered for art and for love. It also reminds the listener of how rare this is, to focus even in art on the integrity of a man’s life rather than the choices he made in living it. It is too soon to hypothesize about whether future generations will remember Javier Bardem or Wes Mason as Reinaldo Arenas rather than remembering the man himself, but it is to the credit of Jorge Martín, Dolores M. Koch, Wes Mason, Jonathan Blalock, Joseph Illick, Darren K. Woods, and all who were involved with the creation and recording of this opera that Before Night Falls is an experience that will not soon be forgotten.

IN MEMORIAM: American mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett, 1931 - 2010

2010-11-09T22:57:00.001-05:00

Shirley Verrett

31 May 1931 – 5 November 2010

Again, so soon, another of the greatest voices in recent memory has been silenced by the passing on 5 November of American mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett, one of those brilliant but humble artists whose career both redefined and obliterated boundaries. Moving with resilience between mezzo-soprano and soprano roles, she was both a celebrated Carmen and the definitive Lady Macbeth (in Verdi’s Macbeth) of her generation.

A child of the American South, Ms. Verrett was among the ranks of pioneering African-American artists—an impressive assemblage of singers that included Martina Arroyo, Grace Bumbry, Mattiwilda Dobbs, Reri Grist, Leontyne Price, and George Shirley—who followed the example of Marian Anderson by both thrilling audiences and changing perceptions in recital and concert halls and in opera houses. When Ms. Verrett made her Metropolitan Opera début as Bizet’s Carmen on 21 September 1968—a week to the day before the MET début of Plácido Domingo, with whom she would memorably sing Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila for the Company more than twenty years later—she had already participated in the first Live from Lincoln Center and Young People’s Concerts broadcasts.

The racism that Ms. Verrett faced in her native land proved no match for the grace and wit of her personality and the abiding sincerity of her artistry. She was content to allow the natural beauty of her voice and the uncompromising dignity of her carriage convey the activism that the adversity that she faced inspired.

During her first season at the MET, Ms. Verrett’s assignments included Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo, a role that she made her own and on which she left an indelible impact through several ‘live’ performances preserved on records and a critically-acclaimed studio recording. In the 1973 – 74 season, one of the defining moments of her MET career came when, owing to Christa Ludwig’s indisposition, Ms. Verrett sang not only Didon (her scheduled role) but also Cassandre in Berlioz’s Les Troyens under the baton of Rafael Kubelík. Ms. Verrett’s Didon had been heard four years earlier in a Roman concert performance conducted by Georges Prêtre and recorded for broadcast by RAI. Along with her Eboli and her eloquent Carmen for RAI, superbly partnered by Albert Lance’s idiomatic Don José, the RAI Didon remains as a fittingly monumental legacy of Ms. Verrett’s career.

In a career at the MET that encompassed successes in such roles as Judith in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Ms. Verrett also sang Neocle in the production of Rossini’s L’Assedio di Corinto in which her friend Beverly Sills made her long-awaited MET début and is perhaps the only singer in the history of the Company to have sung both Adalgisa and the title role in Bellini’s Norma on the MET stage. She was also widely, if not unanimously, praised for her MET performances of Tosca, in a production directed by Tito Gobbi. Appreciation was near universal for Ms. Verrett’s portrayal of Azucena in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, of which William Bender wrote in Time in 1976, ‘One would hate to see a woman as lovely as Verrett consigned forever to play a hag like Azucena, but hers is one of the memorable interpretations of the role, both visually and vocally.’

Throughout the world, Ms. Verrett was celebrated for the beauty and strength of her voice and for the intensity of her performances. It was for the beauty and strength of her spirit that she was loved by audiences and colleagues, however. Fine recordings, both studio-made and ‘pirated,’ are testaments to the work of an exceptional artist: a long, happy marriage and a loving family are testaments to the life of an exceptional woman. It was as Azucena that Shirley Verrett bade farewell to the MET twenty years ago, on 2 May 1990, and it is with a joyous gratitude tinged with sadness that Verdi conveyed so well in his music that she will be remembered.

CD REVIEW: Georg Friedrich Händel – FLAVIO (T. Mead, R. Joshua, I. Davies, R. Pokupić, H. Summers, T. Walker, A. Foster-Williams; Chandos Chaconne 0773-2)

2010-11-09T20:35:00.001-05:00

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Flavio, Re de’ Longobardi, HWV 16 – T. Mead (Flavio), R. Joshua (Emilia), I. Davies (Guido), H. Sumers (Teodata), R. Pokupić (Vitige), T. Walker (Ugone), A. Foster-Williams (Lotario); Early Opera Company; Christian Curnyn [recorded at All Saints’ Church, East Finchley, London, 8 – 12 February 2010; Chandos Chaconne 0773(2)]

Two decades have passed since the enterprising countertenor-turned-conductor René Jacobs introduced the record-buying public to Flavio, Re de’ Longobardi, an historically-based opera seria from Georg Friedrich Händel’s spring 1723 season for the Royal Academy of Music, where it was first performed four months after the premiere of Händel’s Ottone with as illustrious a cast as ever the Royal Academy assembled: the castrati Senesino and Gaetano Berenstadt, the remarkable Francesca Cuzzoni, Margherita Durastanti, Anastasia Robinson (it is likely that it was following her performances in Flavio that she clandestinely became Lady Peterborough), Alexander Gibson, and Giuseppe Maria Boschi. Despite this glittering assemblage of vocal stars and a generally positive reception, Flavio received only twelve performances during Händel’s lifetime, eight during its first production and an additional four during a revival in 1732, and thereafter was not heard again until performed at Göttingen in 1967. The Jacobs recording, featuring a strong cast, was a compelling first taste of Flavio for modern listeners, with both castrato roles assigned to countertenors, as is the case with this new recording in the Chandos Chaconne Series, and it revealed the opera as one of Händel’s most musically appealing and dramatically concise. When the operas of so many lesser-known Baroque composers—many of whom were as celebrated as Händel in their times and respective corners of Europe—languish in obscurity, a second recording of any of Händel’s infrequently-performed operas is met with a measure of skepticism, especially when its predecessor on records was as fine as the Jacobs recording.

It is to the credit of conductor Christian Curnyn and his cast of young singers that this recording of Flavio matches and in several respects surpasses the earlier recording on harmonia mundi. At slightly less than two and a half hours as recorded by Maestro Curnyn, Flavio is among the briefest of Händel’s early operas for London. So sure is Maestro Curnyn’s pacing of the performance that it seems shorter still. Secco recitatives, more compressed than in many of Händel’s other serious operas, are shaped with attention to the shifting emotions of the score, characters’ changes of heart given impact through rhythmic elasticity and variety in the continuo (harpsichord, archlute, and theorbo) without seeming overwrought or ridiculous. The Early Opera Company, a period-instrument ensemble founded by Maestro Curnyn, play with virtuosity and grace throughout the performance, with flautist Lisa Beznosiuk contributing an especially eloquent performance that complements the vocalism she accompanies. Händel’s operas do not depend upon orchestral brilliance to make their effects, but like its brethren Flavio contains musical beauties that are fully revealed by sensitive playing such as that of the Early Opera Company. Maestro Curnyn achieves the delicate balance between maintaining the elegance and poise of Baroque-specialist music-making and allowing the music to benefit from the drive and energy more frequently employed in later repertory. Maestro Curnyn builds upon the scholarship and devotion to the opera established in the Jacobs recording, bringing welcome fire to the bravura passages but also allowing lyrical arias to unfold unhurriedly. Standing on its own virtues, this Flavio ably and impressively complements the Jacobs recording, a considerable achievement.

Even after three decades of scholarship and ever-increasing attention to historically-appropriate performance practices in Baroque music, the solution to the problem of casting modern singers in roles composed specifically for castrati remains elusive. Those who advocate for the casting of female singers, mezzo-sopranos mostly (the true contralto having become a great rarity), argue that the music composed for a castrato such as Senesino requires firmness and strength in precisely the tessitura in which the voices of many countertenors are weakest. There is an undeniable benefit, perhaps more so in the theatre than on records, in having roles sung by singers of the proper gender, however, and in his recording René Jacobs gave both castrato roles to countertenors. Maestro Curnyn follows suit in this recording, with results that even more strongly make the case for the casting of modern countertenors as Händel’s castrato heroes. In the role sung in the first production by Berenstadt, Flavio has less to do than the prestige of being the opera’s title character might suggest. This is not to say that his music is without distinction and difficulties, however, and both of these aspects of Flavio’s part are realized with easy brilliance by young countertenor Tim Mead, an animated but even-toned singer whose technique encompasses all of the challenges posed by Händel’s music. Especially in ‘Chi può mirare,’ Mr. Mead spins a headily beautiful line that, despite being in alto tessitura, maintains a suave, masculine virility. In Mr. Meade’s performance, Flavio is a clever and ultimately magnanimous man and audibly a king in command of his realm even when indecisive.

Taking Guido, the role originated by Senesino, is another young countertenor, Iestyn Davies, one of the rising stars of opera and vocal music in the new century. It is immediately apparent when hearing Mr. Davies in this recording that he is bringing to the music not merely a very beautiful voice but likewise one that is used with sensitivity and abiding good sense. As with many of the roles composed by Händel for Senesino, Guido’s music is by turns excitingly bravura and meltingly sensual in nature, and it is indicative of Mr. Davies’s level of accomplishment as a singer that his technique easily masters all of the nuances of his music. Mr. Davies consistently conveys the meaning of the words that he sings clearly and insightfully without ever jeopardizing the musical integrity of his singing. Mr. Davies’s Guido is more of a lover and statesman than a soldier and schemer, but there is a welcome swagger in the more extroverted numbers that puts forth the character’s masculinity convincingly. It might be ungraciously suggested that Mr. Davies’s timbre is simply too lovely to fully embody chest-thumping heroic roles, even those originally composed for castrati, and it would not be inaccurate to state that this performance will not resolve in the minds of many listeners the question of whether to cast male or female singers in Händel’s castrato roles. What Mr. Davies unquestionably accomplishes in this recording is Händel singing that for beauty and emotional depth joins the finest examples of its kind on records.

Both of the roles originally composed for lower-voiced female singers are cast from strength, with Hilary Summers as Teodata and Renata Pokupić as Vitige. As she has proved in many performances and recordings of a wide repertory, Ms. Summers is that rare thing among contemporary singers—a true contralto. As Teodata, both the depth of tone and profundity of feeling familiar from Ms. Summers’s performances of Händel roles are in abundance, the voice retaining poise and color even very low in the register. Dramatically, she never misses a psychological insight offered her by the score, also never resorting to hysterics and, singing richly and with pointing of the text, creating a portrait of a woman unashamed of either her sentimentality or her scheming. Her lover, Vitige, is sung with vigor by Ms. Pokupić, a young mezzo-soprano born in Croatia. Seemingly approaching her music fearlessly, Ms. Pokupić sings in a manner that is refreshingly on the breath, the color of the voice taking its impetus from the text. Coloratura passages are delivered accurately and excitingly, the voice taking on an impressive hint of masculinity in extroverted numbers. Excellent individually, it is perhaps in their duet that opens the opera, ‘Ricordati, mio ben,’ that these singers are most engaging. It is rare for a Baroque opera, even one by as committed and astute a dramatist as Händel, to begin with an ensemble number, but Ms. Summers and Ms. Pokupić recognize the significance of this masterstroke of having the opera open with an almost Shakespearean parting of lovers. Within the beauty and sincerity of their performance is the foundation upon which the opera is built, and it would be difficult not to continue listening in order to learn what the future holds for these alluring lovers.

Teodata is the daughter of Ugone, sung in this performance by young tenor Thomas Walker. Mr. Walker’s bright tone and impressive florid technique prove equal to all of the stumbling blocks created by Händel’s score, and he does all that he can through inflection and pointed delivery of the text to connect with his basically disinteresting role. Whatever the dramatic limitations of his role, it is a genuine pleasure to hear a tenor role in any of Händel’s operas sung by such a capable, gifted singer.

The heroine of Flavio is Emilia, another of those long-suffering and ultimately insurmountably noble women familiar from Händel’s mature operas for London. Indeed, their company—including Almirena in Rinaldo, Asteria in Tamerlano, Rodelinda, and Teofane in Ottone—is equitable to the assortment of soprano heroines celebrated in the operas of Puccini. Emilia has in ‘Parto, sì; ma non so poi’ one of those sublime arias that seem to suspend time, like Cleopatra’s ‘Piangerò la sorte mia’ and Almirena’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’: cut from the same cloth, Händel ingeniously managed to fit each of these arias precisely to the characters and dramatic situations for which they were composed and to ornament them with careful attention to the singers for whom they were intended. Had Händel specifically composed ‘Parto, sì’ and Emilia’s other arias specifically for her it is doubtful that Rosemary Joshua could have sounded more resplendent in them. Bringing an uncommonly beautiful and secure voice to her performance, the Welsh-born soprano never loses her footing, vocally or dramatically. As in so many Händel operas with castrato title heroes, it is truly the soprano heroine about whom the opera revolves: with a weak Emilia as its center of gravity, Flavio would seem lumbering and pointless despite its relative brevity and a score of very high quality even by Händel’s exalted standards. This performance is fortunate to have at its core one of the most accomplished Händelians of recent years. Every musical arrow in Emilia’s quiver is sharpened to extraordinary precision by Ms. Joshua’s pointed singing, which is a source of endless grace throughout the performance. In her Chandos recordings of Partenope and Semele, Ms. Joshua had already presented her Händelian credentials. With this recording of Flavio, she not only confirms those credentials but emerges as one of the most stylish singers of Händel heard during the ‘Baroque Renaissance’ of the past thirty years.

Completing the cast by singing the role of Lotario, Emilia’s father, is bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams, another young singer whose Händelian credentials have been well established through acclaimed performances and recordings. Singing with imperturbable panache, this artist contributes another performance that ranks with the best recorded examples of Händel singing in the bass register. Unlike many of the low-voiced singers currently active in Baroque repertory, Mr. Foster-Williams possesses not only the formidable technique required to execute intricate coloratura across a range of two octaves but also the vocal power to roar magnificently as his music requires. In this performance, both the grandeur of Mr. Foster-Williams’s voice and his artistic finesse are in evidence, not least in the scene in which Lotario dies in his daughter’s presence, slain by Guido. Mr. Foster-Williams’s performance brings to mind again the adage that suggests that there are no small roles in opera, only ‘small’ artists who fail to seize the opportunities granted by the music given them to sing. Lotario is not a leading role in Flavio, but as sung by Mr. Foster-Williams—one of the handful of leading basses of his generation—it seems an opportunity missed not by the singer but by the composer and his librettist.

Händel’s Flavio will almost certainly never enjoy the popularity or critical acclaim of his Alcina, Giulio Cesare, or Serse. At its best—and the score finds its composer almost always at his best—the opera rises to the level of its siblings in the Händel canon. The concision and clarity of purpose sometimes lacking in Händel’s larger-scaled operas are hallmarks of Flavio, in which even characters who are not as they seem in certain circumstances have obvious, discernible motives. The confusions of convoluted plot elements and hidden agendas thus set aside, performers and listeners alike are free to focus on the emotional interplay among the characters. This is no less impressive or involving than in Händel’s most respected operas, those that have regained places in the international repertory. The case for Flavio was convincingly made twenty years ago by René Jacobs and one of the strongest casts he assembled for a recording of an opera by Händel. Christian Curnyn is to be respected for taking on this score about which it might have been suggested that the Jacobs recordings left nothing further to be said. Indeed, Maestro Curnyn and his remarkable cast say the same things but say them differently, sometimes more directly and in numerous instances more touchingly. It is difficult to fathom how Händel’s first-night cast might have shone in their creation of Flavio, but it is equally difficult to imagine in our own time that a cast with artists such as Rosemary Joshua, Iestyn Davies, and Andrew Foster-Williams giving of their best could be bettered.

IN MEMORIAM: Australian soprano Dame Joan Sutherland, 1926 – 2010

2010-10-11T22:49:00.001-04:00

Dame Joan Sutherland

7 November 1926 – 10 October 2010

In what seems a lifetime ago, in 1994, I was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, studying piano and violin and spending the money given to me by my parents for school lunches on the few opera recordings that were available in my area at that time. First, there was the Philips recording of La Bohème conducted by Sir Colin Davis, with the slightly frail Katia Ricciarelli and the still-golden-voiced José Carreras. The trap was set. Then, perhaps a month later, there was the DECCA Fidelio, an appealing introduction to the inimitable Birgit Nilsson. After a few weeks, the little collection expanded to include Sir John Pritchard’s recording of Raymond Leppard’s much-discussed (and much-dismissed) Glyndebourne L’Incoronazione di Poppea, surely the best recording of Carlo Cava’s unique voice and a welcome document of uncommonly passionate performances by Magda László and Frances Bible. Still, I was not yet ready for this, and the recording—now one that I love for the seriousness with which it addresses the emotions of Monteverdi’s music—quickly changed hands.

It was another recording conducted by Sir John Pritchard that transformed opera from a casual interest, an exploration of a teenager’s curiosity, into a lifelong devotion to a magnificently strange art that manipulates reality and, at its best, changes listeners’ perceptions of themselves, their lives, and their roles within their communities. The recording that revealed that power to this listener was of Verdi’s La Traviata, a performance shaped by a poised but direct Alfredo from Carlo Bergonzi and a Giorgio Germont as well-sung as any on records from Robert Merrill. At the center of the performance is the Violetta of the Australian soprano Dame Joan Sutherland. The critiques of Sutherland’s performance in her first recording of La Traviata are typical of those that her performances and recordings met throughout her four-decade international career. As Violetta, Maria Callas is more enthrallingly visceral, more emotionally on the wire; Ileana Cotrubas is more delicate, more alluringly fragile; Renata Scotto is the consummate tragedienne, the perfume of a life ebbing clinging to her every utterance; Licia Albanese’s singing shimmers with femininity and doomed grace; Mirella Freni brings limpid tone, easy charm, and idiomatic delivery of text and music. Aside from Callas, however, for which Violetta are the eruptions of coloratura in ‘Sempre libera’ as completely integrated into the vocal line, expressions of flippant but panicked joy, as in the singing of Sutherland? By which Violetta are the dramatic demands of the Second Act more fully mastered, the voice soaring where others struggle? Which other Violetta faces the top A’s of ‘Addio del passato’ with greater security? For this listener, in Violetta’s music there are Callas and Victoria de los Ángeles, but first there was Dame Joan Sutherland.

Having first seen an operatic performance in 1990, the year of Dame Joan’s retirement from the stage, I never enjoyed the opportunity of hearing her remarkable voice in the space of a large theatre. Hearing her commercial recordings, from the early Bach Cantatas and Don Giovanni to the late-career Adriana Lecouvreur and Ernani, along with dozens of ‘live’ performances, I came to cherish the opulence and power of her voice at least as much as those whose good fortune allowed them to hear her in the world’s opera houses. Hers was the rare voice that combined Wagnerian dimensions with an astounding—perhaps even more astounding for being produced with minimal evidence of its mechanics—technique that encompassed the most difficult music in the dramatic coloratura repertory. Hers was not the voice of the thin-toned coloratura sopranos who inhabit the oxygen-deprived environs of the stratosphere: the staccato top F’s of the Königin der Nacht were there but only just: the thrill of her Königin was the atypical power of the octave descending from top C. Her top E-flat, a note that ignited the air in all the world’s major opera houses throughout her career, especially in Lucia di Lammermoor, rang with the authority of a dramatic soprano’s top B. Even those who advocated for this or that soprano, who complained bitterly and sometimes loudly that her diction was poor and her acting elementary, admitted that the voice was a wondrous anomaly. A marvel of Maria Callas’s artistry was that she could sing Brünnhilde or Kundry one night and Lucia or Norma the next and fully inhabit both performances. With one voice, Dame Joan could enchant as Händel’s Alcina, suffer as Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, and find redemption as Puccini’s Suor Angelica. Perhaps the words were not always ideally clear, but the music never suffered at her hands, and if she sang a role she knew where she wanted to go in it. Guided by her husband, she knew precisely what she should sing and when she should sing it, and not just in the last seasons of her career; and that self-discipline, a mark of a great singer, resulted in audiences for her final performances perceiving not what time had taken away but what a sound technique had preserved.

There are many singers past and present whose performances, in opera houses and on records, have shaped my understanding of music. To the influence of Dame Joan Sutherland I attribute not my knowledge of opera, such as it is, but my love for it. It was her singing that convinced me that this brilliant, bizarre thing is not merely a diversion but a vital aspect of the complex art of humanity, a genre that perseveres because it lives in the hearts of those who love it. She loved it, and that is audible in every recording that she made. A voice such as hers is not made by men, whether by creation or by study; nor is it subject to imitation or duplication. She was a woman like any other, flawed and fascinating, but neither any other woman nor any other voice will ever be Dame Joan Sutherland.

BRAVA, LA STUPENDA!

CD REVIEW: Philip Glass – ORPHÉE (P. Cutlip, L. Saffer, R. MacPherson, G. Jarman, S. Brennfleck; OMM 0068)

2010-09-18T22:13:00.001-04:00

PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937): Orphée – P. Cutlip (Orphée), L. Saffer (la Princesse), R. MacPherson (Heurtebise), G. Jarman (Eurydice), S. Brennfleck (Cégeste), J. Beruan (Poet), K. Kvach (Judge), R. Brallier (le Commissaire), D. Freedman (Aglaonice), C. Halvorson (Reporter), J. Rubio (Policeman), M. Acito (Glazier), M. Hallak (Radio Announcer – spoken role); Portland Opera Orchestra; Anne Manson [recorded during live performances at Portland Opera, November 2009; Orange Mountain Music OMM 0068]

Since the birth of opera as it now exists, the myth of Orpheus has exerted a strong influence on the creative imaginations of composers, beginning with the ‘first generation’ works of Peri, Caccini, Rossi, and Monteverdi. The figure of Orpheus, a man in whom the fate-altering powers of music and poetry are joined in perfect synthesis, has persisted as an alluring inspiration for composers, keen perhaps to depict through their work elements of their own plights as artists struggling against adversities, archaic social conventions, and stereotypes. The darker aspects of the Orphic myth have often been downplayed or excised altogether, emphasis on the humanity of Orpheus masking to a great extent the less pleasant aspects of an ultimately errant character who literally met his end at the hands of the Ciconian women. As with other of his important projects for the operatic stage, however, it is not strictly from Classical mythology or traditional sources that American composer Philip Glass drew his inspiration but from Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film Orphée, an allegorical examination of the ambiguous states of life and death as applied to the myth of Orpheus through the tattered perspectives of post-WWII France. Adapting the French text used in the opera from Cocteau’s screenplay, Glass evokes the milieu of Cocteau’s film without threatening to create merely a musical accompaniment for the film, after the manner of the music once performed in cinemas during silent films.

Though this recording was made during performances at Portland Opera in November 2009, the opera is not new. Orphée was composed during 1991, when Glass was mourning the sudden death of his wife, and first performed at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1993. Musically, the hallmarks of Glass’s personal style of composition are all present, principally the ‘minimalist’ device of constructing extended phrases with small, repetitive, ostinato-like musical units. Whereas this approach has arguably lessened the impact of some of Glass’s vocal music, in Orphée the otherworldly, ritualistic progress of the drama is credibly, even movingly shaped by the ways in which Glass applies his craft to the text. Though presented in the context of Cocteau’s conception of the story rather than Classical sources, the most influential of which is Pindar, Glass’s account of the Orphic myth compellingly traces the basic course of the Greek tragedy. In the opening scene, Glass convincingly conjures the atmosphere of a mid-century Parisian café, the chanson and jazz scenes of post-war Montmartre suggested without being directly imitated. Thereafter, musical figurations propel the drama along its bizarre but inexorable course, scenes transitioning organically and comfortably. An unfortunate trend among operas composed in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First centuries is the failure for music to truly work in tandem with text to create works that coherently depict in sound the paths from beginning to end: in short, many recent operas are filled with music that merely accompanies rather than embodying the text and that never creates the kind of sound and fury necessary to draw an audience into an operatic journey in the tradition of Verdi and Wagner. Glass does not wholly overcome this trend in Orphée, but he is more successful than in several of his other operas at giving distinct musical profiles to characters who, even when they essentially are faceless archetypes, inspire attention and interest. If Glass has not created in this score a work of timeless beauty like Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Orphée is nonetheless a deeply personal work, one in which Glass’s individual compositional style is heard at its most accessible. Far more than many of the operas composed during the past two decades, it is a piece deserving of revival; and likewise one that fares rather better than most of Glass’s vocal works in the audio-only format of a compact disc recording.

