JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750): The Bach Project, Volume One – Organ Works—Todd Fickley, organ [Recorded in St. Michaëlskerk, Zwolle, The Netherlands, in October 2007; MSR Classics MS 1561; 1 CD, 75:10; Available from MSR Classics, Amazon, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

If ever a composer impacted the writing of music for a particular instrument, Johann Sebastian Bach surely altered the course of composition for the organ, the instrument of which he was an acknowledged master. It now seems inexplicable that in the Eighteenth Century it was as an organist far more than as a composer that Bach was esteemed, even by his own children, but the significance of his work to the organ repertory cannot be overstated. Furthering the German traditions of Heinrich Schütz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Pachelbel, Bach’s prowess at the organ was reputed in the Eighteenth Century to have been rivaled only by that of Georg Friedrich Händel, whose extensive travels and endeavors as a composer of opera spread his fame far beyond that of Bach. Whereas Händel’s compositions for organ are inventive and often delightfully tuneful, Bach’s organ works are, like Chopin’s piano music, virtually a genre unto themselves. Volume One of organist Todd Fickley’s and MSR Classics’ The Bach Project offers a recital of six representative works from Bach’s extraordinary catalogue of music for the instrument. This is a valuable disc solely as a fantastic recording of some of Bach’s finest music, but as a harbinger of future releases in The Bach Project it is priceless.

The sound of the instrument used for this recording is arresting from the first chord of the opening selection, and special mention must be made of the fidelity with which the organ is recorded. This is one of Northern Europe’s greatest organs, and recording it from a distance of thirty-two​ feet as supervised by engineer Jiri Zurek​ for this project both enables preservation of the clarity of the instrument’s registers and appreciation of the acoustical ambiance of the space and the five-second ​reverb​. The 1682 collapse of the tower of St. Michaëlskerk in the Dutch town of Zwolle following a fire dealt a fatal blow to the church’s original organ, an instrument that may have dated from before 1505 and had been substantially reworked in 1643. After a quarter-century without an organ, the famed North German Schnitger firm was engaged in 1718 to construct a new organ for St. Michaëlskerk. Father and sons Arp, Franz Caspar, and Johann Georg Schnitger collaborated on the design and construction of the quadruple-manual instrument, though the Schnitger patriarch did not survive to witness its 1721 completion and installation. In the subsequent 294 years, the organ has been subjected to maintenance and modification but is now restored to the closest possible replication of its original 1721 form. Though having no direct connection with Bach, the Zwolle Schnitgerorgel is emblematic of the influential school of organ-building with which Bach was closely acquainted. Its robust construction and unique timbre​ make it an ideal instrument for playing Bach’s organ music, and Mr. Fickley’s performances on this disc are enhanced by the grandeur of the instrument at his disposal.

A native of Washington, D.C., Mr. Fickley has been acclaimed throughout his career as one of America's finest ​organists. Named a fellow of the American Guild of Organists at the age of twenty-three, Mr. Fickley exhibits both stylistic and philosophical similarities to the celebrated organist E. Power Biggs, who did much to popularize Schnitger organs for the performance and recording of music from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Opening this recorded recital with the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major (BWV 564), Mr. Fickley plays with unpretentious mastery, placing nothing between the listener and complete appreciation of the music. The strict rhythmic accuracy of his playing of the Toccata does not inhibit a suggestion of rhapsodic capriciousness, and he evokes the subdued atmospheres of the slow movements of Bach’s great concerti and suites with his phrasing of the Adagio. The contrapuntal writing in the Fugue often seems to require more than ten fingers and two feet, but Mr. Fickley negotiates its superhuman demands with his anything-but-ordinary human resources. He is especially successful at highlighting the harmonic individuality of countersubjects and secondary voices, something accomplished on the organ only with tremendous skill.

One of his great eighteen chorale preludes, Bach’s ​Francophile ​treatment of the five-stanza Reformation chorale 'An Wasserflüssen Babylon' (BWV 653), a piece set by a wide assortment of composers including Praetorius, Reincken, and Pachelbel, is an evocative response to the despondent text that likely dates from the last decade of the composer's life. In a sense, Bach’s music is truer to the text than many composers’ vocal settings of the chorale. The graceful sarabande in the French style is phrased by Mr. Fickley with an appealing air of ceremony, and the completeness of his understanding of Bach’s idiom is revealed by his delicate handling of the ritornelli and the tenor subject. The level-headed accuracy of the organist’s playing discloses the unparalleled ingenuity of the composer’s sometimes stunningly modern uses of harmony and modulations.

Likely an arrangement of a chamber work made by Bach for the educational benefit of his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, the Trio Sonata No. 1 in E-flat Major (BWV 525) makes no allowances for a student’s weaknesses. This is music as difficult as any that Bach composed for any instrument or ensemble, and Mr. Fickley devotes unflagging energy to his playing of the Trio Sonata’s opening Allegro movement, the textures of the music managed so that the melodic figurations never disappear amidst the cascades of sound. The lovely Adagio is followed by another Allegro, its mood lighter but no less demanding than the first movement. In both the Adagio and the final Allegro, Mr. Fickley plays exceptionally well, his affection for the music apparent in his thoughtful handling of the interplay between chord progressions and the emotional moods of the piece.

Mr. Fickley’s performance of the Prelude and Fugue in A minor (BWV 543) is marked by an expansively-phrased account of the Prelude and an unflappable consistency in elucidating the contrapuntal writing in the Fugue with instinctive balancing of the subject as it passes from voice to voice. These qualities are also at the core of his playing of the Partite diverse sopra il corale ‘Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig’ (BWV 768), a lovely inspiration in which Bach’s singular gift for harmonizing popular chorale melodies is especially apparent. The composer’s mastery of the styles of his own and previous generations is evident in the Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582), as well. In Mr. Fickley’s traversal of the Passacaglia, an unusual piece that is essentially a set of variations with a broadly-conceived fugue as the final variation, the majesty of the Schnitgerorgel rings out stirringly. As in the other selections on this disc, Mr. Fickley plays commandingly, performing in a manner that neglects neither the grandeur nor the individuality of the music.

Hearing a great organ in a space worthy of its sound is an experience like no other, and this first installment in Todd Fickley’s and MSR Classics Bach Project recreates that experience on compact disc as vibrantly as any recording has ever managed to do. Mr. Fickley is not a limelight-seeking organist like Virgil Fox: rather, he is clearly one whose scholarship and dedication equal his technique. In this recital of organ music by Bach, there is a rare intersection of great music, great instrument, and great player. Imagining Bach playing his own music as well as Todd Fickley plays it on this disc, is there any wonder that his contemporaries esteemed him most highly as an organist? When hearing musicality of this quality, one does not interrupt the player’s concentration to inquire about the provenance of a piece: one merely sits back, listens, and enjoys.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Don Giovanni, K. 527—J.C. Cha (Don Giovanni), Adam Lau (Leporello), Alexandra Loutsion (Donna Anna), Hailey Clark (Donna Elvira), David Blalock (Don Ottavio), Jennifer Cherest (Zerlina), David Weigel (Masetto), Benjamin LeClair (Commendatore); Chorus and Orchestra of North Carolina Opera; Timothy Myers, conductor [Crystal Manich, Stage Director; Lighting Design by Tláloc López-Watermann; A.J. Fletcher Opera Theater, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina; Saturday, 18 April 2015]

It is difficult to imagine the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s and Lorenzo da Ponte’s Don Giovanni must have made on audiences who witnessed its first performances in Prague in 1787. In this remarkable score, Mozart not only created a psychologically-nuanced context for a cultural icon—one that remains compelling even after 228 years—but also facilitated in a single work the musical transition from the Eighteenth Century to the Nineteenth. In Don Giovanni, the very modern concepts of condemnation and redemption collide frighteningly, the ramifications of one man’s machinations upsetting a chivalrous social order in ways both tangible and barely perceptible. Dramatically, the great marvel of Don Giovanni is that every character in the opera is an enigma. Is the title character an unrepentant lecher with one foot over the threshold of hell from the start or an inexplicably complex antihero who merely plays the rôle dictated to him by the society in which he participates? Are Anna, Elvira, and Zerlina his victims or his partners in a complicated dance that blurs the boundaries of morality? Is Leporello a willing accessory to his master's nefarious activities or a guileless servant following orders? These are questions with which any production of Don Giovanni must contend, and successful performances convey to the audience discernible aspects of the enigmatic metaphysical dimension of the opera that inspired E.T.A. Hoffmann to write in his Don Juan of 'the conflict of human nature with those unknown diabolical forces that, in surrounding it, ultimately spell its ruin.' Staged in the intimate space of the 600-seat A.J. Fletcher Opera Theater, North Carolina Opera's Don Giovanni peered very deeply into the tantalizing abyss of the opera's dramatic confrontations without being lost in the vortex of well-intentioned but misguided efforts at giving the characters recognizably modern sensibilities. Perhaps no other composer and librettist in operatic history more memorably and meaningfully gave characters in extremis sympathetic humanity than Mozart and da Ponte, and North Carolina Opera's production facilitated unprejudiced interaction with the characters and their motivations. Thoughtful and detailed, the performance nonetheless invited the involvement of the observer's imagination. Don Giovanni is a more known quantity to the people of Raleigh in 2015 than it was to the music-loving citizens of Prague in 1787, but North Carolina Opera's production enabled the genius and erudition of Mozart's and da Ponte's creation to illuminate the auditorium as though the ink were still wet on Mozart’s manuscript.

In her management of North Carolina Opera’s 2014 semi-staged performance of Dvořák’s Rusalka, Stage Director Crystal Manich revealed herself to be an innovative director of opera for whom invention does not equate with intrusion. Her direction of Don Giovanni was bold, sometimes daringly so, but always respectful of both composer and librettist. Even at its most fanciful, Ms. Manich’s concept of the opera was undeviatingly anchored in Mozart’s music and da Ponte’s words. The interplay among characters, enhanced by Tláloc López-Watermann’s wonderfully focused, natural lighting designs, was insightfully presented as the impetus for the text rather than a reaction to it, and stage action never impeded or distracted from singing. The rich hues and whimsical but flattering costume designs, originally created for Michigan Opera Theatre and adapted for North Carolina Opera's performances by Denise Schumaker, conjured an atmosphere of Wildean decadence that was bizarrely compatible with the opera’s sultry suggestiveness, and the set designs of Erhard Rom aptly placed the action in an idealized Eighteenth Century. Sondra Nottingham's wigs and makeup were stars of the production in their own right. Though the audience reveled in the production’s humor, much of which was genuinely funny [the pantomimic representation of the nationalities of Giovanni's conquests as cataloged by Leporello was hilarious, the Turkish stand-in donning a turban, and the fabulously buxom German lass munching on a pretzel], the comedy did not compromise the impact of the opera's fiery denouement. Many far more lavish productions of Don Giovanni have failed to serve the opera as well as North Carolina Opera's presentation: in this performance, Mozart's and da Ponte's description of the opera as a 'dramma giocoso' was reflected in all that transpired on stage.

The music of Don Giovanni challenges every singer and musician assembled to perform it, and a particular delight of North Carolina Opera’s performance was the strength of the foundation provided by the NCO Orchestra and Chorus. Mozart made great demands on the brasses and woodwinds, not least in his proto-Wagnerian music for the spectral Commendatore in Act Two, and the NCO players delivered their parts with stirring brio. String textures were occasionally less than ideally clean, but the mercurial writing in the Overture and ensembles was mostly brought off winningly. With Timothy Myers in the pit, the deftly-sprung rhythms of the playing were not surprising. The conductor’s understanding of Mozart repertory is instinctive, and he paced Don Giovanni with the authority of one who knows not only every note of the score but also the meaning of every word of the libretto. The cleverness of Ms. Manich’s direction was heightened by Maestro Myers’s witty accompaniment of secco recitatives, his extraordinary musicality shining in every passage and exuberantly-resolved cadence. He had no fear of grand Romantic gestures in scenes like Donna Anna’s accompagnato and aria ‘Or sai chi l'onore,’ and under his baton the poised, quintessentially Classical pages of the score never seemed coy or saccharine. Directed by Ben Blozan, the choristers also contributed positively to the performance, singing lustily but accurately. Primarily decorative until the opera’s penultimate scene, the chorus's singing as Don Giovanni was dragged to his infernal reward was rightfully commanding. In his work with North Carolina Opera, Maestro Myers has garnered a reputation for mastery of a broad repertory, but even among great achievements his conducting of Don Giovanni was especially successful.

It is unfortunate that in recent years the notion has developed that Mozart’s operas require a singular style of singing. Compared to the operas of Haydn, Mysliveček, Salieri, Dittersdorf, Holzbauer and other relative contemporaries, Mozart’s operas are unquestionably unique in terms of instrumental support of vocal lines, harmonic progression, and melodic distinction, but it is illustrative to note the numbers of singers of generations past who, despite being remembered as masters of other repertory, excelled in Mozart rôles. There is no finer Don Giovanni on records than Giuseppi Taddei, a singer who would now be unlikely to be assigned the part. Birgit Nilsson was a Donna Anna who could not be ignored, and both Dame Joan Sutherland and Leontyne Price were unforgettable in the rôle. Two of the Twentieth Century’s greatest Mozarteans, Elisabeth Grümmer and Edith Mathis, ladies so different in timbre and vocal production, epitomized the best tradition of Mozart singing, one embodied by a commitment to singing the music full-on. Eschewing the small-scaled, period-practice vocalism that has become fashionable in Mozart repertory, North Carolina Opera’s production honored the legacies of Mozart singers of bygone eras by allowing the well-chosen cast to sing their parts without self-conscious efforts at conforming to some arbitrary notion of how a Mozart singer ought to sound.

Anchoring the young, attractive cast, bass Benjamin LeClair was a Commendatore of dignity and power whose voice seethed with shock and anger in the Act One scene 'Lasciala, indegno, batiti meco!' Effective enough when the Commendatore’s voice was heard from off stage, the echo-chamber resonance applied to Mr. LeClair’s singing of 'Don Giovanni! a cenar teco m'invitasti' in the Act Two finale obscured the singer’s pitch, but he was a robust presence in the drama. As Masetto, Asheville-bred baritone David Weigel was appropriately giddy in his Act One duet with Zerlina, 'Giovinette, che fate all'amore,' but his high spirits quickly crashed back down to earth when Don Giovanni’s designs on Zerlina became obvious. Mr. Weigel sang Masetto’s aria 'Ho capito, Signor, sì,’ passionately, and he launched the Act One Finale with a steely account of 'Presto, presto, pria ch'ei venga.' He manfully suffered abuse from Don Giovanni in Act Two, and his vocalism, sometimes blunt and forceful rather than polished, was unfailingly effective. A tall, brawny fellow with a contagious smile, Mr. Weigel was perfectly matched with soprano Jennifer Cherest, whose perky, petite Zerlina was charm personified. In the first phrases of 'Giovinette, che fate all'amore,' Ms. Cherest’s intonation sounded uncertain, but her singing quickly took on the warmth, elation, and specificity of her acting. She joined with Giovanni in a seductive account of the famous duettino 'Là ci darem la mano,’ and she was the rare Zerlina who made something both touching and amusing of the aria 'Batti, batti, o bel Masetto,' her technique little challenged by the coloratura and ascent to top B. In Act Two, Ms. Cherest impressed both in ensembles and in her bright-toned singing of 'Vedrai, carino.' Her chemistry with Mr. Weigel was endearing, and it was fantastic to hear a voice more substantial than the usual airy (and air-headed) soubrette in Zerlina’s music.

The ardent, euphonious singing of North Carolina-born tenor David Blalock made the omission of Don Ottavio's sublime aria 'Dalla sua pace la mia dipende,' composed for renowned tenor Francesco Morella for the 1788 Viennese première of Don Giovanni, particularly regrettable despite its textual legitimacy. A handsome man whose face can convey a broad spectrum of emotions, Mr. Blalock made Ottavio a man of action who viewed Giovanni as a dangerous rival. In the Act One scene and duet with Donna Anna, his voice rang out confidently in the almost Verdian pledges of vengeance that crown 'Che giuramento, oh terror!’ Then, in the masqueraders' trio in the Act One finale, 'Protegga il giusto cielo,' he lovingly blended his voice with those of Anna and Elvria. In Act Two, many tenors are grateful merely to survive the aria 'Il mio tesoro intanto,' its punishing tessitura centered in the passaggio and repeated Fs at the top of the staff stretching their techniques to the breaking point, but Mr. Blalock excelled: phrasing with elegance, he was an Ottavio in whom poetry and heroism were combined in equal measure.

Hailey Clark, another native North Carolinian, portrayed a Donna Elvira at her wits’ end and, as Don Black and Christopher Hampton wrote in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, ‘too much in love to care.’ Making her entrance in Act One with an entourage, this Donna Elvira was slightly ridiculous but engrossingly touching. Ms. Clark used the roulades and climactic top As in 'Ah! fuggi il traditor!' as springboards for launching Elvira’s emotions into the laps of listeners, and the security of her singing of 'Non ti fidar, o misera' provided the energy that made the quartet a highlight of the performance. In both 'Bisogna aver coraggio, o cari amici miei!' and the masqueraders' trio, 'Protegga il giusto cielo,' in the Act One finale, Ms. Clark sang stunningly, the voice soaring above the turbulent orchestrations. In Act Two, she shone in the trio with Giovanni and Leporello, 'Ah! chi mi dice mai, quel barbaro dov'è,’ and the wonderful sextet, 'Sola, sola in bujo loco palpitar il cor mi sento.’ In the scene written for Caterina Cavalieri for the opera’s first production in Vienna, Ms. Clark unleashed a tsunami of emotions in the recitative 'In quali eccessi, o Numi.' Then, her traversal of the aria 'Mi tradì quell'alma ingrata' was like a bolt of lightning: suddenly, the clouds parted, and Elvira’s innate goodness was apparent. Bursting in on Giovanni’s gluttonous feast in the opera’s finale, Ms. Clark’s voicing of 'L'ultima prova dell'amor mio' was heartfelt and direct. A charge of dramatic electricity coursed through the auditorium whenever Ms. Clark was on stage, but the true glory of her Elvira was musical. She had every note of the part in her voice and knew how to place and project every tone with ideal impact. Hers was an Elvira to be loved, not pitied: whatever trouble partnering such a firebrand might cost him, Giovanni seemed a fool for having discarded such a woman as Ms. Clark portrayed.

The Donna Anna of Alexandra Loutsion was very much a lady of noble bearing, one whose grief and indignation were expressed in outpourings of darkly beautiful singing. In her opening scene in Act One, her singing of 'Non sperar, se non m'uccidi, ch'io ti laschi fuggir mai' was like flood waters tumbling over the top of a dam, her unflappability in rising repeatedly to top G signaling her suitability for the rôle. Duetting with Don Ottavio in 'Che giuramento, oh terror!' inspired Ms. Loutsion to singing of momentous intensity that grew even more compelling in the soprano’s singing of the accompagnato 'Don Ottavio, son morta!' and aria 'Or sai, chi l'onore rapire a me volse.' The aria’s repeated top As held no terrors for Ms. Loutsion: like Ms. Clark, she had all of her part’s notes in the voice and knew it. Her vocal line in the masqueraders' trio took her to glistening top B♭s, and her flinty solidity on high lent her singing in the Act One finale formidable histrionic thrust. ‘Crudele? Ah no, mio bene!’ and ‘Non mi dir, bell'idol mio,’ Anna’s accompagnato and aria in Act Two, are feared by sopranos—or, rather, by sopranos who, unlike Ms. Loutsion, are not completely capable of singing them. The aria’s coloratura is difficult even for a singer of Ms. Loutsion’s gifts, but she conquered both the bravura writing and the profusion of top As and B♭s. Dramatically, the sincerity of the soprano’s acting was refreshing. Greater variety of dynamics would occasionally have been welcome, but there are few pleasures in opera greater than hearing a sizable voice like Ms. Loutsion’s in full cry in music as enthralling as Donna Anna’s.

From the first notes of ‘Notte e giorno faticar, per chi nulla sa gradir’ in Act One, Adam Lau was a Leporello who had the audience in the palms of his hands. More impish opportunist than partner in crime, Mr. Lau’s Leporello was an ideal foil for Don Giovanni. There were both great fun and a suggestion of a tender effort at dissuading Elvira from pursuing Giovanni in his performance of the aria 'Madamina! il catalogo è questo.’ He caressed the melody of the andante con moto, 'Nella bionda egli ha l'usanza di lodarla la gentilezza,' gently flattering Ms. Clark’s becomingly blonde Elvira. His patter in ensembles was barnstorming, and every vocal gesture was matched by physical comedy worthy of Buster Keaton. In Leporello’s Act Two duet with Giovanni, 'Eh via, buffone, eh via, non mi seccar,' Mr. Lau sang splendidly, and his mimicry of Giovanni in serenading Donna Elvira was sidesplitting. His voicing of the aria 'Ah, pietà! Signori miei!’ crackled with fear and frustration, and his address to the Commendatore’s monument in 'O statua gentilissima' was artfully-phrased. Mozart and da Ponte wrote the rôle of Leporello so magically that a good singer can easily walk away with the laurels in a performance of Don Giovanni. The high quality of his colleagues’ portrayals meant that Mr. Lau shared the laurels, but in both voice and demeanor he was a world-class Leporello.

Jeongcheol Cha’s Don Giovanni dominated the performance as any Giovanni should but so few manage to do. In the opera’s opening scene, Giovanni’s carnal appetite was apparent in his pursuit of Anna, but there was a hint of genuine remorse in response to his slaying of the Commendatore. So different was the man who wooed Zerlina in 'Là ci darem la mano' that this Giovanni might have been thought to be bipolar. Mr. Cha beguiled and deceived with consummate arrogance in the quartet with Anna, Elvira, and Ottavio, and his singing of the quicksilver aria 'Fin ch'han dal vino calda la testa' was a model of dramatic bluster tempered by vocal control. His voicing of 'Riposate, vezzose ragazze!' in the Act One finale was similarly governed by absolute vocal surety. Mr. Cha’s account of 'Eh via, buffone, eh via, non mi seccar!' at the start of Act Two was bracing, the singer’s crisp diction—a trait that all of his colleagues shared, much to the benefit of the performance—increasing the vibrancy of his vocalism. The celebrated canzonetta 'Deh vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro' simply could not have been more wonderfully sung. As Giovanni’s destiny began to unravel, Mr. Cha’s singing only grew more granitic. In the aria 'Metà di voi quà vadano' and the sublime sextet, his voice radiated unwavering determination. Still, in 'Già la mensa è preparata' in the penultimate scene, his defiance and self-satisfaction were boundless. Projecting tones like missiles, this Giovanni battled supernatural retribution for his misdeeds to the very end: this was a man so accomplished at escaping justice that it seemed that even the flames of hell might be unable to grasp him. A few moments of struggle in rapid passagework were easily forgiven, and Mr. Cha must be congratulated for having recovered from a hard fall without missing a note. It is inexplicable that many of the world’s most renowned opera houses cast Don Giovanni with singers with familiar names who muddle the music embarrassingly when a singer like Mr. Cha sings the rôle so ingratiatingly.

Every production of Don Giovanni must choose a path to follow into the thicket of interpretation that has grown on the fertile ground of the score since its first performance in 1787. North Carolina Opera’s production traveled a route that started and ended where any operatic journey should logically remain: in the composer’s music and the librettist’s words. The audience learned from North Carolina Opera’s Don Giovanni that Eighteenth-Century Spain was an environment in which one’s honor had to be guarded more closely than any fiscal treasure, but the music-making was certainly magnificent!

Recantation: (left to right) Baritones Jacob Kato and Wesley McCleary-Small and countertenor Matthew Reese as the Cardinals, bass-baritone Deon’te Goodman as Pope Urban VIII (rear), and tenor Derek Jackenheimer as Old Galileo (front) in Scene Two of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei, April 2015 [Photo by Amy Holroyd, © by UNCG Opera Theatre]

PHILIP GLASS (born 1937): Galileo Galilei—Derek Jackenheimer (Old Galileo), Deon’te Goodman (Pope Urban VIII, Simplico, Cardinal Barberini), Matthew Reese (Cardinal 1, Father Sinceri, Oracle 1), Jacob Kato (Cardinal 2, Father Maculano, Servant, Oracle 2), Wesley McCleary-Small (Cardinal 3, Priest), Adrienne Leggett (Maria Celeste, Merope), Natalie Rose Havens (Scribe, Maria Maddalena), Lydia Pion (Sagredo, Marie de Medici, Eos), Derek Gracey (Salviati, Young Galileo), Holly Curtis (Duchess Christina), Evan Reich (Galileo as a child), Sarah Geraldi (Duchess Christina as a child), Brent Byhre (Orion), Baker Lawrimore (Oenopian); UNCG Opera Orchestra; Kevin Geraldi, conductor [David Holley, Stage Director and Producer; Randall McMullen, Scenic Designer; Trent Pcenicni, Costume Designer; Ken White, Lighting Designer; David Wagner, Assistant Conductor and Chorus Master; Chip Haas, Technical Director; UNCG Opera Theatre– Aycock Auditorium, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 19 April 2015]

In his 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.’ So, too, is travel through the musical landscapes of four centuries of operatic repertory. One often finds in unexplored music new horizons that expand one’s personal universe. The most prevalent notion in my individual understanding of opera is that the performance of all repertory, from Monteverdi to Muhly, is or should be governed by the essential tenets of bel canto. Whether one sings the ariosi of Cavalli, the ‘pathetic airs’ of Händel, the grandiose declamations of Wagner, or the thorny lines of Reimann, the poise, placement, and projection of basic bel canto are the technical foundation upon which an impressive edifice of any style can be constructed. Hearing Richard Croft’s dulcet bel canto singing in the Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha lent legitimacy to my belief: even the complex, minimalist music of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries profits as greatly from investment in the art of bel canto as do the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Glass’s Galileo Galilei confirmed that the foremost responsibility of any singer is not to know how to sing this or that piece stylishly but simply to know how to sing. Student productions often offer fascinating glimpses of the processes by which operas are brought to life, but UNCG Opera Theatre’s Galileo Galilei was a far more enlightening experience. Here, it was not isolated details that proved most involving but the totality of the production. The unmistakable core of the performance was beautiful singing, and Glass’s music responded to this handling as memorably as Verdi’s or Puccini’s.