Recorded by Orange Mountain Music in superb sound that preserves very few distracting stage noises (the roaring motorcycle engines might ideally have been less damaging to the cochlear ducts, or—even better—evoked musically rather than literally) and contributions from the audience, this production by Portland Opera offers an excellent introduction to Glass’s opera. The Portland Opera Orchestra play with polish and vigor under the baton of Anne Manson, an undervalued conductor who was the first woman to conduct at the Salzburger Festspiele. The music of Philip Glass presents great challenges for a conductor in that it is largely reliant upon the conductor’s leadership for propulsion and dramatic thrust. Maestro Manson obviously possesses an imperturbable knowledge of her musical destination, and she presides over a performance that progresses more or less coherently from the surrealistic beginning to the not-quite-cathartic end. She understands that this is Cocteau’s and Glass’s Orpheus rather than Monteverdi’s or Gluck’s, and she is careful to avoid any suggestion of parody. [It is worth noting that Cocteau’s film included in its soundtrack much music taken from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.] Maestro Manson also proves successful in this performance by approaching the opera as a straightforward musical course to be followed in a traditional, music-centered manner rather than as a ‘contemporary masterpiece’ in need of conductorial espousal and idiosyncratic endorsement. In short, Maestro Manson displays an understanding of the necessity of presenting a performance rather than an ‘event.’ She focuses on rather than fussing over the music and allows Glass’s opera to unfold on its own terms, the musical values realized at the highest possible levels, and to say what it has to say in its own voice.

In opera, as one hopes that Mr. Glass would agree, the singing is the thing, however, and vocally this performance is built on very firm ground. Comprised almost exclusively of young American singers, the cast is strong even in secondary roles. Impressive in smaller roles are tenors Marc Acito as Glazier and Carl Halvorson as a Reporter; baritone José Rubio as a Policeman; and basses Jeffrey G. Beruan as a Poet, Ron Brallier as le Commissaire, and Konstantin Kvach as a Judge. Aglaonice, Eurydice’s friend, receives a winning performance from mezzo-soprano Daryl Freedman. Eurydice herself, less significant in Cocteau’s and Glass’s version of the myth than in Classical sources and in Gluck’s opera (or, to be sure, in Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers!), is beguilingly sung by Georgia Jarman, a young soprano of great promise whose many fine performances at the Caramoor Festival include an uncommonly effective portrayal of Adina in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore opposite the Nemorino of Lawrence Brownlee. Given by Glass less musical material with which to work than in the bel canto roles for which she is most appreciated, Ms. Jarman nonetheless offers through tonal beauty and good diction a touching Eurydice. French diction is generally good throughout the cast, in fact; an impressive—and rare—achievement in a cast of young, English-speaking singers.

The unconventional ‘villains’ of Glass’s opera are the Princesse, a patroness of the arts, and her chauffeur Heurtebise, shadowy figures both. Sung by renowned soprano Lisa Saffer, who brings to her performance the same intensity familiar from her performances of Händel roles, the Princesse is a character of uncertain motivation: consigned in the opera’s final moments to a fate at least superficially not unlike Don Giovanni’s for what she has proclaimed to be a sort of sacrifice for art, though she has been said to be the personification of Death, one is left to wonder whether she has been in love with a man, his art, her influence over his creativity, or coldly philosophical manifestations thereof. Using her vibrant tone to inflect the text wittily and, when appropriate, touchingly, Ms. Saffer makes the Princesse both attractive and repulsive: like Orpheus, the listener is suspicious and even openly fearful of her strange machinations but nonetheless drawn to witness and participate in them. The Princesse herself aptly defines this ambiguity when responding to Orphée, who has said, ‘Et on me déteste’ (‘They hate me’), by saying, ‘C’est une des formes de l’amour’ (‘It’s one form of love’). This duality is inherent in Ms. Saffer’s performance, all the more convincingly conveyed by the cool radiance of her voice. Heurtebise, her would-be Leporello, is sung by tenor Ryan MacPherson, an engaging young artist. Fittingly, two roles for which Mr. MacPherson has been especially acclaimed are Peter Quint in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and the Stimme des Jünglings in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, vaguely ethereal parts that are not unlike Heurtebise. Aside from his unrequited love for Eurydice and a presumed but far-from-certain loyalty to the Princess, Heurtebise’s reasons for his actions in Glass’s opera are even less apparent than those for the Princesse’s conniving. What is not left to uncertainty is the quality of Mr. MacPherson’s performance, which combines dramatic intelligence with vocal skill and finesse.

The man about whom the drama of Glass’s opera is twisted, Orphée, is sung by baritone Philip Cutlip, one of the best among America’s generation of talented young singers. Departing from the traditional depiction of Orpheus as a semi-deity among men (or, allegorically, an artist among boorish laymen), Glass’s Orphée is a significantly more earthbound character, a complicated figure of poetry, jealousy, insecurity, and latent violence. If there is one principal way in which Orphée fails as an opera in the traditional sense it is the title character’s inability to earn genuine sympathy from his audience. Mr. Cutlip nonetheless contributes a performance that breathes life into every nuance of Orphée’s character, positive and negative. There is poetic yearning audible in Mr. Cutlip’s strong, attractive timbre, but the confusion of the husband and prospective father who is in love with a woman who is not is wife is also vividly depicted in Mr. Cutlip’s performance. Mr. Cutlip is to be praised for believably portraying Orphée’s conflicting emotions without allowing the focus of his voice to be distorted or lost. Even in a role that lacks the vocal opportunities of more conventional baritone roles, Mr. Cutlip offers a performance that is fully worthy of one of America’s finest young singers.

Vocally, though, it is tenor Steven Brennfleck as Cégeste, a younger rival poet, who impresses most with an arresting performance marked by especially beautiful singing encompassing a wide spectrum of vocal colors. Envious of the celebration of Cégeste and his work by the populace in the first scene, Orphée is not complicit but is far from heartbroken by his young competitor’s death soon thereafter. Mysteriously returned to life by the Princesse, Cégeste’s role in the drama is as shrouded in uncertainty as any other aspect of the opera, but in his every appearance Mr. Brennflect reveals a pliant, bright but warm-hued, and beautiful voice that can easily be imagined confronting and conquering the difficulties of Gluck’s Orphée. Dramatic bewilderment is achieved through textural clarity rather than resorting to vocal histrionics. It is obvious in this performance that Cégeste’s poetry, though perhaps shaped by the angst of youth, is purer than the rougher, sharper verse of the struggling, disillusioned Orphée. Mr. Brennfleck’s performance is memorable even in an opera in which he is given nothing truly memorable to sing and is a welcome document of the work of a young tenor of extraordinary promise.

For all its inherent cycles of discovery and rediscovery, opera is in many aspects an unchanging art. Just as was the case when Bizet’s Carmen premièred to vociferous but far-from-unanimous critical dismissal in 1875, Philip Glass’s Orphée is subject to the whims and personal opinions of audiences, critics, and musicians who either will like it or will not. It is almost certain that, a century on, Orphée will not enjoy a place in the mainstream international operatic repertory alongside Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice: Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, a seminal work in the development of opera as it presently exists and an opera of considerable power and beauty, remains by its nature essentially a ‘specialist’ work, after all, and will continue to survive only on the fringes of the repertory. It is not difficult to speculate that Orphée will remain Glass’ most approachable opera, however. It is unfortunate that striving, whether intentionally or subconsciously, in the general direction of tradition is a reason for scorn and dismissal in avant garde artistic communities, by which reaching for conventional—which, in music, might also be termed universal—values is regarded as something akin to treason. Glass has achieved in Orphée a sense of personal depth and involvement that surpasses the instances of these qualities in his other operas, and he has done so while largely maintaining his personal musical voice. A work that appeals to populist emotional engagement is surely no more criminal than one that aims for coldly progressive genius and misses the mark. Even if one does not quite fathom its overall meaning (having seen Cocteau’s film is of little assistance in this regard), a performance as uniformly excellent as this persuades the listener that Philip Glass, like Monteverdi and Gluck before him, has the eloquent essence of Orpheus’ musical and poetic art at the core of his creative process.

ARTIST PROFILE: Bogdan Mihai, tenor

2010-08-23T21:08:00.001-04:00

When Gioachino Rossini’s Armida was premiered at Naples’ Teatro di San Carlo on 11 November 1817, the roles of Goffredo and Carlo were sung by Giuseppe Ciccimarra, a singer appreciated throughout Italy for his extensive range and bravura technique who also originated for Rossini the tremendously difficult roles of Iago in Otello and Pilade in Ermione. Exasperatingly, it is impossible for modern musicologists and music lovers to know precisely how a voice such as Ciccimarra’s sounded: the basic flexibility and tessitura of the voice can be more or less ascertained by studying the music composed for the voice (though composers were as likely then as now to entrust singers with music that was beyond their capacities), but a legitimate aural sense of the timbre and presence of the voice is elusive. What is certain is that these tenor voices of the early Nineteenth Century were remarkable, whether in beauty of tone, expansiveness of range, power, or combinations thereof: within the space of the quarter-century extending from Die Zauberflöte to Il Barbiere di Siviglia, tenors seized from castrati the roles of operatic heroes and romantic lovers, initiating a change in the vocal alignment of opera that persists into the Twenty-First Century. In performances of the few bel canto scores that remained in the international repertory in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century and first decades of the Twentieth, much of this grace and vocal splendor that transformed tenors from bumbling villains, fathers, and servants into leading men had to be taken on faith. Except for the gifted Ivan Kozlovsky, little known outside of the Soviet Union until the fall of the Iron Curtain, the art of bel canto tenor singing as it must have been during the careers of singers such as Ciccimarra, Giovanni David, and Andrea Nozzari was dormant until the emergence of Luigi Alva, Ugo Benelli, and a few other Rossini-specialist tenors in the 1960’s, a tradition that has persisted through the work of Rockwell Blake, Bruce Ford, Raúl Giménez, Chris Merritt, and Ramón Vargas to the current class of bel canto tenors that includes Barry Banks, Lawrence Brownlee, Juan Diego Flórez, and Colin Lee. Poised to take his place among those fine singers as one of the best contemporary bel canto tenors is Bogdan Mihai.

Born in Romania, Bogdan Mihai’s earliest experiences with opera were under the tutelage of some of his homeland’s most accomplished singers. ‘My story, it’s simple and [at] the same time, let’s say, complicated,’ he recollects. ‘I initially started studying the violin in high school, and at the end [of my high school studies] I took voice lessons as a lyric baritone.’ It was as a baritone that Mr. Mihai began his studies at the Conservatory in Bucharest, where he studied with the celebrated baritone Nicolae Constantinescu. ‘In that period, I was very interested [in] the vocal technique,’ Mr. Mihai reflects. He pursued that interest through masterclasses with Rolando Panerai, Sylvia Gestzy, Ileana Cotrubas, Virginia Zeani, and Mariana Nicolesco. The last of these was particularly influential on Mr. Mihai’s development as a young artist. ‘She helped me a lot with many things,’ he says of Nicolesco. ‘I attended three masterclasses with her and also two years at the Transylvania University in Braşov, where under her guidance I received my Master’s Degree in bel canto. It was a joy because Mariana Nicolesco was one of the most important bel canto sopranos, and she told me many secrets about this style.’ Still, if there has been a single artist whose influence has been definitive in Mr. Mihai’s career, he names Mirella Freni. ‘I attended a masterclass in Italy with Mirella Freni in 2006, and I had a revelation about my voice. She told me that I am a tenor and, if I want to do the masterclass and be one of her students in the Accademia at Centro Universale del Bel Canto, I must start to practice as a tenor. Thanks to her, I had a year and a half at the Accademia after receiving the Nicolai Ghiaurov Scholarship, and that changed my life forever.’

The art of singing bel canto is a field in which there are among singers past and present as many examples that are cautionary as those that are beneficial. Among singers known for their work in bel canto repertory, Mr. Mihai cites as particular inspirations to his own work Alfredo Kraus, Gregory Kunde, Bruce Ford, Nicolai Gedda, Rockwell Blake, Maria Callas, Dame Joan Sutherland, and Edita Gruberová. He also mentions as artists important to his appreciation of singing Leontyne Price and Renata Tebaldi. ‘They all bring a message, they all have strong personalities, different techniques, styles, and expressions,’ Mr. Mihai says. ‘I am sure that I’ve learned a lot [from] listening to their art. It is very important to listen because you have examples of how things should or should not be done.’ He is also aware, however, of the great importance of approaching music from an individual perspective, especially in bel canto. ‘Many times I [have] had to learn new roles alone—which is not very bad, I have to say—because in this life there are moments when you are alone, and you have to take care about your voice, technique, and everything without being supervised.’ Collaboration is nonetheless an equally important aspect of the artist’s life, and in this regard Mr. Mihai feels especially fortunate. ‘I have to be honest and say that a lot of important projects [in my career to date] were possible thanks to my agency in Vienna, Opera4u. I have there three great supporters in Kurt-Walter Schober, Michael Gruber, and Erich Seitter, and I thank them a lot for understanding my art and my voice without pushing me [into] things that I’m not prepared for at the moment and also for accepting all my requests. It’s very important for an agent, opera director, and conductor to understand the singers and also to love their voices. Without this, art becomes a business, which in my opinion is only an offense!’

Not surprisingly for a young tenor whose career is based in bel canto repertory, the role of Conte Almaviva in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia is tremendously important for Mr. Mihai. ‘I love the part,’ he says. ‘I made my début on the operatic stage at the Bucharest National Opera in 2007 with this role and [have] sung it many times since then. I later sang it at the Staatsoper Stuttgart under David Parry. Now, I’ll be at the Dresden Semperoper doing this role under Alessandro de Marchi and Riccardo Frizza, in the Deutsche Oper Berlin with Guillermo García Calvo, and at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris under the stage direction of Emilio Sagi, with Jean-Christophe Spinosi conducting. It is a role that has opened the doors to [so many] important opera stages, and I’m very happy with that.’ Almost concurrently with the much-discussed Mary Zimmerman production of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera, Oxfordshire-based Garsington Opera presented the British premiere of Rossini’s Armida, providing Mr. Mihai with another opportunity to prove his value as a Rossini tenor of the first order. ‘Recently I sang the roles of Goffredo and Carlo in Rossini’s Armida in the UK under David Parry and the stage direction of Martin Duncan. It was an absolute premiere there with this opera, a sensational musical score and very difficult. But being on stage with great artists such as Jessica Pratt [who sang Armida], for example, it’s a pleasure and you just give 100 perfect—everything. I love to think that I’m doing this all the time because I respect the composer, the music, and the public.’ British critic Rupert Christiansen wrote in The Telegraph of being ‘impressed’ by Mr. Mihai’s performance in Armida, while David Nice wrote for The Arts Desk Ltd. that ‘perhaps the most authentic in his runs and his ring [in the voice, particularly the highest notes] was Romanian Bodgan Miahi, kicking off in flamboyant style as crusader-commander Goffredo.’

‘For me, bel canto is everything,’ Mr. Mihai states. ‘It’s a school in which you can learn and discover thousands of emotions and expressions. You learn how to keep this legato, which is extremely important. But to start in bel canto you need to go back to the old schools of the Baroque and Classical repertoires. If you know how to sing Baroque [music], then you can sing Mozart, in whose music the lines are more subtle and versatile. After this, you can enter into the supreme Italian bel canto, which will serve you well if you know how to approach it.’ Even at his young age, Mr. Mihai has encountered both good and less-congenial conditions under which to approach new roles and new music. ‘At the Hariclea Darclée International Voice Competition in my country in 2007, I was asked to assist with a concert dedicated to the ‘Three Queens’ of Donizetti (Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux). The tenor that had to sing the parts in Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux got sick. It was a shock because the concert was to be held the next day! Mariana Nicolesco asked me if I could learn the scenes from these operas in order to save the performance. I went out for ten minutes and looked at the scene from Roberto Devereux. Then, they called me, and I had to go on stage and try it with the orchestra. I learned the parts that night. In the morning, I had a rehearsal with the pianist and in the evening the concert. I have to say that it was a great success for everyone. God was with us,’ he muses. ‘I know that was something completely crazy at that time,’ he says, contemplatively. ‘Now I remember that with pleasure, but I know that I will never do something like that again because it’s risky.’ Preparation is an extremely important aspect of Mr. Mihai’s approach to singing. ‘It’s important to continue to study even if you have great success because studying never finishes,’ he suggests. ‘In my opinion, the most important thing that everyone should learn is this: don’t forget the point from which you have started, even if you become a great opera star. You have to remember to be a normal person, gentle, and to act like that. Someone told me once that we need one life in which to learn and another one in which to sing.’ Especially in bel canto, respect for the music is paramount. ‘Mariana Nicolesco said that the image of bel canto is like a royal eagle flying sovereign across the sky. This is the impression that I must have when I’m singing bel canto. You always need discipline and strong preparation to be able to sing in the bel canto style.’

Mr. Mihai describes his own technique as ‘natural and original,’ and these qualities are evident in his philosophy of singing. ‘The most gratifying element [of singing] is the connection that I have to create with the public, making them believe what they see, what they hear—it’s very important,’ he says. Conversely, he concedes that singing, especially in the Twenty-First Century, is not without challenges, some of them expansive and potentially damaging. ‘The greatest challenge for me is to realize which roles I have to approach and which I must not. As an opera singer, I always have to keep a straight line without trying to give more than my vocal possibilities and to maintain a young, natural voice without pushing. I intend to keep my voice in bel canto as much as I can without going into heavier repertory that can destroy me. I’m able to say no, and this is something important in a career, how and when to say no.’ This innate sense of what to sing and when to sing it, seemingly so instinctive to Mr. Mihai, eludes many young singers, especially in the formative years of their careers, when they are eager to prove themselves on the world’s greatest stages. Still, in Mr. Mihai’s aspirations for his career, the issue of sorting out which roles he should or should not sing is uncomplicated. With a comprehensive understanding of the abilities of his own voice at the core of his musical inquisitiveness, the foundations of his artistry are laid upon the most basic of starting blocks: music and text. ‘You can’t be a true artist without giving attention to the music and drama,’ he insists. ‘They are like sisters, and they can’t live one without the other. On stage, we all try to give our best as singers and actors. The text is very important because it gives you the right attitudes and expressions in singing and acting. You have to feel everything that was written in the musical score and the text and also, what is very important, what is behind them. To do this, you just have to listen to the music. Everything is written in the musical background (in the orchestra). Many times, you realize what you should do just by listening. We have to serve the music with respect all the time.’

In his service to music, especially that of the Italian bel canto, Mr. Mihai brings a voice that, at first hearing, is immediately arresting in its bright but rich timbre and uncommon flexibility. Ideal in the complex coloratura of Rossini’s leading tenor roles, Mr. Mihai’s voice also possesses the robust, ringing tone required for the less-florid but equally demanding music of Bellini and Donizetti. Though not a role characteristic of his repertory, the Italienischer Sänger in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier provides—with its elegant, neo-Classical aria, ‘Di rigori armato’ (click here to watch a performance of the aria by Mr. Mihai, from the Staatsoper Stuttgart)—an excellent vehicle for highlighting the particular qualities of Mr. Mihai’s voice. Smooth across a wide range, the upper register blossoms excitingly. Unlike many tenors whose repertories are centered in bel canto, Mr. Mihai’s voice is also well-projected even at low volume, enabling the beauty of the tone to carry through a large hall without forcing or pinching the tone in the upper octave. When employing the head resonance required to produce the extreme upper register demanded by the music of Rossini, Mr. Mihai also avoids the nasality that affects the singing of many tenors in this repertory. Perhaps even more rarely, his singing of complex coloratura passages is not marred by aspirates, elevating his vocal technique to the level of those possessed by Lawrence Brownlee and Juan Diego Flórez. In short, Mr. Mihai’s voice is of a quality that is worthy of comparison with the best bel canto tenors of the age.

Above all, it is the emotional connection—with the composer, the music, fellow artists, audiences, and with one’s own conceptions of art and humanity—that is at the heart of Mr. Mihai’s singing. ‘We sing the way we are as people,’ he suggests. ‘For example, on stage we are extremely transparent to the public, and they can observe the way we are. The energy, the joy, and the happiness of singing opera develops in my case because I love and respect my art, my public, and the sacred music.’ Normalcy, in Mr. Mihai’s view, is important to an artist’s ability to connect with an audience not merely on an artistic level but also on a personal one. ‘In normal life, I’m simply like everyone else. I enjoy staying with my family and my friends and everything beautiful in life.’ Singing, he feels, is a gift that is to be treasured and shared. ‘I thank God for every morning when I open my eyes and breathe life. I think that singing opera is a way of thanking Him for all the joy He brings in my life.’ This joy, so vital to his personal method of succeeding in his chosen life as an artist, is evident in his music-making. Even when he sings music expressing villainous treachery or despondent sorrow, joy is the unavoidable reaction to hearing the voice of Bogdan Mihai.

Heartfelt thanks are extended to Mr. Mihai for his great kindness and openness in responding to questions for this article, as well as for his patience as the author battled an extended illness.

All photographs are used courtesy of Mr. Mihai.

Click here to visit Mr. Mihai’s official website, available in Romanian and English. Click here to read Mr. Mihai’s engaging, informative blog.

Mr. Mihai is represented by Opera4u.

ARTIST PROFILE: Simon Lobelson, baritone

2010-08-16T19:09:00.002-04:00

The extraordinary American baritone Leonard Warren once wrote that ‘tenors are noble, pure and heroic and get the soprano, if she has not tragically expired before the final curtain. But baritones are born villains in opera. Always the heavy and never the hero—that’s me.’ This was Warren’s sarcastic assessment of his operatic career, but his own performance diary, his remarkable range (which reportedly extended to a full-throated top C that would have been the envy of many dramatic tenors), and his participation in what was undoubtedly a Golden Age of singing, especially at the MET, surely enabled him to appreciate the baritone voice for its special capacities for theatre-filling angst, soulful anguish, powerful calls to arms, and dulcet paeans to love. Yet Warren’s tongue-in-cheek remarks reflect what is, among many music lovers, a common perception, that baritones in opera are relegated to portraying villains and figures of depravity; and occasionally also brothers and fathers, though in these cases usually meddling and ill-willed rather than loving and supportive. Warren would have recognized immediately that these stereotypes are derived largely from the Verdi canon, in which baritones—even when ‘heroes’ per se—are rarely wholly sympathetic. Yet, in so many performances of operas with tenor and soprano heroes and heroines, it is the singing of a baritone that wins the collective hearts of audiences. Pamina and Tamino survive their trials and are united, the wicked Königin der Nacht disappears on a cloud of F’s in alt, and Sarastro recesses into his beloved ‘heil’gen Hallen,’ but many audiences leave a performance of Die Zauberflöte with Papageno’s plight in their hearts and his tunes in their heads. The same is true of Mercutio in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Rodrigo in Verdi’s Don Carlo, Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and of course Rossini’s Figaro. It is only rarely that the same artist sings all of these roles, but they are related by more than the fact that they were composed for the baritone voice. There is among these and so many other baritone roles in opera a thread of emotional sincerity that often eludes characters created for higher or lower voices. It would be a misleading generalization to suggest that baritones are the emotional and philosophical epicenters of opera, but it cannot be denied that in many operas when there is deeper thinking it is a baritone who has done it. In many cases carrying the weight of the opera and its ultimate effectiveness with the audience on his shoulders, whether he is singing Cavalli, Mozart, Rossini, or Puccini, what a baritone must be above all—as Leonard Warren displayed in a MET career ranging from the Herald in Lohengrin, via Rangoni in Boris Godunov and Valentin in Faust, to the great Verdi roles—is versatility of voice and sentiment.