With a libretto by Mary Zimmerman to which the composer and Arnold Weinstein​ made additions, Galileo Galilei is a sympathetic but unsentimental examination of the betrayal, disappointment, and necessity of self-preservation to which genius is subjected. Though the opera’s historicity is far more accurate than those of many period epics in the international repertory, the characters are also archetypes, a condition made particularly apparent by UNCG Opera Theatre’s casting. The conflicts among faith, authority, and science are no less prominent in the Twenty-First Century than in Galileo’s time; nor are the transient politics of church and state inventions of modern times. Directed and produced by UNCG's Director of Opera David Holley, the production made extraordinary use of every spatial, technical, and musical resource at the company's disposal. Randall McMullen's scenic designs would have been a credit to theatrical productions in any of the world's opera houses or musical theatre venues. The centerpiece of the set was a grand wooden staircase, the balustrades of which ingeniously served as Galileo's inclined plane and telescope. Revolving in a full circle, the staircase was also suggestive of a sundial and effectively framed the action of the opera. Trent Pcenicni's eye-pleasing, historically-correct costumes combined with the set, Ken White's expertly-managed lighting designs, and Chip Haas’s technical direction to evoke both the physical and emotional dimensions of each of the opera's ten scenes. In the opening scene, the blind Galileo's desolation was movingly depicted, and the claustrophobic oppression of the Inquisition was omnipresent. The projections of light passing through stained-glass windows conjured an imposing cathedral more credibly than the expensive sets seen in many opera productions. Projections of celestial bodies transformed the elegant interior of Aycock Auditorium into a planetarium that reflected the heavens revealed to man by Galileo’s invention of the telescope. In every scene, the production meaningfully mirrored the flow of Glass’s music, making the reverse chronology of the opera’s structure seem not only sensible but inevitable. Observed at the start of the opera, the doubt and loneliness that darkened the last years of Galileo’s life rendered the flowering of his genius and the sweet simplicity of his childhood all the more moving.

The Trial: (left to right) Baritone Jacob Kato as Father Maculano, tenor Derek Jackenheimer as Old Galileo, mezzo-soprano Natalie Rose Havens as the Scribe, and countertenor Matthew Reese as Father Sinceri in Scene Four of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei, April 2015 [Photo by Amy Holroyd, © UNCG Opera Theatre]

Conducted by​ Kevin Geraldi​, the UNCG Opera Orchestra excelled in playing a score that, in its difficulty and requirements of absolute precision of ensemble, spares not one musician. Though Glass’s familiar serialist idiom provides the basic structure of Galileo Galilei, the score is one of the composer’s most alluring. Any listener who alleges that Twenty-First-Century opera is not straightforwardly beautiful should hear this score. The melodic lines are often exquisitely attractive, and Glass’s writing for the elderly Galileo is as forceful and memorable as Gounod’s music for the aged Faust. The repetitive figurations that are a defining component of Glass’s singular style were executed by Maestro Geraldi and the orchestra with an engaging variety that was evidence of close and thoughtful study of the score. Serialism might seem an almost arbitrary means of crafting melodies and harmonic progressions, but there is in Galileo Galilei an expressivity that owes its poignancy to the contrasts created by the repeated musical fragments. Every member of the orchestra was an asset, a collective appreciation of the music emanating from the pit. Colin McDearman’s playing of the celesta was magical, and whether impersonating a cathedral organ or a synthesizer Rachel AuBuchon brought unerring precision to her negotiation of the pulse-like keyboard part. The alert, able string playing was complemented by uncommonly secure work from the wind instruments, exemplified by the performances of horn player Corinne Policriti and trumpeter Donnie McEwan. Maestro Geraldi’s tempi were unfailingly well-judged: the performance surged forward arrestingly without ever seeming rushed. Every phrase that emerged from the pit was aimed at the audience’s hearts, and the response to the opera confirmed that both the musicians’ efforts and Glass’s music found their target.

Towering both figuratively and literally over the opera’s first scene, ‘Opening Song,’ tenor Derek Jackenheimer was an Old Galileo so convincing that one’s knees ached in empathy as he struggled to navigate his reduced world. Tormented by blindness and memories of his beloved daughter and, a man of science to the last, desperate to justify the circumstances of his dotage with logic, he was a caged lion, exhausted and despairing but still hungry for understanding. The sting of the character’s plight was heightened by the singer’s exemplary diction: rarely is English text sung so clearly even by singers whose native language is English. Vocally, his performance was still more impressive. Possessing a strong voice over which he exercised near-perfect control, Mr. Jackenheimer projected superbly. The timbre is one of burly beauty, and his sure intonation throughout the range required by his music enabled emotionally direct portrayal of Galileo’s clashing sentiments. Set in June 1633, ‘Recantation,’ the second scene, introduced a quartet of excellent singing actors: bass-baritone Deon’te Goodman as Pope Urban VIII and countertenor Matthew Reese and baritones Jacob Kato and Wesley McCleary-Small as the interrogating Cardinals. Mr. Goodman’s firm, resonant voice lent gravity to the Pontiff’s proclamations, and the contrasting voices of Mr. Reese, Mr. Kato, and Mr. McCleary-Small blended in columnar articulations of archiepiscopal prerogative.

The mood of the performance transitioned from menace to dolorous nostalgia in the third scene, ‘Pears.’ Soprano Adrienne Leggett gave stirring accounts of selections from letters written to Galileo by his beloved daughter Maria Celeste. Her security above the staff proved vital in her assured jaunt through the punishing intervals of her part. Transporting the drama to April 1633, the fourth scene, ‘The Trial,’ pitted Mr. Jackenheimer’s Galileo against the Inquisition. Mr. Reese’s ethereal but iron-cored singing as Father Sinceri was matched with uncanny cohesion by Mr. Kato’s earthier tones. Their rejection of Cardinal Barberini’s letter of support for the scientist’s theories fell like the blow of an axe upon Galileo’s neck, and Mr. Jackenheimer evinced great consternation in his singing of Galileo’s self-defense. The fifth scene’s philosophical discussion of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, the book that led to the allegations of heresy that complicated the last decade of Galileo’s life, united soprano Lydia Pion as Sagredo with baritone Derek Gracey as Salviati and Mr. Goodman as Simplico. Slight weakness at the lower end of her range did not compromise the integrity of Ms. Pion’s performance, and Mr. Gracey enunciated Salviati’s arguments with focused tone. Costumed in garb similar to that of a Commedia dell'arte Arlecchino, Mr. Goodman’s Simplico was a personification of the good-natured Everyman, his voice caressing the phrases in which he sang of the human mind being one of God’s most wondrous creations.

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World: (left to right) Bass-baritone Deon’te Goodman as Simplico, soprano Lydia Pion as Sagredo, and baritone Derek Gracey as Salviati in Scene Five of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei, April 2015 [Photo by Amy Holroyd, © by UNCG Opera Theatre]

Scene Six, ‘Incline Plane,’ was in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production one of the most viscerally exciting sequences in the opera, its visual recreation of Galileo’s experiments with inclined plane that engendered his early postulation of the equation of falling bodies exhibiting great shrewdness. Eavesdropping on a conversation between Cardinal Barberini—later elected Pope Urban VIII—and Galileo in the Cardinal’s garden circa 1620, the seventh scene, ‘A Walk in the Garden,’ paired Mr. Goodman’s amiable but already nervous Cardinal with Mr. Gracey’s Young Galileo, a characterization so synchronized with Mr. Jackenheimer’s that the change of personnel was hardly noticeable despite the physical and vocal differences. The unease lurking beneath the surface of the gentlemen’s conversation was unnerving, but there was also an obvious affection between the cleric and the intellectual. ‘Lamps,’ the eighth scene, dramatized the epiphany of Galileo’s observation of pendular motion, he and his daughter conducting their scientific discourse over the ostinato of Mr. McCleary-Small’s intoning of the Priest’s Latin text. The trio of mezzo-soprano Natalie Rose Havens as Maria Maddalena, Ms. Pion as Marie de Medici, and soprano Holly Curtis as Duchess Christina produced streams of mellifluous sound in Scene Nine, ‘Presentation of the Telescope.’ Ms. Curtis and Mr. Gracey interacted with the aristocratic intimacy of Shakespearean lovers.

‘Opera within Opera,’ the tenth and final scene, depicted Galileo and Duchess Christina as children, endearingly portrayed by Evan Reich and Sarah Geraldi, watching the opera of Galileo’s father—a still-legendary lutenist and composer widely cited as a pioneer of monody and perhaps the inventor of recitative in the modern sense—mentioned by the adult Duchess in the preceding scene. Mr. Reich and Ms. Geraldi acted with maturity despite their youth, and their brief interactions with Mr. Jackenheimer and Ms. Curtis—their older selves—were unaffectedly profound. Returning as the Oracles, Mr. Reese and Mr. Kato were again sources of strength. The pantomime enactment of the mythological entanglement of Orion (Brent Byhre), Merope (Ms. Leggett), her father Oenopian (Baker Lawrimore), and the goddess Eos (Ms. Pion) was, in effect, a symbolic retelling of Galileo’s own story: blinded by the Holy Father’s suppression of knowledge, he achieved a kind of immortality by bringing mankind nearer to the eternal dawn of self-cognizance. The closing chorus rang through the theatre like thunder, the singers’ voices soaring in homage to the perseverance of genius.

Mark Twain’s suggestion that the truth should never be shared with anyone unworthy of it is an aphorism that is starkly relevant to Galileo Galilei’s suffering and the central precept of Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei. Glass’s opera is a work of absorbing musical appeal and dramatic sensitivity—in combination, the only truth needed in opera. In this appreciatively-conceived, outstandingly-rendered production, UNCG Opera Theatre proved conspicuously worthy of it.

Opera within Opera: Brent Byhre as Orion (left) and soprano Lydia Pion as Eos (right) in Scene Ten of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei, April 2015 [Photo by Amy Holroyd, © by UNCG Opera Theatre]

Dynamic Diva from Down Under: Australian mezzo-soprano Deborah Humble [Photo by Andrew Keshan, © by Deborah Humble]

Like Music itself, both what it takes and what it means to be an important singer are criteria that are perennially evolving. In this age in which a gifted singer can toil for years without receiving the attention that the voice deserves but in which a hard-won career can be ended by a single poorly-judged ‘tweet,’ the parameters by which a singer’s success are now measured might seem arbitrary and bewildering to singers of the past, singers who expected to be judged primarily for how they sang. Without question, there are now more well-trained singers before the public than at any other time in the four-century history of opera, but there now are also more obstacles to making a career as a singer. However vociferously their perceived absence is lamented, there are still great voices to be heard, though one must perhaps listen more diligently to hear them. When Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra closes the 2014 – 2015 Season with a concert performance of Act Three of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried on 26 April, among a quartet of esteemed Wagnerians will be heard one of the Twenty-First Century’s great voices, that of mezzo-soprano Deborah Humble. Born in Bangor, New South Wales, but raised in the South Australian capital of Adelaide, she embodies a tradition that in years past brought Australian artists like Dame Joan Sutherland and Dame Joan Carden to international prominence. Her studies at the University of Adelaide and Australian Catholic University of Melbourne complemented by receipt of the 2004 Dame Joan Sutherland Scholarship and being chosen as a finalist in the 2008 Seattle International Wagner Competition, she was a principal mezzo-soprano first with Opera Australia and then with Hamburgische Staatsoper. Singing an exceptionally varied repertory including rôles in operas as diverse as Händel’s Alcina and Janáček’s Jenůfa prepared her to accept one of the greatest challenges in opera: interpreting parts in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. As the Oehms Classics recordings of Der Ring, compiled from live performances conducted by fellow Aussie Simone Young confirm, Ms. Humble’s singing as Erda in Das Rheingold and Siegfried, Schwertleite in Die Walküre, and the First Norn and Waltraute in Götterdämmerung in Hamburg proclaimed the presence of a world-class Wagnerian on the international scene. Continuing the legacies of eminent Australian mezzo-sopranos like Margreta Elkins, Lauris Elms, and Yvonne Minton, this impeccably-trained, unfailingly-prepared artist is a dynamic Australian diva for the Twenty-First Century. In truth, though, excellent training and consistent preparation are insignificant if the quality of the voice does not match the care expended in cultivating it. Deborah Humble’s voice is like the spirit of her native Australia: fearless, indomitable, and beautiful in ways that words can only imperfectly and inadequately describe.

A delightfully intelligent, shrewd artist with complete cognizance of her musical roots, Ms. Humble is awed by the musical colossuses to whom she is often compared. ‘Margreta Elkins, Yvonne Minton, and Lauris Elms are three of Australia’s greatest-ever singers, and I am humbled to be considered to be upholding and expanding their legacy,’ she says. ‘Indeed, I had the great good fortune to learn with both Lauris in Australia when I was a beginning student and later with Yvonne in London. I learnt a great deal from these ladies, not only about the art of singing, interpretation, and technique but also about the personal values that they believed were important in a successful career: integrity, perseverance and patience, and an intuitive understanding of one’s own instrument. One of the nicest compliments I was ever paid in an Australian review said, “Deborah Humble surely evoked Elms and Elkins.” It was referring to my performance of Pauline in a concert version of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, and I still think there could really be no greater compliment for an Australian mezzo-soprano.’ Ms. Humble is also aware that the first fifteen years of the Twenty-First Century have been an amazing time for Australian artists, both at home and abroad. ‘Australian opera singers are visible all over the world right now, so the education and training in Australia must be said to be doing something right,’ she suggests. ‘I think Australian artists are aware of how lucky they are to get any opportunity overseas, perhaps more so than [those] who have lived in Europe, the UK, or America all their lives. This awareness makes them work especially hard, embrace learning opportunities, and take advantage of every professional and training situation. Having said that, they also have to demonstrate an even greater tenacity for new experiences than the average artist: new cultures, new languages, a totally different operatic system to what they are used to, suddenly having to understand their position on a world stage. Australia is geographically an isolated place, and pursuing a singing career abroad means being far away from family, friends—indeed, everything that has always been familiar. It can be a huge and daunting assimilation process, and it is not necessarily for everyone. I think that, whilst Australia can be confident of its developing culture in the present and future, there will always be more opportunities away from home for Australian artists.’

The sacrifices required of singers pursuing international careers are, as Ms. Humble intimates, intensified for Australians, for whom the geographical divides among artists and their ancestral homes are greater than for singers from almost anywhere else in the world. She is uncommonly clear-sighted about the unique circumstances that Australian musicians encounter when they pursue opportunities beyond their native shores. ‘The concept of “cultural-cringe” is not yet something that is entirely in the past,’ she shares. ‘That’s not a criticism,’ she quickly adds. ‘It’s just a fact—and something that we have to keep working towards together. It is also worth reminding Australians that everything that happens “overseas” is not necessarily always better. Perhaps the best quality of most Australians I know is their open-mindedness and ability to get along with people, an important quality for operatic teamwork’—a quality that, though she is too considerate a colleague to say so, too many singers—especially younger singers—lack.

No forgetting this lady’s fate: Mezzo-soprano Deborah Humble as the title heroine in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Opera Australia, 2004 [Photo © by Opera Australia]

Before diving into the Wagnerian waters that she now navigates so assuredly, Ms. Humble honed her craft by charting the very different seas of Baroque repertory. ‘The exposure to Early Music that I gained in Paris was extremely informative,’ she recalls. ‘First of all, I was passionate about Baroque music at the time, having completed a Master’s Degree in Oration and Gesture in Baroque Opera only a couple of years before arriving in France.’ In Ms. Humble’s view, this experience with Early Music was primarily a tutorial in stagecraft and, from her individual musical perspective, an instance of right place, right time. ‘I wouldn’t say that singing that repertoire shaped my future approach to Romantic music,’ she confides, ‘but I would say that it was very much the right music for me to be singing at the very earliest stages of a career. I still sing Händel and Monteverdi and Bach. It’s not easy, so it provides a challenge, but I also find [that] it keeps the voice fresh, versatile, and flexible. Working with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre also meant that I was exposed to great artists like Anne Sofie von Otter and David Daniels (both of whom I understudied), Dame Felicity Lott, Richard Croft, Gidon Saks, and Ewa Podleś and got to go on tour to the best concert halls and opera houses in Europe. It was an incredible and exciting education for a young Australian singer. We did a large amount of recording, so I also learnt something about that side of the music industry, and I still have lifetime contracts with Deutsche Grammophon and EMI and the royalties that those recordings earn.’ In addition to these benefits, Ms. Humble also fondly recollects interactions with fellow musicians that enriched her formative years in the business—musicians like renowned harpsichordist Jory Vinikour. ‘Yes, coaching with somebody as talented as Jory was an opportunity not to be underestimated,’ she says. ‘I remember going to his apartment in Paris for sessions. There were so many keyboards of various varieties in the living room: one could hardly find a place to stand for the lesson! I am very pleased for his enormous success and international reputation.’

Having sung rôles in operas by composers as varied as Purcell, Händel, Mozart, Donizetti, Mascagni, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, and Henze in addition to the Wagner ladies in her repertory, Ms. Humble is a model of the constructive effects of the versatility demanded of today’s young singers. ‘When one has a fixed contract at a German repertoire house, it is guaranteed that you will be required to sing a wide variety of rôles both large and small,’ she states. ‘For me, this was a very positive experience as I was never asked to undertake anything that wasn’t appropriate. I was not only able to continue developing my technique during my five years at the Hamburgische Staatsoper but I also learnt a lot about stagecraft and the art of rehearsing things in a very short period of time. I had exposure to great coaches who influenced my musical interpretations and language development.’ This exposure aided her in refining her sensibilities as an artist and determining the course that she would pursue in her career. ‘Since becoming a freelance artist four years ago, I have much more choice in the repertoire I would like to sing. One of the most positive things about being a dramatic mezzo-soprano is the fact that the voice develops later than some other voice types, and that means that new repertoire is always opening up. With every note added to the range, that means another rôle becomes possible.’ With her solid technical foundation and stylistic adaptability, future opportunities are virtually limitless, she feels. ‘I can’t think of a rôle in my Fach which would never be possible for me to sing—assuming that I continue to develop in the next few years.’

After singing Erda in Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra’s concert performance of Act Three of Siegfried on 26 April, Ms. Humble’s performance diary includes her inaugural interpretation of Brangäne in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which she will sing in Mexico City under the direction of Jan Latham-König, followed by Judit in Béla Bartók’s A kékszakállú herceg vára (Bluebeard’s Castle) in Melbourne. These are two of the most daunting rôles in the repertory, but Ms. Humble imparts that, in her opinion, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. ‘I often think that the real demands of a particular rôle are not totally evident until after you have performed it for the first time,’ she indicates. ‘Singing something through in a practice room or in rehearsals is very different from doing it on stage in front of an audience. Only when you have done that do you know where the inherent difficulties really lie; where greater breath control might be required, where greater nuance and color would be of benefit, where to conserve, where to give a bit more. Brangäne is quite a physically- and emotionally-demanding rôle. So far, I have really been studying the opera as a whole from a historical perspective. It is certainly difficult to overstate the importance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the operatic repertoire. His use of chromatisicm and uninhibited dissonances challenged the accepted idea of tonality and contributed to the belief that this was the beginning of modern music. The idea of human love that goes beyond emotion into a metaphysical world needs to be understood via an understanding of the libretto, the orchestral music, and, eventually, by the staging. Last year, when I performed my first Wesendonck Lieder, I began looking at the ideas of Schopenhauer and how Wagner was influenced and attracted by concepts such as death and night, dreams and ecstasy, and unattainable worldly love. These themes are also relevant in Tristan since Wagner was in the middle of his love affair with Mathilde Wesendonck during its composition. All of these things help to put a new rôle into context whilst undertaking the technical and musical study required.’

Don’t judge me: Mezzo-soprano Deborah Humble as Amneris in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at Opera Australia, 2013 [Photo by Jeff Busby, © by Opera Australia]

Highlights of the past few seasons in Ms. Humble’s career include her first Amneris in Verdi’s Aida with Opera Australia and singing Catherine in Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. Her commitment to singing not just familiar music like Verdi’s but also less-known works is indicative of the affection and respect that this singer has for her vocation. ‘It is a great privilege to be able to do the thing that you love most for a job,’ she muses. ‘If your work is something you enjoy doing, then it never really feels like work. That is the best thing about my career. I enjoy the ongoing challenges, and as I get better and better at what I do it becomes even more enjoyable. I am very grateful for how things have worked out for me because I had to do a lot of things I didn’t enjoy in order to get where I am today. That makes me more appreciative for every contract, every performance. We never know when the work will stop coming in, so it is important to treat every opportunity with 100% commitment. I have always tried to do that. The ability and opportunity to express oneself through music really is a great gift. Dealing with the insecurity of the profession, the traveling, the stress of staying in good vocal health, living in hotels, and being away from family and friends are some of the inconveniences of the profession. Sometimes, you have to be careful what you wish for. But there is nothing else I would rather do.’ If she were starting her career now, with the knowledge that she has acquired through her studies and engagements, what would she do differently? ‘I went to university when I was seventeen, so I really didn’t know anything about the world of music outside of a structured school setting,’ she reflects. ‘I knew I wanted to be a singer, but I had absolutely no clue what that entailed or how to go about getting to the next step. When I graduated with a Bachelor of Music Performance three years later, I still didn’t really understand anything about the nature of my chosen career, and, to be honest, I couldn’t really sing very well, either! I had a limited repertoire of songs and oratorio pieces, and, since I couldn’t sing above the stave, I knew only three or four arias. I knew I had to leave Adelaide, but where to go and what to do next were a bit of a mystery. I was very determined, although it is true to say I had no idea how hard a career in singing was going to be. Having gone to an all-girls’ school for seventeen years, that time at university was probably more about learning on a social level than a musical one. I don’t think I have changed all that much over the years. I still enjoy doing the same things now as I did then. I don’t think I would tell my seventeen-year-old self to do much differently. I might tell her to worry less about what other people think or to have greater self-confidence. Otherwise, I think I am lucky to look back and feel that there is very little I would alter.’

Returning to the theme of her place in the lineage of great Australian mezzo-sopranos, Ms. Humble is attentive to the remarkable ways in which the narratives of the careers of Twenty-First-Century singers can be shaped by circumstances beyond their control. As she suggested in her comment about advising her younger self to worry less about others’ opinions, her energy is focused on connecting with audiences directly, one on one, as is only possible through music. First and foremost, the aspect of her artistry that facilitates those connections is the voice itself, and, when asked which impressions she hopes to leave with audiences, she responds contemplatively. ‘That’s a very difficult question! I suppose what most people comment on when they talk about my voice is its color and quality. They talk of warmth and depth, carrying power, chocolate, honey, and red wine! I would like to be remembered as an artist who committed to everything [she] did, someone with a compelling stage presence, someone who could help people escape from the reality of their lives for a moment in time and to dream about something else. At the end of the day, my voice is only one part of me. It would also be nice to be thought of as someone people were happy to work with, a generous colleague with a good sense of humor.’ Her performances reveal all of these qualities, but it is this last statement that discloses the heart of Ms. Humble’s artistry: a desire to be a great singer who, off the stage, is equally a great person.

Few singers invite or deserve comparison with the legendary Marian Anderson. The obstacles that she overcame made her a legend, but it was her voice that made her a legendary artist. With its satiny texture, reserves of steely power and molten-lava sensuality, earthy lower register, and lightning-bolt top notes, Deborah Humble’s voice is the rare instrument that warrants comparison with that of Marian Anderson. Sadly, the Wagnerian credentials of many of Australia’s most important mezzo-sopranos remain too little appreciated beyond Oz’s shores, but Margreta Elkins and Lauris Elms were integral to the musical and dramatic triumphs of Sir Charles Mackerras’s Australian concert performances of Tristan und Isolde, Die Walküre, and Götterdämmerung with Rita Hunter in the 1980s. Though her Wagnerian journeys are only one facet of her sparkling artistry, Deborah Humble is what her countrymen might term a ridgy-didge talent—in short, the genuine article. In her, today’s Brünnhildes and Isoldes have a platinum-voiced confidante and a splendidly worthy adversary.

Earth Day: Mezzo-soprano Deborah Humble as Erda in Richard Wagner’s Siegfried at Oper Halle, 2013 [Photo © by Oper Halle]

To learn more about Deborah Humble and her upcoming engagements, please visit her Official Website.

Ms. Humble is represented in Australia and Asia by Patrick Togher Artists’ Management; in the UK by James Black Management; and in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by Kunstleragentur Wrage. Her Press and Public Relations Representative is Tim Weiler of O-PR Communications.

Sincerest thanks to Ms. Humble for her time and extraordinary candor in responding to questions for this profile and to Tim Weiler for facilitating the interview.

HUGH WOOD (born 1932): Wild Cyclamen– Art Songs—Clare McCaldin, soprano; James Gilchrist, tenor; Roderick Williams, baritone; Iain Burnside and Simon Lepper, piano [Recorded at Michael Tippett Centre, Bath Spa University, UK, on 8 February 2014 (The Isles of Greece), and All Saints Church, East Finchley, London, UK, on 17 June 2014 (Laurie Lee Songs) and 17 – 18 November 2014 (DH Lawrence Songs and Wild Cyclamen); NMC Recordings NMC D201; 1 CD, 63:48; Available from NMC Recordings, Amazon (USA), Amazon (UK), jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Any admirer of Art Song, whether within or beyond England’s borders, who is not familiar with the songs of Hugh Wood does himself, the composer, and the genre he claims to appreciate a gross disservice. Born in Lancashire in 1932 and educated in the art of composition by luminaries including William Lloyd Webber—whose own songs are woefully neglected, particularly in the United States—and Iain Hamilton, Wood is in many ways the quintessential British composer: gifted, raised in a musical household, and impeccably trained, he seems to have fulfilled an inevitable destiny. There is nothing ordinary or expected in the sixty-four minutes of Wild Cyclamen, this latest treasure from NMC Recordings, however. Representing a wide swath of Wood’s compositional career, the songs on Wild Cyclamen disclose the voice of a creative spirit clearly acquainted with the songs of Finzi, Quilter, Britten, and Tippett, influenced and perhaps even inspired by them, but compellingly individual. These are songs by a composer with profound understanding of and response to words: in the best of the songs offered here, the texts are set not syllabically but conceptually—indeed, often sensually, the relationships among words and music throbbing with intimacy and the sort of connection that transcends conventional modes of communication. In its purest form, song is the medium via which composers, performers, and listeners can converse in language too delicate for handling except in music. Hugh Wood’s songs are that medium, and what wondrous things they say in the performances on this disc!

In her singing of the Laurie Lee Songs, composed between 1956 and 1958 whilst Wood was studying with Hamilton and Mátyás Seiber, mezzo-soprano Clare McCaldin allies a strong, luxurious timbre and an incredible upper register that would be the envy of many dramatic sopranos with an accomplished actress’s sensitivity to both the sounds and the significance of words. Accompanied with ideal musical and interpretive synchronicity by Iain Burnside, she establishes unique moods in each song with an economy of means: not one phrase is sung with accents bolder than the music allows. She and Mr. Burnside distill the drama of ‘Boy in Ice’ into an exceptionally potent elixir, the intoxicating spirit of which is drawn from the text. The ethos of ‘The Edge of Day’ is unexpectedly enigmatic, and Ms. McCaldin uses her upper register as an interpretive device by punctuating her carefully-formed phrases with notes at the top of the staff that articulate the elevating sentiments of both music and text. The influence of Stravinsky permeates ‘The Easter Green,’ which Ms. McCaldin and Mr. Burnside approach with unbreakable concentration. The deceptive simplicity of ‘Town Owl’ is strangely unsettling, particularly when the vocal line is delivered as enchantingly as Ms. McCaldin sings it, and her account of ‘April Rise’ mines the expressivity of the composer’s diatonic structure of the song. Ms. McCaldin sang the Laurie Lee Songs in recital in the Royal Opera House’s Crush Room in 2013, and her experience with them is evident in her definitive performances on this disc. Stridency and a very slight loosening of the vibrato fleetingly affect her singing as recorded here, but neither her musicality nor the integrity of her profitable partnership with Mr. Burnside is compromised.

The DH Lawrence Songs, published in 1998 but the fruits of many years’ labors, receive from tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Simon Lepper performances of unhesitating attack and splendid imagination. As he is among the most successful Evangelists in Bach’s Passions of his and any generation, it is not surprising that Mr. Gilchrist exhibits such unshakable confidence in the high tessitura of Wood’s music, nor is the unaffected clarity with which he sings English texts unexpected. He and Mr. Lepper collaborate on an insightful account of the jarring ‘Dog-tired,’ which they follow with ardent, touching performances of ‘Kisses in the Train’ and ‘Roses on the breakfast table,’ two of Lawrence’s most evocative texts. The histrionic power of Mr. Gilchrist’s singing of ‘Gloire de Dijon’ is echoed by the unpretentious mastery of Mr. Lepper’s playing, though here and in isolated passages in other songs—and in his performance of Wild Cyclamen—the tenor’s emphatic singing occasionally threatens to overwhelm the music. The poetic grace that radiates from his shaping of ‘River Roses,’ supported by Mr. Lepper’s playing, is very effective, however, both singer and pianist phrasing with unsentimental expressivity.

Every opportunity to hear the fantastic voice of baritone Roderick Williams is a gift, but his singing of the five songs of Wood’s The Isles of Greece on this disc is truly extraordinary. One can only imagine hearing Vogl sing Schubert Lieder or experiencing the magic that Giuditta Pasta brought to the rôles composed for her by Bellini and Donizetti, but NMC’s endeavor here allows an opportunity to enjoy an equal pleasure, that of hearing Mr. Williams sing music by a living composer for which his voice is as perfectly-suited as Vogl’s and Pasta’s must have been for Winterreise and Norma. As he was for Ms. McCaldin in the Laurie Lee settings, Mr. Burnside is an ideal partner for Mr. Williams’s traversal of The Isles of Greece. Both gentlemen give to their performances of ‘Delos,’ ‘Nemea,’ and ‘Bitter Lemons,’ settings of texts by Lawrence Durrell, close attention to detail that is thorough without being pedantic. Wood’s handling of Robert Graves’s ‘Ouzo Unclouded’ is masterful, the composer’s melodic fragments unleashing the full impact of the poet’s sparse imagery. Mr. Burnside’s rhythmically rapier’s-point playing is here an especially vital asset, bolstering Mr. Williams’s bold, imaginative singing. The baritone’s and pianist’s performance of ‘In the sea caves,’ a treatment of Edmund Keeley's and Philip Sherrard's translation of a text by George Seferis, is frankly one of the most gorgeous recordings of song in the English language: reducing the voice to a ribbon of tone, Mr. Williams envelops the music with a delicate shroud of crystalline beauty. The words of the short-lived Demetrios Capetanakis in ‘The Isles of Greece’ could hope for no more eloquent articulation than they receive from Mr. Williams, whose every interpretive impulse is sensed and seconded by Mr. Burnside.

Mr. Lepper accompanied tenor Andrew Kennedy in the world première of Wild Cyclamen in Manchester in 2006, and he partners Mr. Gilchrist in an emotionally raw but musically polished performance on this disc. Though the author of the poems set by Wood, Robert Graves, did not group these texts as a cohesive narrative, Wild Cyclamen was conceived by the composer as a song cycle in the tradition of Schubert and Schumann. Starting the cycle’s examination of the development of a love affair, ‘A Dream of Frances Speedwell’ is sung by Mr. Gilchrist with the smiling insouciance of a man in the grip of burgeoning passion. The sentiments of ‘Wild Cyclamen’ are self-explanatory, and neither singer nor pianist overreaches in his execution of Wood’s musical gestures. Likewise, the atmosphere of ‘Beatrice and Dante’ is charged but never caricatured. Musically, Wood’s inspiration is at its most memorable in ‘The Garden’ and ‘The Leap,’ which are etched with silvery sincerity by Mr. Gilchrist and Mr. Lepper. The disquiet of ‘Not to Sleep’ is powerfully evinced, and the tartness of ‘The Crab-Tree’ is sharply portrayed. The ambiguity of ‘Bites and Kisses’ is knowingly conveyed by Mr. Gilchrist, the irony keenly drawn but unexaggerated. The final quartet of songs, beginning with the stark ‘Horizon,’ recount the deterioration of love, and Mr. Gilchrist proves a noble but wrenching interpreter of these songs. ‘The Window Sill’ draws from him singing of incredible concentration, the voice used as a weapon against the increasing menace of the text. Then, in ‘A Lost Jewel,’ he and Mr. Lepper conjure an air of restless uncertainty. ‘Hedges Freaked with Snow’ is a creation of which Mahler would have been proud, the near-perfect marriage of music and words symbolically contrasting with the spirit of the text: similarly, the refinement of Mr. Gilchrist’s singing and Mr. Lepper’s playing highlights the volatility of the music. Throughout their performance of Wild Cyclamen, Mr. Gilchrist and Mr. Lepper offer instance after instance of intuitive phrasing and dramatic intelligence.

Every nation should have a record label as committed to preserving the work of its composers, singers, and musicians as NMC Recordings is to documenting the best contemporary Classical Music of the British Isles. Fortunately for listeners throughout the world, the decision makers at NMC have adopted as a guiding principal the notion that anything worth doing is worth doing well. That presiding philosophy has never been more apparent than on this disc. Even in 2015, so much time is wasted with discussion of the differences that divide nations, cultures, and peoples when every nation, culture, and people can solve problems through music. A listener need not be British in order to enjoy the terrific performances of Clare McCaldin, James Gilchrist, Roderick Williams, Iain Burnside, and Simon Lepper on Wild Cyclamen. Good music and good music-making need no translation.

SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873 – 1943): Piano Concerti No. 2 in C minor (Opus 18) and No. 3 in D minor (Opus 30)—Stewart Goodyear, piano; Czech National Symphony; Heiko Mathias Förster, conductor [Recorded at CNSO Studio No. 1, Prague, Czech Republic, 15 – 18 October 2014; Steinway & Sons Steinway30047; 1 CD, 76:06; Available from Amazon, ClassicsOnlineHD, and major music retailers]

Whether one is a pianist or a poet, practitioner or pretender, it is easier to concur with the allegations that the significance of Classical Music in the still-new century is undermined by a lack of significant artists than to prove them wrong. Perhaps this also seemed true of his own time to Sergei Rachmaninov, whose career as a pianist and composer spanned an era of unprecedented cultural and social transition and upheaval. Born in 1873 into the class of gentry that would be all but annihilated by the political turmoil that gripped Russia during the final decades of the Romanov dynasty, Rachmaninov was himself the inheritor of an imperiled artistic lineage. In an environment in which musical conversation was increasingly dominated by atonality, his mother tongue was unabashed Romanticism, an idiom to which he clung not as a safety net but as a source of inspiration and direct connection with traditions extending back to Haydn and Mozart. Like Brahms, Rachmaninov was inspired rather than confined by the legacies of his musical predecessors, and the importance of his Piano Concerti to the grand tradition of the Romantic concerto is tremendous. With acclaimed recordings of music by Beethoven, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky already to his credit, Canadian-born pianist Stewart Goodyear also communicates in the language of Romanticism with fluency that Rachmaninov could have appreciated. It is hardly remarkable that a gifted young pianist should play Rachmaninov’s concerti, but the performances of the Second and Third Concerti recorded by Mr. Goodyear for Steinway and Sons are exceptional for an artist of any age. Many pianists, especially younger ones, find in Rachmaninov’s concerti vehicles for the sort of empty virtuosic posturing that inspires the suggestions of Classical Music’s eroding significance. At its core, this disc preserves conversations between two artists, composer and pianist, not about the ways in which musical tastes evolve but about the fact that the interactions among great music and great musicians are virtually unchanged since man first committed music notes to paper.

This disc is the culmination of a long period of intensive study in which Mr. Goodyear clearly approached these concerti both with the traditions of pianists like Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn in mind and from a completely fresh, individual perspective. In part, Mr. Goodyear’s playing in general combines Horowitz’s sensitivity and noble phrasing with Cliburn’s explosive power, but the performances on this disc confirm that he is very much his own artist. Nothing in his interpretations of these concerti is borrowed from great performances or recordings of past generations, but there is much that pianists of the future could learn from Mr. Goodyear’s playing as recorded here. Playing a Hamburg Steinway Model C and recorded with near-ideal clarity and balance by producer Keith Horner and engineer Jan Kotzmann, this gifted young artist makes the music of Rachmaninov his own without ever making the performances more about himself than about the composer.

Written between autumn 1900 and April 1901 and premièred in complete form with the composer at the keyboard in November 1901, Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor (Opus 18) is among Rachmaninov’s most familiar works though the composer himself deemed it a difficult, troubled piece. In his Piano Concerti, Rachmaninov adhered at least in most basic construction to the sonata form that had been the skeletal foundation for concerti since the pioneering efforts of Haydn and Mozart, but Mr. Goodyear’s imaginative yet astonishingly precise playing illuminates the ways in which Rachmaninov manipulated structures, harmonic progressions, and thematic development in distinct demonstrations of imagination. Under the direction of conductor Heiko Mathias Förster, the musicians of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra play capably, the rich string timbre matched by sonorous wind playing with little of the tartness familiar from many vintage recordings by Eastern European ensembles. In the opening Moderato movement, Mr. Goodyear and the Symphony musicians seem to actually listen to one another, their shaping of key phrases conspicuously symmetrical. The Adagio sostenuto second movement is very eloquently done, both pianist and conductor limning the significance of the Più animato transition from C minor to E major and the critical recapitulation of the movement’s principal theme. Mr. Goodyear emphasizes the cumulative impact of the music rather than focusing on particular details and thereby risking distortion of the composer’s meticulously-conceived musical architecture. Intelligent negotiation of the modulations from E major to the root C minor and then to the terminal C major is integral to Mr. Goodyear’s playing of the Allegro scherzando final movement. He eschews none of the music’s latent Indian-summer Romanticism, but the abiding sensibility is a very modern one. Though lacking nothing in energy or primal brawn, Mr. Goodyear’s playing of the Allegro scherzando is characterized by an avoidance of cheap posturing. Textures are kept lean even when the music it at its most robust, revealing Rachmaninov’s very logical solutions to musical problems—solutions that in many performances are hidden beneath waves of egotistical pounding of the keys.

Popularized beyond the ranks of Classical Music enthusiasts by the 1996 feature film Shine, which used it prominently in depicting Australian pianist David Helfgott's struggles, the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor (Opus 30) was completed in 1909. Rachmaninov dedicated the Concerto to the celebrated pianist Josef Hofmann, who never attained a level of comfort with the piece that would have enabled him to perform it publicly. The Concerto was premièred in New York with the composer at the piano and Walter Damrosch on the podium and was later conducted, much to Rachmaninov's satisfaction, by Gustav Mahler. The monumental scale of the music that likely contributed to Mahler’s appreciation and mastery of it seems also to inspire Mr. Goodyear, who plays the epic score with the eagerness of a youngster playing it for the first time and the confidence of a veteran who has played it a hundred times before. The grand diatonic subject of the opening Allegro ma non tanto movement is sculpted with tremendous surety of rhythm, and Maestro Förster and the orchestra exchange ideas with Mr. Goodyear with rousing musicality. The pianist employs Rachmaninov’s first, chordal ossia cadenza and delivers it with perfectly-timed aplomb. The central Intermezzo: Adagio movement, bridging a modulation from F-sharp minor to D-flat major, is one of Rachmaninov’s most radiantly beautiful creations, and Mr. Goodyear plays it not as a languorous, sentimental tour de force but as a profoundly personal, poignant exploration of musical light and shadows. Maestro Förster maintains a consistent level of tension in the orchestra, preparing climaxes that are resolved by Mr. Goodyear’s entrancingly poetic cadences. If the Concerto’s second movement is some of Rachmaninov’s most soulful music, the third movement—Finale: Alla breve—is some of his most exuberantly virtuosic. The pianist’s technique is here at its most dizzying, his playing of the grandiose chords and melodic figurations distinguished by assured navigation of the difficult intervals. As with similar metamorphoses in the preceding movements, the transition from D minor to D major in the Finale receives deft handling from both Mr. Goodyear and Maestro Förster. Duplicating the gesture in the final movement of the Second Concerto, Rachmaninov’s unique four-note musical signature is integrated into the closing of the Third Concerto: this performance discloses its presence without over-accentuating it. Most refreshingly, Mr. Goodyear does not play these Concerti as tired warhorses that require suitably martial pomposity or as stepping stones along a young musicians path to the pianistic Pantheon. Rather, he plays them with the affection of a communicative, open-hearted pianist who has gotten to know these scores through fastidious examination and now considers them friends.

William Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 116 that ‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds,’ and this sentiment is especially appropriate to music. Too many musicians pervert the necessity of finding one’s own way of interpreting pieces into an excuse for wrong-headed forays into idiosyncratic execution that push listeners away from composers and their scores rather than being the catalyst for their fusion. Ultimately, great works of art need only to be seen or heard, and these performances by Stewart Goodyear allow the listener to hear Sergei Rachmaninov’s Second and Third Piano Concerti without distractions. He reminds the listener that an accomplished pianist can wrap his heart, mind, and fingers around any score, but only an accomplished artist trusts himself and the music enough to allow composers’ voices to sing through his own.

Harpsichord Hero: Harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour, recitalist in Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress, 25 April 2015 [Photo by Hermman Rosso, © by Jory Vinikour]

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750), GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759), JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU (1683 – 1764), and DOMENICO SCARLATTI (1685 – 1757): Music for Harpsichord—Jory Vinikour, harpsichord [Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Saturday, 25 April 2015]

There is something magical about the infrequent unions of great music, great musicians, and great spaces. These marvels of musical serendipity are sometimes far from the eyes and ears of spectators, as it surely was when Bach sequestered himself in the Thomaskirche organ loft and played his music solely for God’s ears. More often, these events are all the more extraordinary for playing out before astonished audiences, some of whom do not appreciate in the moment the significance of what they are witnessing. Imagine seeing the deaf Beethoven presiding over the 1824 première of his Ninth Symphony in Vienna’s Theater am Kärntnertor or Geraldine Farrar portraying the despondent nun in the first performance of Puccini’s Suor Angelica at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918. To those who love Baroque repertory, internationally-renowned harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour’s début at the Library of Congress with a recital of music by Bach and Händel, plus encores by Rameau and Domenico Scarlatti, was such an occasion. Born in Chicago but long resident in France, this exceptionally gifted artist is now devoting more time to his native country, where, despite recent engagements with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Haymarket Opera, Pegasus Early Music, and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, his work remains far too infrequently heard and inconsistently appreciated. This marvelous Library of Congress recital, very warmly received by the capacity audience, and a Carnegie Hall performance in December should do much to rectify this neglect of one of America’s artistic treasures. Playing such as Mr. Vinikour achieved in the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium is rare on any instrument and in any context: at his fingertips, three centuries no longer separated masterpieces of the Baroque from today’s listeners.

In the Eighteenth Century, Georg Friedrich Händel’s eight suites of pieces for harpsichord published in 1720 were justifiably regarded as some of the most important works for the instrument. Not surprisingly, the suites fell into neglect in the second half of the century, as the harpsichord increasingly became a fugitive from obsoleteness hiding in the orchestra pits of Europe’s opera houses, but revival of interest in Baroque repertory in the second half of the Twentieth Century restored to the suites a measure of their original prestige. Mr. Vinikour is a model of all that is right with the historically-informed performance practice movement. His technique is centered in fingering and phrasing appropriate to the instruments of the early Eighteenth Century and the music written for them, but in this performance the music never sounded as though it was extracted from a dusty tome found in some dark recess of the Library’s collection. Perhaps his extensive work with singers—he travelled to Washington for this recital in a brief respite from his participation in the Salzburg Whitsun Festival production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride with Cecilia Bartoli—contributes to his unerring projection of principal subjects even in the most complex contrapuntal music. Opening his recital with Händel’s Suite in A major (HWV 426), Mr. Vinikour immediately provided evidence of his prowess both for playing such technically-demanding music and for exposing the full spectrum of the timbral and dynamic possibilities of the instrument at his disposal, in this case a beautiful—and beautiful-sounding—double-manual harpsichord built by Thomas and Barbara Wolf in the style of a 1738 instrument by Christian Vater. [In the interest of full disclosure, it should be admitted that Mr. Vinikour’s performance of HWV 426 was observed via video feed from the auditorium, snarled traffic in northern Virginia regrettably having delayed the author’s arrival.] The Prä​ludium was played with care for its sharply-defined rhythms and taut harmonies, and the vivid Allemande received from Mr. Vinikour a traversal that accentuates its quirky charm—perhaps Germans of Händel’s time were rather livelier than they are given credit for having been. The stately Courante was phrased with considerable eloquence, the principal theme finessed with unforced grace. The formidable strength of Mr. Vinikour’s left hand provided a firm foundation for the Gigue​​, upon which an ornate but substantial edifice was built from the raw materials provided by Händel.

Not solely because of its key, the Suite in ​F-​sharp minor (HWV 431​) is a darker, more nuanced work than the A-major Suite. The Präludium would not sound out of place in several of Händel’s London operas: played by Mr. Vinikour, it was a mercurial, stirring number that exploited the wonderful evenness of tone throughout the instrument’s compass. No emotional subtext was forced onto the Largo, the sentiments already in the music allowed to make their own effects without interference. This was also true of the fugal Allegro, its divisions delivered with awe-inspiring ease. Like that of HWV 426, the Gigue of HWV 431 is an aptly impressive finale to the Suite, and Mr. Vinikour played it commandingly. Unfeigned connection with the music at hand is ever a telltale hallmark of Mr. Vinikour’s artistry, and the expressivity that he manifested in Händel’s music—often unaccountably deemed superficial, particularly when compared with Bach’s works for the keyboard—held the audience in unusually respectful silence as he played.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s grandiloquent ​Ouvertüre nach Franzö​sischer Art in B minor (BWV 831) is the composer’s longest piece for the keyboard, one specially-crafted to take advantage of the full panoply of capabilities of the double-manual harpsichord—and, indeed, of the harpsichordist. Playing the complete recital from memory, Mr. Vinikour took all repeats in the Ouvertüre except for that of the 6/8 fugue in the first of the piece’s eleven movements. Opening with an expansively-phrased account of the Overture and Fugue, he paced a performance of the work that was remarkable for both its abiding cohesiveness and the differentiation of the distinctive moods and rhythms of each successive movement. The ​Courante revealed unexpected depths of emotion in Mr. Vinikour’s hands, and the pairs of both Gavottes and Passepieds were played with uniquely complementary energy and subtlety. The sentimental heart of the Ouvertüre, the Sarabande, both glowingly romantic and intriguingly melancholic, was shaped with incredible fluidity, the elasticity of the melodic line belying the rhythmic precision of the playing. The Bourrées and Gigue danced from Mr. Vinikour’s fingers with infectious brio. The ingenuity of the Echo drew from the poet at the keyboard playing of equal wit, the opulent timbre of the harpsichord making Bach’s invention more obvious than in many performances of the piece. Perhaps the greatest pleasure of hearing Mr. Vinikour play Bach, whether on his own or in ensemble, is discerning the depth of feeling that he devotes to performances of the composer’s music: stylish as his playing is, there is nothing academic or pedantic in his approach to Bach’s scores.

Mr. Vinikour offered as encores Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in D major (K96) and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s A-minor Gavotte with Six Doubles. The martial spirit of Scarlatti’s celebrated Allegrissimo Sonata was rousingly evoked by Mr. Vinikour’s powerful delivery of the fanfare-like figurations, and metronomes could be calibrated by comparison with his trills. His cross-hand technique, recreating the ‘trois mains’ of Eighteenth-Century playing, was a marvel throughout the recital. Influenced, as was Bach’s Ouvertüre, by the harpsichord works of François Couperin, Rameau’s Gavotte and variations provided Mr. Vinikour with a vehicle for a barnstorming finale to his recital. Rameau’s pyrotechnics were ignited with consummate authority and apparent enjoyment.

There were a few missed notes in the course of the recital, it is true, and a handful of passages in which Mr. Vinikour’s concentration seemed momentarily disturbed. There are many, many more mistakes in the famous radio recordings of Richard Strauss Lieder in which the composer himself accompanied sings such as Anton Demota, Hilde Konetzni, and Maria Reining, but do these flaws lessen the importance of the performances? The conscientious artist expects perfection of himself, but the great artist gives to every performance the kinds of passion and abandon that are the natural enemies of clinical perfection. Some of Maria Callas’s most beautiful performances of Tosca’s ‘Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore’ were those in which the top B♭ wobbled perilously. She was an artist who truly lived for her art, however. Jory Vinikour is another. This was a recital in which the music of Bach, Händel, Rameau, and Domenico Scarlatti came to life like figures stepping out of a painting before the audiences’ eyes. Amidst a lifetime of unimaginative, artificial, insignificant perfection, this was the sort of recital that a listener never forgets.

CARL HEINRICH GRAUN (1704 – 1759), GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759), GIOVANNI BATTISTA LEGRENZI (1626 – 1690), PAOLO GIUSEPPE MAGNI (circa 1650 – 1737), JOHANN MATTHESON (1681 – 1764), GIUSEPPE MARIA ORLANDINI (1676 – 1760), GIACOMO ANTONIO PERTI (1661 – 1756), NICOLA ANTONIO PORPORA (1686 – 1768), GIOVANNI BATTISTA SAMMARTINI (1701 – 1775), and GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN (1681 – 1767): Agrippina– Baroque Opera Arias—Ann Hallenberg, mezzo-soprano; Il Pomo d’Oro; Riccardo Minasi, conductor [Recorded in the Orangerie of Kasteel ‘s-Gravenwezel, ‘s-Gravenwezel, Belgium, April – May 2013; deutsche harmonia mundi 88875055982; 1 CD, 74:54; Available from Amazon, fnac, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

If the anecdotes preserved in the writings of Romans of the ilk of Pliny the Elder and Tacitus are to be believed, the historical Agrippina the Younger, also known as Agrippinilla, was perhaps​ even more​ duplicitous than her most famous operatic incarnation as the title character in Georg Friedrich Händel’s Agrippina. To the Twenty-First-Century observer, it might seem remarkable that the libretto for Händel’s tale of the scheming machinations of Agrippina was penned by a cleric, but Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani—who, in addition to his archiepiscopal and poetic duties, owned the theatre in which Händel’s Agrippina premièred—was a politicized prelate with much to say about his ecclesiastical and worldly adversaries. In that regard, he was the perfect man for the job of crafting a libretto about one of the most powerful women in the annals of imperial Rome. It is hardly surprising that history should attribute a litany of nefarious deeds to the mother of Nero: how might such a son have been the issue of any but a venomous mother? Furthermore, she was the sister of Caligula, with whose reign modern observers equate every imaginable debauchery—and with whom, true to the spirit of his court, she was alleged to have had incestuous relations. It is unlikely that almost any historical figure about whom contemporary evidence is sparse was either as good or as evil as commentators would have her or him to be, but there is sufficient evidence to support the notion that Agrippina was a woman of cunning, conniving, and intellectual guerrilla warfare. That she plotted to ensure that her son Nero would become emperor upon the death of her fourth husband, the emperor Claudius, is virtually certain, though the suggestion that she poisoned Claudius was based upon fantasy more than fact. Exhibiting strangely modern sensibilities, she is known to have increased her visibility and gained support among the Roman populace by writing a widely-read book about the tribulations that she endured. As empress, she wielded enormous power, Claudius elevating her not to importance secondary to his own but to equal status. From a Twenty-First-Century perspective, it seems inevitable that personalities as flamboyant as Agrippina’s and Nero’s would come into conflict. It is likely that Nero, whose reign as emperor she ultimately conspired to end, had a hand in her death. Hers was an operatic life, and composers and librettists in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries recognized the potential of such a woman to exercise upon the stage a measure of the authority that she possessed in life. Nearly two thousand years after Agrippina’s death in AD 59, enter phenomenal Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg. Temperamentally, the baser elements of Agrippina’s character could not be more foreign to this wonderful lady, but as a creature of the stage she can spew venom like a threatened cobra. More importantly, she possesses the technical prowess, the stylistic affinity, and the vocal resources needed to sing Baroque repertory authoritatively.​ Even in portraying characters as morally corrupt as Händel’s Agrippina, she invests her portrayals with veins of free-flowing humanity. After all, what is more dangerous than a stunningly attractive, charming villainess?

Magnificently accompanied on her journey through the musical legacies of no fewer than three ladies who bore the name Agrippina by the period-instrument ensemble ​Il Pomo d'Oro and Riccardo Minasi, Ms. Hallenberg, an artist of uncompromising integrity, has never sounded better on disc. Her voice, equally comfortable in Baroque repertory, Rossini, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, or any music to which she dedicates her awe-inspiring powers of musical concentration and communication, makes of the most throat-stressing challenges among the arias on Agrippina expressions of timeless emotions. She and her husband, musicologist Holger Schmitt-Hallenberg, are a musical team par excellence. In addition to understanding the capabilities of her voice, Mr. Schmitt-Hallenberg knows every element of his wife’s stage comportment. Together, they find music that aligns ideally with Ms. Hallenberg’s prodigious gifts. The selections on Agrippina are anything but safe, comfortable vocal territory for any singer, but this artist approaches them with confidence that never deserts her, no matter how fiendish the bravura writing. Maestro Minassi is not just a willing collaborator but an enthusiastic co-conspirator in this exhumation of the incorruptible corpses of musical Agrippinas, pacing each selection with attention to music, text, and Ms. Hallenberg’s formidable breath control. In both individual obbligati and ensemble, the virtuosi of Il Pomo d'Oro contribute far more than accompaniment to the dramatic profile of each aria, their phrasing matched to the singer’s with flawless precision. To the credit of everyone involved, each number in succession has its own atmosphere in which a very specific portrait is created.