That versatility is one of the most immediately apparent aspects of the career of young baritone Simon Lobelson. Born in Sydney and raised in Brussels, Mr. Lobelson first pursued a career in music through his studies at the University of Sydney, where his focus was principally on musicology and led to first-class honors in his Bachelor of Music degree. Thereafter studying with celebrated Australian baritone John Pringle, a particular highlight of whose illustrious career was his creation of the role of Palfreyman in Richard Meale’s Voss (the first opera by an Australian composer on an authentically Australian subject), Mr. Lobelson took the Tinkler Award in the 2003 Australian Singing Competition. This honor was followed by Mr. Lobelson’s receipt of a scholarship enabling him to pursue postgraduate studies with acclaimed British baritone Roderick Earle under the auspices of London’s Royal College of Music. Having taken part in masterclasses with renowned singers such as Sir Thomas Allen, Gerald Finley, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and Philip Langridge, Mr. Lobelson further honed his craft in the Royal College of Music’s prestigious Benjamin Britten International Opera School, from which he was matriculated with distinction. Mr. Lobelson presently studies with Sir Donald McIntyre, the New Zealand-born bass-baritone whose Wotan in the famed Patrice Chéreau production of Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth is one of the lasting cultural icons of the Twentieth Century.

‘I have learnt a huge amount from Donald in a relatively short time,’ Mr. Lobelson reflects. ‘Anybody who has done a masterclass with him will know what a difficult task master he can be. There have been some singers who have gone to see him for a lesson and been too scared to ever return. I arrived for my first lesson with him armed with my artillery of arias from Verdi to Handel. Before we even touched these, he asked me if I knew any nursery rhymes. We then proceeded to sing ‘Humpty Dumpty’ for an hour and then spent three hours on the Count’s aria from Le Nozze di Figaro.’ Mr. Lobelson pauses. ‘Did I say the Count’s aria? I meant the recitative to the count’s aria. This was all less to do with vocal production than with bending your brain around a new way of phrasing your singing. All the time, he was constantly referring back to Wagner’s didactic phrases on music-making, like “Fertig in dem mund” (Ready in the mouth) and “Die kleine noten sind die Hauptsache” (The small notes are the main thing), meaning that paying due attention to the small notes in a phrase causes the longer notes to take care of themselves. And the music for which Donald has become so famous is sung with the same kind of approach as one would sing bel canto opera. Never park ‘n bark. That is,’ Mr. Lobelson explains, ‘perfectly-formed vowels, with preceding consonants before the beat, and those that are voiced, perfectly pitched on the note, with the sound always released. [McIntyre] would demonstrate ways of achieving these goals, for example, by throwing a pair of spectacles as each note is sung, sometimes by skipping around the room to take away the temptation to accent every downbeat, and sometimes running at full speed down a hill, to show that one must lean back slightly as not to fall flat on [one’s] face. Our lessons usually last a whole day and involve a few hours of singing, lunch, a brief walk around his farm, then more work; and of course many amazing stories from his career.’ Mr. Lobelson’s work with Sir Donald McIntyre is focused not only on the development of the voice in the short term but also on potential for future expansion of both the voice and the younger singer’s repertory. ‘He has his eye on me one day singing Alberich, possibly sooner than I’d like to, but one day nevertheless,’ Mr. Lobelson says. ‘The concept that young voices can’t learn how to sing by singing Wagner (if sung properly) is a myth. [McIntyre] is currently working on his own word-by-word translation of Hans Sachs, one of his greatest roles.’ Mr. Lobelson adds, ‘And yes, he is one of he greatest Wagnerians of the past century, of which I am reminded every time I watch him singing Wotan’s farewell [in Die Walküre].’

The belief that singing music that is often considered too ‘large’ to be safe for young singers sorting out their voices can, when done properly, be not only beneficial but revelatory, is central to Mr. Lobelson’s development of his own voice, as well as his formal tuition. ‘Cutting my teeth on bigger repertoire in lessons was a means to learning how to sing, as I already had a fairly solid technique,’ Mr. Lobelson reflects. ‘Things like the Prologue from Pagliacci, arias from Ernani, Don Carlo, even Verdi’s Iago taught me utensils and how to apply these things to all repertoire.’ He is nonetheless cautious in his choices of repertory, especially at this juncture in his career, recognizing the dangers of taking on overtly dramatic roles and the challenges of particular venues. ‘There are even older, more established singers who don’t know better, and seem to have become too famous for the Fach system and sing whatever they like—to their great detriment,’ Mr. Lobelson states. He feels, however, that ‘there really is no set vocal escalator of baritone roles. We are all on our own paths. Some singers started singing very successfully in their late thirties—Matteo Manugerra, for one [whose formal operatic début was in 1962, when he was nearing forty: his début as Rigoletto at the Opéra de Paris came in 1966, when he was forty-one]—and launched straight into the heavier repertoire. A baritone’s career path does not always consist of, for example, Masetto then Morales then Malatesta then Marullo then Marcello then Mandrycka then Musiklehrer then Macbeth, in that order, and then the entire bass repertoire when the tops of their voices have gone haywire.’ Mr. Lobelson adds, ‘This is a classic framework, but it’s not always like this, as singers return to old roles, and then it all depends on what roles one is offered and chooses to accept.’

Mr. Lobelson is also aware of the physical dimension that has become increasingly important in opera during the past generation and its ambiguous relationship with vocal prowess. ‘I have never been offered particularly heavy roles,’ he says. ‘Renato in Ballo in Maschera once. But, then, I don’t possess a large voice, and I am only 5’7”, so often people look at me and decide what I should be singing before they’ve even heard me. The number of times I’ve been turned down for the Count because of my height!’ Mr. Lobelson muses, adding, ‘Luckily, almost all the roles I have done have suited me quite well. I think the heaviest roles I’ve sung to date were Nottingham [in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux, for Spain’s Opera Valladolid] and Mittenhofer [in Hans Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers], which I recently covered for English National Opera. Yes, they challenged me, but I worked it out.’ Mr. Lobelson approaches each role with careful attention to both musical and dramatic values. ‘I guess I’m always apprehensive about doing a new role, for whatever reason,’ he says. ‘I went through this with my first Figaro [in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro], Alfonso [in Mozart’s Così fan tutte], Rossini’s Figaro, and Marcello [in Puccini’s La Bohème]. I remember being apprehensive about singing [Purcell’s] Aeneas at nineteen, but I really didn’t have a clue how to sing then. I sang the role very differently ten years later. But they all came at just the right time for me. Had they come a year earlier, I don’t know if I would have done them well.’ Mr. Lobelson muses, ‘But when is the right time to sing a role? Maybe like having kids, there is never a perfect time, but you just make it work. And, indeed, roles like Marcello [in Puccini’s La Bohème] actually teach you how to sing. When all’s said and done, we’re all different, so some singer’s Papageno is another’s Wotan. But you must always sing them your way, not like anyone else (even if you think that particular “somebody else” sings it much better).’

Describing his vocal technique as ‘rich and flexible,’ Mr. Lobelson is likewise aware of the precarious nature of the voice as a product of the body. ‘Being built into our own body, the voice can be affected by many things: health, environment, and particularly state of mind,’ he says. Reflecting on the familiar statements by singers such as Luciano Pavarotti and Sherrill Milnes, who observed that their voices were both dependent and independent entities within their bodies, Mr. Lobelson states, ‘The more I get to know my own body, patterns, and voice, the more reliable my instrument becomes. But quieting those negative demons of self-belief and staying focused whilst going through day-to-day life and its requirements, ups and sometimes downs, can be challenging.’ This achievement of equilibrium between the physical and mental demands of singing is, in Mr. Lobelson’s view, a central requirement to pursuing a successful career as a singer. ‘At times the greatest challenge [to being a singer], onstage and offstage, is maintaining strong self-belief. When the applause has ended, life is art and art is life. Which reflects which, I don’t know. The works I sing, and listen to, have led me to appreciate different layers in life, people, and situations. Some of these operatic characters have taught me a bit about life and have really had a didactic influence upon me. Music, singing, and my job have opened my soul to the wonders of life. Sometimes we need to forget about “the job” and simply listen and look with new, refreshed ears and eyes.’

In approaching any role or production, whether for the first or the fiftieth time, one characteristic is vital to Mr. Lobelson’s art: truth, musical and dramatic. ‘Know what you’re singing about, and feel the emotions in the drama at any one time. This is what will drive the music, for are you not the one creating the entire sound-world with your inner thoughts and emotions? Music is what feelings sound like,’ he suggests. Pursuing this thought, he cautions, ‘Don’t “act.” Be. Whatever you feel, if fuelled by what is being said to you (and really listen now to what the others are saying!), will ensure that you will never go wrong. Drama isn’t about standing in the right place at the right time and moving your left pectoral muscle on the fourth bar of the bassoon melisma. All that stage “business” is meaningless if not felt. The musical aspect of this will be taken care of if the dramatic and character foundation is stable.’ Mr. Lobelson admits that there are roles and specific situations in which this necessary application of one’s own emotional engagement with the music is not so easily made. ‘Some of the greatest battles are not to be won by constantly trying to get it right,’ he concedes. ‘Sometimes you win these battles when you’re simply walking down the street, or doing the washing-up. Take the focus off the singing and tone production, and don’t think of “acting.” Think of reacting and simply “being.” Emotions of opera are intimate, and many theatres are very large, but audiences can see, whether trained in drama or not, when acting is false or overdone. The tools taught to an opera singer through vocalism, movement, and acting are simply to serve at the disposal of dramatic truth.’

In addition to opera, Mr. Lobelson’s work to date has encompassed an array of concert performances, in which he has amassed a repertory of some of the most important works in choral music, including Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium and Johannes-Passion, Händel’s Messiah, and Mozart’s C-minor Große-Messe and Requiem. His approach to concert singing, especially in oratorios, mirrors his personal philosophy on singing opera. ‘Affecting people, moving them and communicating with them, is incredibly gratifying. Isn’t that at the end of the day what it’s all about?’ Mr. Lobelson says. Considering his concert repertory, he reflects, ‘I’ve stood too many times next to singers in oratorios who sing beautifully but could well be reciting a shopping list rather than singing about the crucifixion and Jesus’ trials.’ Citing a technique mentioned in Richard Miller’s book Securing Baritone, Bass-Baritone, and Bass Voices, Mr. Lobelson states that a ‘a very useful tool in order to get you out of your head and cease constantly fretting over technical matters during performance is very simply to communicate. I mean really communicate. And you know what, it works. You sing better.’ As evidence of the effectiveness of this focus on communicating through the text, Mr. Lobelson recounts his recent experience with singing Haydn’s Die Schöpfung for the first time, music which he describes as ‘a technically tricky and very extended sing, covering both ends of the vocal spectrum for the bass. From start to finish,’ he recalls, ‘I simply thought of the words, depicting the narration of God’s creation of the earth. It was incredibly gratifying to tell such a wonderful story.’

Mr. Lobelson contends that this element of communicating through the music and text of a musical score in order to present an audience with a coherent, hopefully moving story begins with attention to communicating openly and candidly with oneself. ‘Were [I to offer other singers] a single most important piece of advice, it would have nothing to do with technique or roles or vocal production or musicality,’ he says. ‘It’s not even to do with how to get employed and behave on the job. It’s more to do with that which never gets taught at colleges—state of mind, which is what gets in the way of people achieving their best. We are all on our own path. As soon as you stop enjoying the job, or become obsessive about it for the wrong reasons (the peripheral), then stop. Don’t compare yourself to other people, for you’ll always be disappointed. Why are you doing this for a living? What is it that makes you wake up every morning and do this? Is it the money? The accolade? The attractive women simply throwing themselves at you (or not)? The fame? I have come to realize very recently that if I stopped singing, that’d be OK. And this is a very challenging thought for a full-time singer to conceptualize, and indeed with which to come to terms. Were this to happen, though, I would still have music in my life, and that to me is the most important thing. It’s the reason I began singing.’ Likewise, for Mr. Lobelson neither one’s attention to one’s individual craft in singing nor the blend of respect and genuine affection for the music one sings ends when a run of performances draws to its close. ‘I get very disturbed when colleagues of mine haven’t the slightest interest in exploring music outside the rehearsal room and shoot off comments to me like, “I don’t like to listen to opera in my free time, I leave work at work,”’ he says. Thoughtfully, he adds, ‘Yes, leave the petty politics and annoyances at work, but can’t you have a passion for the job, and more importantly the music, outside work? How are you supposed to get inside a character or drama or role if you never think about this when you’re on your own? First: I love music. Second: I love opera. Third: And I love singing. In that order. And I have no shame in saying that. Great pride, actually.’

This pride, especially refreshing in a young singer, is apparent in all that Mr. Lobelson sings, in staged performances, concerts, and on recordings of repertory as varied as Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas and Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (recordings on ABC Classics of productions by Australia’s enterprising Pinchgut Opera) and Dame Elizabeth Maconchy’s The Sofa (on Chandos, conducted by Dominic Wheeler). Flexing his muscles in the tricky arena of opera in concert, Mr. Lobelson also took part in a widely-acclaimed concert performance by Chelsea Opera Group of Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur with Nelly Miricioiu and Rosalind Plowright. To ‘Early Music’ roles such as Joabel in David et Jonathas and the Drunken Poet in Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, Mr. Lobelson brings natural vocal flexibility and an uncanny ability to translate this pliancy of technique into a complementary dramatic adaptability. Building upon this foundation, he comes to later repertory with the versatility that is the hallmark of a successful singer. Pensive and modest about his artistry, Mr. Lobelson downplays the fact that he possesses a voice of beauty, its timbre dark but capable of taking on a myriad of colors depending upon the role and the dramatic temperature of the music he sings. ‘I can honestly say that I have never thought of my voice as beautiful. Regardless of this, I must agree that if you don’t make a good quality sound that people will want to hear, then don’t bother,’ he says. He also emphasizes that vocal beauty is inherently subjective, as exemplified by the singing of Maria Callas. ‘Callas said that “it isn’t enough that you have a beautiful voice; you must take this voice and break it up into a thousand pieces, so she will serve you,”’ he reflects. It can be argued unto the twilight of eternity whether Callas was completely successful in reassembling her voice, as it were, but there can be little debate about the shimmering, secure tone of Mr. Lobelson’s voice and the skill with which he uses it to shape performances that, no matter what fates befall his tenor and soprano colleagues, remain in the memory.

Looking to the future, it is significant that Mr. Lobelson cites as artists whom he particularly admires and whose work has influenced his own understanding of singing as an art and a profession are those whose careers spanned wide repertories: foremost his teacher, Sir Donald McIntyre (whose discography includes, in addition to his famous Wagner performances, a towering account of the name-part in Händel’s Saul), as well as Dame Margaret Price (a Mozartian second to none who also proved her importance as a Verdian at Covent Garden and elsewhere—Desdemona was the role of her Metropolitan Opera début—and recorded a thrilling Isolde for Carlos Kleiber), George London (as effective as Debussy’s Golaud and Mussorgsky’s Boris as in Mozart and Wagner roles), and Philip Langridge (an incalculably important singer whose active repertory included music from four centuries in roles both large and small, in all of which his artistry shone brilliantly). This versatility, founded upon secure technique and careful attention to texts, is at the heart of Mr. Lobelson’s aspirations, which are also tempered by keen self-awareness. ‘We all have roles and repertoire we want to sing in the future,’ he says. ‘I’d love to sing the Dutchman [in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer]. And King Philip in Don Carlo. But I know I won’t. Ever. Regardless of what I will be singing when I’m fifty, there are things I do not ever want to abandon in favor of “bigger” repertoire. I hope to sing Mozart’s da Ponte operas until I die. Now, [if] that means “graduating” (or slipping?) in Le Nozze di Figaro from Figaro (which I have sung) to Count Almaviva, to Antonio, to second bridesmaid, that’s fine. Nor would I wish to lose touch with the Baroque repertoire, either. I love the music’s directness, clarity, and sound world, especially when produced by some of the top Baroque specialists in Germany, France, and Italy, for example.’ Of course, Verdi and Wagner, whose music he views as both natural and healthy when approached with the appropriate vocal acumen, are central to the work of many baritones, and Mr. Lobelson is likely to be no exception to this as his career progresses. ‘I must say that I don’t think Verdi and Wagner cause a singer to lose flexibility—if sung correctly,’ he says.

It is this notion of singing ‘correctly’ that is the conundrum—and the undoing—for many younger singers. Speaking of the power of music to wash away ‘the dust of everyday life,’ Mr. Lobelson recognizes that, as directors and managements are eager to convince audiences, a trait crucial to the survival of opera is its relevance. Yet he also acknowledges, with rare insight, that this relevance is determined internally by the artists and the audiences who witness their work. ‘Opera will always be relevant,’ Mr. Lobelson offers, ‘whether set in Jacobean England or Twenty-First Century Hong Kong. But one must never forget what it is that defines relevance.’ This, he feels, is the culmination of an artist’s work, to convey to an audience thoughtfully-rendered parts which, when properly assembled, reveal a meaningful story. That singing is a profoundly personal experience for Mr. Lobelson is evident in all aspects of his artistry, behind the curtain as much as before the footlights. Baritones are plentiful but, in one of the few things upon which opera-goers in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century will agree, good ones are not. Displaying the versatility necessary to effectively and touchingly portray a deceptive, ambitious Israelite soldier in an underappreciated Baroque opera, Mozart’s wily Don Alfonso, the treacherous, wronged Duke of Nottingham in a Donizetti rarity, and Bizet’s swaggeringly virile but too-often-hackneyed toréador, Simon Lobelson is among the best young baritones singing today, and unlike most artists of his generation he understands how he got to the point in his career that he presently enjoys. Considering his early experiences at the Royal College of Music, he says, ‘There were bigger voices, better voices, more beautiful voices, more flexible voices, and voices that could do the various things on which I’d prided myself better.’ Rather than proving a field of competition, this was for Mr. Lobelson an environment in which he gained an appreciation for the complexities of making a career as a singer that guides him as he looks to his future as an artist. Pondering, iPod in hand, as he enjoyed a vista of a serene lakeside garden in Scotland, where he was preparing to sing Escamillo in Carmen, Mr. Lobelson reflects on his journey to date as a singer. ‘[I have been] listening to the Act Two quartet finale of Die Entführung auf dem Serail. The applause has just ended. What am I thinking about now, having just heard one of the most sublime, life- and love-affirming pieces of music? Naturally, [about] love—for my family and for all the world and nature. I know that probably very soon I will forget this feeling again. But I also know with the firmest assurance that I will recall it all again when music again moves my soul.’ It is such love for music that gives life to the works of long-dead composers and, combined with the gift of a good voice and the acquisition of a durable technique, makes the work of a singer memorable. Simon Lobelson is a singer in whose work this combination is consistently audible, and for years to come his enthusiasm for his craft will be a vital element in the effort to validate the relevance of opera and concert music to audiences in the Twenty-First Century.

The author’s deepest gratitude is extended to Mr. Lobelson for his kindness, insightfulness, and uncommon candor in responding to questions for this article.

All photographs are used with Mr. Lobelson’s permission.

Click here to visit Mr. Lobelson's Official Website.son.

IN MEMORIAM: Italian bass Cesare Siepi, 1923 - 2010

2010-07-15T18:50:00.001-04:00

CESARE SIEPI

10 February 1923 – 5 July 2010

‘Dormirò sol nel manto mio regal quando la mia giornata è giunta a sera’ (‘I shall sleep in my royal mantle when my life’s day reaches evening’), Filippo II sings in his great monologue in Verdi’s Don Carlo. Despairing of his unrequited love for his wife, the tormented king reflects upon the duty that will confine him even unto his death. He is also aware of the dignity of his rank, however, and the place that he will take among the Spanish kings of lore. So wears into eternity the great Cesare Siepi the royal mantle befitting a prince among singers.

Documented in many studio recordings—including accounts of the title roles in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni that many critics consider the unsurpassed benchmarks for those works—and countless more ‘pirated’ recordings of live performances and radio broadcasts, the long career of Cesare Siepi requires no exposition. The dark, beautiful voice rolls out across the decades in music as varied as Donizetti’s La Favorita and Montemezzi’s L’Amore dei tre re, the tone even in his last recordings steady and secure of pitch and placement. Yet, as with any great artist, there was more than merely a superb voice. Cesare Siepi possessed, more discernibly than any other Italian bass of his generation, a remarkable ability to convey via subtle tonal shading elusive facets of both simple and complicated characters. A figure as seemingly one-dimensional as Verdi’s Sparafucile emerged in a performance by Cesare Siepi as a study in ambiguities, the knell of death always audible in the voice, especially in the sepulchral but never artificial lower register, but the menace all the more chilling for also being sly and playful. Likewise, Siepi’s Filippo II was no weak-willed monarch wallowing in self-pity but a deeply intelligent man, enslaved by his own power and insightful enough not only to sense his wife’s detachment from his affection for her but also to comprehend the reasons for it. As Gurnemanz in Parsifal, his singing expressed both the sorrow and the optimism of a man troubled by the sinfulness of mankind but adherent to his faith in ultimate redemption. As Don Giovanni, Siepi was one of the few basses to fully convey the sensuality of the role without compromising the propulsion of the music with heaviness of voice.

Despite singing an uncommonly wide repertory for an Italian bass, Cesare Siepi will likely be most fondly remembered for his portrayal of Filippo II in Don Carlo, one of the most musically rewarding and psychologically profound roles in the Italian bass repertory. It was as Filippo that Siepi made his début at the Metropolitan Opera on 6 November 1950, opposite the Don Carlo of Jussi Björling in the Rolf Gérard production that launched the MET directorship of Sir Rudolf Bing. Hand-picked by Bing (along with Fedora Barbieri, who made her MET début as Eboli in the same performance), Siepi was at twenty-seven an atypically youthful Filippo, but his understanding of the role was already near-complete. Inexplicably, Siepi’s Filippo—widely acclaimed as one of the most consistent and powerful operatic creations of the Twentieth Century—was never preserved in a studio recording. Fortunately, there are numerous ‘live’ recordings (including the MET broadcast of 11 November 1950: the opening night performance was telecast), perhaps most notable among which is an ORF broadcast from the 1958 Salzburger Festspielen (dating from 26 July 1958) in which Siepi’s Filippo was complemented by the near-ideal cast of Eugenio Fernandi as Carlo, Sena Jurinac as Elisabetta, Giulietta Simionato as Eboli, and Ettore Bastianini as Rodrigo, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Even across more than five decades and through imperfect sound, Siepi’s inimitable voice draws the listener into Filippo’s dangerous, distressed world, every word of the great monologue lived as well as sung.

Later in Don Carlo, Filippo sings to his wife, ‘Me debole credete e sfidarmi sembrate: la debolezza in me può diventar furor’ (‘You have known me only in my weakness: but this weakness can be changed into fury’). In a sense, this thought enshrines the artistry of Cesare Siepi: a voice of darkly terrestrial beauty that, in an instant, could be transformed from placidity to roaring rage. Like Maria Callas, Cesare Siepi was a true artist in whose single voice a thousand voices were assimilated.

CD REVIEW: Ludwig van Beethoven – MISSA SOLEMNIS (Kammerchor der KlangVerwaltung; Orchester der KlangVerwaltung; Enoch zu Guttenberg; FARAO B108053)

2010-06-28T23:10:00.001-04:00

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827) – Missa solemnis in D major, Op. 123: S. Bernhard, A. Vondung, P. Breslik, Y.F. Speer; Kammerchor der KlangVerwaltung; Orchester der KlangVerwaltung; Enoch zu Guttenberg [recorded in concert at the Herkulessaal der Münchner Residenz, Munich, on 07 March 2009; FARAO B108053]

It is evident from the opening chords of this performance, recorded ‘live’ in Munich in March 2009, that Maestro Enoch zu Guttenberg intended this to be a refreshingly ‘new’ Missa solemnis, even after much-discussed ‘period’ performances by the likes of Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Philippe Herreweghe. Textures are cleaner, not necessarily lighter than in ‘traditional’ performances but articulated with admirable clarity, and balances are often little short of revelatory in the sense that details of Beethoven’s dense orchestration are granted welcome prominence without undermining the broader structure of each movement. This is a performance that sets out not so much to ‘rethink’ the Missa solemnis from an academic perspective as to simply approach the score with unbiased eyes and ears. What seems an instinctive approach to a work as famously complicated as the Missa solemnis has nonetheless eluded many conductors and performances, the former pursuing ambitious efforts at leaving individual marks on the music and the latter becoming mired in those efforts. In the celebrated performances conducted by Otto Klemperer, listeners were allowed to see through music the rage and exaltation of Beethoven’s concept of the Divine. On this recording, Maestro zu Guttenberg presides over a performance that provides glimpses of a slightly less tumultuous but no less glorious firmament, decisions regarding tempi and instrumental color varying widely from those familiar in Klemperer’s performances and also those of period-practice specialists but equally rooted in a deep respect for Beethoven’s score. What Maestro zu Guttenberg exhibits anew is that conductors need not strive to make the Missa solemnis monumental: the quality and profundity of the music, when allowed to unfold as Beethoven indicated in his score, are all that are required to reveal the spiritual significance and musical importance of what is by any measure one of the greatest achievements of Western art.