First performed in 1676, Giovanni Legrenzi’s Germanico sul reno is the earliest score sampled on this enlightening disc, but the Agrippina represented in Legrenzi’s opera is not Händel’s femme fatale but Julia Agrippina, sometimes styled Agrippina the Elder, the wife of the prominent Roman general Germanicus and the mother of Emperor Caligula and the infamous Agrippina. Reportedly a woman of great virtue whose marriage was a happy one, Julia Agrippina’s example was seemingly ignored by her most upwardly-mobile pair of offspring. Ms. Hallenberg sings the aria ‘O soavi tormenti dell'alma’ with ravishingly lovely tone and poise worthy of a Roman lady of exalted birth. Few singers before the public today can equal Ms. Hallenberg’s phrasing, which she puts to profoundly expressive use in this music. Dating from 1692, Giacomo Antonio Perti’s Nerone fatto Cesare is also a transitional work of the generation that linked the Early Baroque of Cavalli and his contemporaries to the more familiar operas of Händel and Vivaldi. Hearing the arias from Nerone fatto Cesare included on this disc awakens curiosity about the composer’s still-undiscovered scores. The impassioned ‘Date all'armi, o spirti fieri!’ receives from Ms. Hallenberg a performance of unrelenting intensity, the solidity of tone conveying a captivating singularity of dramatic purpose. Relegated to a ‘bonus track’ after it was discovered in manuscript sources that it was originally sung not by Agrippina but by Tigrane, ‘Questo brando, questo folgore’ partners the mezzo-soprano’s tornadic singing with a masterfully-played violin obbligato to dazzling effect. Ms. Hallenberg slices through the music with vocal swordplay, the rhythmic sharpness of her singing gratifyingly unperturbed from first note to last and her ornamentation exciting but flawlessly tasteful.

Not least because of his tutelage of Caffarelli and Farinelli, two of the most acclaimed castrati of the first half of the Eighteenth Century, Nicola Antonio Porpora was among the most influential musicians of his generation. He is now perhaps better remembered as a pedagogue than as a composer, though espousal of his music by several notable singers has increased the visibility of his operas and cantatas in recent years. Composed for Naples in 1708, L'Agrippina was Porpora’s first opera, and a more persuasive advocate for its revival than Ms. Hallenberg cannot be imagined. Porpora, too, depicted Julia Agrippina, and this lady could hope for no more sensitive musical tribute than ‘Mormorando anch'io ruscello.’ Ms. Hallenberg sings the piece exquisitely, the lilting melodic line caressed by her warm-brandy timbre. The contrast with the concentrated feeling of ‘Con troppo fieri immagini’ is immediately apparent, but Ms. Hallenberg sings both arias with panache. In his 1704 Leipzig opera Germanicus, Georg Philipp Telemann also set his sights on the virtuous Julia Agrippina, and the aria ‘Rimembranza crudel’ from his 1710 adaptation of the score provides the character with a powerful scene of doubt and regret. Ms. Hallenberg is here aided exceptionally by Il Pomo d'Oro and Maestro Minassi, the strings driving the music without jeopardizing the forthrightness of her phrasing.

‘Tutta furie e tutta sdegno’ from Giuseppe Maria Orlandini’s 1721 Nerone is an eruption of rage of which Mozart’s Königin der Nacht would be proud, and Ms. Hallenberg’s singing of the aria is a bravura tour de force that any coloratura soprano would gladly claim as her own. The sheer brilliance of her negotiations of the divisions, not only in Orlandini’s music but in all of the arias on this disc, is incredibly impressive. The success of the Venetian première of Orlandini’s Nerone was considerable enough to prompt Johann Mattheson to produce his own adaptation of the opera, styled Nero, in Hamburg in 1723. Exercising almost total control of operatic life in Hamburg, where the dominance of star castrati never took hold, Mattheson frequently produced editions of other composers’ scores, often with newly-composed music of his own creation. The aria ‘Già tutto valore’ was written for his Nero, and Ms. Hallenberg’s performance of it reveals the breadth of Mattheson’s ingenuity. Hers is the sort of artistry that is always at the service of the music, and even the sentimental largesse of ‘Già tutto valore’ receives from her a traversal in which technical acumen combines with an attractive suggestion of emotional vulnerability.

Georg Friedrich Hä​ndel’s Agrippina (HWV 6), premièred in Venice in 1709, is one of the young composer’s most intriguing concoctions, its profusion of relatively brief arias in the Venetian style virtually unique in his operas: only in Serse and Teseo is material of such brevity employed with equal impact. Ms. Hallenberg cites singing Händel’s Agrippina as one of her favorite musical experiences, and her performances of three of the character’s arias on this disc leave no doubt about the sincerity of her assertion. The poignant lines of ‘Pensieri, voi mi tormentate’ are sung with boundless eloquence and imagination, and the imagery of ‘Ogni vento ch'al porto lo spinga’ is vividly conveyed by Ms. Hallenberg’s idiomatic diction. Her singing of the incendiary ‘L'alma mia fra le tempeste’ is one of the pinnacles of the disc: hearing the music sung as Ms. Hallenberg sings it, it is apparent that it is not just Händel’s greater fame that makes his Agrippina the best-known of the operatic portraits excerpted here.

Paolo Giuseppe Magni’s 1703 reworking of Perti’s Nerone fatto Cesare, entitled Agrippina, madre di Nerone, produced another setting of the electrifying ‘Date all'armi o spirti fieri!’ Ms. Hallenberg sings this version no less expertly than Perti’s, her delivery of fiorature astonishingly precise but never mechanical. It was Vipsania Agrippina, the wife of Tiberius, who inspired Giovanni Battista Sammartini’s Agrippina, moglie di Tiberio, premièred in Milan in 1743, and her ‘Non ho più vele, non ho più sarte’ is impeccably sung by Ms. Hallenberg, whose subsequent account of ‘Deh, lasciami in pace’ is a glowingly heartfelt plea rather than a one-dimensional operatic gesture.

Carl Heinrich Graun’s 1751 Britannico is perhaps the most ‘modern’ of the scores revived for Agrippina, its gallant style spanning the divide between late Baroque and the Viennese Classicism of Haydn, Salieri, and Mozart—a divide populated by a generation of composers whose music is still far too inadequately explored. The aria ‘Se la mia vita, o figlio’ is a wonderful piece, its nuances highlighted by Ms. Hallenberg’s imaginative, aristocratically-phrased singing. Even this pales in comparison with her take-no-prisoners performance of ‘Mi paventi il figlio indegno,’ quite simply one of the most demanding arias composed in the Eighteenth Century—one so extraordinary that it survived well into the Nineteenth Century in the repertory of Pauline Viardot. The braying horn parts are played raucously by Il Pomo d'Oro’s skilled musicians, but not even their musical wizardry distracts from Ms. Hallenberg’s spirited singing. A performance as confident as this one is achieved only with meticulous study and rehearsal, but the spontaneity of her singing disguises her fastidious preparation. Not one roulade, trill, or interval flusters her. In the history of sound recording, there are some few performances that are rightly considered legendary: among the classic recordings of Claudia Muzio, Rosa Ponselle, Conchita Supervía, Kirsten Flagstad, and Giulietta Simionato, Ms. Hallenberg’s interpretation of ‘Mi paventi il figlio indegno’ is destined for immortality.

Surveying the history of recorded ventures similar to Agrippina limns a cautionary tale of the uncertain interactions of ambition, ego, and musicality. The guiding spirit of a disc of this nature should always be—but so rarely is—the marriage of music with the unique qualities of an individual artist. Too often, projects are founded upon what an artist can gain rather than what she can give. In the sixteen arias on Agrippina, Ann Hallenberg gives very generously. The gifts that she shares with listeners are those of musical discovery, mind-boggling technical daring, and the pleasure of hearing a great voice in its prime. In truth, though, the greatest demonstration of technique will be forgotten if it is not borne upon a tide of beauty. Above all, Agrippina is a surpassingly beautiful disc.

ANTÔNIO CARLO GOMES (1836 – 1896): Il Guarany—Manrico Patassini (Pery), Niza de Castro Tank (Cecilia), José Perrotta (Don Antonio de Mariz), Paschoal Raymundo (Don Alvaro), Paulo Fortes (Gonzales), Juan Carlos Ortiz (Il Cacico), Roque Lotti (Ruy-Bento), Waldomiro Furlan (Alonso); Orquestra e Coro do Theatro Municipal de São Paulo; Armando Belardi, conductor [Recorded in the studios of the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, Brazil, in August 1959; Andromeda ANDRCD 9115; 2 CDs, 147:11; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Though it is perhaps the most magnificently fanciful and diverting entertainment devised by mankind, opera nonetheless reflects many of humanity’s darkest shadows. There is greater diversity in opera in 2015 than at any other time since Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo was first heard in the Seventeenth Century, but it cannot be denied by anyone who cares enough for the art form to be honest that prejudices are no less prevalent in opera now than when the color of artists’ skin or their sexual preferences were criteria unapologetically used in assessing the value of their work. Great progress has been made in the integration of the personnel of opera, but the music itself remains almost exclusively the realm of Europeans. North American and Australian composers have gained momentum during the past half-century, but where are their African, Asian, and South American counterparts? Opera in the form of Monteverdi, Mozart, or Massenet is an inherently Western art, one that pretends to ignore gender and ethnicity unless they are dramatically relevant, but it has effectively expanded its influence to envelop the globe. Even now, when artists from every corner of the world are heard in opera houses large and small, it remains rare for an opera by a composer not from Europe or America to be performed on the international circuit. In that sense, the triumphant March 1870 première of Brazilian composer Antônio Carlo Gomes’s Il Guarany at Milan’s iconic Teatro alla Scala was an unprecedented event. Gomes, who was regarded as a peer by no less a master of the genre than Giuseppe Verdi, would surely have preferred that the primary focus of attention be the quality of his score, however. As a pioneering operatic liaison between the Old and New Worlds, Gomes’s significance is tremendous, but the restoration of this winsomely authentic recording of Il Guarany to widespread circulation confirms that the composer not only deserved the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries but also merits a fair-minded reappraisal in the new millennium.

Recorded under studio conditions in São Paulo in 1959, this performance of Il Guarany has been sporadically available in varying sound on other labels in past, but Andromeda mostly provides clean, slightly boxy acoustics on this release. Though the voices generally have good presence, there are moments in which distortion and peaking mar enjoyment of the performance. The 1959 engineering was far from state of the art even for its vintage, but this Andromeda release facilitates appreciation of Gomes’s craftsmanship without requiring excessive allowances for poor sonic reproduction. Despite the opera’s Italian origins [its first South American production followed the Milan première nine months later, in December 1870], it would be unfair and irrelevant to compare the São Paulo choral and orchestral forces to those of the great opera houses of Italy, but they give a compelling, idiomatic account of Gomes’s music that pulses with dedication and vivacity. Under the baton of Armando Belardi, the Chorus and Orchestra of the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo perform energetically and enthusiastically. The opera’s Overture, occasionally heard as a concert piece, is robustly played: full discernment of orchestral textures is compromised by the watery sound quality, but the instrumentalists’ good intentions are consistently audible. With voices given prominence in the soundscape, the orchestra’s efforts are relegated to the background whenever there is singing, but both the musicians’ fine work and the composer’s gifts for orchestration are apparent, not least in the finely-wrought ballet music. Throughout the performance, the choral singing is engaging if sometimes raw of tone and ensemble. ‘Dal piano al monte ognor’ in Act One establishes an atmosphere of unease, and the Coro di Aimorè in Act Three, ‘Aspra, crudel, terribile,’ is powerfully delivered. Musically, Gomes’s style owes considerable debts to the Donizetti of Caterina Cornaro, Maria di Rohan, and Dom Sébastien and the Verdi of Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera. Clearly influenced by these titans, as well as by Meyerbeer’s Italian operas, Gomes’s style is an interesting hybrid of elements but is not derivative. Maestro Belardi’s tempi provide momentum without unduly rushing any of his personnel. He paces a stylish reading of the score that sounds like a performance of an opera premièred in 1870, which is to say that he takes the opera on its own terms and makes a delightfully uncomplicated argument on its behalf.

A tale of conflict among indigenous peoples and European colonists, Il Guarany has dramatic kinships with Delibes’s Lakmé, Meyerbeer’s L'Africaine, and Verdi’s Alzira, La forza del destino, and Aida. Much of the angst that courses through Verdi’s scores is also present in Gomes’s, and the melodic writing, though seldom as memorable as Verdi’s, is consistently distinguished. Particularly in ensembles, even secondary characters are given lovely music to sing. As the Spanish adventurers Alonso and Ruy-Bento, bass Waldomiro Furlan and tenor Roque Lotti sing capably if not unfailingly steadily, and their fellow Iberian, the Portuguese adventurer Don Alvaro, is portrayed with gusto and pinched, nasal tone by tenor Paschoal Raymundo. Bass José Perrotta sings handsomely as Dom Antonio de Mariz, launching the beautiful ‘Ave Maria’ ensemble with a nobly-phrased account of ‘Salve, o possente vergine.’

The quartet of principals is anchored by baritone Paulo Fortes, who as his surname suggests is a source of strength as the wily Spaniard Gonzales. He voices ‘Allor che annotti’ in Act One with considerable grandeur, and he delivers his lines in ensembles with unstinting power, pushing himself dramatically but maintaining tight control on the voice. In Act Two, Mr. Fortes contributes solid singing in both ‘Tutto è silenzio!’ and the duet with Cecilia, ‘Donna, tu forse l'unica.’ His account of the Congiura in Act Four, ‘In quest'ora suprema,’ crowns an alert, ardent performance in which the singer’s use of text as a roadmap for phrasing is exemplary.

The rôle of Il Cacico, chief of the Aymoré tribe, was originated by the celebrated French baritone Victor Maurel, Verdi’s first Iago and Falstaff and the creator of the part of Tonio—and thus the first interpreter of the famed Prologo—in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Interestingly, Maurel was esteemed by his contemporaries as a singing actor of the highest order rather than as an extraordinary vocalist per se, and similar sentiments might justifiably be expressed about bass Juan Carlos Ortiz, who in this performance is a dominating presence as the implacable chief. He is appropriately pompous in the Act Three Canto di guerra, but he softens both his demeanor and his tone in the duet with Cecilia, ‘Giovinetta, nello sguardo.’ Mr. Ortiz is at his best in the Invocazione, ‘O dio degli Aimorè,’ which he shapes with the fervor of a religious incantation.

Singing Cecilia, Dom Antonio's daughter, soprano Niza de Castro Tank deploys a lyric coloratura voice with a delicate timbre and surprising resources of steely reserve. Born in Limeira near the eastern extremity of the state of São Paulo in 1931, she was educated in the Italianate tradition of Amelita Galli-Curci, whose voice hers resembles in the upper octave. Likewise, her timbre and manner of singing are fleetingly reminiscent of Toti dal Monte, Mercedes Capsir, and Mady Mesplé, as well as the American soprano Ruth Welting. Ms. de Castro Tank’s repertory included virtually every rôle appropriate to her Fach, in many of which she was lauded in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Related in structure to the similarly-conceived number in Bellini’s I Puritani, Cecilia’s Polacca in Act One of Il Guarany, ‘Gentile di cuore,’ has a distinctly Brazilian flavor, and Ms. de Castro Tank revels in its rhythmic fizz. There is sometimes an idiosyncratic element to her management of coloratura that brings the Dutch diva Cristina Deutekom to mind, but the Brazilian soprano soars to—and through—every challenge. The most familiar music in Il Guarany is Cecilia’s duet with Pery, ‘Sento una forza indomita,’ a piece recorded by notes singers including Emmy Destinn and Enrico Caruso. Ms. de Castro Tank and her Pery sing the duet, not unlike the duet for Amelia and Gustavo in Act Two of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, winningly, nailing the climactic unison top notes. Verdi’s influence is again in evidence in ‘Oh! Come è bello il ciel!’ and the ballata ‘C'era una volta un principe’ in Act Two, Cecilia’s vocal lines recalling Gilda’s ‘Caro nome’ in Rigoletto. The sheen and limpidity of Ms. de Castro Tank’s singing are very effective, and her slightly edgy femininity is never overplayed. She takes on the mantle of a true tragic heroine in the Act Three duet with Il Cacico, and the steadiness of her singing is upset in only a few passages. There is a brittleness to the tone above the stave, but she ascends to D6 with minimal effort. Fine singers of previous generations surely tire of the suggestion that they would have hugely important international careers were they singing today, but Ms. de Castro Tank is is singer of whom this is almost certainly true: in this performance, at least, she is a last exponent of a style of singing that is now not only virtually extinct but also largely forgotten.

The aptly-named tenor Manrico Patassini is a firebrand in the Manrico-like rôle of Pery, son of the chief of the Guarany tribe. What little recognition Il Guarany has claimed in the past quarter-century is largely due to Plácido Domingo’s advocacy for the the score, and he sang Pery to acclaim in Europe and the United States in the 1990s. Despite the participation of singers with names more familiar to modern listeners than those in the 1959 performance, the Sony recording that documents Domingo’s Bonn performances of the opera is, as an introduction to Il Guarany, not markedly superior to this recording. Mr. Patassini lacks Domingo’s vocal glamor, but he has greater reliability and resilience in the upper register. From the opening strains of the Act One duet with Cecilia, ‘Sento una forza indomita,’ Pery’s music makes crushing demands on the tenor’s passaggio, but Mr. Patassini copes impressively. His foremost opportunity for vocal display is the Act Two aria ‘Vanto io pur superba cuna,’ and he holds nothing back. As recorded here, Mr. Patassini is something of an enigma. There are passages in which the voice sounds like that of an able but unexceptional character tenor, but these alternate with stretches in which his singing has the sturdiness and squillo of a near-world-class spinto. The voice is not a polished instrument, but Pery is not a sophisticated character. The earthiness of his singing is entirely credible, and his vocal inconsistencies never lessen the consistent success of his tough, touching interpretation of this volatile character.

Realistically, basic tenets of the economics of opera rather than any bias against South American artists continue to limit the exposure that Antônio Carlo Gomes’s music receives. Spending the money necessary to cast an opera like Il Guarany with singers qualified to sing it, an opera company is compelled to make decisions that are informed by the necessity of maximizing returns on investments. Shortsighted as it may be, it is a fact that a lackluster production of Il trovatore will sell more tickets than a fantastic production of Il Guarany. Especially in the case of music as satisfying as Gomes’s, thoughtfully-produced recordings are invaluable. Money is the single greatest source of prejudice, but Andromeda’s release of this classic performance of Gomes’s operatic masterpiece is a reminder that, in their enduring impact on society, important works of art are subject not to ownership that can be bought or sold but to appreciation that can only be shared.

JOHANN CHRISTIAN BACH (1735 – 1782), FERDINANDO BERTONI (1725 – 1813), BALDASSARE GALUPPI (1706 – 1785), CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK (1714 – 1787), GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759), JOHANN ADOLF HASSE (1699 – 1783), NICCOLÒ JOMMELLI (1714 – 1774), JOSEF MYSLIVEČEK (1737 – 1781), and NICOLA ANTONIO PORPORA (1686 – 1768): The 5 Countertenors– Eighteenth-Century Opera Arias—Max Emanuel Cenčić, Yuriy Mynenko, Valer Sabadus, Xavier Sabata, and Vince Yi, countertenors; Armonia Atenea; George Petrou, conductor [Recorded in Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall, Megaron, The Athens Concert Hall, Athens, Greece, 12, 13, and 15 – 18 July 2013; DECCA 478 8094; 1 CD, 63:46; Available from Amazon, iTunes, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

When Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin expanded the focus of their work sixty years ago to include not only the liturgical repertory and Elizabethan lute songs considered the only natural territory for their voices but also the Baroque opera and oratorio arias long commandeered by contraltos and mezzo-sopranos, it is unlikely that even these visionary artists foresaw that, by the turn of the Twenty-First Century, countertenors would be winning major prizes and competitions, singing leading rôles in many of the world’s opera houses, and making recordings for major labels of repertory ranging from Cavalli to Cage. Though the male alto or countertenor voice, a painstaking refinement of a man’s natural falsetto register, has been a distinct vocal classification from the beginnings of opera and vocal music in the modern sense, much of the music with which countertenors are now associated was originally composed for castrati. The quintet of voices heard on DECCA’s The 5 Countertenors could not have been better chosen to illustrate the differences among singers of this voice type, and the ten arias on the disc span nearly seventy years of repertory. Presenting music originally composed for both male and female singers, this disc offers perspectives on the development of voice types in opera and on the part that countertenors have played in music during the past sixty years. Before the revival of interest in Baroque opera, Benjamin Britten’s composition of the rôle of Oberon in his Midsummer Night’s Dream for Alfred Deller ushered countertenors back into the world’s opera houses and initiated a renewed energy for writing for the countertenor voice that has continued into the Twenty-First Century. Furthered by pioneering singers such as James Bowman, Michael Chance, Gérard Lesne, and Derek Lee Ragin, the Countertenor Revolution is now led by accomplished singers from all parts of the world. Recorded in Athens with DECCA’s usual technical flair, The 5 Countertenors is a fun disc on which five talented singers, expertly supported by Armonia Atenea and George Petrou, show off their vocal and histrionic virtuosity. This is not a recital of shallow displays of ego in aria form, however. The 5 Countertenors is a banquet of a style of singing at once old and new, served by five of its finest exponents.

Born in South Korea, raised in California, and an alumnus of the University of Michigan, where David Daniels’s countertenorial gifts were discovered and polished, Vince Yi is a cosmopolitan gentleman with a beautiful voice of silvery delicacy. His performance of the title character's ‘Ti parli in seno amore' from Josef Mysliveček's Farnace, first sung in 1767 in Naples by soprano castrato Carlo Reina, is soft-grained but incisive. Reminiscent of the young Mozart’s music for the character of the same name in his Mitridate, rè di Ponto, Mysliveček’s vocal writing puts Mr. Yi’s technique to the test, and while the relative weakness of his lower register is a liability his confidence on high is a decided strength. His mastery of the coloratura is not yet complete, but he gives his all to the performance and earns respect for the earnestness of his efforts. The hero’s ‘Ah, non è ver, ben mio’ from Johann Adolf Hasse's 1768 Ovid-inspired intermezzo Piramo e Tisbe in handled capably by Mr. Yi. By Eighteenth-Century standards, the composer was an old man when he wrote Piramo e Tisbe for private performance on an estate near Vienna, but his creative genius was unimpaired by time. Mr. Yi’s basic timbre makes Hasse’s sensitive Piramo sound rather wan, more in the fashion of Shakespeare’s and Britten’s rustics’ comically inept but ultimately profoundly touching telling of the story than of Ovid’s. Here, too, the young countertenor sings enthusiastically, however, the vowels on the breath and the consonants crisp but unexaggerated. The natural vocal material is of great quality, and he will surely prove an even more valuable artist as his craft is refined through experience.

Xavier Sabata’s piquant Catalan spirit emanates from every note that he sings, whether emitted in plaintive sorrow, gnawing perfidy, or sultry seduction. He makes a specialty of portraying Baroque operatic villains, but the smoky sexiness of his singing grants him a disquieting credibility as a musical lover and dashing hero. As Agamennone in Nicola Porpora’s Ifigenia in Aulide, created in London in 1735 by Senesino, he plumbs the melodramatic depths of the recitative ‘O di spietati numi più spietato ministro!’ The bursts of coloratura in the aria ‘Tu, spietato, non farai cader vittima’ are dispatched with with awesome ease, but the explosive tones at the crests of phrases sometimes upset the balance of the vocal line. Still, he is the despondent father to the life, and the tessitura of Porpora’s music suits him perfectly, his singing notable for the absence of the awkwardness that male and female singers often cannot avoid in parts written for Senesino. Ottone in Georg Friedrich Händel’s Agrippina was sung in the opera’s first production in Venice in 1709 by contralto Francesca Vanini-Boschi, a singer who worked with Händel in Italy and in London despite being described by contemporaries as having possessed an unremarkable voice. Ottone is quite a rôle to have been entrusted to a singer with a less-than-first-rate voice! Mr. Sabata reveals what a singer with a first-rate voice can achieve in Ottone's music. The bracing power of his articulation of the recitative ‘Otton, Otton’ prepares the listener for the incredible expressivity of his voicing of ‘Voi che udite il mio lamento,’ one of the young Händel’s finest inspirations. Even removed from the context of the full opera, Mr. Sabata’s affectionately-shaped singing and concentrated emotion garner sympathy for Ottone’s plight. The opportunity to observe this aspect of the singer’s artistry is most welcome and will hopefully engender many more similar opportunities in future. How wonderful it would be to occasionally hear Mr. Sabata as characters who get the girls and live happily ever after rather than exclusively as those who live and die by the sword!

A native of Arad, Romania, Valer Sabadus has emerged as one of the leading interpreters of the daunting music in the gallant style of the neglected generation of composers active in the years between the waning of the Baroque and the height of Classicism. This is an extremely rich and still largely untapped reservoir of great music. Though modern performances rarely feature countertenors in music composed after 1770, castrati maintained a considerable though diminishing presence in Italian opera until the 1820s, Rossini and Meyerbeer writing prominent rôles for castrati in the tradition extending back to Gualberto Magli, one of the first operatic castrati. Like Mysliveček, Niccolò Jommelli was an innovator whose musical language was considerably more advanced than that of many of his contemporaries. In the bravura writing and wide intervals of Manlio's ‘Spezza lo stral piagato’ from the 1746 Venetian version of Jommelli's Tito Manlio, first sung by the castrato Gioacchino Conti (better known as Gizziello), Mr. Sabadus makes a vivid impression. Braving the divisions without hesitation, he gives evidence of a well-honed artistic intelligence with his alertness to the shifting nuances of text, and his sparse vibrato in passagework allows the composer’s chromaticism to make its full effect. Written for Felice Salimbeni in Venice in 1742, the title character’s pensive ‘Non so frenare il pianto’—sung whilst he is disguised as Alceste—from Gluck's Demetrio is imaginatively sung by Mr. Sabadus, his excellent breath control facilitating stunning feats of phrasing. The unadorned simplicity of the principal theme contrasts meaningfully with the brief but robust B section, and Mr. Sabadus maximizes the dramatic significance of the da capo. His voice is a fine instrument over which he wields meticulous control, and his performances on this disc are exemplary examples of the transitional musical idioms of an unjustly-overlooked period in operatic history.