FARAO, a label responsible for the preservation of a number of fine operatic performances from Munich, present this performance of the Missa solemnis in sound of demonstration quality for ‘live’ recordings. There are a few coughs and other noises off to be heard, mostly in the pauses between movements, but these are never disturbing and are merely inevitable elements of recording a work in concert before an audience. These are more than offset in this recording (and would be were they increased ten-fold) by the immediacy of sound achieved by recording ‘live.’ There are unique qualities of a ‘live’ performance before an audience that cannot be duplicated even by recording in the same space under studio conditions, qualities that are not limited to the frisson of a live occasion and the interactions among performers and their audience. There are very basic sonic implications of a sea of human bodies in the space: opera houses and concert halls were designed with the intention of being inhabited by audiences, their physical presence contributing to the spatial ambience of the acoustics. FARAO have ideally captured the acoustics of Munich’s Herkulessaal with the charged atmosphere of a live performance combined with the clarity and careful balances typical of studio recordings. This is among the best-recorded accounts of the Missa solemnis in the discography and one that is a credit to the performance that it documents.

The Orchester and Kammerchor der KlangVerwaltung are relatively new ensembles in the context of Teutonic instrumental and choral groups. The Orchester, founded in 1997, is comprised of players from many of Germany’s and Austria’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Berliner, Münchner, and Wiener Philharmonikers. Playing with the distinction and accomplishment that this implies, the Orchester meet Maestro zu Guttenberg’s demands with unwavering dedication and an impressively high level of execution. Founded three years later, in 2000, the Kammerchor is likewise comprised of members of other distinguished choral ensembles, as well as experienced young singers from throughout southern Germany. For musical accuracy and security of tone, the members of the Kammerchor need fear no comparisons with the famed choirs that take part in other recorded performances of the Missa solemnis. Both instrumentalists and choristers consistently rise to the challenges of Beethoven’s music with heartening fearlessness, completely obliterating recollections of staid performances in the Teutonic tradition from generations past. Maestro zu Guttenberg takes advantage of the various experiences of his orchestra and choir to shape a performance of a work that is audibly of the early Nineteenth Century but not limited in scope or impact by its time.

The performance is also fortunate to have a quartet of capable young soloists. Munich-born soprano Susanne Bernhard, already at her young age an experienced Violetta in La Traviata and Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, sings the soprano’s solo lines—which are nothing less than operatic—beautifully, soaring into her upper register with appealing freedom. Anke Vondung, a very promising young German mezzo-soprano who made her Metropolitan Opera début as Cherubini in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro on 2 October 2007, effectively delivers the alto lines, which admittedly do not allow plentiful opportunities to display the beauty of her voice. Many performances of the Missa solemnis are let down by inadequate work by the bass soloist, to whom Beethoven entrusted the heartrending opening of the Agnus Dei. Young German bass Yorck Felix Speer sings admirably throughout the performance, however, bringing special intensity and pointed vocalism to his critical contributions to the Agnus Dei. Most impressive among the soloists is Slovak tenor Pavol Breslik. One of the finest tenors of his generation, he made his début at the Metropolitan Opera as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni on 13 April 2009, and will return to the MET in the 2010 – 11 season to sing Ferrando in the much-anticipated revival of Così fan tutte in which famed Baroque specialist and founder of Les Arts Florissants William Christie will make his MET début. In this performance, Mr. Breslik brings to the tenor’s solo lines the plangent beauty and security of tone that have won the appreciation of audiences and critics throughout Europe. His contributions to the opening Kyrie set the high standard for the performance, and he completes a solo quartet that is unique among recent recordings of the Missa solemnis for reliable, attractive singing.

In a matter of musicological significance, Maestro zu Guttenberg prefers the choral singing of the great ‘Osanna’ fugue rather than the assignment of the passage to the solo quartet—a decision based upon ambiguous markings in Beethoven’s manuscript—preferred by Klemperer and other conductors. There is an undeniably rewarding precision possible when the fugue is sung by the soloists, but in a performance such as this one, in which the choristers diligently articulate the interweaving subjects in contrapuntal passages, the resulting breadth of the music makes the singing of the ‘Osanna’ by the full chorus seem inherently right.

Reviewing a 1934 performance of the Missa solemnis conducted by Arturo Toscanini, the first performance of the work by the New York Philharmonic (with the almost unbelievable quartet of Elisbeth Rethberg, Sigrid Onegin, Paul Althouse, and Ezio Pinza), an article in Time magazine stated that ‘few conductors choose to give the Missa solemnis because of its great technical difficulties, its demands on the human voice for which Beethoven never learned to write considerately.’ Those who love Fidelio might take exception at the suggestion that Beethoven never mastered composition for the voice, but it is an oft-repeated notion that is supported by plentiful examples of performances featuring singers stretched to and beyond the limits of their abilities. Beethoven was not known during his lifetime as an adaptable man: in life and in music, he wanted what he wanted, and compromise was improbable. Perhaps it is the lot of a great genius to demand perfection without ever truly hoping for it, to put forth visions to which contemporary eyes are not yet ready to adjust. This is a performance, compelling not just in its unruffled grandeur but equally in its moments of sublime simplicity, that redeems the Missa solemnis from its reputation for near-insurmountable technical demands. Enoch zu Guttenberg and his teams of excellent soloists, choristers, and instrumentalists display a communal acceptance that, in his Missa solemnis, Beethoven wanted what he wanted and, giving him what he wanted, prove that he was right.

CD REVIEW: Johann Sebastian Bach – MASS IN B MINOR (Dunedin Consort & Players; John Butt; Linn Records CKD354)

2010-06-17T17:44:00.001-04:00

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750) – Mass in B Minor, BWV 232: S. Hamilton, C. Osmond, M. Oitzinger, T. Hobbs, M. Brook; Dunedin Consort & Players; John Butt [recorded at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 – 17 September 2009; Linn Records CDK354]

Lest matters of scholarship and disparate editions of the score distract from the merits of the performance at hand, it must be stated at the start that this new recording from Dunedin Consort and Players presents a superb performance of Bach’s monumental B-minor Mass. As in their prior releases of works by Bach (Matthäus-Passion) and Händel (Acis and Galatea, Messiah), Linn Records have provided top-of-the-line sound, preserving careful balances among singers and players but also granting space within the Greyfriars Kirk acoustic for tonal expansion without troublesome echoes. This is a performance that, examined solely on the grounds of the quality of music-making, is competitive with the best recordings of the B-minor Mass in the discography. The soloists—sopranos Susan Hamilton and Cecilia Osmond, mezzo-soprano Margot Oitzinger, tenor Thomas Hobbs, and bass Matthew Brook—are a splendid lot, perhaps less inclined to seem individually triumphant because the overall level of their singing is uniformly high. The timbres of Ms. Hamilton and Ms. Osmond are sufficiently contrasted to lend distinction to each voice when the ladies are singing in duet, and both Ms. Oitzinger and Mr. Brook bring firm tone and great involvement to their singing: Mr. Brook gives a particularly fine account of the spirited ‘Quoniam tu solus sanctus.’ Especially deserving of praise, however, is tenor Thomas Hobbs, a fine young singer whose naturally beautiful, fresh voice—Evangelical, one might deem it in the context of the vocal music of Bach—is complemented by a technique that encompasses all the demands made by Bach’s music. Maestro Butt and the Dunedin Consort and Players bring to the performance their usual precision and zeal, which is to say that one has the sense of being on the leading edge of historically-informed performance practices, as it were, but also that those numbers in the Mass which require unhurried grandeur receive it. Musically, this performance is on the best possible footing, and this recording joins Dunedin Consort’s other Bach and Händel performances in the Linn Records catalogue as another of demonstration quality in terms of both musical integrity and sonic reproduction.

As with many Baroque scores, however, matters of scholarship and disparate editions are central to any discussion of Bach’s B-minor Mass. Perhaps less is known about the life of Bach than about that of any other of the truly great composers of the Baroque, and much of the information pertaining to Bach’s composition of the B-minor Mass is based primarily upon conjecture and theorizing. It is known that Bach composed the Mass in segments—the Missa consisting of the Kyrie and Gloria; the Symbolum Nicenum (the Credo); and a final segment consisting of the Sanctus, Osanna, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei—during the last thirty years of his life: what is not known is whether Bach ever consciously intended for these segments to be performed as a combined entity, a complete setting of the Latin Mass. Much of the music in the B-minor Mass is recycled from Bach’s earlier works, but there is an unquestionable stylistic continuity maintained throughout the segments of the Mass. Some scholars point to the differences in vocal and instrumental scoring among the segments as evidence that Bach never intended for the segments to be united and performed as a single, monumental Mass, the varying numbers and distributions of personnel involved in the different segments complicating performance to a degree that would have been virtually insurmountable during the Eighteenth Century. It would surely have been atypical for the devoutly Lutheran (by personal practice and by employment) Bach to compose a full musical setting of the ordinary of the Catholic Mass, especially without commission, anticipation of aristocratic patronage, or expectation of performance. Bach was, after all, an unfailingly practical composer whose works were carefully crafted to make full use of the abilities of the musical forces at his disposal. It is possible to debate the sources of the creative impetus that led to Bach’s composition of the segments of the B-minor Mass, but the products of that creativity are of indisputable importance.

The present recorded performance is the first to use the 2006 edition of the score prepared by American conductor and musicologist Joshua Rifkin, published by Breitkopf und Härtel. Mr. Rifkin was among the first scholars to propose the notion of performing Bach’s larger-scaled liturgical works with one voice to a part even in the most complex choral movements, as he believes was the practice during Bach’s lifetime, a theory also espoused by the British conductor Andrew Parrott and taken up by a number of influential conductors of Bach’s music during the first decade of the new millennium. As stated at the start, the singers in the present performance are all capable of dealing competently and eloquently with Bach’s demands, both in their solo arias and ensembles and in the choruses, and there are unquestionable rewards in hearing the intricacies of fugal subjects and countersubjects executed with the clarity possible with single or doubled voices. One of the most admirable qualities of the recording is that, even with the slim-lined vocal personnel, big-boned choruses avoid seeming conspicuously anemic because the singing and playing are so committed. Maestro Butt and his band have found the most persuasive manner of realizing Mr. Rifkin’s concept of the B-minor Mass and achieve a performance of beauty, spirituality, and impeccable musicality that render the academic aspect of the enterprise unobtrusive.

Even in an era in which the musical environment is populated by many gifted Early Music specialists, Maestro Butt and his Dunedin Consort colleagues are surely exceptional, however, and the question of the suitability of Mr. Rifkin’s theories to the B-minor Mass lingers. Without exploring the implications of Bach’s role as choirmaster-in-chief during his Leipzig tenure on his compositional modus operandi, there is surely evidence within the music of the Mass itself that provides clues to scholars and musicians alike about the nature of the music as Bach conceived it, despite the fact that very few passages in the Mass were newly composed specifically for their functions within the Mass. What cannot be denied is that, whatever the circumstances of its conception and composition (matters upon which musicologists will almost certainly have to content themselves with uncertainty), Bach’s B-minor Mass is a monumental work that was without equal until Beethoven completed his Missa solemnis almost a century later, though had it been completed Mozart’s C-minor Große Messe (K. 427) would have run it close. Indeed, the individual fragments of the B-minor Mass may well have been among the then-obscure works of Bach and Händel that Mozart studied in Vienna at the instigation of Baron van Swieten at the time during which he was composing his C-minor Mass. Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, though strikingly original, was composed in the Viennese tradition inherited from Haydn and Mozart, whose liturgical works Beethoven knew and admired, a tradition derived from the late Baroque masterpieces of Bach and Händel. [Haydn, for instance, cited Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel as an important influence on his own development as a composer, and it is known that the younger Bach advocated and performed segments from what would eventually be known as his father’s B-minor Mass during the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century.] Haydn’s, Mozart’s, and Beethoven’s masses were all scored for ensembles of soloists and choruses that, though it is impossible to ascertain their precise numbers, surely consisted of substantially more than one or two voices per part, but the fugal passages in their masses are nonetheless modeled closely on those found in Bach’s Passions and B-minor Mass. While it might not be sound scholarship to suggest that Bach’s absolute familiarity with the abilities of the choristers at his command throughout his career contributed decisively to his style of composition in choral pieces, it is surely wrongheaded and disingenuous to ignore the fact that Bach had at hand during his last years in Leipzig the choirs of both the Nikolaikirche and the Thomaskirche, as well as the youth choir of the Thomasschule, which was significantly expanded under Bach’s guidance. In Bach’s time, the Thomaskirche was—as it is now—equipped with two organs, reminiscent of the tradition of ‘grand’ and ‘choir’ organs in French cathedrals, an arrangement of which Bach took full advantage when he revised his Matthäus-Passion for performance in Leipzig. Was it straightforward musical progress, a conscious effort at expanding the scope of choral music, that inspired Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to depart from the presumed one-voice-to-a-part tradition scholars like Mr. Rifkin suggest that they inherited from Bach? Could these geniuses have merely misunderstood or misinterpreted the choral writing of their ancestor?

This recording by the Dunedin Consort and Players provides a sterling example of the viability of the one-voice-to-a-part concept proposed by Mr. Rifkin and other Bach scholars (including John Butt), but the excellence of music-making is to some extent damaging to the academic position the performance seeks to represent in that the quality of the singing and playing fully reveals the brilliance of Bach’s score. Even when executed with skill and commitment that meet and veritably rejoice in the challenges set by the music, Bach’s music cries out for the thrilling sounds of massed voices, double choirs placed on opposite sides of a great space, if not thundering as was heard in Victorian performances at least raising a glorious din. With excellent players and gifted singers, John Butt and the Dunedin Consort achieve a stirring performance of the B-minor Mass that is a gift to any listener who loves the music of Bach. The recording is also an experiment, though, and its very success is also its failure. It is suggested that gossip almost always begins with a speck of truth. However hoary, however inconsistent with what academics deem to be ‘authentic,’ are decades-old performance practices completely arbitrary? Is it not possible that traditions are merely the continuations of the better aspects of the past?

CD REVIEW: Frédéric Chopin & Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – PIANO MUSIC (Miloš Mihajlović, piano; Bel Air Music BAM2046)

2010-06-01T22:06:00.001-04:00

FRÉDÉRIC FRANÇOIS CHOPIN (1810 – 1849) & WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Piano Music – Miloš Mihajlović, piano [recorded at the Lucky Sound Studio in Belgrade, Serbia, during December 2009; Bel Air Music BAM2046]

PROGRAM

Fantasia No. 3 in D minor, K. 397 [Mozart]

Piano Sonata No. 8 in A minor, K. 310 [Mozart]

Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 [Chopin]

Étude No. 8 in F Major, Op. 10 [Chopin]

Waltz in D-flat Major (‘Minute’ Waltz), Op. 64 No. 1 [Chopin]

Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20 [Chopin]

Waltz in C-Sharp minor, Op. 64 No. 2 [Chopin]

Andante spianato & Grande Polonaise Brillante, Op. 22 [Chopin]

Winner of the 2009 Southern Highlands International Piano Competition in New South Wales, Australia, Serbian pianist Miloš Mihajlović received in recognition of his victory the opportunity to make this recording of music by Chopin—much represented on disc this year in both new releases and reissues timed for celebration of the bicentennial of his birth—and Mozart for Bel Air Music, a venture underwritten by Australia’s award-winning Tertini Wines. What in previous generations was essentially an inevitable rite of passage for a young musician after winning a major competition is in the economic environment of the present recording industry a decided luxury. In the case of Miloš Mihajlović, it is a luxury for which those who appreciate the music of Chopin and Mozart and those who take special interest in wonderfully promising young pianists should be grateful.

None of the pieces on this disc is unfamiliar or under-represented on commercial recordings. Whereas many young pianists who are fortunate enough to make recordings in the early stages of their careers are eager to make their marks with performances of lesser-known pieces of which there are not scores of recordings by the greatest pianists of the past century, Mr. Mihajlović possesses the courage and foresight to make his international recording début with music squarely at the center of the traditional piano repertory. It can be dangerous for a young artist to invite comparisons of his work with decades of recorded performances by seasoned, celebrated pianists: when his playing is shaped by an assured technique and genuine interpretive insights, however, his credentials are appreciated on their own merits, and the risks are justified. With the recent publicity concerning the concert performances by the legendary Ivo Pogorelić, perhaps merely the mention of a ‘new’ pianist from Serbia is sufficient to garner interest, but his playing on this disc reveals that Mr. Mihajlović has at his command the complete technical mastery and mature artistry not only to satisfy a music lover’s curiosity but also to stand proudly alongside Mr. Pogorelić and to join the ranks of the finest pianists of the new century.

The piece with which the disc opens, Mozart’s D-minor Fantasia (K. 397), is among the Salzburg master’s most enigmatic and difficult pieces for piano. Little is known about the circumstances of the composition of the Fantasia except that Mozart never completed the piece. The incomplete form in which it survives creates many mysteries: called a Fantasia because of its meandering musical moods and unpredictable changes in tempo, the piece adheres to none of the musical forms prevalent in music for the piano in Mozart’s time. Though of great technical difficulty, this lack of formal boundaries has made the Fantasia popular with pianists because the scope for individual interpretation is broadened. Mr. Mihajlović plays the piece with rhythmic freedom that exploits the rhapsodic nature of the Fantasia, but he also maintains an audible sense of grace that reminds the listener that this is music by Mozart. The A-minor Sonata (K. 310/300d), one of only two of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas in minor keys, is also a seminal work. Composed in Paris during the summer of 1778, Mozart’s work on the Sonata may have coincided with the sudden illness and death of his beloved mother, who died at their flat in the rue du Sentier on 3 July 1778. It is perhaps irresponsible to suggest that any one of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas is his most profound, but the A-minor Sonata undeniably contains some of its composer’s most brooding music for the solo piano. Mr. Mihajlović’s performance of the Sonata, observing every stylistic element of the piece with precision that suggests both absolute familiarity with the music and understanding of historically-informed practices in the playing of keyboard music of Mozart’s era, exhibits the same approach that sounds inherently right for the music that can be heard from a ‘period specialist’ keyboardist such as András Schiff—a considerable achievement for a young pianist. So extraordinary is the stylistic aptitude with which Mr. Mihajlović plays the Mozart selections on the disc that it is possible to think that he is, in fact, playing a period pianoforte rather than a modern instrument. Equally impressive, though, is his respect for the emotional nuances of the music, every shift in mood rendered poetically but without distorting the musical continuity. Mr. Mihajlović’s playing proves as eloquently as that of any pianist in recent memory that the greatest test of a musician’s artistry is to perform in a manner that allows the music at hand to be heard on its own terms, and with his playing of these Mozart pieces Mr. Mihajlović rivals the best performances of this repertory by allowing the listener to hear, unencumbered, the voice of Mozart.

If more demanding from a purely technical perspective, it might be argued that the music of Chopin is, in comparison with that of Mozart, more emotionally direct, the later composer’s pieces more consistently evoking a specific mood rather than proving temperamentally chameleonic like the music of Mozart. That Mr. Mihajlović so thoroughly inhabits through his playing the musical world of Chopin is remarkable after hearing his stylistically spot-on playing of Mozart. In the first Chopin piece on this disc, the G-minor Ballade (Op. 23, No. 1), Mr. Mihajlović announces to the listener the dizzying virtuosity of his playing, a quality that never fails him in any of the pieces on the disc. Even in Chopin, however, Mr. Mihajlović searches beyond the furious flurries of notes, quietly underlining rhythmic buoyancy and using dynamic contrasts to reveal unexpected hues in even the very familiar ‘Minute’ Waltz and C-minor Waltz (Op. 64, No. 2). The wonderful B-minor Scherzo (Op. 20, No. 1) receives a particularly fine performance: with his exaltedly lyrical playing of the contemplative second theme, Mr. Mihajlović—on Chopin’s behalf—aims for the heart. Both in the Scherzo and in the Opus 22 Andante spianato & Grande Polonaise (played here without its original orchestral accompaniment) that closes the recital, Mr. Mihajlović shapes Chopin’s delicate melodic phrases with unimpeachable poise, executing the ornaments with the distinction of a great bel canto singer performing an aria by Bellini. Primary and secondary themes, harmonies, bass figurations in accompaniments, and the most elaborate of ornaments are all in Mr. Mihajlović’s playing equally important components of the music. Chopin of course knew and admired Bellini during the time when both composers were in Paris, and without in any way diminishing appreciation of his technical brilliance perhaps the most memorable quality of Mr. Mihajlović’s playing of Chopin on this disc is his talent for truly making the piano seem to sing.

It also merits mention that this is an excellently-recorded disc, engineered by Mr. Mihajlović, produced by Aleksandar Radulović, and mastered for Bel Air Music by Ole Jorgensen. Both balances and the timbre of the instrument are clear, with only a pair of the piano’s highest tones losing focus. Throughout, the listener has the aural perspective of hearing a recital in a small venue.

The unfortunate truth is that, much as the advocates of both genres might deny it, serious concert music and popular music are very much alike in the ways in which talented youngsters come and go. Artists who display from the first the indescribable affinity for survival are sadly rare. If his artistry continues to develop after the manner represented by his playing of the music of Mozart and Chopin on this disc, Miloš Mihajlović is a pianist whose work will endure for decades to come and whose name will be synonymous with pianism of the highest order.

CD REVIEW: Ruggero Leoncavallo – I MEDICI (P. Domingo, C. Álvarez, D. Dessì, R. Lamanda, E. Owens; DGG 477 7456)

2010-05-22T17:44:00.001-04:00

RUGGERO LEONCAVALLO (1857 – 1919): I Medici – P. Domingo (Giuliano de’ Medici), C. Álvarez (Lorenzo de’ Medici), D. Dessì (Simonetta Cattanei), R. Lamanda (Fioretta de’ Gori), E. Owens (Giambattista da Montesecco), V. Kowaljow (Francesco Pazzi), C. Bosi (Bernardo Bandini), A. Kotchinian (L’Archivescovo Salviata), F.M. Capitanucci (Il Poliziano); Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Coro di Voci Bianche della Scuola di Musica di Fiesole; Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino; Alberto Veronesi [recorded in the Teatro Comunale, Florence, during July 2007; DGG 477 7456]

Why? Even the most ardent admirers of the world’s busiest tenorissimo surely utter this question to themselves when they see another new recording of a forgotten score with their idol at the top of the cast list. First from DGG there was the studio recording of Isaac Albéniz’s Pepita Jiménez that left many critics and listeners wondering which was more embarrassing, the opera or the performance, though it had to be conceded that our leading man’s singing was the best part of the recording. Then, there were new versions of zarzuelas recorded in performance in Spain, most notably the Teatro Real production of Luisa Fernanda, valuable documents of Señor Domingo’s work in the musical tradition inherited from his padres and, in general, redolent of the theatre but as well-recorded as many studio sets. A studio recording of Puccini’s Edgar followed; not quite a forgotten score, it is true, and one with a recording of a legendary Carnegie Hall concert performance with Carlo Bergonzi and Renata Scotto available to anyone who wanted to hear it. Now there comes this studio recording of Leoncavallo’s long-buried I Medici, utilizing a ‘critical revision’ edited by Graziano Mandozzi and published by Ricordi in 1993. This critical revision was undoubtedly prepared in order to mark the centenary of the opera’s premiere at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme (where Pagliacci also had its premiere) on 9 November 1893, with Francesco Tamagno—Verdi’s first Otello—as Giuliano de’ Medici. Perceived by critics and touted by its composer as an Italianate homage to Wagner, I Medici was not successful at its premiere and was heard very infrequently (if ever) thereafter until a 1993 concert performance—also marking the opera’s centenary—by the forces of Alte Oper Frankfurt with Giuseppe Giacomini as Giuliano.