Hailing from Ukraine, Yuriy Mynenko is one of the foremost discoveries of recent seasons. With a bright timbre and exceptional comfort in music of fiendish difficulty, he promises to make an enduring impact in the realm of countertenor singing. His negotiation of the punishing pyrotechnics of the title character's ‘Crude furie degl'orridi abissi’ from Händel's Serse, débuted in 1738 in London by Caffarelli, is sure of intonation and rhythmic accuracy, and the gleaming edge on the tone aids him in creating a sharp dramatic profile in the duration of a single aria. The rôle of Lisimaco in Johann Christian Bach’s 1772 Temistocle was created in the opera’s Mannheim première by soprano castrato Silvio Giorgetti, who was obviously a fantastic singer. The stirring ‘Ch'io parta?’ is delivered by Mr. Mynenko with consummate gusto and vocal freedom. Like Mr. Yi and Mr. Sabadus, he brings to his work a soft-grained voice anchored by an impenetrably strong technical foundation, and he succeeds in appealingly conveying the swaggering masculinity of the music without hardening his lovely tone quality.

The links between the great castrati of the past and countertenor singing present and future are thrillingly exemplified by Max Emanuel Cenčić. Born into a musical family (his mother is a gifted soprano and teacher, his father an esteemed conductor, and his sister a powerhouse chanteuse), he was a participant in a centuries-old musical tradition from an early age as a member and frequent treble soloist with the Wiener Sängerknaben. His early recordings as a Sängerknabe and an adolescent male soprano reveal surprising artistic maturity. Not yet forty, he is one of the world’s greatest singers—not merely among countertenors—owing both to his exceptional voice and to interpretive sensibilities that lend his work uncommon dramatic and expressive power. Beyond the confines of Baroque repertory, he made the supporting rôle of the Herold in Aribert Reimann’s Medea a vitally important one in the opera’s 2010 world première at the Wiener Staatsoper, but it is in his Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century repertory—a gallery of handsomely-drawn portraits ranging from Monteverdi’s Nerone and Ottone to Händel’s Andronico and Sesto and Hasse’s Siroe—that his endeavors are unfailingly unforgettable. Premièred by Angelo Maria Monticelli in London in 1741, Telemaco's exquisite ‘A questa bianca mano’ from Baldassare Galuppi's Penelope is a superb vehicle for Mr. Cenčić, the meandering melodic line enabling full appreciation of the uncommon evenness of his voice. Sounding slightly darker than in past, his timbre is uniquely poised for exploring conflicting emotions, and his moving account of Telemaco’s aria, notable for his tastefully understated ornamentation, is resolved by a restrained, poetically-phrased cadenza. Most known for its appearance in Gluck’s 1774 Paris version of Orphée et Eurydice (as ‘L’espoir renaît dans mon âme,’ later adapted again as ‘Amour, viens rendre à mon âme’) for the famous haute-contre Joseph Legros, the name part’s showpiece aria ‘Addio, o miei sospiri’ from Ferdinando Bertoni's 1767 Tancredi is another piece that was first interpreted—in Bertoni’s setting, at least—by Carlo Reina. [Scholars continue to debate the true origins of the aria. Whilst in London in the 1770s, Bertoni vehemently asserted that the aria was his own work, lifted by Gluck from an earlier score, but surviving evidence suggests that the music first appeared with different text in Gluck’s serenata Il Parnasso confuso, performed at Schönbrunn on 24 January 1765, when it was sung by one of the young Hapsburg archduchesses, and was subsequently reused in the central portion, Aristeo, of the 1769 Le feste d’Apollo.] Neither Reina nor Legros could have sung the number more authoritatively than Mr. Cenčić, who commands both the fiorature and the tessitura demanded by the music with unassailable assurance. The exhilarating precision of his coloratura is only one facet of his shimmering performance: equally pulse-quickening is the immediacy of his enunciation of text, which is not disrupted by even the most challenging passages. Considering his youth, it seems stupid to suggest that Mr. Cenčić is the ‘elder statesman’ of The 5 Countertenors, but among his colleagues here he is the seasoned veteran. Having already been a serious artist at an age at which most people are concerned with schoolhouse gossip and wearing the right brands of clothes, he is now a prime example of a man whose life is dedicated to his art.

For some listeners, the countertenor voice will perhaps always be an acquired taste. What The 5 Countertenors makes marvelously apparent is that ‘the countertenor voice’ is, in fact, a kaleidoscopic array of colors and patterns, no more defined by the singular sound of a particular singer than any other Fach. As much as it is impossible to know to what extent today’s countertenors echo the sounds produced by the castrati of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, it is difficult to imagine whether Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin imagined that some of the world’s most acclaimed singers in 2015 would be countertenors. The 5 Countertenors is a sensational souvenir of this musical brave new world.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937): Daphnis et Chloé [complete ballet] and Pavane pour une infante défunte—Netherlands Radio Choir (Daphnis et Chloé); Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor [Recorded in De Doelen Hall, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2012 (Daphnis et Chloé) and March 2014 (Pavane pour une infante défunte); BIS Records BIS-1850; 1 CD, 63:27; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

In an age in which acclaim often has little to do with quality, how does one make one’s mark as a conductor without betraying individuality and one’s own unique cultural identity? With Classical Music ever more a commodity rather than a community, a young musician is sometimes required to devote greater attention to the business of making a career rather than following where his musical instincts lead. Sadly, colleagues are competitors in the nonsensical but perhaps necessary game of garnering ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ on social media rather than kindred spirits to be cherished and supported. This life of a serious young artist in the Twenty-First Century is a crushing business that scoffs at the notion of building and maintaining a successful career on one’s own terms, but this is what Québécois conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has done and continues to do. He is a master of the trappings of modern notoriety, but his love for music and respect for those with whom he collaborates in creating it are joyously apparent in every performance over which he presides. A recent, already infamous Saturday matinée performance of Verdi’s Don Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera exemplified Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s defining ethos as a conductor. With a host of challenges tearing the performance apart, he calmly used his baton as a needle to reinforce the opera’s seams, sewing a golden thread into the tattered fabric of a poorly-fitted garment. Through the struggles, the dignity of Serafin, the grand but heartfelt gestures of Giulini, and the sweep of Karajan were present in his pacing of the gargantuan score. Too sensitive a musician and, by all accounts, too kind a man to ignore his colleagues’ distress, he found in Verdi’s music the strength to uplift the performance and hold back the tide of negativity that threatened to flood stage, pit, and auditorium. These were not actions intended to inspire hashtags and retweets: they were a committed musician’s responses to his sense of camaraderie with fellow artists. These were the actions of an important conductor for whom greatness is measured not by social media chatter or even by applause but by the knowledge of having given his all to the composer, his colleagues, and his audience.

This recorded performance of Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé, composed between 1909 and 1912, is a product of Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s directorship of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and the quality of the music-making on this disc is evidence of the serendipitous symbiosis of the relationship between conductor and orchestra. Throughout the performance, the orchestral personnel play sonorously and with legitimate Gallic sophistication, personified by the slyly seductive solo lines of flautist Juliette Hurel. Ravel christened Daphnis et Chloé as a ‘symphonie choréographique,’ and Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s pacing of the piece on this recording is decidedly more symphonic than balletic in scope. Commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev and premièred by his Ballets Russes at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet on 8 June 1912, the score is an inventive hybrid, the offstage, wordless chorus—here the Netherlands Radio Choir, creating eerily atmospheric effects with superbly-blended singing—employed with the sort of enigmatic beauty familiarized by similar writing in the celebrated Méditation in Massenet’s Thaïs. A particular strength of Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s work in general is his affinity for preserving lean textures even in passages with dense orchestrations, enabling details to emerge with uncommon clarity. Compared with the classic account led by Pierre Monteux, who conducted the score’s première, Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s recording of Daphnis et Chloé is notable for his measured approach, his tempi indicative of a profound understanding of the score’s lush sensuality. Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s concept of Daphnis et Chloé is one of sultry, unfulfilled desires rather than noisy but ultimately meaningless climaxes. In this performance, the work’s three parts are presented as unique but interrelated paragraphs in a single narrative, and commitment to Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s vision seems to be shared by every musician under his direction.

Launching the Première Partie, the opening whispers of the Introduction (Lent – Très modéré) arise hesitantly, almost uncertainly, from primordial silence, the effect not unlike that of the beginning of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Maestro Nézet-Séguin encourages beautiful rather than overtly dramatic playing, enhancing the music’s latent eroticism. This is especially true in the Danse religieuse (Modéré) and Danse des jeunes filles (Vif), the rhythmic profiles of which are shaped by attention to sustaining mood without sacrificing textural lucidity. The masterfully-contrasted strains of the Danse grotesque de Dorcon (Vif – Plus modéré – Très modéré – Pesant), Danse légère et gracieuse de Daphnis (Assez lent – Animé – Vif), and Lyceion entre (Lent – moins lent – Très libre)—decidedly sounds of the Twentieth Century—are given very distinct but strangely complementary auras, each tempo change heightening the restlessness of Ravel’s harmonic centers of gravity. The shimmering Nocturne is performed with a disquieting simplicity that seems both supplicating and sinister, the genius of Ravel’s writing for the orchestra never more perceptible.

Maestro Nézet-Séguin paces the Interlude that opens the ballet’s Deuxième Partie with eloquence derived from rhythmic freedom, and the Rotterdam Philharmonic musicians respond with unmistakably affectionate playing. The ferocity of the Danse guerrière is startlingly realized by both conductor and orchestra, but the poetry of the Danse suppliante de Chloé is recited with equal fluency in Ravel’s compositional idiom. A century after the music was first performed, the young conductor and his Rotterdam musical family communicate both the emotions that have become familiar through lauded performances and recordings and passions unique to this performance.

Perhaps the most familiar music in Daphnis et Chloé is Ravel’s Impressionistic representation of dawn in ‘Lever du jour’ in the ballet’s Troisième Partie. In this performance, the restoration of light to the slumbering earth is in Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s handling a genuine musical catharsis. The colors that he extracts from the orchestra scintillate in the burgeoning light of Ravel’s depiction of the awakening world, a symbolic partner of the music of the ballet’s first scene. The expansive sentimental canvas of the Pantomime (Les amours de Pan et Syrinx) is filled with stirring imagery drawn directly from Ravel’s score. Throughout the performance, the string, woodwind, and percussion playing is luxuriously beautiful, but the musicians reach new peaks of virtuosity in the final Danse générale (Bacchanale). Here, too, Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s dual attention to the singular needs of the Bacchanale and the cumulative impact of the score is discernible. The jubilant conclusion of the ballet inspires an exhibition of the artistry possible only with complete comfort with and dedication to the music.

Originally composed for piano solo in 1899, orchestrated by the composer in 1910, and ultimately denounced owing to what he perceived as an unacceptably pervasive indebtedness to Emmanuel Chabrier, the Pavane pour une infante défunte is understandably one of Ravel’s most enduringly popular works, its Spanish flavor produced by some of the same ingredients that spice Boléro and L’heure espagnole. Horn player Martin van de Merwe’s solo lines are the foundation upon which Maestro Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic players form a traversal of the piece that evinces deep feeling without wallowing in dumb-show pathos. As in their performance of Daphnis et Chloé, this team’s playing of Pavane pour une infante défunte is distinguished by ebullient musicality that cascades through Ravel’s score.

Recordings of Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Pavane pour une infante défunte are numerous, and many of them preserve the work of conductors and orchestras whose endeavors to fashion unique interpretations of these great scores led them away from rather than into the music. This recording by the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whose tenure as the orchestra’s Principal Conductor will end in 2018, is unique in its fidelity to Ravel’s inspiration. How wonderful it is to hear on this disc an honest rendering of this stimulating music rather than idiosyncratic variations on Ravel’s unforgettable themes. Careers are changeable creatures, but Art, when executed at this level, is eternal.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Il trovatore—Flaviano Labò (Manrico), Anna de Cavalieri (Leonora), María Mercedes Morquio (Azucena), Jorge Botto (Il Conte di Luna), Juan Carbonnell (Ferrando), Marita Perdomo (Ines), César Vicciconte (Un vecchio zingaro), José Luis Parma (Ruiz); Coro y Orquesta del Teatro Solís; Nino Stinco, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in performance at the Teatro Solís, Montevideo, Uruguay, on 13 September 1964; Bongiovanni HOC 085/86; 2 CDs, 126:10; Available from Bongiovanni, ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon, iTunes, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Once upon a time, composers composed, conductors conducted, singers sang, and musicians made music. These personages did these things in inevitable pursuits of livelihoods, but Verdi composed Falstaff, Mascheroni conducted it, Victor Maurel sang it, and the La Scala orchestra played it for reasons more noble than the necessity of earning paychecks. Also once upon a time, when the gorgeous Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires was an inevitable port of call on virtually every great singer’s grand tour, artistic merit frequently drifted across the Río de la Plata from Argentina to the less-pretentious Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, where many of the great performers that made the Teatro Colón an operatic Mecca also shared their gifts with Montevideo audiences. This 1964 performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore assembled in Montevideo’s Teatro Solís an international cast that in the 1960s might have seemed unexceptional to Londoners or New Yorkers but today epitomizes the clichéd suggestion that a performance with such a cast would now be the gold standard. Listening to this performance, it is obvious that this cast’s goal was providing the Montevideo audience with a memorable encounter with Verdi’s swashbuckling score. Can these dedicated performers have suspected that their goal would be achieved anew fifty-one years later?

Some sources indicate that this performance was conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, whereas other sources state that Maestro Giulini was likely already in London for rehearsals of the watershed Covent Garden production of Il trovatore with Bruno Prevedi, Dame Gwyneth Jones, and Gulietta Simionato at the time of this performance in Montevideo. This release names Nino Stinco as the conductor of this Trovatore, and, contemporary documentation being elusive [the sole authoritative tome on musical life in the Uruguayan capital does not offer details about the 1964 Trovatore production], this is a credible attribution. In any event, the performance preserved on these discs sounds little like extant Giulini-led performances. Fortunately, the sound quality, while not high-fidelity, is good enough to permit appreciation of the vigor with which the performance is conducted. Neither the orchestral playing nor the choral singing is world-class, but Il trovatore does not need absolute perfection to make its points. The orchestra musicians play energetically, and the choristers sing the familiar Anvil Chorus, 'Vedi! le fosche notturne spoglie ​de' cieli sveste l'immensa vôlta,’ with gusto. No one attends a performance of Il trovatore solely to hear the orchestra or chorus, but the Montevideo forces do their national musical tradition proud.

In supporting rôles, Marita Perdomo, César Vicciconte, and José Luis Parma are reliably musical presences as Ines, the Old Gypsy, and Ruiz. [Mr. Parma is credited by Bongiovanni with having sung the part of the Messenger, while no singer is listed for Ruiz. Mr. Parma’s usual part in Il trovatore across the river in Buenos Aires was Ruiz, so it is more plausible that sources that allot him that rôle in the Montevideo performance are correct.] Bass Juan Carbonnell is an occasionally unsteady ​Ferrando who sometimes sounds like a refugee from a performance of a Rossini opera buffa. His singing of 'Di due figli vivea, padre beato, il buon conte di Luna' and 'Abbietta zingara, fosca vegliarda!'​ in Act One is spirited, and his and the choristers’ reaction to the tolling of midnight during his spooky storytelling is hilarious. A few imperfections notwithstanding, Mr. Carbonnell’s Ferrando is amusing and menacing in turn—just as Verdi surely intended him to be.

As the Conte di Luna, Uruguayan baritone Jorge Botto has nothing to fear from comparisons with the finest recorded interpreters of the rôle. As recorded here, the voice seems slightly small for the core Verdi baritone repertory, but Mr. Botto was an acclaimed Boccanegra in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo in an era in which audiences knew how an authentic Verdi baritone voice should sound. From his first entrance in Act One, he never emits an unattractive sound: in that regard, he is the rare Conte di Luna who is a suitor not unworthy of Leonora’s attention. He is also among the few recorded Conti who manage to successfully balance bluster and nobility in the Act One finale. Mr. Botto voices the impactful 'Di geloso amor sprezzato arde in me tremendo il fuoco!' with ideal stamina and style, making easy going of the high tessitura. Few—if any—audiences who hear performances of Il trovatore in 2015 will hear 'Il balen del suo sorriso d'una stella vince il raggio,' the Conte’s celebrated aria in Act Two, sung as well as Mr. Botto sings it here. The top Fs and Gs are produced with ease, and the bel canto melodic line is sculpted with unaffected artistry. Likewise, few baritones succeed as Mr. Botto does in making the de facto cabaletta 'Per me ora fatale, i tuoi momenti affretta, affretta' as effective in performance as ‘Il balen del suo sorriso.’ Act Three makes no demands of this fine singer that he fails to meet with charisma to spare, but, despite his superb rendition of his aria, Mr. Botto is at his best in Act Four. In the duets with Leonora, his handsome voice moves through the music with complete confidence, and in the opera’s final scene the suggestions of desperation and regret that his singing reveals indicate that this Conte truly loves Leonora rather than merely loving the notion of possessing her. Mr. Botto proves not only one of the most sympathetic Conti di Luna on disc but also one of the most musical.

Listeners who are acquainted with the much-discussed Azucena of Sylvia Sawyer, the elusive benefactress of complete recordings of Il trovatore, Aida, and Un ballo in maschera in which she sang the lead mezzo-soprano rôles, will know what to expect, at least to some extent, of the Azucena of María Mercedes Morquio. In this performance, Ms. Morquio’s vocalism is rarely poised or polished, but as the unhinged Azucena—as Pedro Almodóvar might put it, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown—she is undeniably effective. There are no trills in her singing of ‘Stride la vampa,’ but she unleashes some exciting sounds above the stave; sounds, it must be admitted, that do not always reach Verdi’s indicated pitches. Still, the unforced power that she brings to ‘Condotta ell' era in ceppi al suo destin tremendo'​ is undeniably exhilarating. She ducks the written top C in 'Perigliarti ancor languente per cammin selvaggio ed ermo!' but veritably erupts with love and fear for her adopted son. In Act Three, the mounting agitation that Ms. Morquio evinces in her singing of 'Giorni poveri vivea, pur contenta del mio stato' and 'Deh! rallentate, o barbari, le acerbe mie ritorte' foreshadows the opera’s tragic conclusion. Her duet with Manrico in Act Four is crowned with an understated but evocative account of 'Ai nostri monti ritorneremo.' Few performances of Il trovatore seem to build to Azucena’s piercing cry of 'Sei vendicata, o madre!' in the opera’s final moments as inexorably as this one, and Ms. Morquio’s ferocious top B♭ ends the performance heartstoppingly.

​​Anna de Cavalieri (1924 – 2012)​, née Anne McKnight in Aurora, Illinois, is a steely, persuasive, and surprisingly moving Leonora. Introduced to the public by her brassy Musetta in the famed 1946 NBC performance of La bohème in which Arturo Toscanini paced Licia Albanese’s Mimì and Jan Peerce’s Rodolfo, she was a bonafide prima donna in Italian parts at New York City Opera before making her career in Italy, where her large repertory included rôles as dissimilar as Imogene in Bellini’s Il pirata and Puccini’s Turandot. Despite her near-native diction, she makes little of Leonora’s introductory recitative in Act One of this performance of Il trovatore, but when she sings ‘ascolta’ to Ines before launching her aria there is no question that she is to be obeyed. That aria, ‘Tacea la notte placida e bella in ciel sereno​,’ is sung ardently, the singer’s comfort with Verdi’s style growing with every successive phrase. ​She rushes the cadenza to avoid lingering at the top of the range, but the Allegro giusto cabaletta 'Di tale amor, che dirsi mal può dalla parola'​ finds her on confident, risk-taking form. When she reaches the Act One finale, Ms. de Cavalieri is soaring through Leonora’s music, and she and her colleagues bring the curtain down on Act One with singing that thrillingly combines virility with elegance. In the last minutes of Act Two, her voicing of 'E deggio e posso crederlo?' and the fine-spun 'Sei tu dal ciel disceso, o in ciel son io con te!' radiates femininity and the contrasting sensuality and religiosity that land Leonora in such a quandary. The performing edition used for this performance reduces Leonora to a stander-by in Act Three, but she opens Act Four with the aria 'D'amor sull'ali rosee vanne, sospir dolente,' one of the most demanding pieces in the Verdi canon. Ms. de Cavalieri gives a powerful account of the aria, making credible efforts at the trills and rising to a gritty but solid top C. Like many Leonoras, she opts out of the top D♭, cruelly approached from an interval of a tenth, but she delivers the cadenza ably. Her singing is filled with trepidation and fervor in the inventive ‘Miserere,’ making the excision of the cabaletta 'Tu vedrai che amore in terra mai del mio non fu più​ forte' particularly regrettable. Duetting with Mr. Botto’s lustful Conte in 'Mira, di acerbe lagrime spargo al tuo piede un rio!' and 'Vivrà​​! Contende il giubilo,'​ Ms. de Cavalieri wields spot-on staccati and white-out emotions. She is a Leonora for whom, like Ponchielli’s Gioconda (another part in which Ms. de Cavalieri excelled, incidentally), death is an act of defiance rather than defeat. In the haunting andante 'Prima che d'altri vivere io volli tua morir!' in the finale, nothing more than a fascinatingly-manipulated ascending scale, Ms. de Cavalieri completes Leonora’s transformation from haughty Spanish noblewoman to tragic heroine. Like Mr. Botto, she fosters a portrayal of her rôle that succeeds musically and dramatically more memorably than many more famous singers have managed to create.

A few months before traveling to Montevideo for this performance, Italian tenor Flaviano Labò (1927 – 1991) alternated with Richard Tucker, James McCracken, and Franco Corelli as Manrico at the Metropolitan Opera. Possessing a lean, sinewy voice with compelling squillo and technical prowess that allowed him to sing both lyric and spinto rôles without abusing the natural instrument, Mr. Labò was equally capable of sweetly wooing Mimì in La bohème, rejoicing at revolutionary victories in Tosca, and melting the title heroine’s icy heart in Turandot. As Montevideo’s Manrico, he combines the ringing masculinity of Pertile and Lauri-Volpi with the chivalry of Björling and Bergonzi. His clear, Italianate tone glistens even from afar in the romanza in Act One, 'Deserto sulla terra, sul rio destino in guerra,' which he caps with a sterling interpolated top B♭. He complements Ms. de Cavalieri’s and Mr. Botto’s mercurial singing in the the trio that ends the act. His marmoreal performance of 'Mal reggendo all'aspro assalto' in Act Two is searing, the top A hurled out with the brilliance of a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere, and his lines in the Act Two finale are voiced with velvet-clad iron. The Mozartean aria in Act Three, 'Ah sì, ben mio, coll'essere io tuo, tu mia consorte,' is handled with manly finesse by Mr. Labò, who even bothers to approximate the trills for which Verdi asked. He also sings the ubiquitous cabaletta 'Di quella pira l'orrendo foco' at Verdi’s pitch, interpolating secure, pulse-quickening top Cs. Though the quality of his singing is very high throughout the performance, the tenor is on especially impressive form in Act Four. His despondent lines heard from offstage during the ‘Miserere’ are beguiling, and his interactions with Ms. Morquio’s Azucena are tender and resigned. It is apparent that this Manrico’s burst of anger when he believes that Leonora has betrayed him is born of love rather than pride and petulance. Mr. Labò ends the performance in the same fashion in which he started it: his Manrico faces execution as courageously as he first came to Leonora’s defense and sings spectacularly all the while.

It seems unfathomable that this thoroughly satisfying Trovatore would likely have been deemed provincial a half-century ago: as Mary Hopkin sang in 1968, those were the days, my friends. Perhaps along the banks of the Río de la Plata in 1964 it was thought that they would never end. Now, hearing a performance as quenching as this Montevideo Il trovatore, how distant they seem!

AGOSTINO STEFFANI (1653 – 1728): Niobe, regina di Tebe—Karina Gauvin (Niobe), Philippe Jaroussky (Anfione), Amanda Forsythe (Manto), Christian Immler (Tiresia), Aaron Sheehan (Clearte), Terry Wey (Creonte), Jesse Blumberg (Poliferno), Colin Balzer (Tiberino), José Lemos (Nerea); Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra; Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, Musical Directors [Recorded in the Sendesaal, Bremen, Germany, 1 – 14 November 2013; ERATO 0825646343546; 3 CDs, 223:44; Available from Amazon, fnac, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

It is one of the great ironies of music in the new millennium that an opera like Agostino Steffani’s Niobe, regina di Tebe should languish in obscurity, not heard for centuries until produced in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries by enterprising historically-informed institutions, and then, as if by the sort of magic so beloved by opera audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, not one but two commercial recordings of the score should appear within only a few months. The rival to ERATO’s fantastic souvenir of the Boston Early Music Festival production, which in addition to its 2011 Festival outing has recently toured Europe in concert form, is a ‘live’ recording of the 2010 Royal Opera House production featuring the Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble and Thomas Hengelbrock. Despite engineering superior to that heard on many recordings made during live performances at Covent Garden and the participation of an excellent cast including one of the world's finest sopranos, the divine Véronique Gens, the Opus Arte recording falls short of the benchmark set by ERATO’s impeccably-engineered, thoughtfully-presented recording. Indeed, by today’s standards Steffani’s score receives suitably royal treatment. The critical question that a production or recording of a forgotten work like Steffani’s Niobe, regina di Tebe ultimately must answer is whether the score is truly worthy of the effort and expense required to revive it. A little-remembered 1977 performance in New York’s Alice Tully Hall by Newell Jenkins and his Clarion Music Society hinted that Niobe deserved the attention. The Covent Garden and BEMF productions furthered the case for the opera’s renaissance, and this recording offers an opportunity for listeners to hear Steffani’s music performed with the flair and finesse so missed in performances of later repertory. Niobe, regina di Tebe cannot be claimed to be a rediscovered masterpiece of the lasting significance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Wagner’s Parsifal, or Verdi’s Falstaff, but when revisited in 2365 how many of today’s operas will have anything like the lasting enchantment of Steffani’s gem of a score?