So, again, why? Even if one is tempted to doubt the underlying artistic merit of the tenor’s recorded exploration of operatic esoterica, one thing for which Plácido Domingo must be congratulated is his ability to secure the collaboration of Deutsche Grammophon in making commercial recordings that surely have decidedly limited aspirations for financial success. When even Juan Diego Flórez, one of his generation’s most important singers and one very much in his prime, must content himself with few-and-far-between ‘live’ recordings, the influence that Mr. Domingo continues to enjoy is palpable. Later this year, a new recording of Giordano’s Fedora with Maestro Veronesi presiding over Angela Gheorghiu’s Fedora and Mr. Domingo’s Loris is due for release. Perhaps, then, the true question is, why I Medici? With a libretto by the composer, it is a standard-issue veristic tale of amorous entanglements, murders, and conspiracies involving the Church, and it has the undoubted strength of ending with a lynching. Leoncavallo’s music has Wagnerian pretentions, and unfortunately this is precisely how it sounds; lesser-quality Leoncavallo with an ostentatious vein of Wagner—pasticcio and direct quotes—injected into the flesh. The score of course lacks the stinging passion of Pagliacci but also the uneasy charm of his Bohème and the wistful pathos of Zazà, but even lesser-quality Leoncavallo is still Leoncavallo, and there are in I Medici moments in which one glimpses the musical distinction of the composer of Pagliacci.

It is to the credit of Alberto Veronesi, with whom Deutsche Grammophon have embarked on an informal verismo series, that these moments in which the music in I Medici seems better than it truly is are relatively plentiful. Conducting the combined choruses of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Voci Bianche della Scuola di Musica di Fiesole (a children’s ensemble) and the orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Maestro Veronesi conducts the recording, which followed a performance at the 2007 Puccini Festival (mounted for the 150th anniversary of Leoncavallo’s birth), with grace and the good sense to keep things moving when Leoncavallo’s pseudo-Wagnerisms threaten to impede musical and dramatic progress. Portions of the score obviously regarded by the composer as ‘purple passages’ are allowed to develop naturally but unsentimentally, with Maestro Veronesi gauging his tempos to respect the capacities of his singers. If not quite the equals of their La Scala counterparts or even their Maggio Musicale ancestors, the Florentine singers and players have Leoncavallo’s idiom—even when it is somewhat diluted on a Wagnerian palette—in their musical mitochondria. Leoncavallo gives the choristers a good deal to do, and they meet every demand set before them. Praise is due to Deutsche Grammophon’s engineers for capturing the work of singers and players alike in spacious but detailed sound.

As in most verismo scores, the lion’s share of the musical challenges in I Medici is assigned to the quartet of principals, but the opera relies more than most of Leoncavallo’s other works on reliable singing in supporting roles. The conspirators against the Medici brothers are sung with gleeful relish by Italian tenor Carlo Bosi (Bernardo Bandini), Armenian bass Arutjun Kotchinian (L’Arcivescovo Salviati), and Ukranian bass Vitalij Kowaljow (Francesco Pazzi). The minimal contributions of il Poliziano are stylishly done by Italian baritone Fabio Maria Capitanucci.

The historical role of Giambattista da Montesecco, a captain in the Papal army who has been entrusted with the task of assassinating the brothers Medici, is sung by American bass-baritone Eric Owens, an exciting singer whose operatic repertory extends from Monteverdi and Händel to Twenty-First-Century works. Mr. Owens made his Metropolitan Opera debut in John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, but he was especially lauded by MET audiences for his performances as Sarastro in the Julie Taymor production of Die Zauberflöte. As Montesecco, Mr. Owens cleverly and chillingly embodies the role of the Holy See’s ruthless assassin, conveying the sinister sliminess of the part through the coloration of his voice. Leoncavallo conjures Montesecco’s cutthroat sound world by peppering his vocal lines with frequent descents to a sepulchral lower register. The cumulative tessitura of the music seems slightly too low to be completely comfortable for Mr. Owens, leading to a ‘dead’ sound (which, to be fair, is perhaps unduly emphasized by the recording perspective) in the voice. This is not inappropriate for a character who is an agent of death for hire, but the role surely shares with most villains in Italian opera the tendency to be most effective as an instrument of evil if also deceptively charming and beautiful. Nonetheless, among basses of the past few decades only Kurt Moll and Cesare Siepi could have brought to the role an ideal blend of vocal depth and tonal warmth, and in fact Mr. Owens sings the role as well as any active singer is likely to have done.

The famous de’ Medici, Lorenzo, is sung by Spanish baritone Carlos Álvarez, a singer with celebrated portraits of Verdi and verismo roles in his repertory. Mr. Álvarez’s voice has always seemed to lack on records the impact that it can have in an opera house, where the wide vibrato on his topmost tones is mitigated by the space in which the tone can expand. The voice has a ruggedly handsome timbre that suggests authority, but in this performance Mr. Álvarez’s approach is too conventionally blunt and hectoring. His character is a man with a target on his back, but he is also Lorenzo de’ Medici, the patron of Botticelli, da Vinci, and Michelangelo, and whose charisma was sufficient to stifle the Papacy-backed insurrection that took the life of his brother Giuliano. One hears the brute force in Mr. Álvarez’s performance but not the charm and diplomacy that made Lorenzo de’ Medici more powerful in his Florentine Republic than the Pope. Mr. Álvarez’s actual singing of the notes cannot be faulted, but his one-dimensional performance is disappointing.

The somewhat hapless love interests of Giuliano de’ Medici are a pair of Arcadian maidens, one of them loved by Giuliano but—predictably—both of them in love with him. Both are tragic heroines in a sense, one condemned to die of consumption in Giuliano’s arms in the third of the four acts and the other widowed by the man who impregnated her but never truly requited her love and destined to give birth to a future Pope. Leoncavallo’s intention was to contrast the roles by assigning the withering consumptive, Simonetta, to a lyric soprano and the stronger, ultimately maternal Fioretta to a heavier, more dramatic voice. The effectiveness of this is undermined to a degree in this performance by the casting of Daniela Dessì as Simonetta. Ms. Dessì is a lyric soprano who at this point in her career, not unlike Mirella Freni before her, has several seasons of dramatic roles to her credit. Singing heavier repertory has taken a toll on Ms. Dessì’s voice, especially in the extreme upper register, which is apt to loosen slightly under pressure. Ms. Dessì sings with abandon, however, thrusting the voice into the highest notes with exciting attack. If the results are not always as thrilling as one would like them to be, Ms. Dessì at least gives a performance that suggests that she regards the opera as something more than a tattered score that had been collecting dust for more than a century.

If Simonetta is I Medici’s Nedda, it might be said—to borrow from a traditional association—that Fioretta is its Santuzza. Sung by Italian mezzo-soprano Renata Lamanda, who surprisingly does not list Santuzza among the dramatic mezzo-soprano roles in her repertory, Fioretta receives a performance of musical and dramatic conviction. There is in the baleful sound of Ms. Lamanda’s voice a sense of the dejection of unrequited love, and she pursues her quest of loving a man who is not truly in love with her with convincing vocal ardor. There are a few instances of clumsy handling of register shifts, but Ms. Lamanda’s experience with a role such as the Principessa in Adriana Lecouvreur serves her well in Leoncavallo’s music. Ms. Lamanda avoids making Fioretta seem a shrew, a danger which appears large when one reads the libretto. The nature of her role does not distract Ms. Lamanda from indulging in old-fashioned, eyes-on-the-melodic-line Italian singing, an approach of which Leoncavallo would surely have approved. The timbre is not distinctive but is pleasant and forceful when required, and Ms. Lamanda contributes an effective performance of her role.

The parallels between the repertories of Francesco Tamagno, Leoncavallo’s first Giuliano de’ Medici, and Plácido Domingo suggest that Giuliano should be a near-ideal role for Mr. Domingo—or perhaps that it would have been earlier in his career. It is clear almost at once that Giuliano was the focus of Leoncavallo’s most studious musical interest, an effort at creating his own Siegfried or Tannhäuser. The wonder of Mr. Domingo’s performance is that he manages the challenging tessitura of the role with an assurance that is undeniably impressive for a tenor who was six months past his sixty-sixth birthday at the time at which the recording was made. This is not to suggest that the music is managed without strain, for the effort required to produce many of the higher tones is almost painfully audible. The vibrato has unraveled slightly, but the bronzed, burnished quality of the tone remains intact. After more than four decades of service, Mr. Domingo’s timbre remains immediately recognizable, a trait that is increasingly rare among his often anonymous-sounding younger colleagues. Mr. Domingo is not in this performance an astonishingly insightful interpreter, but his earnestness and attention to musical values are decided assets. On the whole, Mr. Domingo offers a performance that, while perhaps not fully justifying the expense of a studio recording for this work, proves that his voice and versatility remain impressive despite the unavoidable diminishments wrought by time.

It is certainly possible to appreciate the reasoning that compels many younger singers to long for Mr. Domingo to step aside. Hearing the quality of singing of which he remains capable, however, it is also possible to appreciate why he continues singing as his seventieth birthday approaches. Had Mr. Domingo recorded I Medici in the early years of his career, with Montserrat Caballé as Simonetta, Fiorenza Cossotto as Fioretta, Sherrill Milnes as Lorenzo, and Cesare Siepi as Montesecco, he might have managed to convince his listeners that the opera is an overlooked gem. This recording misses that mark but is an enjoyably honorable effort.

ARTIST PROFILE: Christophe Dumaux, countertenor

2010-05-22T11:45:00.001-04:00

When visiting Bologna in August 1770, the English music historian and author Charles Burney wrote in his famous journal of meeting the world-renowned castrato Farinelli, ‘I cannot describe the pleasure it gave me to see this extraordinary personage, who had so enchanted all Europe by his uncommon powers.’ It is indeed a testament to the remarkable quality of Farinelli’s singing that Burney, from whose pen came some of the most astute assessments of Farinelli’s singing during his London tenure as primo uomo of his tutor Niccolò Porpora’s Opera of the Nobility, should have written so exuberantly of him more than three decades after his voice had last been heard in Britain. Farinelli was unquestionably among the finest castrati of the Eighteenth Century, a member of an unintentional fraternity of singers who inspired some of the most demanding and emotionally poignant music of the Baroque and early Classical periods. One of the greatest challenges faced by artists involved with the Baroque renaissance that emerged in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century was the necessity of making decisions about how and by whom music composed for castrati would be sung. In the occasional performances of works like Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Händel’s Giulio Cesare prior to the 1970’s, roles composed for castrati (principally Nerone and Ottone in the former and the name-part in the latter) were typically transposed for tenors, baritones, or basses, enabling preservation of the gender identities of the roles at the expense of the composers’ concepts of musical integrity. The heightened sensibilities of the Baroque renaissance led to ever-broadening efforts to present Baroque and early Classical scores in performances that adhered to their composers’ original intentions, not just by using instruments and playing techniques from these periods but by restoring Monteverdi’s, Händel’s, and their contemporaries’ operatic heroes to the vocal registers for which they were composed.

Some twenty years before the Baroque renaissance reached its zenith, two unique artists emerged who paved the way for Baroque specialists to realign the music composed for Eighteenth-Century castrati with male singers possessing the appropriate vocal registers. In Britain, there was Sir Alfred Deller, a remarkably unique artist whose work in the sacred and secular music of Bach and Händel revitalized the legendary British choral tradition and whose revelatory performances of John Dowland’s Elizabethan songs and the music of Henry Purcell not only refocused the attention of Twentieth-Century British musicians on the music of their collective past but also inspired Benjamin Britten to compose the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose music recalls Purcell, for him. In America, there was Russell Oberlin, an equally important and perhaps even more effective artist whose voice, in contrast to Deller’s falsetto, was a genuine high tenor in the tradition of the French haute-contre. Neither Deller nor Oberlin enjoyed extensive opera-house careers despite being regarded as pioneers in singing castrato roles at the original pitches. Comparing their sounds, Deller’s voice was ethereal, a sexless timbre that could seem almost inhuman, whereas Oberlin’s voice was similarly pure but firmer and more centered, capable of reaching soprano heights but always obviously emanating from the throat of a man. The combined influence of these two artists set the stage for the advent of the modern countertenor in the subsequent generation, when the doors of the world’s opera houses opened to singers such as James Bowman, René Jacobs, Jeffrey Gall (the first countertenor to sing a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera), Jochen Kowalski, and, another few years on, David Daniels and Andreas Scholl.

It is upon the foundation laid by these esteemed singers that the career of young French countertenor Christophe Dumaux has been built. ‘The first one I want to quote [as an influence on my career] is James Bowman, with whom I [took part in] a master class,’ Mr. Dumaux reflects: ‘then René Jacobs, and later Andreas Scholl and David Daniels. I [was] brought up with the recordings of all these artists, and I [have been] lucky to work with them in my career.’ It was opposite the Bertarido of Andreas Scholl in Händel’s Rodelinda that Mr. Dumaux made his Metropolitan Opera debut on 2 May 2006, a performance that prompted Bernard Holland to write in the New York Times that Mr. Dumaux’s MET debut heralded the arrival of another ‘first-rate countertenor.’ In an age in which first-rate countertenors are perhaps more plentiful than first-rate Verdians and Wagnerians, there are nonetheless exceptional qualities in Mr. Dumaux’s singing that set him apart.

The son of musical parents, Mr. Dumaux’s first explorations of the family craft were as a cellist. ‘My cellist experience was a passion, and at that time [in my life] I didn’t want to become a musician,’ he recollects. ‘The cello was at first a hobby, but [during] the same period I began to sing in a chorus, and I realized that my experience in an orchestra brought me a kind of humility [that enabled me] to begin my career as a singer. To my mind, these two worlds are completely different.’ After studying singing in his native France and taking part in a student production of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm, Mr. Dumaux made his professional debut as Eustazio in Händel’s Rinaldo in Montpellier at the Festival de Radio France in 2002, in a production conducted by René Jacobs and recorded by harmonia mundi.

An important milestone in Mr. Dumaux’s career followed in 2005, when he participated in the rapturously-received David McVicar production of Giulio Cesare at the Glyndebourne Festival, singing Tolomeo, a part that has become in the brief space of five years a signature role that Mr. Dumaux has sung to great praise with opera companies throughout Europe and the United States. The role of Tolomeo epitomizes Mr. Dumaux’s approach to his art, which in his own assessment is centered on maintaining a sense of spontaneity. ‘Each time I am on stage I try to make my character evolve,’ Mr. Dumaux says. ‘I try to convey to the audience the dark, complex sides of the character, such as for Tolomeo, who is both Machiavellian and at the same time charming. Indeed, I’ve sung Tolomeo more than eighty times, and each time I try to bring something new to the character.’ Mr. Dumaux’s success in achieving spontaneity is apparent in any of his performances as Tolomeo. Of his performance in the November 2007 outing of the McVicar production at Chicago Lyric Opera, conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm, Steve Smith wrote in the New York Times, ‘The countertenor Christophe Dumaux brought a penetrating voice and a thrilling physical athleticism to the role of Tolomeo, Cleopatra’s conniving brother and co-ruler. His interactions with Ms. de Niese [soprano Danielle de Niese, who sang Cleopatra] mixed salaciousness with adolescent contrition in a manner both fascinating and repellent.’

Not surprisingly, the music of Händel occupies a large place in Mr. Dumaux’s repertory. ‘I am open to all repertories,’ he says, ‘but I prefer when the music had specially been composed for countertenors – even if Händel composed not for countertenors but for castrati.’ Music both earlier and later than Händel is also vital to Mr. Dumaux’s career and artistic development, however. ‘I’ve recently sung [the Voice of Apollo] in Death in Venice by Benjamin Britten in the Theater an der Wien. Next year, I’ll be in a new contemporary creation composed by Bruno Mantovani, called Akhmatova, at the Opéra de Paris. I have received scores by Jonathan Dove, and I am very interested in this music and hope to sing this repertory very soon.’ Even while possessing a welcome and obviously intuitive musical curiosity, Mr. Dumaux is aware of the natural boundaries of his voice at this time in his career, bringing uncommonly insightful judiciousness to his choices of repertory. ‘Before accepting a contract I always look at the score, and if this [role] doesn’t fit me I prefer to refuse the role rather than to risk running into trouble vocally. I have refused many roles; for instance, Nerone in L’Incoronazione di Poppea. I am very interested in this role thanks to the duality and complexity of the character, but unfortunately I don’t have sufficient high notes at this moment [in my career]. Maybe I’ll get them in few years, and my voice will allow me to sing this part. In 2011, I am [scheduled] to sing the title roles of Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo, and I think that both of these experiences will happen in suitable moments in my career.’ Mr. Dumaux adds, pensively, ‘Generally, I prefer to sing secondary roles in order to avoid trouble with a primary one.’

His considerable success in leading roles is evident from the recent recording of Händel’s Orlando, previously reviewed on this site, in which Mr. Dumaux brings both intensity and tonal beauty to his performance of the title role, however. Another recent success was in the name-part in Mariame Clément’s evocative production of Cavalli’s Giasone for Vlaamse Opera. Critic Bernard Schreuders wrote on ForumOpera.com that Mr. Dumaux, ‘who continues to improve, enacted a Giasone as camp as one could wish, both seductive and detestable, and he brought off with panache tessitura that is dangerous for a countertenor.’ Of Ms. Clément’s production, Mr. Dumaux says, ‘The director [Ms. Clément] chose not to place the action in the [era of Classical] mythology but in a post-Apocalyptic setting in order for the spectator to interpret the story and place it in the period that he wants.’ Though a potentially controversial business, Mr. Dumaux feels that a certain degree of artistic license among directors is crucial to introducing younger audiences to opera. ‘I think that the most important [things] are to adapt classic repertories to modern situations and, more particularly, to attract young people to operas; and also to try to stop some of the prejudices that concern [young people’s perceptions of] opera. That’s why, even in Baroque repertory, some directors update the sets and costumes and make the operas more approachable to young people.’ This progressive attitude towards the presentation of opera is consistent with Mr. Dumaux’s personal philosophy of singing, which he characterizes as being based upon ‘pleasure and rigor.’

Above all, it is Mr. Dumaux’s view that striking a balance between one’s lives on and off the stage is the most critical component of an individual’s artistry. ‘The state of mind influences the voice a lot,’ he suggests, ‘and [I believe that] if the strength [of mind] is absent there is no way to sing in a good way. The most gratifying element of singing for me is to really enjoy being on stage and giving pleasure to the audience. The day when I no longer enjoy being on stage, I’ll stop my career. Indeed, the greatest challenge of this career for me will be to enjoy the stage for another twenty years and more!’ Realizing, respecting, and managing the impact that a career as a singer has on one’s personal life and relationships are the other elements of the balance for which Mr. Dumaux strives. ‘I spent a lot of time to dedicate my life to music, far away from my family and friends. This cost me a lot, so I realized that my private life is more important than music and now I succeed in reconciling both my private life and music. Music is a passion, but my biggest passions are life and spending time with those I love. If I have to refuse some contracts to spend more time with my family, I don’t hesitate.’ The almost indiscernible core of his artistry is this ability to give everything to his audience in the course of a performance but to resume a refreshingly ‘normal’ life when the applause ends. ‘When I am on stage I am not Christophe Dumaux anymore: I am entirely the character. But when the performance is over, the character is left on stage.’ This, in Mr. Dumaux’s view, is the way in which a thoughtful artist survives the sacrifices he makes for his art.

It is this emotional centeredness that allows such a thoughtful young man to portray threatened, tormented, and sometimes unhinged characters with fiery brilliance. As with any singer, however, it is the voice that demands primary attention, and Mr. Dumaux’s modesty cannot obscure the fact that his is a vibrant, beautiful voice that is meant for leading roles. Unlike those of many of his rivals, Mr. Dumaux’s voice is a true alto, even from the bottom of his range in baritonal chest resonance to the bright top and without the slightest hint of femininity. His is unquestionably a masculine timbre, and an heroic one that is well-suited to the alto castrato leading men in the operas of Händel and his contemporaries. Though the actual timbres and ranges are not at all alike, there is something in the sweet but stirring sound of Mr. Dumaux’s voice that is reminiscent of some of the headily beautiful voices of generations past, voices such as those of Georgi Vinogradov and Léopold Simoneau. As with these artists, the intensity of Mr. Dumaux’s singing is derived organically from his consummate musicality and dedication to thoughtful, idiomatic delivery of text. He is content to follow composers where they lead him and, in making these journeys repeatedly, to find new insights and nuances at every turn. As he suggests, each performance is a new creation such that even a role that he has sung more than eighty times is approached with a combination of experience and inquisitiveness rather than with a carefully-sorted-out impersonation that is employed repetitively, unchanged, and then stored away like a costume until it is required again.

Mr. Dumaux is a rare countertenor who, possessing a voice of exceptional quality, a solid technique, and an impressive understanding of himself as a man and an artist, one can imagine enduring in his craft to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of his professional debut. Perhaps more remarkably, Christophe Dumaux is the even rarer countertenor one can truly imagine oneself wanting to hear for decades to come.

Heartfelt thanks are extended to Mr. Dumaux for his wondrous grace, kindness, and candor in responding to the questions that formed the basis for this article.

Sincere thanks are also extended to Mr. Dumaux’s manager, Ms. Claire Feazey of IMG Artists Paris, for her dedicated assistance and to Ms. Marie Kalaghabian, Vocal Division Intern at IMG Paris, for her assistance with providing photographs used in this article.

Click here to visit Mr. Dumaux’s profile on the IMG Artists Paris website.

IN MEMORIAM: Italian mezzo-soprano Giulietta Simionato, 1910 - 2010

2010-05-06T14:30:00.001-04:00

GIULIETTA SIMIONATO

12 May 1910 – 5 May 2010

The life and work of the remarkable Italian mezzo-soprano Giulietta Simionato, who passed away in Rome a week before she would have marked her 100th birthday, are too familiar to require detailed recounting. She was, especially during the last two decades of her nearly-forty-year career, the reigning Italian dramatic mezzo-soprano in all of the world’s principal opera houses, her performances as Azucena (in which role she débuted at the Metropolitan Opera, opposite Carlo Bergonzi, Antonietta Stella, and Leonard Warren) and Amneris remaining unsurpassed standards more than forty-four years after her retirement in 1966. She was also a pioneer in singing Rossini’s Rosina in the original mezzo-soprano keys in an age in which the role had been appropriated by coloratura sopranos and in singing La Cenerentola, which aside from the famous Glyndebourne production with Spanish mezzo-soprano Marina de Gabarain was ignored until another Spaniard, Teresa Berganza, espoused the opera in the 1970’s.

From a purely personal perspective, Giulietta Simionato was an exceptional artist, which is to say that she was an artist of exceptions. In my view, the role of Santuzza in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana requires a dramatic soprano – except for Giulietta Simionato, whose voice was of such richness and expansive security in the upper register that it could easily encompass the merely technical aspects of the role while tearing into the dramatic flesh of the opera with special intensity. Good as the work of many international singers has been in the role, Bizet’s Carmen possesses a quintessentially French insouciance that is best enacted by French singers – except for Giulietta Simionato, whose Carmen seduces with sultry arrogance and an alluring integrity even when sung in Italian. Valentine in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, first sung by the much-discussed French soprano Cornélie Falcon, demands a powerful singer of the elusive Fach named for its creator – except for Giulietta Simionato, whose performances (albeit sung in Italian) of the role in the famous 1962 La Scala production with Dame Joan Sutherland and Franco Corelli, audibly from the timbre of the voice the work of a mezzo-soprano, shone like meteors even in a very starry firmament. [Maria Callas, who was perhaps closer than any other singer active in 1962 to being a true Falcon, entered into negotiations with La Scala to sing Valentine in the Huguenots production, but nothing came of it. Could even La Divina have sung the role more magnificently than Simionato?]

It was opposite Maria Callas, at La Scala in 1957, that Giulietta Simionato enjoyed one of her greatest triumphs, as Giovanna Seymour to Callas’ Anna Bolena. In interviews conducted after her retirement, she often cited her performances as Giovanna Seymour in 1957 as the pinnacle of her career, and hearing any of the available recordings of the 14 April performance reveals at once the work of an incomparable singer at her breathtaking best. The La Scala production of Anna Bolena was also a milestone in Callas’ career, and hearing the two singers dueling with their voices in the great duet for Anna and Giovanna – the incredible anger and betrayal of Callas’ Anna as she accuses Simionato’s Giovanna of being the rival for whom Enrico has spurned and condemned her and the horrified guilt and sorrow of Simionato’s Giovanna, a woman who knows that she is soon to be Queen, still riveting after so many years – is to hear the interaction between two artists for whom the music was a genuine conversation, not between a Queen and her would-be usurper but between two women, both of them ambitious but desperately frightened, who loved the same man. It is not the art that conceals art or, as Leoncavallo put it, art that is a slice of life: it simply is life that, for those moments in the hands of great artists, happens to take place in song.

There is no more charming recording of Giulietta Simionato than her account with baritone Ettore Bastianini of ‘Anything You Can Do’ from Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, part of the gala sequence in Herbert von Karajan’s DECCA recording of Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. Making her entrance with a sepulchral ‘Reverenza’ (a reference to her success as Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s Falstaff), this is a singer who is not afraid to poke fun at herself. Her interactions with Bastianini in exaggeratedly-accented English are delicious: the jewel is surely when she responds to Bastianini’s assertion that he ‘can live on bread and cheese’ with the deadpan line, complete with absurdly-trilled r, ‘so can a rrrrrrat!’ It is cute, it is genuinely hilarious – above all, it is the essence of Giulietta Simionato.

As a modest collector of operatic memorabilia, principally photographs of singers whose work I admire, one of my most cherished possessions is a rare photograph (reproduced below), taken on the stage of La Scala in 1963, showing Giulietta Simionato as Santuzza on her knees at the feet of Franco Corelli as Turiddu, their expressions so passionate and yet so natural. This description might apply with equal validity to Simionato’s artistry: as passionate as the fiery core of the earth and as natural as breathing.

BRAVA, Giulietta, grazie, e addio.

CD REVIEW: André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry – ANDROMAQUE (K. Deshayes, M.R. Wesseling, S. Guèze, T. Christoyannis; Glossa GCD 921620)

2010-05-06T12:24:00.001-04:00

ANDRÉ-ERNEST-MODESTE GRÉTRY (1741 – 1813): Andromaque – K. Deshayes (Andromaque), M.R. Wesseling (Hermione), S. Guèze (Pyrrhus), T. Christoyannis (Oreste), M. Heim (Phœnix), É. Hache (une Greque), E. Hurtrait (un Greq); Les Chantres du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, Chœur du Concert Spirituel; Orchestre du Concert Spirituel; Hervé Niquet [recorded at Salle Henry Le Bœuf, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in October 2009, in conjunction with concert performances in Brussels and Paris; Glossa GCD 921620]

To all but those who are specialists in French opera of the late Eighteenth Century, the Belgian-born composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry is most remembered for a score that he did not compose: the opera Pikovaya Dama (or The Queen of Spades), in which Tchaikovsky quoted the aria ‘Je crains de lui parler la nuit’ from Grétry’s Richard Coeur-de-lion as the Old Countess recalls her fast-and-loose youth in Paris. Richard Coeur-de-lion was widely considered the masterpiece of its composer, who was a seminal figure in post-Rameau French music and some of whose fifty or so operas held French stages until the end of the Nineteenth Century (a record that the operas of Puccini are only just achieving, by comparison). With Tchaikovsky’s appropriation of ‘Je crains de lui parler la nuit’ and the adoption of another aria from Richard Coeur-de-lion, ‘O Richard, o mon roi,’ by Royalists during the French Revolution, Grétry’s influence seems merely topical from an historical perspective, but his music was almost universally admired during the late Eighteenth Century, particularly the operas Zémire et Azor (recorded for French EMI/Pathé by the wonderful Mady Mesplé) and La caravane du Caire (which is similar in theme and certain efforts at ‘local color’ in scoring to Die Entführung aus dem Serail, though Mozart’s opera was not heard in France until fifteen years after the premiere of La caravane du Caire), and exerted a considerable influence over the composers active in France during the 1790’s and first two decades of the Nineteenth Century, especially Luigi Cherubini and Étienne Méhul.

The young Grétry honed his craft – as did many young composers in the Eighteenth Century – by studying in Italy, having been inspired by hearing the operas of Baldassaro Galuppi and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi in his native Liège. During his five years in Italy, Grétry studied with Giovanni Battista Casali, maestro di coro at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, one of the last composers of unaccompanied polyphonic choral music in the tradition of Palestrina. Learning more by absorption than by academic prowess, Grétry returned to France with understanding of the prevalent Italian operatic forms of the time. Having devoted himself upon his return to the French opéra comique, still in its formative stages, with his best works like Zémire et Azor (which is based on the ‘beauty and the beast’ legend) and L’amant jaloux (the music and text of which are thought to have influenced Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte in their work on Le Nozze di Figaro), Grétry produced recognizably French works that built upon the examples of Rameau but also introduced Italianate elements such as complex coloratura.

Taking up the tradition of French tragédie lyrique inherited from Lully and Rameau, no composer was more influential in France during the latter half of the Eighteenth Century than Christoph Willibald von Gluck, whose ‘reform’ operas of the 1760’s and 1770’s sought to purge the music of the French lyric theatre of Italianate excesses and return to a style of utterance that aspired to the dramatic purity of Classical Greek theatre. The extent to which Grétry was directly influenced by Gluck’s work is impossible to ascertain, but the controversial success of the premiere of Gluck’s Armide, in which his ideals of reform were fully explored, in 1777 may well have played a decisive role in Grétry’s decision to accept the commission to compose his first tragédie lyrique, sadly the only one of his several efforts in the genre which seems to have performed. Grétry’s Andromaque was conceived as an ambitious setting of the famous literary tragedy by Jean Racine, and legal wrangling with the Comédie Française, by which institution the performance rights to Racine’s play were held, delayed the first performance of Grétry’s opera – which had entered rehearsals as early as 1778 – until 6 June 1780. The opera did not manage to win either the unfettered appreciation of audiences or the praise of critics, by whom it was particularly condemned for its profusion of choruses, which led to the charge that the score was more an oratorio than an opera. Grétry and his librettist, Louis-Guillaume Pitra, made significant alterations to the opera, most notably replacing Racine’s tragic ending (which is retained in the present recording) with a happier finale, in advance of a revival of the opera in 1781. After this second run of performances, which won the favor of audiences, Andromaque seems not to have been performed again until the concert performances in October 2009 upon which this recording is based.

Listeners who are familiar with Grétry’s opéras comiques will encounter an entirely different sound world in Andromaque, one with similarities to the music that Gluck was contemporaneously composing for Paris but even stronger ties to Rameau’s mid-century operas. The style of vocal declamation is similar to that heard in Gluck’s two operas on the myth of Iphigénie, with fast-paced recitative developing into brief but emotive arioso. In an opera that runs for slightly less than ninety minutes (as recorded) even with the customary ballet, there is no room for long-winded arias and ensembles. Though never reaching the level of inspiration achieved by Gluck in his finest operas for Paris, Grétry proves in Andromaque that he possessed a sensitive understanding of the tragédie lyrique tradition, composing music that is apt for the dramatic situations and unfailingly attractive if not ultimately memorable. The Ouverture is perhaps the weakest number in the score, but the opera’s three acts move at a swift pace and contain much music that, while not distinctive, is never less than enjoyable.

The recording by Le Concert Spirituel and Hervé Niquet, renowned for their enterprising performances and recordings of French Baroque repertory, gives an impressive introduction to Grétry’s score. Maestro Niquet and his instrumental ensemble are as comfortable in Andromaque as in the music of Charpentier, Lully, or Marais, shaping the music with articulation born of their experience with Baroque music but attentiveness to the stylistic nuances of Grétry’s music, which in this case is curiously suggestion of his forbears, his contemporaries, and his musical successors all at once: it is possible to hear the cornerstones laid by Rameau as well as the framework built by Gluck, but there is also the feeling that Les Troyens is not too far distant on the horizon. This is perhaps to give Grétry’s musical inventiveness greater credit than it truly deserves, but Andromaque is a score in which there are subtle stirrings of Romanticism, perhaps more by chance than by intention. Maestro Niquet’s leadership is alert to this sense of the opera being of both past and future, and the singers and musicians of Le Concert Spirituel – the former increased by the participation of Les Chantres du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles – sound devoted to their tasks and to Grétry’s music throughout.

The quartet of principal soloists assembled for the concerts and recording is excellent and, ideally for Grétry, comprised of singers with experience in both Baroque and later repertories. Dramatically, the pick of the lot is Greek baritone Tassis Christoyannis, a singer whose fiery recorded performances (especially of Bajazet in Tamerlano) in mdg’s series of Händel operas have been thrillingly virile displays of technically-assured singing. Given leaner material with which to work as Orestes in Andromaque, Mr. Christoyannis scales back the power of his singing, unleashing the full frisson of his voice only when required by the dramatic situation. Having succumbed to the demands of Hermione, whom he loves, Orestes is complicit in the slaying of Pyrrhus. By the time that Pyrrhus has fallen to Greek swords, however, Hermione realizes that she was not in full command of her reason when she directed Orestes to kill Pyrrhus, and Orestes brings the opera to a close with his own crushing grief and madness. The brutality of this dénouement is conveyed with complete sincerity by Mr. Christoyannis, whose vocal quality fully equals the dramatic swagger of his singing.

The catalyst of the tragic actions that lead to Orestes’ madness is Hermione (the daughter of Menelaus and Helen of Troy), sung with characteristic intensity by Swiss mezzo-soprano Maria Riccarda Wesseling, who is also a veteran of many fine productions and recordings of Händel operas. There is a darkness around the edges of Ms. Wesseling’s tone that allows her to suggest pathos without causing her vocal lines to droop. Whereas she has sometimes struggled to maintain steadiness as Händel heroes, the music that Grétry composed for Hermione gives her the opportunity to fully express her femininity. Hermione’s music is not of the difficulty of what she frequently sings in Händel roles, and perhaps this relative simplicity focuses the impact of Ms. Wesseling’s voice, uniting the purity of her technique with the emotional directness of her manner of singing. In truth, Hermione’s music does not plumb the depths of passion suggested by her text, but the integrity of Ms. Wesseling’s performance closes the psychological gaps in Grétry’s music with heartfelt, beautiful singing.

Grétry gave some of the best music in Andromaque to Pyrrhus, the victim of Hermione’s jealousy and Orestes’ misplaced vengeance. The role receives a very fine performance in this recording by young French tenor Sébastien Guèze, a tremendously promising singer who alternated with Roberto Alagna in the 2007 premiere production by Opéra Municipal de Marseilles of Vladimir Cosma’s Marius et Fanny and won the appreciation of Gounod fanciers throughout the world with a beautifully-sung Roméo in a Concertgebouw performance of Roméo et Juliette broadcast over Netherlands Radio. The youthful pliancy of Mr. Guèze’s tenor is very appealing, and he enters into his part in Grétry’s tragedy with touching conviction. Throughout his performance, Mr. Guèze’s tone is refreshingly even, without the ugly or barely-concealed breaks at the passaggio that mar the singing of many young singers. Mr. Guèze’s voice is a bright but rich lyric tenor, with sweetness and freedom in the upper register that are reminiscent of some of the most refined French tenors of past generations, not least the sublime Michel Sénéchal. Mr. Guèze’s voice is of proportions larger than Sénéchal’s, allowing him to comfortably sing roles like Rodolfo in La Bohème, but he shares his artistic ancestor’s affinities for pointed delivery of text and musical expression that touch the heart even when the music he sings is not of the highest quality. With this performance, Mr. Guèze manages not only to convince the listener that Grétry was a composer who, in his music for Pyrrhus, aspired to the heights reached by Rameau and Gluck but also that his own voice is among the finest tenors of his generation.

The title role is entrusted to French soprano Karine Deshayes, who at relatively short notice replaced Dutch soprano Judith van Wanroij in both the concerts and recording sessions. Like her colleagues in this performance, she sings a varied repertory: celebrated in Europe for her work in Baroque music, she made her début at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006 as Siebel in Gounod’s Faust. As Andromaque, Ms. Deshayes brings a youthfully vibrant voice that hovers, like those of some of the great exponents of tragédie lyrique of bygone years (Dame Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, for instance), between mezzo-soprano and soprano tessituras. The absolute security of her voice is upset by none of the demands placed on it by Grétry’s music, and if there is not the last measure of grandeur that one expects from a figure such as Andromache – the grieving widow of Trojan hero Hector (who, in a tangential nod to Rameau, was descended from Dardanus) whose perseverance in her grief and determination to safeguard her son precipitate the tragic actions of Racine’s play and Grétry’s opera – that is to be credited to the composer rather than the singer. Ms. Deshayes’ performance is touching and sung with complete confidence, making the most of the music that Grétry gave her: one can ask for nothing more.

It must be conceded that Grétry’s Andromaque is not the forgotten masterpiece that some of the other scores resurrected by Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel have proved to be, not least the marvelous Sémélé of Marin Marais. As always, though, the artists involved with this recording have given of their best, and Glossa’s engineers have provided typically first-rate sound to complement the artists’ performances. It is interesting to hear Grétry’s efforts at tragédie lyrique, which was as much a part of his musical heritage as the opéras comiques for which he is remembered, and of course a vital and sometimes thrilling element of the Period Practice movement is encountering carefully-prepared, expertly-executed performances of imperfect works. Andromaque is an imperfect work in that its style did not draw from Grétry the brilliance and wit that flow so charmingly through his opéras comiques, and if the music of Andromaque displays no startling individuality it also avoids parody and facile imitation. Andromaque is clearly the product of an important composer who merely was not working within his element. The opera receives from Maestro Niquet, Le Concert Spirituel, and a team of excellent singers a performance that maximizes its eloquence and minimizes its deficiencies – in short, the best possible introduction for Twenty-First-Century listeners.

CD REVIEW: Gioachino Rossini – L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI (M. Pizzolato, L. Brownlee, L. Regazzo, B. De Simone; NAXOS 8.660284-85)

2010-05-04T23:56:00.001-04:00

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): L’Italiana in Algeri – M. Pizzolato (Isabella), L. Brownlee (Lindoro), L. Regazzo (Mustafà), B. De Simone (Taddeo), R. Gonzalez (Elvira), E. Giannoulidou (Zulma), G. Mastrototaro (Haly); Transylvania State Philharmonic Choir, Cluj; Virtuosi Brunensis; Alberto Zedda [recorded ‘live’ at the Kursaal, Bad Wildbad, Germany, during the XXth Rossini in Wildbad Festival; 2, 3, & 5 July 2008; NAXOS 8.660284-85]

Though it premiered at Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto on 22 May 1813, when its composer was less than three months past his twenty-first birthday, L’Italiana in Algeri was Gioachino Rossini’s eleventh opera, following closely on the heels of the acclaimed premiere (also in Venice, at the famous Teatro La Fenice) of Tancredi. The role of the barnstorming Isabella was first sung by Italian contralto Marietta Marcolini, who with her participation in the L’Italiana premiere created the fourth of five roles that the young Rossini composed for her. Also present in the first-night cast of L’Italiana was the celebrated bass Filippo Galli, a talented and versatile singer for whom Rossini composed several of his most demanding basso roles and who also created the role of Enrico (Henry VIII) in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena in 1830.

Musically, L’Italiana in Algeri is enlivened by the clever way in which its young composer employed traditional aspects of Classically-inspired opera seria, a then-rapidly-declining genre with a pedigree extending back to the Italian operas of Händel, within the confines of the dramma giocoso (a categorization that it shares with Mozart’s Don Giovanni) he was creating to the libretto of Angelo Anelli. The frenetic pace and famous crescendo of Rossini’s maturity are already present in L’Italiana in Algeri, but the score benefits from a melodic preciosity that is remarkable even among Rossini’s operas. The two cavatinas for Lindoro, ‘Languir per una bella’ in the First Act and ‘Oh come il cor di giubilo’ in the Second, possess beautiful melodic lines that are as reminiscent of Mozart as of Italian bel canto. Here, however, a measure of uncertainty creeps in: it is well known that the secco recitatives and Haly’s famous aria ‘Le femmine d’Italia’ were not composed by Rossini but by an anonymous collaborator (whether the collaboration was necessitated by the speed of the opera’s creation, which required less than a month at most, by details of the first production that are lost to history, or by other circumstances remains a matter for debate), perhaps the Italian composer Luigi Mosca, an older contemporary of Rossini whose own setting of Anelli’s libretto for L’Italiana in Algeri was first performed in Milan in 1808. Bolstered by the fact that Rossini composed the virtuosic aria ‘Concedi, amor pietoso’ to replace 'Oh come il cor di giubilo’ for a later production of L’Italiana in which the original Lindoro, Serafino Gentili, reprised his part, modern scholarship suggests that the lovely original aria may also have been composed by someone other than Rossini. [Despite its dubious authorship, ‘Oh come il cor di giubilo’ is preferred in the present performance. Performances of ‘Concedi, amor pietoso’ are available as an appendix to Jesús López-Cobos’ recording of L’Italiana in Algeri, on which it is sung by tenor Raúl Giménez, and on recital discs, notably the DECCA collection of Rossini Arias sung by Juan Diego Flórez.] There is not in ‘Oh come il cor di giubilo’ the obvious falling-off in quality apparent in the numbers composed for La Cenerentola by Luca Agolini, so its composer – whether Rossini, Mosca, or a forgotten third party – took pains to match the aria in both style and musical integrity with the rest of the score. A testimony to the genius of the young composer, L’Italiana in Algeri is the rare early bel canto comic opera that is both filled from beginning (in this case, a rollicking Overture that remains a concert favorite) to end with first-rate music and, in a good performance, can prove genuinely funny.

Fortunately for listeners, a good performance is precisely what the opera receives in this recording, derived from three performances at the Twentieth Rossini in Wildbad Festival in Germany during July 2008. Orchestral playing by the Virtuosi Brunensis, the ensemble with which NAXOS recorded their splendid account of Rossini’s Tancredi with Ewa Podleś and Sumi Jo, is excellent, benefiting from the fine-tuning of period-instrument practice but very much adapting their approach to Rossini’s idiom. The singing from the members of the Transylvania State Philharmonic Choir – variously portraying eunuchs, pirates, and slaves – is similarly impressive, precise but also conveying a grand sense of fun (and, when appropriate, of dread and mock heroics). Presiding over the performance is Italian maestro Alberto Zedda, a tireless advocate of the music of Rossini as its composer intended it to be performed who celebrated his eightieth birthday six months to the day before the first performance that contributed to this recording. Like the performances of Karl Böhm, Otto Klemperer, and Tullio Serafin at similar ages, Maestro Zedda’s spirited leadership of this recording of L’Italiana in Algeri suggests the work of a man trying to prove his vitality. After a career that has yielded many worthy performances of Rossini operas (including the aforementioned NAXOS Tancredi), no proof of Maestro Zedda’s mastery of the repertory is required, but this recording proves anew that few conductors active today share the same idiomatic grasp of Rossini’s music that Maestro Zedda has at his command. Maestro Zedda knows instinctively when his influence is required to keep things moving and when the music flows without manipulation. The singers are given support consistently sensitive to their own needs and the requirements of the music. As in most of Maestro Zedda’s performances, interpolated top notes at the ends of numbers are mostly eschewed in favor of presumably more authentic flourishes on high within the internal ornamentation of arias and ensembles. Maestro Zedda understands how Rossini worked as a composer, and his leadership ensures that this performance of L’Italiana in Algeri ‘works’ both musically and theatrically.

Unlike many productions of bel canto operas, this Rossini in Wildbad production enjoyed the work of uniformly good singers in secondary roles. As Elvira, wife of the philandering Mustafà, Tenerife-born soprano Ruth Gonzalez sings with secure tone and pointed diction, managing to convey exasperation without seeming an annoying shrew. Zulma, Elvira’s slave and confidante, receives a performance of charm from Greek mezzo-soprano Elsa Giannoulidou, her contributions to ensembles inspiring the wish that Rossini – or, considering the troublesome provenance of L’Italiana in Algeri, someone – had graced her role with an aria. Italian bass Giulio Mastrototaro ideally captures the spirit of Haly’s (but not Rossini’s) aria in praise of the wily women of Italy, ‘Le femmine d’Italia,’ and elsewhere adds delightfully to ensembles.

Italian bass Bruno De Simone has made a specialty of basso buffo roles in bel canto operas and has sung Taddeo in L’Italiana in Algeri throughout Europe, including at the prestigious festival devoted to the operas of Rossini in his hometown of Pesaro. This experience is evident in Mr. De Simone’s wonderful comic timing, exercised to maximum effect in ensembles and in a well-sung account of Taddeo’s aria, ‘Ho un gran peso sulla testa.’ If Mr. De Simone’s tone is no longer rock-solid, his performance never falters.

Mustafà is one of those roles that if played for laughs can seem unbearably insipid and if played as an humorless tyrant quickly becomes insufferable. It is the sort of part that, like Verdi’s (or Salieri’s, Balfe’s, or Nicolai’s) Falstaff, requires both comedy and dignity in order to prove wholly effective. Italian bass Lorenzo Regazzo is familiar with the traditional roles of basses as tyrants and villains in Italian opera from his considerable work in Baroque music. Mr. Regazzo’s Mustafà is a relatively straightforward performance with none of the foolishness that mars many performances of the role. On balance, Mr. Regazzo’s Mustafà may be too straight-laced for those listeners who prefer Rossini’s buffo roles enacted on a broader scale, but there can be few complaints about Mr. Regazzo’s singing. Mr. Regazzo is admittedly stronger in the role’s bravura passages than in roaring and bawling, but his tone is secure throughout the range. He knows his way round the role, and his command of Rossini’s tricky coloratura is several notches above what most of his rivals achieve (the incomparable Samuel Ramey excepted). This Mustafà’s beylik may be somewhat tame, but it is on sound musical footing.

With two fine arias and engaging contributions to ensembles to his credit, the role of Lindoro is a gift to a leggiero tenor with the bravura technique required for Rossini. Most modern exponents of Rossini’s tenor roles are essentially lyric tenors who, through careful study, have cultivated coloratura ability: the true tenore di grazia, noted as much for a firm grasp of the lowest notes of the tenor range as for comfort in the vocal stratosphere, is virtually a musical unicorn in the sense that there are people who believe that they have encountered them but closer inspection reveals that what they actually witnessed were rather more ordinary equines with some extraordinary qualities. Even in a field prominently populated by a world-renowned singer, American tenor Lawrence Brownlee is anything but ordinary. With an ever-increasing repertory of Rossini roles in his vocal arsenal (including Rinaldo in the Metropolitan Opera’s premiere production of Armida by Mary Zimmerman), Mr. Brownlee has emerged during the past five years as one of the finest Rossini tenors of his generation – and, as his performance as Lindoro in this recording attests, rightfully so. Mr. Brownlee’s voice is warm but bright and seemingly produced with liquid ease that defies the difficulty of the music he sings. In Lindoro’s music, Mr. Brownlee’s voice fizzes with idiomatic authority in coloratura passages, reaching formidable heights of virtuosity that never detract from the natural attractiveness of his tone. Dramatically, Mr. Brownlee’s Lindoro is filled with touching longing for freedom and love but avoids sentimentality: he wears his heart on his sleeve, to be sure, but he is content in his big moments to thrust his hands into his pockets and let his music do the emotional heavy lifting. This sort of thoughtful restraint is always welcome in Rossini’s comic operas, but it is Mr. Brownlee’s vocalism that demands one’s attention and ultimately wins one’s affection. Both of Lindoro’s arias receive exceptionally poised, fleet-footed performances (though it is a pity that a very well-recorded cough mars the beginning of ‘Languir per una bella’), setting a new standard in the music. This is exceptionally fine Rossini singing that rivals even the best singing of Mr. Brownlee’s competitors in bel canto repertory.