First performed in Munich in 1688, Niobe is among the plethora of Baroque operas with subject matter drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in this case adapted by librettist Luigi Orlandini. Already a figure with a centuries-old tradition by the times of her mentions in texts by Homer, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, Niobe is reputed to have been the daughter of Tantalus. Her early chroniclers depict her as a proud woman whose boastful claims of superiority led to the slaying of her fourteen children by the twins Apollo and Artemis, acting on orders from their mother Leto. Both in the literary milieu of Antiquity and in a much later work like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Niobe was an archetype of the grieving mother akin to Clytemnestra and Hecuba, and the character created by Steffani and Orlandini is in certain respects not unlike Händel’s Semele. In essence, this Niobe is the protagonist in a cautionary tale ideally summarized by the familiar words of Psalm 16:18: ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.’ The destruction that Niobe’s actions inflict upon her family had as many parallels in the Seventeenth Century as there are in the Twenty-First. Only forty years before the première of Niobe, central Europe was devastated by the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict on a gargantuan scale propagated by clashes among empires, nationalistic ambitions, and Catholic and Protestant interests: it is not difficult to imagine that the symbolic relationships among the characters in Niobe resonated with composer, librettist, and contemporary audiences. From a Twenty-First-Century perspective, the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001, a day that now seems almost mythological, lends an unique profundity to the conceit of the decisions of people in positions of power upending innocent lives. As recorded, this performance focuses on performing Steffani’s score as stylishly as possible and allowing the individual listener to form opinions about the opera’s topicality. At the very least, Niobe is a piece with a social conscience, but this recording rightly presents the opera as a musical journey, not a manifesto ripe for political interpretation.

The musical language of Niobe is a cosmopolitan idiom that combines elements of the Italian traditions inherited from Monteverdi and Cavalli with north-of-the-Alps trends guiding musical discourse in German-speaking Europe. The assertion that Steffani’s work in general represents a crucial step in the transition from the early opera of Monteverdi to the mature Baroque of Händel is justifiable, but Niobe inhabits a singular sound world. Händel was a toddler when Niobe was first performed, but Steffani’s score sounds as though it could have been a suitable nursemaid during the younger composer’s operatic infancy. Building upon Cavalli’s development of contrasting recitative, arioso, aria, and ensemble, Steffani engendered a style that resembles the young Händel’s Venetian opera Agrippina with its succession of plot-advancing recitative and brief, emotionally-specific arias. In Niobe, at least, Steffani’s gifts as a musical dramatist do not equal those of Monteverdi, Cavalli, or Händel at their best, but a considerable talent for tailoring music to particular situations and moods is readily apparent. The brevity of individual numbers notwithstanding, Niobe is a sprawling work, and without visual cues and the benefit of watching singers interact not even the peerless cast assembled for this recording can wholly overcome the burden of having to sustain the listener’s interest over what is, particularly by modern, post-Puccini criteria, a long haul. That this recording succeeds so capitally is a testament to the exceptional work of everyone involved with it.

Led by Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs with the stylistic affinity that their names have come to represent, the musicians of the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra give an account of Steffani’s score that is nothing short of authoritative in terms of virtuosity, understanding of the inner and outer structures of each scene, and teamwork, not only among their own ranks but also with the vocal cast. In music such as this, the continuo is of vital importance—nothing short of the central nervous system of a performance. Vital to the continuity and histrionic effectiveness of the performance on these discs is the outstanding playing of Luca Guglielmi on harpsichord and organ, Maxine Eilander on Baroque harp, and Erin Headley on viola da gamba: their endeavors, spurred by Maestri O'Dette’s and Stubbs’s predictably inventive playing of theorbo and Baroque guitar, propel the performance forward, giving consistently organic impetus to the characters’ exchanges and inviting the listener into the drama as a silent participant rather than a distant observer. Likewise, the gorgeous sounds made by the viol consort in Act One, Scene 13—Christel Thielmann, Hille Perle, Frauke Hess, and Ms. Headley—add a dimension of musical variety to the performance. Interestingly, some of the finest playing on this recording is done in the ballet music by Melchior d'Ardespin. Throughout the performance, the musicians play masterfully, however, and Maestri O'Dette and Stubbs pace an account of the opera that provides the singers with ideal support of their collective efforts at bringing Steffani’s music and Orlandini’s words to life for the listener.

Among a large cast of reliably stylish, engaging singers, the astounding voice of countertenor José Lemos is unforgettable. His singing of the rôle of Nerea, the sort of part that can quickly annoy the listener when entrusted to a careless singer, is remarkable for its integration of an endearingly vibrant personality with a natural instrument of extraordinary beauty. Nerea’s trio of arias in Act One—'Quasi tutte,''Che agli assalti degli amanti,' and the delightful 'Assistetemi'—provide Mr. Lemos with fodder for exhibiting both his vocal eloquence and his unerring dramatic instincts. The nobility with which he shapes ‘Quasi tutte’ grants the duplicitous nurse greater depth of character than she deserves, but the dignity of Mr. Lemos’s singing is most welcome. His arias in Acts Two and Three, 'Questi giovani moderni' and 'Che alla fè di donne amanti,' are oases in a landscape drained of humor, and Mr. Lemos rises to the occasions with vocalism of focus and panache. A few notes at the top of line strain him, but as a singer and an actor he finds in Nerea’s meddling opportunities to uplift Steffani’s music with the best of his artistry.

The Tiresia of bass Christian Immler is a stern, vocally granitic presence whose oracular tidings are proclaimed with solid, bronze-hued tone in the Act One arias 'Amor t'attese al varco' and 'Di strali, e fulmini.’ In Act Two, Mr. Immler sings 'Confuse potenze' and 'De numi la legge' with grandiloquence befitting a seer. Mr. Immler’s voice is stronger at the upper extreme of Tiresia’s range than at the bottom, but his impersonation is forceful throughout the character’s musical and dramatic compasses.

As Tiberino, Canadian tenor Colin Balzer sings powerfully, his flexible voice and complete security in the lower octave of the part contributing to a vivid portrayal that radiates strength and sensuality. His sings Tiberino’s Act One aria 'Alba essulti, e il Lazio goda' with insurmountable technical acumen, and the subsequent arias 'Tu non sai che sia diletto' and 'Quanto sospirerai' inspire him to singing of stirring immediacy. 'Il tuo sguardo o bella mia' and 'Ci sei colto mio cor' in Act Two are delivered with similar impact, the unstilted refinement of his elocution all the more impressive because of the magnetism of the timbre. In Act Three, Mr. Balzer voices the aria 'Hor ch'è mio quel vago labro' with delicious sophistication. His burnished, burly tone distinguishes him from his male colleagues in this performance, and the adroitness of his singing identifies him as one of the most gifted exponents of repertory of Niobe’s vintage.

Young baritone Jesse Blumberg is a singer of astonishing versatility who seems capable of singing virtually any repertory authoritatively. A Lieder singer of a high order, his performance as Poliferno in Niobe confirms that he is also a potent presence in Baroque music. The imagination with which he sings the very different 'Nuovo soglio, e nuova bella' and 'Fiera Aletto' in Act One makes a potent impression, the alacrity with which he differentiates the arias indicative of expert musicality and dramatic intelligence. The swagger with which he executes the difficulties of 'Numi tartarei' in Act Two harmonizes with his rousing performance of the aria 'Gioite, godete' in Act Three. His vocal lines sometimes take him just below the lower boundary of his comfort zone, but the only real disappointment is that Steffani did not allocate more music to the malicious Poliferno: perhaps he never envisioned an artist as talented as Mr. Blumberg singing the rôle.

Swiss countertenor Terry Wey portrays the hapless Creonte with dignity and an unaffected display of technique and tonal allure. A gifted artist still too little represented on disc, his performance in Niobe is evidence of the fine singing of which he is capable. In the Act One arias 'Dove sciolti à volo i vanni' and 'Anderei fin nell'Inferno,' his command of the idiom and warm tone are obvious in every phrase that he sings. Likewise, Creonte’s arias in Act Two, 'Del mio ben occhi adorati' and 'Lascio l'armi, e cedo il campo,' receive from Mr. Wey traversals of glistening charm. His duetting with Niobe in 'T'abbraccio mia diva' is wonderfully evocative, and his lustrous account of 'Luci belle' in Act Three is one of the highlights of the recording. Indeed, Mr. Wey’s every appearance in the course of the opera prompts gratitude, both for his polishing singing and for his thoughtful vocal acting.

In the rôle of Clearte, this performance benefits from the work of one of America’s finest singers in any repertory, tenor Aaron Sheehan. With a voice and dramatic demeanor as piercingly lovely as his glacial blue eyes, he creates a three-dimensional character even in the context of a studio recording. In Act One, his singing of the aria 'Son amante, e sempre peno' is unutterably beautiful, his enunciation of the text touched by a throbbing melancholy. He complements this with a performance of 'C'hò da morir tacendo' that embodies the elusive art of bel canto. The phenomenal effectiveness of his portrayal of Clearte is heightened in Act Two by his singing of 'Voglio servir fedel' and 'Non mi far pianger sempre,' both of which he sculpts with the strokes of a master craftsman. There is an exuberance in his enunciation of 'Tutta gioia, e tutta riso' in Act Three that increases the emotional temperature of the performance, and the intensity of expression in his intoning of the accompagnato 'Ma lasso' is electrifying. The faculty with which Mr. Sheehan scales the heights of Clearte’s haute-contre tessitura is awe-inspiring, but the foremost pleasure of his singing is its unforced comeliness.

Here singing the rôle of Manto, the radiant soprano Amanda Forsythe sang the title rôle in the 2011 BEMF staging of Niobe. She is a singer for whom Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century repertory is completely natural territory, and her polished-silver voice possesses reserves of power that enable her to sustain fastidiously-nuanced characterizations throughout the course of a performance of a score as demanding as Steffani’s. Her technique enables her to toss off the Act One aria 'Se la vita à me donasti' with aplomb, followed by an account of the aria 'Vuoi ch'io parli, parlerò' that is notable for its singularity of dramatic purpose. The simplicity of her enunciation in 'Nel mio seno à poco à poco' transforms her portrayal from one of a delicate, naïve girl into a study of a sensitive but strong-willed young woman. In Act Two, she shapes her accounts of the arias 'Tu ci pensasti poco' and 'Hò troppo parlato' with unfettered ingenuity, her upper register pealing with the freshness of youth. Like several of her colleagues in this performance, Ms. Forsythe is at her best in Act Three, in which she sings 'Chiudetevi miei lumi' lusciously. She must have been a very moving Niobe, but she cannot have been more convincing than she is as Manto in this performance.

It is no exaggeration to state that French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky has not only achieved the pinnacle of success for a modern singer of his Fach but has also contributed indelibly to the expansion of the reach, reception, and sheer appeal of countertenor singing. His assumption of the title rôle in Stefano Landi’s Il Sant'Alessio with Les Arts Florissants restored to that opera the authenticity of its original casting, and he has brought to a wide array of parts composed for legendary castrati both the appropriate gender identity and historically-informed instincts bolstered by the training and preparation of a modern singer. It is also no exaggeration to suggest that, with a discography containing many valuable recordings, Mr. Jaroussky has done nothing finer on disc than this portrayal of Steffani’s Anfione. In the proud monarch’s Act One duet with his obdurate consort, 'Sollievo del mio seno,' the countertenor’s voice gleams, and his singing of the aria 'Miratemi begl'occhi' is exquisite. Then, the concentrated emotion that he evinces in the accompagnato 'Dell'alma stanca' is contrasted with the subtlety of his performance of the aria 'Sfere amiche.' The grandeur that courses through Mr. Jaroussky’s account of 'Come padre, e come dio' recurs in his ardent singing in the duettino with Niobe, 'Mia fiamma, mio ardore.' In Act Two, self-righteousness emanates from his assured navigation of the vocal lines in the aria ‘Ascendo alle stelle,' and he phrases 'Dal mio petto o pianti uscite' with tremendous feeling. In terms of unadulterated virtuosity, the summit of Anfione’s musical Everest is the aria 'Trà bellici carmi.' The almost insouciant ease with which Mr. Jaroussky dispatches the frenzied coloratura is dazzling, as well as appropriate to the character’s psychological profile, but it is the pair of arias in Act Three—‘Hò perduta la speranza' and 'Spira già nel proprio sangue' with Niobe—that reveal the full spectrum of his gifts. The bright patina of Mr. Jaroussky’s voice is ideally suited to Anfione’s incandescent music: other singers might sing the part as well as he does on this recording, but it is impossible to imagine the rôle being sung better.

Québécoise soprano Karina Gauvin is one of the brightest stars shining in the Early Music firmament, and her performance of the title rôle in Niobe is often celestial. There are fleeting moments in which the voice sounds slightly heavy for the music, the singer’s deft handling of even the most fleet passagework notwithstanding. The prevailing sensibilities of her portrayal seem borrowed from the Nineteenth Century rather than the Seventeenth, but as the performance progresses it becomes ever clearer that this is a dramatic advantage. Instead of an over-complicated but ultimately one-dimensional heroine in the fashion of the ladies who populate Seventeenth-Century operas, Ms. Gauvin creates within the confines of Steffani’s music and Orlandini’s words a nuanced character who would not be out of place in a masterpiece of Donizetti’s maturity. This is not to imply that there is anything anachronistic in Ms. Gauvin’s singing: she consistently matches her colleagues’ stylishness but on a somewhat larger scale. In the Act One duet with Anfione, ‘Sollievo del mio seno,’ Ms. Gauvin and Mr. Jaroussky spar with legitimate regality, and the soprano’s assured singing of Niobe’s arias 'È felice il tuo cor' and 'Vorrei sempre vagheggiarti' sets the stage for the understated, self-serving eroticism of her voicing of her lines in the duettino with Anfione, 'Mia fiamma, mio ardore.' The stream of contempt that flows through the Act Two aria 'Qui la dea cieca volante' floods Ms. Gauvin’s singing without disturbing the tonal quality, and she soars through 'Stringo al seno un nume amante' with the words thrown like knives into the listener’s ears. The duetto with Creonte, 'T'abbraccio mia diva,' finds her at her most demure, the text wafted on a gentle zephyr of song. Niobe’s formidable dramatic challenges are in Act Three, and Ms. Gauvin proves a shrewd artist with untold stylistic resources at the ready. She produces a golden river of tone in the aria 'Amami, e vederai' before unleashing tempests of sentiment in 'Contro il Ciel' and 'In mezzo al armi.' She again unites with Mr. Jaroussky in 'Spira già nel proprio sangue,' their very different voices conveying conflicting emotions that in turn both bring Niobe and Anfione together and drive them apart. Ms. Gauvin assumes the dramatic weight of a Gluckian doomed heroine in her pained but controlled reading of 'Funeste imagini.' On the page, Orlandini’s Niobe is a woman who warrants only slightly more sympathy than Ovid’s, but in Ms. Gauvin’s performance she earns the mien of tragedy.

It must sometimes seem strange, especially to those observers whose primary musical interests are centered in later repertory, that such wealths of time, talent, and funding are devoted to the rediscovery and resurrection of operas like Agostino Steffani’s 1688 Niobe, regina di Tebe. Like any other aspect of life on earth, opera is cyclical: in terms of interest in a particular niche of operatic repertory, what goes around comes around. There are very practical factors contributing to the rebirths of forgotten operatic progeny of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, however. Foremost among those factors is the presence of singers like those heard on this recording, singers not only capable of singing music like Steffani’s but committed to singing it as Flagstad and Melchior sang Wagner and Tebaldi and Bergonzi sang Verdi. When recordings of standard repertory so often disappoint [perhaps Warner Classics’ forthcoming Aida with Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann will defy this trend!], it is a recording like this superb encounter with Niobe, regina di Tebe that reminds Twenty-First-Century listeners that we do not dwell in a musical dessert parched of great singing. The watering holes are now perhaps a bit farther from the established trails and, rather than being named Elisabeth and Tannhäuser on the operatic map, are called Niobe and Anfione.

LUIGI BOCCHERINI (1743 – 1805), JEAN-PIERRE DUPORT (1741 – 1818), GIUSEPPE ANTONIO PAGANELLI (1710 – circa 1763), DOMINGO PORRETTI (1709 – 1783), FRANCESCO PAOLO SUPRIANO (1678 – 1753), PABLO VIDAL (died 1807), and JOSÉ ZAYAS (died 1804): The Cello in Spain– Music by Eighteenth-Century Virtuosi—Josetxu Obregón, cello and direction; La Ritirata [Recorded in Sala Tomás Luis de Victoria, Real Conservatorio de Música, Madrid, Spain, in December 2014; Glossa GCD 923103; 1 CD, 57:05; Available from La Ritirata, La Quinta de Mahler, Amazon (USA), Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

I begin with an egregious but unmalicious act of heresy; or, from the perspective of my fellow violinists, perhaps treason. I have long thought that, if circumstances somehow permitted me to start my musical education anew, I should abandon the violin in favor of the cello. Hearing The Cello in Spain, the new Glossa disc featuring cellist Josetxu Obregón and La Ritirata, has both intensified my love for the cello and reassured me that I was right to have studied the violin: profaning the cello with my poor playing should have been criminal in comparison with what Mr. Obregón and his colleagues achieve on this disc, which Federico Prieto’s engineering gives the holding-one’s-breath ambiance of a live performance rather than that of an antiseptic recording studio. This music, much of which is undeservedly unfamiliar, demands this sort of vitality, and the advocacy that it receives on this disc is extraordinary. Even an imperceptive listener is seldom fooled by empty virtuosity, and there is no ignoring the tremendous dose of corazón that makes this disc so enjoyable. There are technical fireworks aplenty, but the defining quality of The Cello in Spain is passion.

Like so much in the glorious history of music, the lineage of the modern violoncello is open to interpretation. Likely first developed by luthiers working in and near Bologna in the 1660s, the cello was a gradual adaptation of the bass viol and viola da gamba—in short, a product of musical evolution that arose in response to the creation of metal strings that enabled reliable intonation on low pitches on instruments with smaller, more manageable bodies. Standardizations of size and design did not follow until the middle of the Eighteenth Century, after the efforts of makers such as Stradivarius elevated the cello to the level of importance at which it rendered earlier incarnations of the bass violin obsolete. The history of the cello in Spain travelled a course that can be most reliably documented via the music composed for the instrument by artists resident in the country and visiting the Hapsburg and Borbón courts of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spain. In the selections on The Cello in Spain, Mr. Obregón and his expert colleagues—Daniel Oyarzabal on harpsichord and organ, cellist Diana Vinagre, Enrike Solinís on Baroque guitar and archlute, Daniel Zapico on theorbo, harpist Sara Águeda, violinists Lina Tur Bonet and Miren Zeberio, violinist and violist Daniel Lorenzo, double bass player Michel Frechina, and master of the castanets David Chupete—recreate with compelling musical narrative the formation of a tradition of composition for the cello that became as central to the artistic life of Spain as writing for the baryton—a bizarre relative of the cello and bass viol—was to Haydn’s composition of instrumental music during his tenure at Esterháza. Informed but never restricted by historically-informed performance practice scholarship, Mr. Obregón and his La Ritirata colleagues transport the listener to the alternately reverent and playful halls of el Escorial with sounds that engage and enthrall as viscerally now as when the composers represented on The Cello in Spain peddled their music to princes and popes.

Born into a musical family in Lucca, Italy, Luigi Boccherini was for much of his creative career in service to Spanish patrons, and his ‘transplanted’ music is now as widely—and more justifiably—associated with Spain as Bizet’s Carmen and Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. Collaborating with Ms. Vinagre, Mr. Solinís, and Mr. Oyarzabal, Mr. Obregón offers a standard-setting performance of Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in C Major (G.6), his enthusiasm for the music emanating from the energetic reading of the opening Allegro movement. Italianate melodic fecundity and Spanish soulfulness are combined in the lovely Largo assai, and Mr. Obregón revels in the expressivity of the music without diminishing the rhythmic crispness that gives his playing its stimulating power. The Allegro moderato movement also receives from Mr. Obregón a rousing performance of unflagging stylishness. His is the sort of virtuosity that is always secondary to emotional connection with the music: by exploring the sentiments around which the music was woven, Mr. Obregón discloses to the attentive listener the impetus for every musical gesture.

Like Boccherini, Padua native Giuseppe Antonio Paganelli was also an Italian who devoted the last phase of his compositional career to Spain. His Sonata in A minor displays a certain indebtedness to the style of Giuseppe Tartini, with whom Paganelli may have studied, as well as a nod to French models. The dulcet Largo that opens the Sonata is phrased expansively by Mr. Obregón, and his efforts are eloquently seconded by the playing of Mr. Zapico, Ms. Águeda, and Mr. Oyarzabal. The cajoling harmonies of the subsequent Allegro movement are blended with the richness of a traditional paella, and the undiluted feelings of the Adagio are poignantly but unexaggeratedly conveyed by Mr. Obregón. He and his colleagues give a nimble account of the spirited Gigue, its character that of the Gran Vía rather than the Champs-Élysées.

Jean-Pierre Duport and his brother Jean-Louis were pupils of the celebrated French cellist Martin Berteau, credited by many musicologists as the godfather of French cello technique. Both Duport brothers were acquainted with Beethoven in the years after Jean-Pierre’s sojourn in Spain, and the young Beethoven dedicated his Opus 5 Cello Sonatas to Jean-Pierre, who was master of chamber music at the Potsdam court of Friedrich Wilhelm II. Duport’s own Cello Sonata No. 1 in D Major was dedicated to the Duque de Alba, presumably Fernando de Silva Mendoza y Toledo, grandfather of Goya’s muse Doña María del Pilar de Silva, duquesa de Alba. Partnered by Ms. Vinagre and Mr. Oyarzabal, Mr. Obregón whizzes through the Sonata’s opening Allegro movement in a fantastic exhibition of bowing technique, and his mastery of the expansive Adagio is no less thorough. The final Allegro is rendered with consummate skill and obvious exuberance by cellist and his amigos musicales.

Dating from the second half of the Eighteenth Century, the anonymous Adagio in E minor from the Manuscrito de Barcelona is a subdued piece that pulses with the veiled desolation that lurks beneath the surface of so much Spanish music. Mr. Obregón, Ms. Águeda, and Mr. Oyarzabal immerse themselves in the spirit of the music without aggrandizing its moods, playing with perfect intonation and flawless musical teamwork. Mr. Obregón provides a deeply-felt interpretation of the Toccata prima in G major for solo cello by Francesco Paolo Supriano (né Scipriani), a product of the Neapolitan school and the famed Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini. He is joined by Ms. Vinagre in a beautifully-conceived performance of Pablo Vidal’s brief but memorable Duetto-Andante from Arte y Escuela de violoncello. Mr. Oyarzabal adds his insightful playing to theirs in a similarly affectionate traversal of José Zayas’s Última lección in B-flat Major from Manuscrito de Barcelona.

Thought to be the only extant example from the set of twenty-four concerti composed circa 1755 by Domingo Porretti, the Cello Concerto in G Major is, in terms of instrumentation, the most substantial work on The Cello in Spain. Its four movements of near-equal duration engender an uncanny symmetry, and this is also reflected in the performance by Mr. Obregón and La Ritirata. The pair of Largo movements are rapturously delivered, the melodic lines caressed by Mr. Obregón with the aura of song. The contrast with the Allegro movements is realized with exemplary artistry, the musicians shining the light of their talent on the colorations in the composer’s score rather than painting the music with artificial hues. If this Concerto is indicative of the quality of its missing brethren, the loss to the concert repertory of the cello is considerable.

A more thrilling finale for The Cello in Spain than the Fandango from Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet in D Major (G.448) could not have been selected. Though he was born in Italy, a half-century’s residency in Spain surely injected a transfusion of the musical sangre de España into Boccherini’s veins, and the resulting metamorphosis of his artistic DNA yielded a piece as quintessentially Spanish as the Fandango. As performed here by Mr. Obregón, Ms. Solinís, Ms. Tur Bonet, Ms. Zeberio, and Mr. Lorenzo, with a brilliant contribution from Mr. Chupete’s castanets, the Fandango evokes the dual freedom and formality, the palmas and pitos, the grit and grandeur of Spanish music and culture.

There are as many ways of describing the unique sonorities of the cello as there are methods of coaxing them from the instrument. Mstislav Rostropovich, one of the preeminent cellists of the Twentieth Century, wrote that he was initially attracted to the cello because its sound was to his ears like that of a voice—a voice that he recognized as his own. The marvel of this disc is that the playing of Josetxu Obregón and La Ritirata empowers the listener to hear the cello as the voice of a nation. The selections on The Cello in Spain and the zeal with which they are played illustrate the urbane roots of Spanish repertory for this four-stringed vessel of the musical soul. Fellow violinists, forgive me: The Cello in Spain inspires me to long to be a cellist—in Spain, por favor.

When Don Luis Méndoz de Haro and Cardinal Mazarin met in 1659 on the Isla de los Faisanes in the middle of the Bidasoa River as the proxies of the Hapsburg Spanish and Bourbon French crowns, the Treaty of the Pyrenees that arose from their diplomacy ended a quarter-century of conflict between Spain and France that paralleled the broader Thirty Years' War that devastated much of northern Europe in the first half of the Seventeenth Century. The foundations of the regional politics that upset the balance of daily life in Spain even now, sometimes in tragic eruptions of violence that echo the 1640 Corpus de Sang, were already strongly fortified when, angered by Spanish abuses of Catalan troops and citizens during the Thirty Years’ War, the people of Catalonia rebelled against their Hapsburg oppressors, capitalizing on the differing agendas and distractions of the French and Spanish. This revolt perpetuated war between the neighbors across the Pyrenees that persisted after the Peace of Westphalia ended the hostilities of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Though this clash of imperial ambitions would persist for another seven years, destiny deserted the proud Catalan when the Spanish captured Barcelona in 1652, capitulating Catalonia to Hapsburg dominion and solidifying Spain’s border with France. It was into this tempestuous environment that Pier Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l'amazzone di Aragona was born. Premièred at the Nuovo Teatro del Palazzo Reale in Naples—another sparkling but problematic jewel in the Spanish Hapsburg crown—on 21 December 1652, the opera was an obvious paean to the Spanish conquest of Barcelona and expulsion of the Moors, its depiction of the 1462 conquest and annexation of Gibraltar by Enrique IV of Castile and the subsequent 1492 victory of his daughter Isabella I of Castile and her consort Ferdinand II of Aragon—Spain’s lionized reyes católicos, restyled by Cavalli and his librettists as Veremonda and Alfonso—over the Moorish Emirate of Granada [sailing the ocean blue was not all the royal couple had on their minds in that fateful year] standing in handily for the Spanish suppression of the Catalan revolt. Both the propagandizing and Cavalli’s music evidently proved palatable: scarcely more than a month passed before Veremonda was performed in Venice’s Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo on 28 January 1653. It is baffling to observe that a plot as startlingly modern as that of Veremonda has been so long overlooked by conductors, directors, and singers whilst the ancient and mythological denizens of Cavalli operas such as La Calisto, Ercole amante, Giasone, and Xerse—characters who Sir Peter Shaffer’s Mozart might accuse of defecating marble—have regained footholds along the sidelines of today’s operatic playing field. Histories musical and anthropological reveal that a woman like Veremonda will not be silenced forever, but where she will be heard depends upon a fortuitous arrangement of circumstances. Fortuitous indeed are the circumstances that bring Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona to the 2015 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina: 362 years after maiden voyages, Veremonda will trade the Golfo di Napoli and Canałasso for the Ashley and Cooper and drop anchor at the Dock Street Theatre in a production poised not only to resurrect but also to revitalize this mesmerizing collision of art and politics.