Musically and dramatically, the climax of L’Italiana in Algeri is the heroine Isabella’s second-act rondo, ‘Pensa alla patria,’ an exhortation to Mustafà’s Italian slaves to think of their fatherland and trust in Isabella’s commitment to deliver them from their servitude. This description might give the impression of an ostentatiously grand utterance, something more appropriate to Fidelio than to a Rossini dramma giocoso. Isabella’s rondo is an instance of Rossini’s use of an overtly opera seria style, but the wit of Rossini’s deployment of coloratura reveals the aria to be a worthy sister to Rosina’s ‘Una voce poco fa’ in Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Angelina’s ‘Non più mesta’ in La Cenerentola. When one first hears Mr. Brownlee’s Lindoro, a nagging doubt that any performance could likewise offer an Isabella to match him arises. From her first note, Italian mezzo-soprano Marianna Pizzolato – also a superb Malcolm in NAXOS’ live-from-Wildbad recording of La Donna del Lago (indeed, the finest aspect of that recording) – erases that doubt with a performance that meets the standard of Mr. Brownlee’s Lindoro note for thrilling note. Like Mr. Regazzo, Ms. Pizzolato has extensive experience in Baroque music, but she also participated in masterclasses given by Anita Cerquetti and Magda Olivero, from whom she surely learned much about adapting one’s singing to the varying styles of different repertories. Ms. Pizzolato has proved very fine indeed in Cavalli and Händel on disc, but she proves anew in this performance that Rossini’s idiom poses no challenges that are too much for her. Her voice is dark-hued but ideally mobile, dealing expertly with the fearsome coloratura of her arias. She is careful to articulate every note in her roulades, an effort that contributes to her nuanced reading of the text without seeming pedantic. Her singing of the great rondo is commanding, the culmination of a performance that is, quite simply, Rossini singing of the highest quality. When will the world’s most important opera companies realize, as NAXOS did from their inception, that the very famous singers are in many cases not the very best?

Aside from the cough that accompanies the opening strains of Lindoro’s ‘Languir per una bella,’ a few of its cousins from the throats of audience members and perhaps musicians, and occasional bumps, the sound engineered by NAXOS is excellent, even in passages of secco recitative. It is also in secco recitatives that the balance seems most noticeably artificial, however: the continuo harpsichord, played very capably by Gianni Fabbrini, comes at the listener from an acoustical perspective identical to that in which the singers are framed, as if the singers were positioned around the harpsichord for a recital. Balances are otherwise carefully-engineered to keep all of the singers front and center, with the orchestra and chorus given equal but never undue prominence, the final product suggesting a concert more than a staged performance with the typical changing perspectives imposed by theatrical blocking. Editing has also been expertly done, which is to say that one is not aware that it has been done at all. Despite occasional too-close perspectives, there is enough space around the voices to suggest their natural resonance. All things considered, it is an admirably-rendered recording of live performances, another example that the lower prices of NAXOS recordings do not indicate lower production values.

L’Italiana in Algeri has not been recorded as frequently as some of Rossini’s other operas, especially Il Barbiere di Siviglia, but has been more fortunate than most of them in accumulating a small discography of recordings that are all competitive. It is difficult to chose among Simionato with Valletti, Berganza with Alva, Valentini Terrani with either Benelli or Araiza, Horne with Palacio, Baltsa with Lopardo, and Larmore with Giménez. NAXOS’ recording enters a field that is not crowded but is unusually distinguished, and it is wonderful (because it is so atypical) that – thanks to the singing of Marianna Pizzolato and Lawrence Brownlee – a recording made in the Twenty-First Century can more than hold its own.

CD REVIEW: Edvard Grieg – VISITING GRIEG: Songs, Opp. 5, 12, 18, 26, 48 (Johannes Weisser, baritone; Søren Rastogi, piano)

2010-04-30T13:29:00.002-04:00

EDVARD GRIEG (1843 – 1907): Selected Lieder from Opp. 5, 12, 18, 26, & 48 – Johannes Weisser, baritone; Søren Rastogi, piano [recorded in Oslo, Norway; Simax PSC1310]

Aside from the familiar ‘Jeg elsker Dig!’ (‘Ich liebe dich’ or ‘I love thee’), included in recitals and recordings by virtually every classically-trained singer at some point in his or her career, the Lieder of Edvard Grieg are far too little-known, even among the most dedicated advocates of Art Songs. There have been more in-depth recorded explorations of Grieg’s Lieder by Scandinavian and international artists, most notably by the towering Norwegian Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad (whose beautiful recital of Scandinavian songs, recently restored to the catalogue by the Australian Eloquence branch of DECCA, introduced Grieg’s soulful Opus 67 cycle ‘Haugtussa’ to listeners outside of Scandinavia) and the Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter (whose disc of Grieg Songs with pianist Bengt Forsberg for Deutsche Grammophon remains after nearly twenty years a landmark both in Ms. von Otter’s discography and in the global appreciation of Grieg’s music), but this cache of musical treasures remains virtually unearthed when compared with the frequently-sung Lieder of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. More so than most of his fellow composers, many of whose finest songs were settings of texts by dead writers, Grieg enjoyed incomparable opportunities of collaborating with his near-contemporaries Hans Christian Andersen, Henrik Ibsen, and Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, three of Scandinavia’s most influential writers of the Nineteenth Century. Though Grieg also set texts by the ‘usual suspects’ such as Goethe and Heine, his settings of texts by Scandinavian poets produced a body of work that, despite its lack of fame, elevated the Nordic song repertory to the standard set by Teutonic masters and that, as an embodiment of nationalistic pride, deservedly stands alongside German Lieder and French chansons.

Perhaps the relative obscurity of Grieg’s Songs can be attributed in part to the fact that among audiences and singers there are far fewer speakers of Norwegian than of French or German. There may exist a belief among singers and those who hear them that Scandinavian pieces are best left to native speakers, not unlike the operas and songs of Russian composers. This is surely true of the vocal works of Scandinavian composers such as Aarre Merikanto and Tauno Pylkkänen, but Grieg’s instrumental music retains a prominent place within the international concert repertory, especially in Europe. Music with Nordic accents is more easily assimilated than texts in Scandinavian languages, it seems, and perhaps it is true, then, that fears of incomprehension due to linguistic remoteness inhibit widespread dissemination of Grieg’s Songs. Musically, close examination reveals that many of Grieg’s finest Songs are of quality at least equal to that of the French and German ‘chestnuts’ of traditional Lieder repertories. Even taking into account linguistic trepidation, it seems unfathomable that the Lieder of a composer as widely-acclaimed as Grieg could remain, slightly more than a century after his death, an underexplored musical wilderness.

Those who love the music of Grieg, as well as those for whom Lieder are the most rewardingly intimate expressions of composers’ vocal artistries, are certain to have longed for pioneering young artists to follow in the tradition of Flagstad and von Otter, and this recital of twenty-four of Grieg’s most beautiful Songs (including the famous ‘Jeg elsker Dig!’) by Norwegian baritone Johannes Weisser and Danish pianist Søren Rastogi is an exceptional addition to the comparatively meager discography of Grieg’s Songs. One of Denmark’s most promising young musicians, Mr. Rastogi has pursued in addition to his considerable engagements as a soloist and chamber player a close collaboration with Mr. Weisser, and the dedication of this professional relationship pays impressive dividends in this recording. As an accompanist, Mr. Rastogi possesses that rare but vital trait: the ability to breathe, musically speaking, in tandem with a singer. Many sublimely gifted concert pianists are poor accompanists because they regard the music before them as straightforward musical expressions in the manner of a sonata or concerto. Accompaniments in the Lieder of insightful composers are a thing apart, however, exercises in chamber playing that require not only musical coordination but a nurtured emotional synchronization between singer and accompanist. This is not to say that the art of accompaniment (or, for that matter, of singing Lieder) requires anonymity or the suppression of personality: indeed, the finest Lieder accompanists – Graham Johnson, Gerald Moore, Geoffrey Parsons, and Erik Werba, for instance – are artists for whom the act of accompanying singers is both the most natural and the most sophisticated of musical conversation, in which an individual voice is always discernible. While the evidence of a single disc is not sufficient to add the name of Mr. Rastogi alongside those cited above, it is indicative of an apparent artistic sensitivity that shapes Grieg’s sometimes laconic Songs (nearly half of the Songs in this recital are of less than two minutes in duration) with bite that does not preclude grace. Longer, more lyrical lines are shaped with finesse, built upon a careful attention to the inflections of the text and nuances of the singer’s delivery. Mr. Rastogi distinguishes himself with complete command of the music Grieg sets before him and is a young pianist from whom much else (perhaps Grieg’s beautiful E-minor Piano Sonata and Violin Sonatas) will hopefully be heard on disc in future.

Mr. Weisser, a Norwegian baritone whose impressive diary of engagements seemingly belies his youth, is perhaps most known to the record-buying public for his singing of the title role in René Jacobs’ controversial recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni on harmonia mundi, which followed a much-discussed production (recorded and released on DVD) at Baden-Baden’s Festspielhaus. A singer with a voice of natural beauty that requires little manipulation in order to depict complex emotions, Mr. Weisser brings to his performance of the Grieg Songs on this disc the additional benefit of being a native Scandinavian. It might be rather naïve to suggest that Mr. Weisser has these Songs ‘in his blood,’ so to speak, merely by being Norwegian, but his native understanding of the texts of the Songs is tremendously important. Small details of interpretation that would escape the notice of artists who have learnt the language by rote, solely for the purpose of singing the Songs, are surely apparent to a native speaker. The extent to which this is critical to a recital of art songs depends upon the quality of the voice singing them, and in this case the lovely, silver-hued quality of Mr. Weisser’s baritone ensures an enjoyable listening experience even if there were no great interpretive insights on offer. Fortunately, however, the disc is to be cherished as much for Mr. Weisser’s thoughtful interpretations – equally impressive in songs as different in character as ‘En Digters Sidste Sang’ (‘A Poet’s Farewell’) and ‘Trudom’ (‘Faithfulness’) – as for the attractiveness of his singing. Unlike many young singers, Mr. Weisser avoids the pitfall of singing this recital in a manner that causes the interpretations to seem studied: his singing, though subtle throughout, sounds spontaneous, suggesting not casualness but genuine affection for the music. Perhaps there is more than a kernel of truth to the many adages concerning the icy Nordic resolve for Grieg expresses darker feelings without wallowing in tonal quagmires (as his German counterparts were apt to do) or spinning endlessly aching melodies (comme les francaises), but Mr. Weisser’s performances of the Songs ensures that everything that Grieg means to say is said eloquently, resolutely but without excess. What Mr. Weisser achieves as a singer in this recording is a first-rate recital that reveals the unquestionable value of an overlooked repertory of fascinating songs. What he achieves as an exponent of music of his own fatherland is akin to what Victoria de los Angeles, Kathleen Ferrier, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Gérard Souzay accomplished in the songs of their respective native cultures.

It is flirting with folly to deem any performance definitive as this is to dismiss by default (if not always by intent) both all that has come before – and, in the context of Grieg’s Songs, neither the work of Kirsten Flagstad nor that of Anne Sofie von Otter can be dismissed – and what is possible in future. It is beyond doubt that a voice such as Flagstad’s is not likely to ever again be heard in Grieg’s Songs, but it is likewise doubtful that a recital as musically astute and emotionally fulfilling as this one by Johannes Weisser and Søren Rastogi is to be had (especially on disc) within the foreseeable future. It is also unlikely that, even with the espousal of artists of this caliber, the Lieder of Edvard Grieg will join their French and German brethren in the repertories of the world’s most discerning recitalists. The enchanting performances on this disc prove that the loss is as much theirs as it is Grieg’s and the individuals’ who love his music.

[Note: Only hours after the posting of this article, the release of a complete edition of the Songs of Edvard Grieg was announced, combining seven previously-issued discs. The recordings, on the BIS label, feature Finnish mezzo-soprano Monica Groop, who is accompanied by pianists Love Derwinger, Ilmo Ranta, and Roger Vignoles. The compilation is scheduled for release in the UK on 1 June.]

CD REVIEW: Georg Friedrich Händel – ORLANDO (C. Dumaux, E. de la Merced, R. Nicholls, J.M. Fumas, A. Buet; K617)

2010-04-28T23:18:00.001-04:00

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Orlando, HWV 31 – C. Dumaux (Orlando), E. de la Merced (Angelica), R. Nicholls (Dorinda), J.M. Fumas (Medoro), A. Buet (Zoroastro); La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy; Jean-Claude Malgoire [recorded ‘live’ at the Théâtre Municipal de Tourcoing, France, on 4 May 2008; K617 221/3]

Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso – first published in complete form in 1532 and at more than 38,000 lines among the longest poetic epics in European Literature – was to composers of the Eighteenth Century what the plays of Shakespeare were to their Nineteenth-Century successors: an irresistible source of heroic stories populated by legendary figures who nonetheless possessed endearingly ordinary qualities. Inspiring operas from composers ranging from Rameau and Vivaldi to Piccinni and Haydn, Ariosto’s humanistic epic provided plots for three of Georg Friedrich Händel’s most compelling operas for London: Alcina, Ariodante, and Orlando. The earliest of Händel’s three Orlando Furioso operas, Orlando was premiered at the King’s Theatre (now the home of the long-running West End production of Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera) on 27 January 1733. The cast for the inaugural production, which ran for ten performances, included the world-famous Senesino as Orlando, Anna Maria Strada del Pò as Angelica, Celeste Gismondi as Dorinda, Francesca Bertolli as Medoro (a relatively rare instance in Händel’s London operas of an important male role being created by female contralto), and Antonio Montagnana as Zoroastro. If not among the handful of Händel’s operas most known to Twenty-First-Century audiences, Orlando was one of the most notable successes of its composer’s London career, a score in which Händel’s skills as both musician and dramatist were tested and proved.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Ariosto’s literary epic – and, later, of Händel’s opera – is the uncommonly frank depiction of the hero’s [he is, incidentally, the famed Roland, one of Charlemagne’s most capable paladins] madness, which results from his unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica (who, after a fashion that virtually demanded operatic treatment, is in love with Medoro, a Saracen knight). The sensibilities of Renaissance writers were increasingly engaged by explorations of the intricacies of human psychology, and the madness of Orlando proved for Ariosto an opportunity for examining insanity within the context of an individual psyche rather than that of religious conventions as had been prevalent in earlier literary movements. This psychological depth, combined with the fantastic staging possibilities offered by a plot containing battles and sorcery, attracted the artistic attentions of the most celebrated composers of the Baroque era. The madness of Orlando was an unprecedented opportunity for composers to cast off musical formulae and compose ‘pure’ music to depict the wanderings of an afflicted mind. In Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso, the title character’s madness is conveyed by lapses into French (which Vivaldi’s Venetian audiences are sure to have found hysterical in both senses of the term) and wordless variations on the Iberian folksong ‘La Folía,’ a veritable ‘hit’ tune that circulated throughout Europe during the Eighteenth Century in the form of variations by celebrated composers. Händel brought even greater novelty to his depiction of Orlando’s madness, not by discarding traditional forms piecemeal but by turning them in on themselves in order to achieve the most intense dramatic expression with the most economical of means. What Händel achieved in Orlando with the portrayal of psychological unraveling with relatively simple musical devices would remain unchallenged in its dramatic effectiveness until the development of the more extravagant mad scenes of Nineteenth-Century Italian bel canto.

Musically, Orlando deserves a place among the most distinguished operatic scores of Händel’s maturity. Composing his music for a distinguished cast, Händel enriched each role in Orlando with arias and ensembles of beauty and brilliance. Furthermore, there are no characters of secondary importance in Orlando, which allowed Händel to dedicate himself even more perceptibly than in his other operas for London to minute details of musical and dramatic characterization. In this sense, Orlando is ultimately one of Händel’s most sensual and emotionally honest operas despite its exalted personages of lore.

The present recording, preserving a performance given on 4 May 2008 in the Théâtre Municipal de Tourcoing in a production by Gildas Bourdet, features the Baroque-specialist ensemble La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy under the direction of their founder, Jean-Claude Malgoire. A pioneering figure in the Early Music movement since his creation of La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy in 1966, Maestro Malgoire has long inspired arguments among scholars and music lovers with the often idiosyncratic nature of his approach to Baroque operas. His series of Händel opera recordings (Rinaldo, Serse, and Tamerlano) for CBS/Sony were subject to mixed receptions by critics despite their documentation of the work of several wonderful singers (especially Carolyn Watkinson, Ileana Cotrubas, Paul Esswood, and the young Barbara Hendricks), with much of the harshest criticism aimed at what was described as the astringent sound of the period string playing and bizarrely-inflected phrasing. Maestro Malgoire’s forces have hardly proved to be alone in occasionally making unpleasant sounds, but in the course of the past three decades the ears of listeners have adjusted (and have heard far worse noises emerging from other period-instrument bands, to be frank). This recording of Orlando is played with the verve characteristic of Maestro Malgoire’s work at its best, and the tones produced by his players fall pleasantly on the ears, on the whole. Equally importantly, Maestro Malgoire’s conducting of the score reveals not only an acquaintance with the music but also a recognition of its significance in Händel’s operatic output. Surely benefiting from having been recorded in performance, secco recitatives never drag or lose momentum, and Maestro Malgoire paces the performance with admirable attention to the cumulative impact of the music, bringing rhythmic vitality to the overtly dramatic scenes and welcome restraint to moments of lyricism. For all that his work has not been universally appreciated, Maestro Malgoire remains a vital contributor to the Baroque Renaissance, and this performance of Orlando confirms that, in his fifth decade of music-making, his is a credible presence among the most accomplished conductors of Händel’s operas.

Händel rarely lavished even upon his roles in other operas composed for the great Antonio Montagnana music of the quality that he created for Zoroastro. Zoroastro in the context of Orlando is a ‘mago’ (magician), but it is clear from the profundity of the music that Händel wrote for the role that he may well have also had in his mind the Persian philosopher Zoroaster, albeit anachronistically (and, from a strictly philosophical perspective, erroneously) as the historical Zoroaster likely lived two millennia before Charlemagne’s reign in the Eighth Century. A decade after the first performance of Orlando, the Persian Zoroaster would become the subject of an important tragédie lyrique by Jean-Philippe Rameau, and after another forty years the basis – arguably – for the character of Sarastro in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Allowing for the obvious differences in styles, the music for Händel’s Zoroastro would not be out of place in either Rameau’s opera or Mozart’s in terms of the dignity of utterance. That dignity is well-served in the performance on this recording by Frenchman Alain Buet, who is variously billed as both a baritone and a bass. Mr. Buet’s voice is stronger in the baritone range than in the lowest depths of the bass range, but he copes fearlessly with the considerable range demanded by Händel’s music. Mr. Buet avoids the sluggishness of many larger-voiced singers in this repertory, delivering the rapid passagework with vigor and ease. Mr. Buet’s Zoroastro is a presence both forceful and benevolent, and his performance ignores no aspect of the role.

Though created by a female singer, Medoro is sung in this performance by the French countertenor Jean-Michel Fumas, a fine singer whose work is too little-known in the United States, even among connoisseurs of Baroque music. Mr. Fumas has collaborated often with Maestro Malgoire, and the conductor’s understanding of the singer’s needs in Medoro’s often daunting music is obvious. Medoro is one of those Händel characters whose lot it is to more or less be in the wrong places at the wrong times, the unintentional hypotenuse of a love triangle resulting from the affections of both Angelica (who, though passionately desired by Orlando, remains true to Medoro) and Dorinda. To audiences in the Twenty-First Century, this predicament introduces a subtle suggestion of comedy (a suggestion that becomes none too subtle in many productions of the opera), but Händel’s music reveals that the composer considered Medoro’s plight deadly serious. Mr. Fumas, who also sings roles from the haute-contre repertory of his native country, possesses a voice of suitable richness to convincingly portray a male character, a trait surprisingly rare among countertenors. As Medoro, Mr. Fumas brings admirable concentration to his performance, taking the care to maintain an even tone throughout his role’s most difficult passages. As a result, the significance of Medoro in the overall drama of the opera is apparent. Meeting the technical demands of Medoro’s music confidently, Mr. Fumas is free to focus on honing his interpretation of the role, ultimately contributing a performance that is wholly effective in its restraint and subtlety.

Singing the role of the shepherdess Dorinda, whose Arcadian existence is disrupted by the pangs of misbegotten love, the voice of British soprano Rachel Nicholls is one of bewitching purity. The effect of hearing Ms. Nicholls in any of Dorinda’s pensive arias is like that of seeing the early-morning sunlight pouring through the windows of a great cathedral. The sophistication inherent in Ms. Nicholls’ singing reveals that Dorinda is a character whose simplicity is that of honesty rather than banality. Ms. Nicholls’ technique encompasses all of the tools needed to meet the challenges of Dorinda’s more spirited music, as well, and on the whole her performance is one of this recording’s greatest strengths and a superb achievement in recorded Händel singing.

The ‘international’ soprano (born in Australia but resident in Spain since an early age) Elena de la Merced is a recurrent presence among the casts of productions and recordings of Baroque operas. She makes of Händel’s heroines something of a specialty, the blend of technical brilliance and natural timbral attractiveness in her voice proving ideal for the dueling fire-breathing and heart-breaking elements of Händel’s soprano roles. Angelica is just such a role, split between extremes of exasperated vehemence and absolute dejection. The darkness that invades Ms. de la Merced’s voice in moments of pathos does not shut out the light altogether, and as with Ms. Nicholls’ Dorinda there is to Ms. de la Merced’s Angelica a wonderfully refreshing quality of quietude. Even in their bleakest musical moments, there is in the performances of both sopranos a prevalent sense of truth, of things being sorted out and set right before the final curtain. As so often in opera, thoughtful artists prove that what seems on the page a manufactured lieto fine is in execution a deeply-considered resolution built gradually, if almost imperceptibly, by the composer. That no single aria stands out for having received an especially fine performance from either Ms. Nicholls or Ms. de la Merced is indicative of the extremely high standards of singing achieved in this performance – a remarkable achievement indeed in the context of a single live, staged performance.

It is immediately apparent when hearing this recording that French countertenor Christophe Dumaux has an arrestingly beautiful voice, sweet-toned and true throughout his range. It is more controlled than the voices of many countertenors and also possesses a greater spectrum of colors and dynamic contrasts. His splendid technique notwithstanding, Mr. Dumaux’s singing in this performance is an exciting display of dramatic bravura, his vocalism always at the service of the text. Occasionally, this dramatic vividness is at the expense of the beauty of Mr. Dumaux’s tone, but the commitment with which Mr. Dumaux completes every dramatic journey that he begins justifies his choices. Not surprisingly, the apotheosis of Mr. Dumaux’s performance comes in Orlando’s celebrated mad scene, which Mr. Dumaux shapes delicately, the sorrow and disappointment that disrupt the character’s reason depicted with touching sincerity and musical sensitivity. Throughout the performance, Mr. Dumaux combines the textual clarity typical of an accomplished verismo singer with his skills as an Händel singer of the first order, contributing an account of Orlando’s music that is cumulatively thrilling and moving. Those who love Händel’s music owe a particular debt of gratitude to K617, the Convent of Saint Ulrich, and their ‘Chemins du Baroque’ initiative for adding to the Händel discography a recording of an important singer, unique in his Fach, in his prime singing one of the Saxon Master’s most compelling operatic characters.

Despite the presence in the catalogues of several fine recordings, Orlando has not been as fortunate as others among Händel’s operas in receiving the full attention of audiences and music-lovers. One way in which the present recording might prove indispensible is that it offers evidence of the fact that Orlando is an opera with the capacity, drawn solely from Händel’s score, of proving as engaging, thought-provoking, and moving as Giulio Cesare, Rodelinda, or Tamerlano. The title role is a tour de force for an insightful singer, and the multiple-venue production preserved on this recording was rightly centered on the standard-setting Orlando of Christophe Dumaux. So much of Jean-Claude Malgoire’s work having been dismissed by critics with charges of inconsistency and idiosyncrasy, the consistent excellence of the performance and unerring validity of Maestro Malgoire’s pacing of the score are rewards of this recording that are perhaps more cherished for having been somewhat unexpected. Above all, a quintet of very fine singers and a conductor who understands and supports their efforts prove anew that the barrier between Händel’s best operas and the international mainstream repertory is built of nothing more than unfamiliarity.

CD REVIEW: Christoph Willibald von Gluck – ORPHÉE ET EURYDICE (J.D. Flórez, A. Garmendia, A. Marianelli; DECCA)

2010-03-26T15:54:00.001-04:00

CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK (1714 – 1787): Orphée et Eurydice – J.D. Flórez (Orphée), A. Garmendia (Eurydice, une Ombre heureuse), A. Marianelli (L’Amour); Coro y Orquestra Titular del Teatro Real; Jesús López-Cobos [recorded ‘live’ during concert performances at the Teatro Real, Madrid, 27 &30 May and 2 June 2008; DECCA 478 2197]

In two important ways, this new recording of Gluck’s 1774 Paris version of Orphée et Eurydice – unencumbered by academic conceits and awkward transpositions – seems an opportunity missed, but it must be conceded from the start that hearing Juan Diego Flórez sing the fearsomely difficult ariette ‘L’espoir renaît dans mon âme’ is one of the greatest pleasures to be had from opera during the past quarter-century. Thankfully, Mr. Flórez’s commitment to his role does not end with the challenge of this coloratura showpiece aria, but in truth there is more to Orphée than, well, Orphée.