A queen regnant with both tremendous political power and the intelligence and wherewithal to wield it effectively, Isabella I was an anomaly in the predominantly primogenital social order of her time. That the Seventeenth-Century librettists who retrieved her from the recesses of history and repurposed her for the operatic stage with a symbolic Amazon slant seem somewhat chauvinistic from a Twenty-First-Century perspective is perhaps inevitable, but removing the operatic Veremonda from her singular historical context diminishes the impact of her histrionic power. She will be sung in Charleston by Fairbanks-born mezzo-soprano—and Spoleto USA débutante—Vivica Genaux, one of the few singers in the world whose dynamic dramatic instincts are equaled by her astounding bravura technique. Having in the recent past sung Händel’s Giulio Cesare and Ruggiero (Alcina), Purcell’s Dido, and Veracini’s Farnaspe (Adriano in Siria), Ms. Genaux is adept at portraying characters in extremis on both sides of the gender divide. As a woman of irrefutable power tested by the mores of a patriarchal society, Veremonda is not unlike Purcell’s long-suffering Queen of Carthage: more than a few Didos would surely have welcomed the notion of gathering an army of sympathetic ladies to punish Aeneas’s betrayal! Ms. Genaux excels at bringing nuanced characters to life without overdoing their emotions, and she is an ideal musical conduit for the dramatic electricity of Cavalli’s score, her inimitable vocal technique mirroring Veremonda’s no-holds-barred manner of taking charge of every situation in which she finds herself.

Una bella amazzone: Mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux (center), who will sing the title rôle in Spoleto Festival USA’s production of Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona, in rehearsal; May 2015 [Photo by Aaron Carpenè; used with permission]

Aaron Carpenè, the Perth native and renowned Early Music specialist who prepared the score of Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona for the Spoleto USA production and will conduct the performances, cites the team of exceptional musicians assembled for the production as one of the greatest pleasures encountered in the initiative to breathe new life into Cavalli’s score. ‘We are proud to be working with a wonderful international cast led by Vivica Genaux and accompanied by the period instrument ensemble New York Baroque Inc.,’ he said recently. ‘We are [also] fortunate to have the prize-winning photographer Michel Juvet and author Allison Zurfluh, who will be publishing a book on the Veremonda production. It will include chapters on Cavalli, his life in Venice and the manuscript still conserved there today, the pre-production preparation with fascinating peeks into Ugo Nespolo’s art studio in Turin and the Oscar®-winning costume atelier Farani in Rome, as well as the backstage rehearsal work and première performance in Charleston. The book will be a fine souvenir of this extraordinary event.’

The wonderful international cast mentioned by Maestro Carpenè brings together a group of young singers already celebrated for musical and stylistic excellence. A like-minded partner for Ms. Genaux both on stage and on disc [their critically-lauded deutsche harmonia mundi studio recording of Johann Adolf Hasse’s Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra will be followed in autumn 2015 by fra bernardo’s release of a recording of their 2014 concert performance of Ferdinando Bertoni’s L’Orfeo], golden-throated Italian soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli will portray Zelemina in Veremonda, bringing a wealth of experience in Baroque repertory to her reunion with Ms. Genaux. One of the finest young representatives of his Fach, handsome Italian countertenor Raffaele Pè will make his American operatic début in the rôle of Delio—a part so critical to the plot that his name serves as the alternate title for Cavalli’s opera. Another pair of gifted countertenors will lend further period-appropriate singing to the production, the impersonations of Zaida by high-voiced Michael Maniaci and of Don Alfonso and il Sole in the opera’s prologue by Andrey Nemzer, a youthful veteran of the 2013 revival of the much-discussed Herbert Wernicke production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Metropolitan Opera, sure to be highlights of Spoleto USA’s Veremonda. Bass-baritone Joseph Barron’s Roldano, baritone Jason Budd’s Giacutte, tenor Steven Cole’s Don Buscone, and tenor Brian Downen’s Zeriffo and il Crepuscolo also promise musical flair. As the guiding force behind San Francisco-based Ars Minerva and the sagacious director and leading lady in that organization’s March 2015 modern-première performances of Daniele da Castrovillari’s 1662 opera La Cleopatra, coloratura mezzo-soprano Céline Ricci brings to her performances as Vespina in Veremonda vital experience with recreating a neglected operatic gem with complementary historically-informed practices and modern sensibilities. Completing the cast as the Sergente maggiore, a rôle that, as Maestro Carpenè notes, presents challenges to modern musicologists as the part’s tessitura shifts from bass to soprano halfway through the manuscript score, soprano Danielle Talamantes comes to Charleston for her first travesti rôle after an acclaimed turn as Frasquita in Bizet’s Carmen at the MET.

An authority on music of Veremonda’s vintage, Maestro Carpenè is uncommonly attentive to the daunting task that reviving forgotten scores poses to even the most insightful artists. ‘There are many challenges in preparing a score from a manuscript,’ he states, ‘but, in particular for Veremonda, one of the great challenges was dealing with what is known as Cavalli’s messiest manuscript. There are evidently the hands of at least two copyists; Cavalli’s own hand in corrections, cancellations, and additions; and lastly [that of] Cavalli’s wife Maria, who also helped out in both copying and composing. Cavalli’s handwriting appears hasty and untidy, while the copyists—who presumably replaced Maria since she died in the same year as the production of the opera, 1652—have neat handwriting but present numerous musical errors which have to be corrected.’ Solving these problems, the Maestro muses, is only one facet of the endeavor of restoring an opera like Veremonda to its original glory. ‘A further challenge in bringing this opera back to life for a contemporary audience is the decision related to the style of production,’ he intimates. ‘Should a world première in modern times seek to propose a philological reinterpretation that reflects what Cavalli’s audiences would have seen and heard in 1652, or should there be a reinterpretation that reflects modern day tastes?’

Delio divino: Countertenor Raffaele Pè in rehearsal for his portrayal of Delio in Spoleto Festival USA’s production of Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona; May 2015 [Photo by Aaron Carpenè; used with permission]

At this point, Maestro Carpenè’s thoughts turn to the inception of Spoleto USA’s production of Veremonda—a groundbreaking project typical of the Festival’s enterprising spirit. ‘It was the Spoleto Festival’s director, Nigel Redden, who proposed [Veremonda] to stage director Stefano Vizioli and myself,’ he recollects. ‘Having accepted the offer, the principal attraction of the project was the challenge of preparing a production score from the manuscript and then working in an organic way with Vizioli in the development of the staging concept that determines aspects such as sets and costumes based on our perception of what the music and the libretto were trying to express. We decided, for example, to work with one of Italy’s most famous contemporary artists, Ugo Nespolo. His colorful and vibrant style evokes a striking Mediterranean zest, and the sets themselves, perfectly suited to the Baroque dimensions of the USA’s oldest theatre—the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, built in 1736 [the present structure was constructed in 1809, following a devastating fire],—actually follow closely the Baroque grammar of stagecraft. To create a philological production of what Cavalli’s audience might have seen would have been an interesting exercise, but we felt that some of the themes of the opera—the conflict between Christians and Muslims, the questions of gender and rôles in society—were just as relevant today as they were to those audiences and that the argument for a more ‘contemporary’ staging seemed to be more pressing. For me personally, an historically-informed approach is the starting point, not the finishing line. So while I am being very attentive to the Cavalli singing style of recitar cantando, the employment of period instruments, the appropriate pitch and tuning, and so forth, I feel that the message of the opera has to speak in the most accessible way possible to an audience of today.’

Spoleto USA and Charleston are ideal venues for the rediscovery of Veremonda, Maestro Carpenè feels. ‘The Spoleto Festival in Charleston prides itself on presenting little- or unknown works and artists to their audiences,’ he reflects. ‘Only recently, the festival director, Nigel Redden, proudly spoke of his policy of not presenting the familiar to his audiences but, rather, cultivating them and their curiosity in embracing the unfamiliar. Yet another Tosca or Traviata can be easily seen in any major opera theatre throughout the world: Veremonda has the privilege of [a] world première in modern times, just over 360 years since its original performance, at this festival.’ Moreover, the conductor suggests, both recent events and the annals of Charleston’s storied past as a cradle of the American Civil War make the city a fitting backdrop for the angst of Veremonda. ‘With respect to the [original] performance date, it is a story based on relatively recent history, in contrast to the mythical subjects found in Ercole amante, La Didone or La Calisto or more ancient historical references in Muzio Scevola or Il Xerse,’ he explains. ‘Veremonda is also unique because of the way the libretto was composed. Giulio Strozzi, writing under the pseudonym Luigi Zorzisto, took an earlier Florentine libretto entitled Celio by his colleague Giacinto Andrea Cicognini and literally copied and pasted much of the material to form a new libretto designed to entertain Venetian audiences. In many other ways, in style and form, Veremonda is quite close to the other masterpieces such as Giasone and La Calisto, and it is a great honor and privilege to be able to present this glorious music to a modern audience.’

Veremonda is an experience that will linger in the minds of Spoleto USA audiences for years to come, Maestro Carpenè believes. ‘There will be many things to remember: the fine singing, the skillful orchestral accompaniment, the enthralling staging, the artwork of the sets,’ he says with pride. ‘But besides all of this,’ he continues, ‘I would like the Spoleto audience to remember an unique and historical event; the resurrection of a long-forgotten opera by the most important opera composer of the day, whose operas helped shape the destiny of musical theatre performance that we know today.’ This, he suggests, is the greatest reward of the exhausting process of bringing Veremonda to Charleston. ‘To follow the growth and development of the project through all its phases, from the viewing of the old manuscript in the Marciana Library of Venice, to the transcription of the music and text, the elaboration of the staging, and finally the rehearsals with cast and orchestra with the mounting of the staging leading up to the première—to see and experience the final product is a great source of satisfaction.’

That satisfaction seems certain to be shared by cast, production team, and audiences alike. In advance of opening night, Spoleto Festival USA will offer a ‘Salon Series’ preview on Wednesday, 20 May. Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona opens at the Dock Street Theatre on Saturday, 23 May. Additional performances are scheduled for 26 and 30 May and 2 and 5 June.

Prima la musica: Pier Francesco Cavalli (1602 – 1676), composer of Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona, returning to the stage after 362 years at the 2015 Spoleto Festival USA [17th-Century engraving from private collection]

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo—Tara Erraught (Angelina), David Portillo (Don Ramiro), Simone Alberghini (Dandini), Valeriano Lanchas (Don Magnifico), Shenyang (Alidoro), Deborah Nansteel (Tisbe), Jacqueline Echols (Clorinda); Washington National Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Speranza Scappucci, conductor [Directed by Joan Font; Set and Costume Designs by Joan Guillén; Lighting Designs by Albert Faura; Choreography by Xevi Dorca; Washington National Opera, John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC; Sunday, 17 May 2015]

Who has not dreamed of being transformed by the unseen hand of fate into a beautiful princess or of being the magnanimous prince who values pulchritude of spirit above loveliness of face and form? These are the fantasies personified by Angelina and Ramiro, the protagonists of Gioachino Rossini’s 1817 comic masterpiece La Cenerentola, and their journeys from downtrodden housemaid and lonely bachelor to partners in marital serendipity can be some of the most enjoyable adventures in opera. The score is vintage Rossini, with whirling coloratura, manic ensembles, and frolicsome crescendi aplenty, but the true heart of La Cenerentola is the well of sadness that lurks beneath the brilliant patina of Rossini’s polished music. The most successful productions of the opera are those that draw from that well without bleeding it dry, and this is precisely what Washington National Opera’s production achieved in spades. Comedy is meaningless if the audience is given no reason to care about the characters whose antics inspire mirth: in this performance, the audience’s ebullient hilarity was an organic response to the exploits of an unusually lovable cast. For a few hours on a balmy Sunday afternoon, a congregation of people united by nothing more than holding tickets to the same performance laughed together without concern for race, religion, or social status. Equality, Rossini intimates, really can be that simple.

Conducted by Speranza Scappucci with the flexibility and genuine Italianate finesse missing from so many of today’s performances of Rossini’s operas and bel canto repertory in general, WNO’s Cenerentola—a production shared with Welsh National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Gran Teatre del Liceu, and Grand Théâtre de Genève—was in a number of ways a feast for the senses. Visually, Joan Guillén’s sets and costumes placed the action in a fantastical fairytale dominion in which ladies were effortlessly prepossessing, men were heroically handsome, and even the shabbiest creatures had the good taste to adopt genteel manners. The rainbow-colored costumes, complemented by outrageous wigs in corresponding hues, were a vital component of the comedy: who else in opera but Don Magnifico could pull off donning a ripe-grape purple suit and periwig? Alidoro’s celestial robe was straight out of Harry Potter, and the choristers looked like a splendid hybrid of the Swiss Guard and courtiers of Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Mr. Guillén’s designs shone in the glow of Albert Faura’s intelligently-managed lighting, which bathed the stage in glows both natural and appropriately magical.

One of the production’s strokes of genius was the team of mice that shadow Cenerentola throughout the opera: her gentle caressing of them was surprisingly touching, and their expertly-enacted choreography, devised by Xevi Dorca, was fabulously witty. The team of dancers beneath the mice’s cleverly-crafted masks—Nancy Flores-Tirado, Damon Foster, A. Maverick Lemons, Monica Malanga, Alvaro Palau, and Christopher Pennix—were lithe, winningly charming, and utterly believable as mice. They provided so many small details that enriched the production immeasurably: unobtrusively moving props, quietly watching the action, lovingly comforting the downtrodden Angelina, and, most critically, using a dose of mouse ingenuity to ensure that the Prince’s carriage wrecked conveniently in the vicinity of Villa Don Magnifico. In the interactions of cast members both human and murine, Joan Font’s and Tanya Kane-Parry’s direction was consistently shrewd. Tellingly, not one member of the cast ever looked uncomfortable with any component of the staging. The focus was on ordinary people finding themselves in near-impossible situations, having a few laughs at their own expense, sorting things out as best as they could, and singing great music all the while—in short, on performing Rossini’s Cenerentola, not some wrongheaded reimagining of it.

Una famiglia insolita: (from left to right) Mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel as Tisbe, bass-baritone Valeriano Lanchas as Don Magnifico, and soprano Jacqueline Echols as Clorinda in Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola at Washington National Opera, 17 May 2015 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

La Cenerentola is a score that I have known and loved for nearly twenty years. I have attended performances by opera companies large and small, and each performance has educated me about previously-unnoticed aspects of Rossini’s effervescent music. Appreciating this music as much as I do, I can offer no greater praise for Maestra Scappucci’s pacing of the performance than stating that she conducted the opera precisely as I would do if an opera company were foolish enough to trust me with a baton. Refreshingly, she was never afraid of applying the brakes when the musical and emotional atmosphere warranted doing so. The madcap Rossini prestissimi were there, to be sure, but neither the music nor those performing it were rushed. Also proving an imaginative maestra di cembalo in Luca Agolini’s secco recitatives, she adopted tempi that enabled a rare level of appreciation for the bel in Rossini’s bel canto. Under Maestra Scappucci’s baton, the WNO Orchestra and Chorus performed with the vivacity and unfettered musicality that the score demands. The orchestra delivered an especially spirited account of the Sinfonia in which, as throughout the performance, the conductor heightened the emotional ‘messages’ of the music by observing Rossini’s markings and employing great flexibility in resolving cadences. The kinship among La Cenerentola and the two great ‘last stands’ of Italian comic opera, Verdi’s Falstaff and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, was unusually apparent. Rossini is not renowned for his aptitude as an orchestrator, but his writing for woodwinds in Cenerentola is often quite inventive: in this performance, the WNO woodwind players left no felicity of their parts undisclosed. The gentlemen of the chorus sang robustly, their performances of ‘O figlie amabili di Don Magnifico, Ramiro il principe or or verrà’ and ‘Scegli la sposa, affrettati’ in Act One bustling with enthusiasm and of ‘Della Fortuna instabile’ in Act Two filling the auditorium with finely-blended sound.

As Cenerentola’s delectably nasty stepsisters, mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel and soprano Jacqueline Echols were ideally paired vocally, comically, and temperamentally. Making enormous pink and yellow wigs look like the pinnacle of swanky ‘mean girl’ style, the ladies pranced and pouted like a spoiled Dorabella and Fiordiligi. [Note to WNO and other companies: a production of Così fan tutte with this twosome would be smashing!] An alumna of the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, Ms. Nansteel exhibited such naturalness in Tisbe’s tantrums that she hardly seemed to be acting at all, and the Nationals would do well to invite her to spring training next season: her aim when hurling slippers at poor Cenerentola was deadly. Ms. Echols, an unforgettable Violetta in North Carolina Opera’s La traviata earlier in the present season, equaled Ms. Nansteel’s every gesture and soared in Clorinda’s high lines in ensembles, displaying firm, attractive top As, B♭s, and Bs. The spiteful sisters were riotous in the Act Two Sextet, and their eventual resignation to Alidoro’s suggested reconciliation with Cenerentola, Tisbe coming to her senses rather more readily than Clorinda, was managed humorously but with real feeling. Though it is the work of Angelini rather than Rossini, it was unfortunate that Clorinda’s aria was suppressed: Ms. Echols deserved the additional opportunity to shine.

Winner of the 2007 Cardiff Singer of the World competition, Chinese bass Shenyang was an imposing Alidoro who vocal power matched his towering physique. WNO’s production preferred the aria that Rossini composed for Alidoro in the 1820 revival of Cenerentola, ‘La, del ciel nell’arcano profondo,’ and the performance that it received from this talented young bass fully justified its inclusion. His dark tones were occasionally lost in ensembles, but he was an implacable voice for integrity whose expertly-sung utterances could not be ignored.

Il padre riluttante: Bass-baritone Valeriano Lanchas as Don Magnifico (center) in Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola at Washington National Opera, 17 May 2015 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © Washington National Opera]

Colombian bass-baritone Valeriano Lanchas, also a veteran of the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program, portrayed Don Magnifico as a foolish man but not a fool. Possessing a large sound, a lively stage presence, and an easy command of the stage, total mastery of Rossini's idiom is not yet a weapon in his impressive operatic arsenal. In Act One, Mr. Lanchas gave an account of Magnifico's cavatina ‘Miei rampolli femminini’ that was dramatically captivating but musically rough around the edges. He sang ‘Mi sognai fra il fosco e il chiaro’ and ‘Per pietà quelle ciglia abbassate’ excitingly, and he combined with Dandini with spitfire exasperation in their duet in Act Two. Mr. Lanchas was at his best in ensembles, in which he dedicated himself to the task of maintaining Magnifico’s central part in the drama. Even when his bravura technique was slightly overwhelmed by Rossini’s patter writing, Mr. Lanchas created a larger-than-life character, and it was a legitimate pleasure to hear such a big, bold voice in Magnifico’s music.

​A native of Bologna, bass-baritone Simone Alberghini is to the Rossinian manner born, and his impersonation of the wily Dandini was the work of both a very capable singer and a comedic mastermind. The dryness of his timbre lent his characterization an unexpected sophistication that in no way inhibited his instincts for comedy.​ Seizing his opportunity to experience the master’s perspective on giving and taking orders, this Dandini let no chance to exercise his temporary authority pass him by. Many singers might have overplayed Dandini’s dropping his hat so that the disguised Prince must retrieve it, but Mr. Alberghini made it funnier each time he did it. His singing of the cavatina ‘Come un’ape ne’ giorni d’aprile va volando leggiera e scherzosa’ was more forced than forceful, the top Fs secure and ringing if tightly-muscled, but he rousingly met every demand of the duet with Ramiro, ‘Zitto, zitto; piano, piano.’ The Act Two duet with Magnifico, ‘Un segreto d’importanza,’ was all the more effective for being understated: when the scene is written so perfectly, there is no need for a plethora of slapstick shenanigans. The most treasurable moment of the afternoon was when, after a bit of particularly funny stage business between Dandini and Magnifico, a small child’s laughter rang out. Dandini’s next lines were delivered through the singer’s own laughter. It was the kind of moment that cannot be rehearsed and makes an enjoyable performance an unforgettable one for artists and audience. Mr. Alberghini dispatched the mercurial writing of ‘Questo è un nodo avviluppato’ in the Sextet with astounding technical acumen, and he contributed a high level of accuracy in florid music to all ensembles. So impressive was his dancing that it seemed that he was preparing for the Royal Ballet’s visit to Kennedy Center in June. Mr. Alberghini sang impressively throughout the performance, but the hallmark of this Dandini was unalloyed, good-natured fun.

Il servo ed il principe: Bass-baritone Simone Alberghini as Dandini (left, in disguise as the Prince) and tenor David Portillo as Ramiro (right) in Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola at Washington National Opera, 17 May 2015 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

With recent triumphs as Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte with Houston Grand Opera, Tonio in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment with Arizona Opera, and Tebaldo in Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi with Washington Concert Opera to his credit, Texas-born tenor David Portillo brought to his portrayal of Ramiro in WNO’sCenerentola an estimable bel canto curriculum vitae that belies his youth. Singing his first part with WNO, he dominated the stage with his mischievously handsome presence, disarming smile, and natural flair for Rossinian comedy.​ Aside from his Puckish characterization, the principal glory of Mr. Portillo’s Ramiro was the elegance with which his ravishing tenore di grazia rendered Rossini’s vocal lines. From the first notes of ‘Tutto è deserto,’ his singing combined near-perfect diction with undeviating assurance in coloratura passages. In the duet with Angelina, ‘Una soave non so che in quegl’occhi scintillò,’ his wide-eyed wonder was outstanding, and the cute detail of the Prince chivalrously offering to sweep up the remnants of the cup broken by Cenerentola but having no clue about what to do with a broom was endearingly managed. Mr. Portillo was a source of poised, skillfully-projected singing in the sensational Quintet and the duet with Dandini, in which he and Mr. Alberghini interacted with the conspiratorial conviviality of Conte d’Almaviva—in which rôle Mr. Portillo will be heard at the Metropolitan Opera in December and January, reuniting with Mr. Lanchas, who will make his MET début as Bartolo—and Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia. In Act Two, the four top Cs in Ramiro’s aria ‘Sì, ritrovarla io giuro’ were launched effortlessly, and the tonal sheen of Mr. Portillo’s singing of the Andantino section of the aria, ‘Pegno adorato e caro,’ was arresting. His performance of the cabaletta ‘Dolce speranza, freddo timore dentro al mio core stanno a pugnar’ was galvanizing, the pair of written top Cs supplemented by an interpolated third, as well as a breathtaking top D. Like Elvino in Bellini’s La sonnambula, Ramiro has little to do after he and his true love are reunited, but Mr. Portillo’s amorously benevolent part in the drama continued to the opera’s final chord: his new bride seemed almost to float upon his affectionate gaze.

I primi sorrisi d’amore: Tenor David Portillo (left) as Ramiro and mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught in the title rôle (right) of Gioachino Rossini's La Cenerentola at Washington National Opera, 17 May 2015 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

The much-discussed interpreter of the title rôle in Glyndebourne’s 2014 production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught also made her WNO début, as well as her American staged opera début, in the current production of La Cenerentola. Sadly, the principal focus of last summer’s furor in the British press was not this lovely young singer’s voice, which is a well-controlled, amber-hued instrument of excellent quality, but the kind of inexcusable stupidity that makes not only opera itself but also those who love it seem shallow, outmoded, and no longer significant. WNO's Cenerentola was an ideal setting for​ the unpretentiously beautiful Ms. Erraught to display her capabilities as a singer and an actress, and what a display she gave! She looked as pretty as a fairytale princess even in Cenerentola’s ‘rags’—which, in truth, were rather smarter than in many productions of the opera—and acted the rôle with simplicity and sweetly feminine grace, ashamed at first of her burgeoning feelings of love for the disguised Prince and gradually blossoming into a bonafide romantic leading lady. Especially in Act One, in which Ms. Erraught phrased the delicate ‘Una volta c’era un re’ with excellent breath control, the voice was not ideally projected and was sometimes difficult to hear, especially in phrases in the lower octave of the part. In the duet with Ramiro, ‘Io vorrei saper perchè il mio cor mi palpitò,’ she sang dulcetly, and the expansiveness of her account of ‘Una grazia, un certo incanto par che brilli su quel viso’ was absorbing. The entreaties of ‘Signor, una parola’ were harrowing, and the seeming spontaneity of her enunciation of ‘Ah! sempre fra la cenere, sempre dovrò restar?’ deepened the poignancy of the scene. Ms. Erraught conveyed all of Cenerentola’s hope for a happier future in her sun-drenched singing of 'Sprezzo quei don che versa fortuna capricciosa,' and she made Cenerentola’s giving Ramiro the bracelet and charging him with searching for its mate a task no man could refuse. Every reappearance of 'Una volta c'era un re' grew lovelier, and the special intensity of the singer’s statement of 'Sposa...Signore, perdona la tenera incertezza che mi confonde ancor,' bolstered by Maestra Scappucci’s genial support, magnified the character’s altruistic spirit. Ms. Erraught approached the opera’s final scene as a musical and sentimental tour de force, singing the andante 'Nacqui all'affanno e al pianto’ with unaffected silkiness that she carried from the bottom of the range to her top B. Fittingly, Ms. Erraught’s finest singing of the afternoon was done in the rondò finale, 'Non più mesta accanto al fuoco starò sola a gorgheggiar.’ Here, the voice soared into the auditorium, the coloratura dispatched with complete adroitness, her trill invigorating, and her top Bs lustrous and secure. Her confidence flourished as the performance progressed, and she was ultimately a Cenerentola who proved equally adept at expressing the rôle’s joviality and profundity.

La Cenerentola is not a complicated opera, but far too many productions complicate it unnecessarily. It is unlikely that Rossini and his librettist, Jacopo Ferretti, ever intended for audiences who attend performances of Cenerentola to embrace the opera as anything but entertainment: perhaps they never envisioned that their opera would continue to be performed two centuries after its première. By approaching the opera with both creativity and fidelity to Rossini’s score, Washington National Opera affirmed that La Cenerentola deserves its place in the international repertory in the Twenty-First Century. Indeed, furnishing surroundings for singing such as that done by Tara Erraught and David Portillo on Sunday afternoon is reason enough to perform La Cenerentola anytime, anywhere.