The gestation and performance history of Orphée et Eurydice are famously complicated matters. Set to an Italian libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, Gluck’s first version of his Orpheus opera was premiered in Vienna in 1762 with the celebrated alto castrato Gaetano Guadagni (some of whose ornaments are preserved in the singer’s hand) singing the role of Orfeo. More than a decade later, at the zenith of his efforts to steer opera towards a closer conformity with the tenets of Classical Greek drama, Gluck adapted the score to a French libretto by Pierre-Louis Moline, revising the orchestration and vocal lines to comply with French tastes shaped by the music of Lully and Rameau. Ironically, though, while the original 1762 version was groundbreaking in its avoidance of secco recitative and bravura vocal effects, the first act of the 1774 version ended with the aforementioned ariette for Orphée, ‘L’espoir renaît dans mon âme,’ an heroic piece in the Italian style that Gluck had already used in his Il Parnaso confuso and Le feste d’Apollo. Gluck had at his disposal as the first Paris Orphée Joseph Legros, an accomplished exponent of the typically French haute-contre vocal Fach, evidenced by the composer’s extension of Orphée’s tessitura to the E-flat above the tenor’s top C. [Jeremy Hayes reminds the reader in his brief liner notes for this DECCA release that pitch in Eighteenth-Century Paris may have been as much as a whole tone lower than modern concert pitch, but this remains a controversial matter.] In the Nineteenth Century, Hector Berlioz – perhaps Gluck’s most ardent champion in the century following his death in 1787 – created a version of the opera for the great mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, combining music from both the 1762 Vienna and 1774 Paris versions. As with the great singers of the past, it was the remarkable talent of Juan Diego Flórez, and specifically his ability to cope with the high tessitura of the 1774 Paris version of the score, that inspired the Madrid concert performances from which the material for this recording (which was produced, incidentally, by the excellent Peruvian tenor Ernesto Palacio, Mr. Flórez’s tutor and manager) was drawn.

Fine as the singing and playing by the Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Real (the same personnel as the Coro y Orquestra Sinfónica de Madrid) are in this performance, they ultimately are professional but no more and are let down somewhat by their conductor, Jesús López-Cobos, the outgoing Music Director of the Teatro Real. In terms of choices of tempo, Maestro López-Cobos maintains a center-of-the-road course, avoiding the extremes and idiosyncrasies that undermine so many performances, but he also lacks the Gallic poise that the 1774 Paris version of Orphée requires, Gluck having been heavily influenced not only by Classical Greek dramatic devices but also (significantly) by the tragédies lyriques of Lully and Rameau, as well as the Mid-Century operas – neither wholly Baroque nor Classical in form – of the Italian composer Niccolò Jommelli. In the context of a less exceptional performance than this, Maestro López-Cobos and his Teatro Real forces might well seem more than merely adequate, but it is difficult to avoid pondering what a revelatory recorded performance might have been had with ensembles like William Christie and Les Arts Florissants or Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort supporting the star tenor’s efforts.

Capable singing is contributed by both sopranos, Ainhoa Garmendia (who replaced Nicole Cabell) as Eurydice and Alessandra Marianelli as L’Amour, each singer meeting the coloratura requirements of her role with relative ease. Ms. Garmendia sings especially beautifully in the first scene of the third act, in which Eurydice – restored to life – doubts Orphée’s love and, compelling him to betray the terms of her release from the Underworld by looking at her, perishes anew. There is a sameness in the timbres of the sopranos, but the brevity of their roles (and, indeed, of the opera as a whole, which runs for just less than 105 minutes in this performance) prevents this from becoming wearying.

As it was in past when Léopold Simoneau and Nicolai Gedda recorded Orphée, primary interest focuses on the tenor who sings the title role. Even with these fine performances preserved on commercial recordings, it is regrettable that neither Hugues Cuénod nor Michel Sénéchal, those paragons of French haute-contre singing, was recorded as Orphée. Among latter-day Orphées on records, the Frenchman Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (on NAXOS) is likely the closest in style to Joseph Legos: in the present performance, Juan Diego Flórez sings with largely the same resonance that he employs in his bel canto repertory, and Richard Croft’s performance on Marc Minkowski’s recording for Archiv/DGG is something of a compromise between the two approaches. The slight nasality of Mr. Flórez’s tone, especially in the extreme upper register, lends a certain eloquence to his French diction that projects a compelling sense of the appropriate style. Moreover, the complete security with which Mr. Flórez encompasses the range required by the music is astonishing on its own terms. There are perhaps a few tenors who could run him close in this music – the Americans Lawrence Brownlee and Kenneth Tarver, the Briton Toby Spence, and the Frenchman Marc Laho, for instance – but it is simply inconceivable, especially when listening to this recording, that any singer could surpass Mr. Flórez’s performance of this music. The dreaded ‘L’espoir renaît dans mon âme’ (omitted in their respective recordings by Simoneau and Gedda, who also employed modest downward transpositions) seems hardly a challenge for Mr. Flórez, who sings the ariette with the assurance one might expect from the world’s reigning Rossini tenor par excellence. The ease of Mr. Flórez’s singing perfectly conveys the spirit of the piece, which expresses the reawakening of hope in Orphée’s heart as he realizes that his beloved Eurydice may be restored to him. Equally effective and even more beautiful is Mr. Flórez’s singing of the arias ‘Quel nouveau ciel’ (‘Che puro ciel’ in the Italian version) and ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice’ (the universally-known ‘Che farò senza Euridice’), in the latter of which one can sense Mr. Flórez willing Maestro López-Cobos to preside in a manner more sensitive to the stylistic nuances of the music. Whatever discussions persist concerning Mr. Flórez’s singing of his typical bel canto repertory, there can be no denying that this recording of a role to which it is not likely that Mr. Flórez will often return in his career preserves the work of a great singer at the height of his abilities.

Alas, he deserved better from DECCA, the label whose reputation he has done much to maintain since making his first recording for the company a decade ago, of Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto with Les Talens Lyriques and Christophe Rousset. The recording, a composite assembled from three concert performances, is well-balanced on the whole but is a far less faithful document of the Teatro Real’s acoustics than several zarzuela recordings on other labels. Opera lovers have accepted that ‘live’ recordings are the way of the future, being faster and less expensive to produce and release, but whereas many of the ‘live’ recordings of concert performances (EMI’s recording of Sir Simon Rattle’s account of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges with the Berliner Philharmoniker, for instance) give no evidence of their origins, DECCA’s final product in this instance sounds little better than many of the so-called ‘pirated’ recordings in circulation. [The author has, in fact, heard a ‘pirated’ recording of one of the Madrid concert performances that has both a finer, more realistic aural perspective and a less ‘produced’ dynamic spectrum, all to the good where the voices are concerned.] There is a veritable plethora of extraneous noises to be heard, almost none of which originate with the capacity audience. Creaking furniture and equipment, sloppy page-turns, and hosts of bumps and groans from the unseen orchestra and chorus are reproduced with startling clarity and prominence, even marring some of Mr. Flórez’s most beautiful passages. One expects these sorts of flaws in the much-duplicated ‘private recordings’ that are traded by connoisseurs, but this is not the standard to which DECCA have aspired, nor indeed that which they achieved with their ‘live’ recording – based on staged performances, and less cluttered even so! – of Rossini’s Matilde di Shabran with Mr. Flórez and Annick Massis. Recording the audience’s frenzied reaction to Mr. Flórez’s singing of ‘L’espoir renaît dans mon âme’ is understandable, as the enthusiasm is wholly justified and the ariette also ends the first act, but the inclusion of the ovation following ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice’ impedes the emotional development of the final act and frankly seems gratuitous. In fairness, the sonic blemishes in this recording only slightly distract the listener, but like a precious gem the superb performance by Mr. Flórez deserved a setting worthy of its brilliance.

The very difficulty of the music for Orphée in the 1774 Paris version of Gluck’s masterful opera makes it unlikely that the 1762 Vienna version will ever be supplanted in the international repertory, especially as there are now talented countertenors who can bring to the contralto vocal lines something at least theoretically like the impact that Guadagni had as Orfeo. Nonetheless, only with this performance by Juan Diego Flórez has the 1774 version of the score gained a complete recording that can stand in the company of the timeless performances by Kathleen Ferrier and Dame Janet Baker.

ARTIST PROFILE – Nelly Miricioiu, soprano

2010-03-22T02:16:00.001-04:00

On 12 January 1844, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples presented the first performance of Donizetti’s Caterina Cornaro, its composer’s penultimate opera (his final piece, Ne m’oubliez pas, was never completed), written when Donizetti was succumbing to the disease that would prematurely end his life. The title role was sung by Fanny Goldberg, about whom little is remembered other than her participation in the first production of Caterina Cornaro and the exasperation she inspired in Donizetti. ‘I wrote for a soprano, and they give me a mezzo,’ the frustrated composer wrote to a relative before the Caterina Cornaro premiere. Donizetti’s anxiety was ultimately proved to be justified: Caterina Cornaro pleased neither the Neapolitan audience nor critics and was withdrawn after six performances. Revivals during the Twentieth Century – first with the fiery Leyla Gencer, again at the San Carlo in 1972 and then with the Opera Theatre of New Jersey at Carnegie Hall in 1973, with Montserrat Caballé in several European venues, with Brazilian soprano Auréa Gómez at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1982, with Matile Rowland (replacing Aprile Millo) for Opera Orchestra of New York in 1994, with Denia Mazzola-Gavazzeni at the Teatro Donizetti di Bergamo in 1995, and with Julia Migenes (conducted by Richard Bonynge) at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1998 – failed to fully reverse the opera’s fortunes, as did a 1974 RAI Torino broadcast (and recording) with the unjustly-neglected Italian soprano Margherita Rinaldi. Despite passages of acknowledged musical distinction, the score was regarded largely as it was in 1844, as a failed effort by an important composer. On 20 March 2010, however, in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Donizetti’s opera seria swansong received the invaluable attention of a remarkable soprano whose career has contained many triumphant forays into rare bel canto repertory: Nelly Miricioiu. Even the insights of this committed singer likely will not restore Caterina Cornaro to the repertory, where indeed it perhaps does not truly deserve to be, but her performance further secured her throne as Amsterdam’s Queen of Bel Canto.

Hailed by Italian audiences as ‘La Unica’ for her unique dramatic gifts and remarkable musical versatility, Nelly Miricioiu was born in Adjud, Romania, which is also the hometown of opera-singing sisters Elena Dan and Angela Gheorghiu. Sadly, Ms. Miricioiu’s early life paralleled the history of her fatherland during the years of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s brutal Marxist regime: first enduring the persecution of her family by Ceauşescu’s government, she then fell victim herself to abuse and imprisonment by the fearsome Securitate, Romania’s Communist secret police. Inevitably, the emotional scars of this existence affected Ms. Miricioiu’s development as an artist and as an individual. ‘The main experience [from my early life] was the pain from being a sensitive child and having my dreams and individuality suppressed by the cruel regime who at that time controlled the lives of everyone in Romania,’ she recollects. ‘To change this I needed to rework and find again the emotions and belief within myself in order to experience the freedom to explore what was possible in my greatest passion in life – music.’

Singing was the young Ms. Miricioiu’s connection with the happier life that she sensed could be hers. ‘I lived for music because it connected me to Mother Nature and the love of trying to make people happy,’ she says. In a sense, music was Ms. Miricioiu’s means of emotional escape. Still, opportunities for honing her art under the tutelage of great artists of her own and other countries were limited by the repressive environment in which she came of age. ‘I was not particularly influenced by opera singers in my youth,’ she remembers. ‘Having said that, I always strongly recommend to young singers that they should take for inspiration what is best from artists and performances both past and present,’ she adds. After having displayed prodigious talent for singing as a young girl and winning her first singing competition at the age of fourteen, Ms. Miricioiu studied in her native country at the Conservatory of Iaşi (now the George Enescu Universirty of Arts of Iaşi). A string of victories in international singing competitions, including the inaugural Maria Callas Grand Prix in 1975, launched her career. After making her main-stage debut as the Königin der Nacht in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Ms. Miricioiu was cast in leading roles in theatres throughout Romania. The political atmosphere in Romania only continued to deteriorate in the decade prior to Ceauşescu’s ouster in 1989, however, and the world beyond Romania’s borders beckoned Ms. Miricioiu.

Still only in her late twenties, Ms. Miricioiu gave one of her first performances outside of Romania at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila in 1980. Tumultuously cheered by the Filipino public, she was likewise lauded by the Philippines’ First Lady, Imelda Marcos. The success of her performance in Manila inspired Ms. Miricioiu to the harrowing decision of affecting her defection from her homeland. Unfortunately, the Marcos government maintained diplomatic ties with Ceauşescu’s Romania, and the Filipino government were compelled by protocol to reject Ms. Miricioiu’s request for political asylum.

In 1982, Ms. Miricioiu experienced a milestone in her fledgling international career when she made her debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Nedda in a production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci opposite the Canio of Jon Vickers, the Tonio of Piero Cappuccilli, and the Silvio of Sir Thomas Allen. A short time before, she had enjoyed another triumph in her debut with Scottish Opera in Glasgow as Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata, a role that became one of the most frequent in Ms. Miricioiu’s diary. The beauty and dedication of her singing impressed the legendary patron of the arts Lord Harewood, who took up her cause. She was granted asylum by the British government, and the United Kingdom became her new home.

Additional international successes followed Ms. Miricioiu’s Covent Garden debut in rapid succession. In 1983, she was called upon to introduce herself to the legendarily demanding public at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala as Donizetti’s Lucia, replacing Luciana Serra. Her magnificent performance was rapturously received by the often-merciless denizens of La Scala’s loggione. Her success as Lucia was repeated two years later in Modena, when she sang the role alongside the Edgardo of celebrated tenor Carlo Bergonzi. Ms. Miricioiu’s debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera followed four years later when, on 28 October 1989, she sang Mimì in Franco Zeffirelli’s famed production of Puccini’s La Bohème. Further debuts and performances brought delight to audiences throughout Europe, the United States, and South America.

The early years of Ms. Miricioiu’s international career were marked by her uncanny ability to adapt her technique to a wide array of repertory, ranging from Mozart to verismo, without compromising the quality of her singing. In addition to roles such as Lucia and Violetta, she was praised for performances of Cio-Cio San and the soprano heroines of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. One of the most interesting aspects of Ms. Miricioiu’s artistry is the way in which she sang such a broad repertory without damaging her voice. ‘In some ways, it’s not good to continue to sing operas that maybe stretch your possibilities too much, but by the same token I also needed to first push my limits in order to find out what I can do. I also wanted in those early years to find out what my journey was supposed to be, and by allowing myself a little freedom to explore repertories from which I could learn, I always felt this would eventually help me to come closer to revealing my true dramatic possibilities,’ she says. Recalling the roles that she was offered in the early years of her career, she adds, ‘Still, choice was not a luxury I always had available.’

These experiences shaped Ms. Miricioiu’s concepts of her own artistry and approach to singing. She suggests that singing is a dual exercise for both body and soul. ‘Technique being to the Body what musical expression is to the Soul, what else can there be?’ she asks. ‘Above all, I need to make the art of singing part of my own spiritual life and experience.’ This centrality of singing in her emotional life is evident in the way in which Ms. Miricioiu approaches the roles that she sings. ‘I am totally committed to the music, but in many ways what you see onstage is part of my personality, and I always need something through which I can channel my energy, my imagination, my need to work, my love for my fellow man, my curiosity, and my interest in diverse subjects. Singing was always the center of my life and shaped the way I viewed art and humanity both on and off stage.’ Her vast repertory led her to believe that a singer’s trust in his or her own intuition is the key to pursuing a long and meaningful career. ‘Be honest with yourself and [with the] music,’ she muses. ‘Listen, learn, practice, test for yourself. The single most important piece of advice for anyone with a passion to sing and a natural voice,’ she states, ‘is never to believe that there is only one possible journey for the voice; or to accept that any magic formula can replace the dedication needed to build and sustain a singing career.’

Despite the necessity of understanding and respecting one’s own abilities and limitations, opera is an essentially collaborative art, and Ms. Miricioiu has participated in one of the most significant artistic collaborations in operatic history. Even considering the importance of Maria Callas to EMI/HMV/Angel and of Dame Joan Sutherland and Renata Tebaldi to DECCA/London, the fortunes of a recording venture have scarcely ever relied as prominently as have those of the Opera Rara label on the singing of Nelly Miricioiu. Founded in 1970 by Americans Patric Schmid and Don White, Opera Rara began as an organization dedicated to giving performances of long-forgotten, lesser works of the bel canto period. The Company gave their first concert, dedicated to the music of Saverio Mercadante in celebration of the centenary of his death, on 17 December 1970, and their first performance of a complete opera – Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Il Crociato in Egitto – followed in 1972. By the end of the decade, Opera Rara had brought out their first recording, an exciting account of Donizetti’s sprawling Ugo, Conte di Parigi. With an ambitious desire to produce more recordings of overlooked bel canto works, Opera Rara needed a diva who could convincingly sing the roles created for some of the most renowned and musically adventurous sopranos of the Nineteenth Century. In 1993, they planned a studio recording of Mercadante’s Orazi e Curiazi in which the role of Camilla would be sung by Ms. Miricioiu. With this recording began a fruitful collaboration that continues more than a decade later. The success of Ms. Miricioiu’s singing in the Orazi e Curiazi recording led to her singing of the barnstorming role of Eleonora in Opera Rara’s 1994 recording of Donizetti’s Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, in which the title role was sung by the young Renée Fleming. When Ms. Miricioiu duplicated her superb performance in her first outing on the Opera Rara label both in Rosmonda and in the following year’s recording of Rossini’s Ricciardo e Zoraide, Patric Schmid knew that he had found his diva.

‘Patric once said to me that he [had] been waiting for thirty years to find the soprano who could sing some of the roles of operas he had been collecting over the years. He gave me a “platform” and showed that he believed in me and loved my artistry and commitment,’ Ms. Miricioiu remembers wistfully. ‘He inspired me with his own knowledge of those rare operas, and singing for him enriched my life in many ways. I shall never forget this.’ Pursuing his passion to the last moment of his life, Mr. Schmid passed away suddenly on 6 November 2005, only a short time before a performance of Donizetti’s Il Diluvio Universale that followed recording sessions for Opera Rara. ‘We shared tears and laughter,’ Ms. Miricioiu says, ‘and I miss him!’

Even viewed in the context of her searing performances in Verdi roles and in operas such as Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur (in the title role of which Ms. Miricioiu made her warmly-received return to Romania after an absence of nearly thirty years), Respighi’s La Fiamma and Marie Victoire, and Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, it is as an interpreter of bel canto roles that Ms. Miricioiu has achieved her greatest successes and assumed her place among the ranks of such legendary singers as Maria Malibran and Giuditta Pasta, Luisa Tetrazzini and Dame Nellie Melba, and Maria Callas and Dame Joan Sutherland. Often compared to the great Callas, Ms. Miricioiu has displayed throughout her career a consistent affinity not only for the complex vocal requirements of bel canto but also for the dramatic intricacies – far too often disserved in the performances of lesser artists – of even the ignored operas by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Her performances of the title roles in Rossini’s Armida, Bellini’s Norma, and Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Lucrezia Borgia, and Maria Stuarda, as well as Amenaide in Rossini’s Tancredi and Imogene in Bellini’s Il Pirata, have electrified audiences at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, inspiring the typically subdued Dutch patrons to Italianate expressions of feverous appreciation. The somewhat smaller scale of bel canto productions, and the theatres in which they are most often presented, contributes to Ms. Miricioiu’s effectiveness in this repertory. ‘I am not truly comfortable in very large theatres,’ she states. ‘I believe in the possibilities of expressing intimate emotions from the opera stage [just as they are] found in plays and cinema, and I particularly don’t like being presented on any stage in the sort of semi-obscurity that you find in some productions, which feels like an attempt to reduce and homogenize the individualities of artists.’ It is the communication that must develop between the artist and an audience that is vital to her singing, not only of bel canto roles. ‘It’s only through connecting inner experiences with the music that an artist can truly convey any close-on emotions of opera to the audience – and certainly not through vocal technique alone,’ she continues. ‘I suppose [that] in this respect the only real differences between bel canto and verismo repertories are the styles and periods of the orchestration, but generally my approach to both is the same whether the theatres are large or small.’ Bringing this dedication to connecting with her audience to her Amsterdam performance of Caterina Cornaro, she also recalls a similar artistic experience in a vastly different score. ‘One recent great challenge was learning and performing on stage, from memory, Poulenc’s one-act, one-woman opera La Voix humaine, which lasts fifty minutes. [Singing is] gratifying when I can make the composer happy, the public happy, and myself happy.’ With typical good humor, she adds, ‘and maybe some critics, too! I have plenty more to keep me challenged, though, and to [help me] to remember always to have the humility to never stop learning.’

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Ms. Miricioiu’s artistry, not least in bel canto, is her ability, virtually absent from the world’s stages since the retirement of Maria Callas, to portray the often outrageous situations in which her characters find themselves with dramatic veracity that derives from organic responses to emotional stimuli. This was memorably apparent even in a concert performance of Bellini’s Il Pirata for Washington Concert Opera that the present author attended. Rather than seeking inspiration from external sources, Ms. Miricioiu looks to the music itself to find the cornerstones of her dramatic portraits. ‘We should remember that without composers and librettists, particularly those of great genius, opera would have no stage on which to work,’ she insists. ‘I feel [that artists] should therefore try as much as possible to find the humility and integrity to serve the music and drama in the manner in which [the composers and librettists] originally intended. At least artistically, I believe [that] this is the only way that opera can really survive. Although it may endure different forms in terms of exciting designs and lighting, dramatic settings, and theatrical movements, the emphasis on music must still always reign supreme.’ That musicality and innate respect for the endeavors of composers and librettists are vital to Ms. Miricioiu’s singing is obvious in any of her performances or recordings. Perhaps what sets her apart from so many of her contemporaries who have sung a similar repertory is that deep concentration on the music and text are for her liberating rather than confining.

Above all, singing is for Ms. Miricioiu not a chore or merely a career, not a task undertaken out of the obligation created by the recognition of a genuine talent, but the fulfillment of dreams and bottomless founts of desire. ‘I cannot just exist, as life for me is an active thing, not simply living without challenges,’ she says. ‘I am an insatiable “doer” in music and in life, and only death will end my passion.’ Looking to the future, there is another seldom-heard Donizetti opera on her horizon – Belisario, which she will sing in February 2011 for London’s Chelsea Opera Group, an underappreciated staple of London’s operatic community for which she has already sung an assortment of roles including Rossini’s Ermione and Semiramide, Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda and Imogene (Il Pirata), Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Lucrezia Borgia, Verdi’s Odabella (Attila) Lady Macbeth, and Violetta (La Traviata), and Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. She also returns to her native Romania again in April 2010 to sing Adriana Lecouvreur.

Many youngsters who faced the hardships that Nelly Miricioiu endured in her youth would have abandoned their dreams, succumbing to the routines that too readily absorbed them or simply fading into the oblivion of faceless existence. From Providence Ms. Miricioiu received the gift of a sublimely beautiful voice, and from her own inner determination she drew the strength to carry on despite crushing adversity. Her modesty permits only fleeting glimpses of this legacy of resilience, but it can be heard in each of her performances. Belief in the power of music was the path that she followed to freedom from the oppression that imperiled not just her artistry but also her life, and the greatest single measure of her enduring accomplishments as a singer is the fact that, after years of happiness, safety, and success, she continues her journey along that path with untarnished conviction.

I am deeply indebted to Ms. Miricioiu for her exceptional candor and grace in responding to my questions and to her publicist, Ms. Maria Mot, for her kind and thorough assistance, as well as for permission to use the photographs included in this profile.

Click here to visit Nelly Miricioiu’s official website. Her blog can be accessed by clicking here.

Nelly Miricioiu is represented in Europe by Camille De Rijck of Pelleas Artists and in North America by Zemsky/Green Artists Management.