Una donna ed il suo topo: Mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught in the title rôle of Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola at Washington National Opera, 17 March 2015 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © Washington National Opera]

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Der fliegende Holländer—Herbert Janssen (Der Holländer), Kirsten Flagstad (Senta), Ludwig Weber (Daland), Max Lorenz (Erik), Mary Jarred (Mary), Karl Ostertag (Steuermann); Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Fritz Reiner, conductor [Recorded in performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, UK, on 11 June 1937, with supplemental material necessary to fill gaps in the original broadcast recording; Immortal Performances IPCD 1051-2; 2 CDs, 132:48; Available from Immortal Performances and major music retailers]

The Royal Opera House Coronation Season of International Opera mounted in celebration of the 1937 enthroning of King George VI and his consort, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, opened on 19 April with a performance of Verdi's Otello with Giovanni Martinelli in the title rôle, Fernanda Ciana as Desdemona, and Cesare Formichi as Iago. During the course of the subsequent eleven weeks, the operatic homage to the royal couple encompassed performances of Borodin's Prince Igor and Bizet's Carmen with Eduard Kandl as Igor and Escamillo; Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, in which Vanni-Marcoux bade farewell to London as Golaud; Donizetti's Don Pasquale with Mafalda Favero as Norina and Dino Borgioli as Ernesto; Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue with Germaine Lubin as Ariane; Gluck's Alceste with Lubin in the name part and Orphée et Eurydice with Dame Maggie Teyte as Eurydice; Euguene Goossens's Don Juan de Mañara, given its world première with Lawrence Tibbett as Don Juan; Puccini's Tosca with Gina Cigna as the eponymous diva, Martinetlli as Cavaradossi, and Tibbett, appearing for the first time at Covent Garden (and also alternating with Formichi as Iago in Otello), as Scarpia and Turandot with Dame Eva Turner, Licia Albanese, and Martinelli; Verdi's Aida with Cigna, Ebe Stignani, and Martinelli and Falstaff with a fantastic cast including Formichi, Maria Caniglia, and Albanese; and Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer with Herbert Janssen and Kirsten Flagstad, Tristan und Isolde with Lauritz Melchior and Flagstad, Der Ring des Nibelungen with Flagstad as Brünnhilde under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Parsifal with Torsten Ralf and Kerstin Thorborg. By any standard, it was an extraordinary season, rivaled in Covent Garden's history—indeed, in the history of opera in the modern era—only by the fourteen-week season presented on the occasion of the 1911 coronation of George V. Even in the context of such musical excellence, the season's Wagner productions were remarkable, none more so than Charles Moor's staging of Der fliegende Holländer. The production united Kölner baritone Herbert Janssen (1892 – 1965), then starting his second decade on Covent Garden's roster, as the Holländer, Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad (1895 – 1962), still new to Covent Garden (she débuted at the Royal Opera House as Isolde on 18 May 1936: though she was ill with a nasty head cold on her first night, she received fifteen curtain calls at the performance's end), as Senta, Düsseldorf-born tenor Max Lorenz as Erik, and Viennese bass Ludwig Weber (1899 – 1974) as Daland, under the direction of Fritz Reiner (1888 – 1963), also a recent Covent Garden débutant. [His début was in Parsifal with Ralf and Frida Leider on 29 April 1936: he also conducted Flagstad's début and the three subsequent performances of Tristan und Isolde in May 1936.] If there were an operatic Eden, Kirsten Flagstad would surely be its Eve: from her intoxicating example Wagner singing in the later Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries was born. The 11 June broadcast of Der fliegende Holländer is rightly a famous performance. Now, owing to the painstaking restoration and conservation work of Richard Caniell and Immortal Performances, the listener in 2015 can truly hear rather than merely perceiving the performance’s importance. The current Queen could hope for no finer tributes to the musical heritage of the opera company under her patronage and to a tremendously important time in her and her parents’ lives.

Following accomplished but stylistically uncertain early efforts, Der fliegende Holländer was the score in which the twenty-nine-year-old Wagner found his mature voice, a fact that he acknowledged in his sprawling 1851 manifesto Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde. The Leitmotifs in Der fliegende Holländer are primarily dramatic devices rather than the psychological acuities in musical form that they would become in Der Ring des Nibelungen. The undistorted sound quality achieved by Caniell’s remastering of this performances enables contemplation of the standards of Wagner performance at Covent Garden in Fritz Reiner’s first seasons on the company’s podium. Compelled by the necessity of filling gaps left by portions of the 11 June performance that have not survived, Caniell seamlessly integrated material from other performances: unlike the proprietors of many labels, Caniell provides detailed information about the sources of the excerpts used as patches. The Overture and a few choral interjections before Erik’s entrance in Act Three are sourced from the Metropolitan Opera broadcast performance of 30 December 1950, in which Reiner presided over Hans Hotter’s Holländer and Astrid Varnay’s Senta (Ljuba Welitsch was the originally-scheduled Senta). The continuity of Weber’s Daland and Karl Ostertag’s (1903 – 1979) Steuermann is preserved by using brief passages from a 1936 Munich broadcast conducted by Carl Leonhardt. It was impossible to replicate the scene for Senta and Erik in Act Two with a recording featuring Flagstad and Lorenz, so the scene’s omission sensibly was not rectified. Most importantly, Caniell has corrected and equalized the pitch bar by bar, producing a recording that is a faithful document of how the performance must have sounded in the theatre (or over the wireless) in 1937, in addition to providing extensive, educating rather than pedantic liner notes that provide the listener with fresh insights and a sense of context whether hearing this performance for the first or the fiftieth time.

Under Reiner’s baton, the Covent Garden chorus and orchestra give an invigorating account of Wagner’s score. Neither the choral singing nor the orchestral playing is perfect: the earnestness of their efforts notwithstanding, the choristers often sound stressed by their music, and the instrumentalists make enough mistakes to remind listeners that even in such legendary settings musicians are fallible creatures. Still, the positive effects of what was surely a rigorous regimen of preparation are audible in the work of both chorus and orchestra. Reiner’s pacing of the performance is surprising, especially when compared to the familiar 1950 MET broadcast performance. The expected thrust is present throughout the performance, but there are scenes in which the conducting evinces a profoundly poetic wistfulness. The casts of the Covent Garden and MET performances are very different, of course, but it seems unlikely that this alone accounts for the marked dissimilarities between the two broadcasts. Whatever factors contributed to the nuances of Reiner’s interpretation of the score in London, the results are magical. Owing in large part to the support that they receive from the conductor, the singers are able to create characters who are credible as genuine individuals rather than typical Wagnerian archetypes, and the drama is engagingly visceral, not coldly symbolic. An erotic electricity crackles in the orchestra when the Holländer and Senta interact in Act Two, and the opera’s finale ultimately does not seem—as is usually the case—like an early study for Isolde’s Liebestod and Brünnhilde’s Schlussgesang but like the desperate action of a young woman consumed by a love too great to be sacrificed to conventionality. Reiner’s approach introduces an element of inevitability into the drama that makes the characters’ decisions all the more engrossing. These people are destined to collide, but Daland chooses to offer Senta to the Holländer as a bride in exchange for treasure, and Senta chooses to reject Erik’s warnings and join her fate to the Holländer’s. Her choice is not death: it is merely to follow the man she loves into his world, the eternal sea. Perhaps it would be hyperbolic rhetoric to term this performance visionary, but Reiner’s conducting of this performance conveys a quixotic but very specific exegesis. The keystone of this Fliegende Holländer is introspection. As a manager of musical personnel, Reiner is known to have been an exacting, sometimes intractable figure, but as the manager of this performance he displays perceptiveness unique in both his and the opera’s discographies.

Despite the participation of titans of Wagner repertory, Covent Garden’s Coronation Season Fliegende Holländer had as unified an ensemble cast as has ever been heard in the opera on recordings. Singing Mary, Senta’s nurse, Yorkshire-born contralto Mary Jarred (1899 – 1993) is a lovingly maternal but vivid presence, delivering ‘Ei, fleißig! Fleißig, wie sie spinnen!’ energetically and dotingly. Ostertag shames a number of today’s exponents of his rôle by truly singing the Steuermann’s music. His account of ‘Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer’ is a model of intelligent phrasing.

With the duet for Senta and Erik missing from the recording of Act Two of the 1937 broadcast and no suitable replacement being known to exist, there is only Erik’s scene in Act Three by which to judge Lorenz’s degree of comfort in the music. It is an awkwardly-written rôle, virtually a holdover from Weber’s Der Freischütz or Euryanthe. In the opening of the scene, Lorenz voices ‘Was mußt ich hören! Gott, was mußt ich sehn!’ with frenzied intensity. Reiner sets a measured tempo for the Kavatine, ‘Willst jenes Tags du nicht dich mehr entsinnen,’ enabling the singer to accurately place tones in the upper register and execute the ornaments gracefully. Lorenz sings the top As and B♭ and turns very elegantly indeed. Unlike many Eriks, the character portrayed by Lorenz does not badger Senta: he is none too happy about the path that she chooses, but his concern is that of affection rather than possessiveness. Musically, Lorenz’s voice was an ideal instrument for the rôle: commanding the resources to project over Wagner’s orchestrations, he also had the full range and the sweetness of tone demanded by the part. In this performance, he earns adulation even with nearly half of his music missing.

When Wagner’s libretto suggests that Senta is still in the full flush of youth, why is her father so often depicted as an old man in various stages of decrepitude? Visually, audiences in large theatres may well benefit from the generation gap between father and daughter being made artificially wide, but Wagner’s music for Daland benefits tremendously from youthful, virile singing like that offered by Weber in this performance. Without question, his was one of the finest bass voices of the Twentieth Century, but this Daland is notable for the lightness of both timbre and characterization. In the Act One duet with the Holländer, Weber’s singing of ‘Wie? Hört ich recht?’ is brawny but not unduly heavy. At the time of this performance, he seems to have been capable of doing almost anything he wanted to do with his voice, and his singing of ‘Mein Kind, du siehst mich auf der Schwelle’ and Daland’s aria ‘Mögst du, mein Kind, den fremden Mann’ in Act Two is poised and powerful. His lines in the trio with Senta and Holländer are shaped with dramatic alertness, beginning with a bristling pronouncement of ‘Verzeiht! Mein Volk hält draußen sich nicht meht.’ In Weber’s performance, Daland is his own man and less obviously a prototype for Pogner, König Marke, or Gurnemanz. As Weber portrays him in this performance, Daland is far more winsome than he often is: for once, he is not a figure who seems to have soured in the briny salt air.

From her first note, Flagstad’s Senta is precisely what the label promises—an immortal performance. After seeming to actually enjoy her volleys of ‘Ho jo hoe’ and the like, she phrases the Act Two Ballade, ‘Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an,’ with unerring control and complete confidence. Her lines in Senta’s duet with the Holländer, launched by ‘Versank ich jetzt in wunderbares Träumen,’ are phrased with imagination and individuality. ‘Wohl kenn ich Weibes heil'ge Pflichten’ is sung with girlish abandon, though there is nothing dainty about Flagstad’s top Bs. The soprano’s upper register likely gains most from Caniell’s stabilization of pitch: aside from a few top notes that sound slightly shrill, Flagstad’s voice is very flatteringly reproduced. Like Dame Joan Sutherland’s early broadcasts, this Fliegende Holländer likely gives a truer notion of the amplitude of the voice than almost any of Flagstad’s too-few studio recordings. The fullness of the middle octave of the voice is surpassed by no other Senta on disc, and those who allege that Flagstad’s singing was matronly throughout her career surely have not heard this release. In fact, her singing in Act Three is particularly significant for its freshness and undiluted expressivity. In the opera’s final moments, her singing of ‘Preis' deinen Engel und sein Gebot! Hier steh ich, treu dir bis zum Tod!’ erupts from the disc with an immediacy that could hardly be greater were the listener in a prime seat in the stalls at Covent Garden. The solidity of the top As and B♭ leaves no doubt about the firmness of Senta’s resolve, but these are not the defiant tones of Isolde or Brünnhilde: these are the sounds of a young woman embracing new, transformed life. Above all, they are the products of one of the world’s greatest voices, here on extraordinary form and finally preserved in sonics worthy of the singing. Also worthy of Flagstad’s artistry—and, from the perspective of this writer, reasons to acquire this Immortal Performances release as compelling as the 1937 Fliegende Holländer—are the 1949 and 1950 San Francisco broadcast recordings of Senta’s Ballade and three of Richard Strauss’s most celebrated Lieder included on the set’s second disc. The passage of twelve years robbed Flagstad of nothing in terms of her vocal and dramatic interpretations of the Ballade, which in the San Francisco performance conducted by San Francisco Opera founder Gaetano Merola has even greater lushness than in the Covent Garden broadcast. Flagstad premièred Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder in London’s Royal Albert Hall on 22 May 1950, less than five months before the performances of ‘Befreit,’ ‘Allerseelen,’ and ‘Cäcilie’ presented here. Though the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier was one of the rôles that Artur Bodanzky charged her with learning before traveling to the USA to fulfill her new contract with the Metropolitan Opera, she never sang any of Strauss’s operas in New York or elsewhere. The availability of these performances of ‘Befreit,’ ‘Allerseelen,’ and ‘Cäcilie’ in such fine sound partially makes amends for the missed opportunities of Flagstad’s Marschallin, Ariadne, and Färberin.

The near-impossible ambiguity of the Holländer is that, in order to be wholly believable in accordance with Wagner’s text, he must sound like both a man reckless enough to have made a deal with the devil and one capable of inspiring the sort of undeviating redemptive love that Senta develops for him. Bringing to the part a voice of a size appropriate for the music, Janssen has no need to cheat at either end of the range as many Holländers have done. Like Flagstad’s and Weber’s, his voice is appealingly spry, but his characterization is guided by an uncommonly thoughtful maturity. In the Act One aria 'Die Frist ist um, und abermals verstrichen sind sieben Jahr,' Janssen is untroubled by the frequent top E♭s, but the most arresting component of his interpretation is the world-weariness that he evinces without warping the vocal line with ponderousness. In the duet with Daland, he sculpts 'Weit komm ich her; verwehrt bei Sturm und Wetter ihr mir den Ankerplatz?' with poignant hesitation, the words those of a man too often injured to risk hoping anew. Janssen and Flagstad spellbindingly portray a man and woman falling in love rather than allegorical representations of sin and redemption in the Holländer’s Act Two duet with Senta, 'Wie aus der Ferne längst vergangner Zeiten.' The dramatic focus and beauty of tone that the baritone exhibits in his singing of 'Du bust ein Engel, eines Engels Liebe Verworfne selbst zu trösten Weiß!' are phenomenal, his security in the high tessitura ushering him into the rarified company of singers who can manage this music without strain. In Act Three, the heartbreak in his articulation of 'Verloren! Ach! Verloren! Ewig verlornes Heil!' is crushing, the climactic top F aimed like an arrow at the heart of fickle destiny. His pronouncement of 'den „fliegende Holländer“ nennt man mich' is crestfallen rather than menacing, the singer projecting the totality of the character’s troubled psyche through those six words. Cumulatively, Janssen is perhaps the most sympathetic Holländer on disc: Schorr had greater tonal orotundity, Nissen equal nobility of demeanor, and Hotter more sheer voice, but no recorded Holländer past or present is as moving as Janssen was in this 1937 performance.

Many singers’ and conductors’ work in Der fliegende Holländer suggests that their notions of effectively performing the opera—the score in which Wagner became Wagner, as it were—are that the composer’s stylistic advancement is best served by making Der fliegende Holländer sound like Tristan und Isolde, Siegfried, or Parsifal. How wrongheaded the 1937 Covent Garden broadcast performance of Der fliegende Holländer proves this to be! As is almost always true in opera, the most effective performances of any score are those in which the characters, however parabolic, are invested with recognizable humanity. Similarly, the most effective recordings are those in which the performances at hand are lovingly prepared and presented. From both of these perspectives, Immortal Performances’ edition of the 1937 Covent Garden Der fliegende Holländer broadcast is one of the most important, most inspiring releases in more than a century of recorded opera.

Das Geisterschiff: Charles Moor's scenic design for Act Three of Richard Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer in the Coronation Season production of 1937 [Image from the collection of the Royal Opera House, © by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden]

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Les Martyrs—Joyce El-Khoury (Pauline), Michael Spyres (Polyeucte), David Kempster (Sévère), Brindley Sherratt (Félix), Clive Bayley (Callisthènes), Wynne Evans (Néarque), Simon Preece (un Chrétien), Rosalind Waters (une femme); Opera Rara Chorus; Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Sir Mark Elder, conductor [Recorded in St Clement’s Church, London, UK, during October and November 2014; Opera Rara ORC52; 3 CDs, 188:12; Available from Opera Rara, harmonia mundi USA, and major music retailers]

Few events are as exciting to the opera lover as the release of a new recording by Opera Rara. For the past four decades, Opera Rara's efforts have unearthed scores buried beneath generations of dismissal and neglect and revealed their finest qualities via performances and recordings featuring world-class casts, orchestras, and conductors. These efforts have in many cases reshaped modern notions of composers and their music, as well as having expanded the woefully inadequate discographies of important singers and bel canto exponents such as Annick Massis, Nelly Miricioiu, Bruce Ford, and Colin Lee. The enduring popularity of Lucia di Lammermoor, L'elisir d'amore, Don Pasquale, and La fille du régiment has kept the music of Gaetano Donizetti playing in opera houses large and small for nearly two hundred years, but even with milestones like a Glyndebourne production of Poliuto and the Metropolitan Opera première of Roberto Devereux achieved or planned there are significant products of Donizetti’s creativity that remain in the shadows. Opera Rara’s specialty is shining the lights of rediscovery and rejuvenation upon the hidden works of Nineteenth-Century masters of bel canto, and these lights have never shone more brightly than in this studio recording of Donizetti’s 1840 leviathan Les Martyrs. Many of recent years’ well-intentioned forays into ignored music have ultimately revealed that there are more instances than it seems fashionable to admit in which neglect is not unjustifiable, but the performance of Les Martyrs on these discs is a case of a superb score receiving long-overdue recognition from artists capable of doing it justice. Like most of the grands opéras of the Nineteenth Century, the extravagant musical demands of Les Martyrs render the opera unlikely to claim a permanent place in the international repertory, but this recording confirms the impression made by Opera Rara’s concert performance of the opera in Royal Festival Hall in November 2014: if today’s listeners regard Les Martyrs primarily as a curiosity, it is a score that richly rewards inquisitiveness. Hearing the opera performed as it is on these discs causes one to shake one’s head and wonder why Les Martyrs is only now being returned to life, but singing of the quality that is preserved on these discs is worth any expenditure of patience.

Premièred at the famed Opéra in Paris in April 1840, Les Martyrs was the product of a turbulent genesis. Under contract to provide a new opera for the 1838 Season at the Neapolitan Teatro di San Carlo, Donizetti and his librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, turned to Pierre Corneille’s Seventeenth-Century epic Polyeucte, which they adapted in Italian as Poliuto. Mere days before the opera’s scheduled opening, the opera fell victim to the censorship of the court of Ferdinando II, King of the Two Sicilies, and was withdrawn by the incensed composer, who declined to substitute another new score and begrudgingly paid the fine for breaking the San Carlo contract. When a commission for two new operas was offered by the Opéra in Paris, the composer recognized an opportunity to revisit his music for Poliuto, which he esteemed very highly. With Grand Opéra librettist par excellence Eugène Scribe taking Cammarano’s libretto and Corneille’s text in hand, Poliuto was reborn as Les Martyrs, a score of proportions adhering to Parisian standards. The obligatory ballet was inserted, and Donizetti repurposed the lion’s share—an apt designation considering the opera’s ending—of his music for Poliuto in the score of Les Martyrs. Introduced to the Parisian audience by an accomplished cast including Julie Dorus-Gras, Halévy’s first Eudoxie in La Juive and the creator of Marguerite de Valois in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, as Pauline and the celebrated Gilbert Duprez as Polyeucte, Les Martyrs was a considerable success. Like Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, Les Martyrs was subjected to cuts by the composer even before the first night. For this recording, Opera Rara made use of a new critical edition of the opera by Dr. Flora Willson in which many of those cut passages are reinstated. The resulting score is one of dramatic tautness that belies its hulking pomposity. Like Aida and Don Carlos, Les Martyrs is an incredibly intimate piece despite its large scale. Musicologists have long suggested that this score contains some of Donizetti’s most finely-crafted and perceptibly personal music. Hearing the opera performed as it is on this recording, who could disagree?

Much of the praise for the sweep and serenity of this performance is garnered by Sir Mark Elder, who again confirms that no conductor in the world today has a surer grasp on idiomatic pacing of bel canto repertory than his own. Responding to his propulsive but cool-headed tempi, the musicians of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment play superlatively, giving an account of the opera’s innovative Overture that boils with contrasting eloquence and tension. The dances in Act Two—‘Lutte des gladiateurs,''Pas de deux,' and 'Danse militaire'—are executed with Gallic charm that rubs shoulders with Donizetti’s innate Italian fervor. Throughout the performance, conductor and instrumentalists rise to every challenge of Donizetti’s score, providing a musical setting for a traversal of Les Martyrs that transcends the limitations of a studio run-through. Directed by chorus master Stephen Harris, the fine voices of the Opera Rara Chorus are effective in every guise in which they appear in the course of the drama, beginning with a beautifully-shaped chorus of Christians in the Overture, 'O Dieu tutélaire.' Both 'Amis...silence...Du silence' and the maiden's chorus, 'Jeune souveraine,' in Act One are strongly sung, and the monumental triumphal chorus in Act Two, 'Gloire à vous, Mars et Bellonne,' is delivered with an abundance of gusto. 'Dieu du tonnerre, ton front sévère' in Act Three is appropriately ardent. Conductor, orchestra, and chorus all collaborate not in accompanying but in creating a performance of Les Martyrs in which their contributions are no less important than those of the principal singers.

In the small rôles of un Chrétien and une Femme, baritone Simon Preece and soprano Rosalind Waters sing capably, both possessing voices that promise future success in lead rôles. Welsh tenor Wynne Evans is a confident, athletic-voiced Néarque who takes advantage of every opportunity offered to him in his Act One duet with Polyeucte, singing ‘Arrêtons-nous, Polyeucte, et dans l'instant suprême’ with supple line and vivid characterization. Likewise, Manchester-born bass Clive Bayley seizes every moment that Donizetti allows him as the obdurate priest of Jupiter Callisthènes, his sinewy, Stygian-hued voice lending the character a frightening element of zealotry. Occasionally slightly unsteady, his singing never lacks impact, and the brutal impetus of his pronouncements is enjoyably potent.

As Félix, the governor of Armenia and Pauline’s father, bass Brindley Sherratt, a native of Lancashire, credibly portrays a man torn between commitment to his gubernatorial authority and love for his daughter, who married Polyeucte at his bidding despite her enduring love for the missing and presumed dead Sévère. In Félix’s Act Two aria 'Dieux des Romains, dieux de nos pères,' Sherratt uses his fibrous, gravelly voice with great intelligence, revealing the depths of his artistry with his attentiveness to nuances of text. A few moments of discomfort at range extremes are put to telling dramatic use, and the wide vibrato of his capacious voice rarely impedes the accuracy of his pitch. His singing in the Act Four trio with Pauline and Sévère is superb, the aggrieved father’s plight limned with gripping immediacy in ‘Qui défend la victime approuve son erreur’ and ‘Leur voix immortelle réchauffe mon zèle.’ Dramatically, Félix has much in common with Oroveso in Bellini’s Norma, but Donizetti was more musically generous. Sherratt gives the rôle dignity and, in the opera’s final scene, unexpected piteousness, qualities kindled by his sonorous singing of Félix’s music.

The imperial proconsul Sévère receives from Welsh baritone David Kempster a performance defined by complementary muscle and musicality. Thought to have been lost to battlefield misadventure, Sévère returns to Roman-occupied Armenia as the representative of the Emperor, finding his beloved Pauline married to Polyeucte, a clandestine new convert to Christianity. In Sévère’s Act Two Romance, ‘Amour de mon jeune âge,’ the baritone conveys the tenderness from which the character’s ferocity arises, tracing the bel canto line of the music with assurance, only a handful of struggles with intonation marring his estimable intentions. Kempster sings ‘En touchant à ce rivage' in the Act Three duet with Pauline, one of the finest numbers in the score, with focused, attractive tone, and his Sévère interacts with Pauline with a believable blend of exasperated indignation and still-pervasive affection. In the Act Four trio with Pauline and Félix, his exclamations of ‘Arrachons la victime a leur juste fureur!’ and ‘A tes lois rebelle ce glaive fidèle combattra pour elle en face des dieux!’ throb with the ambiguity of a man whose duty commands him to acts that conflict with the desires of his heart. Like Camoëns in the 1843 Dom Sébastien, also a setting of a libretto by Scribe, Sévère clearly stoked Donizetti’s imagination, inspiring the composer’s most profound sympathy: the music that he wrote for the rôle is not unworthy of comparison with Verdi’s music for Macbeth, Don Carlo in Ernani, or even Rigoletto, and Kempster’s performance, rough patches and all, is worthy of the music.

Simply put, the performance of American tenor Michael Spyres as Polyeucte is a marvel. His voice is difficult to classify except as an instrument of virtually boundless aptitude. In this performance of Les Martyrs, the voice is ideal for a rôle created by Gilbert Duprez, the tenor celebrated for his espousal of the do di petto and creations of several of Donizetti’s finest tenor parts, including Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor (for whom, as is often overlooked, the composer included a stratospheric top E♭ in the Act One duet with Lucia, ‘Verrano a te, sull’aure’). In Act One, Spyres delivers a rugged ‘Que l'onde salutaire,’ the voice glowing with a golden sheen. ‘Dieu puissant qui voit mon zèle’ in the Act Two finale finds him on roof-raising form, his singing taking on increasingly heroic dimensions as the character’s fortunes become ever more imperiled. Spyres’s performance reaches its zenith in Polyeucte’s scene in Act Three, beginning with a composed account of the aria ‘Mon seul trésor, mon bien suprême’ in which the emotional temperature gradually rises to the boiling point. The dramatic agitation explodes in the cabaletta ‘Oui, j'rai dans leurs temples,’ a cousin of Arnold’s ‘Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance’ in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and ‘Di quella pira l’orrenda foco’ in Verdi’s Il trovatore. Here, Spyres’s incendiary singing ignites the sentimental kindling of the music, and the formidably secure E5 that he unleashes thrillingly suggests the character’s—but not the singer’s—desperation. In Act Four, the tenor’s subtle voicing of ‘Rêve délicieux dont mon âme est émue’ is followed by an extraordinarily telling articulation of ‘Qu'importe ma vie sauvée ou ravie.’ Dramatically, Spyres encapsulates the essence of Polyeucte’s nature with his sweetly enraptured elocution of ‘La foi sainte brille à tes yeux!’ As portrayed by this incredibly gifted young singer, Polyeucte faces death with the steely resolve of Radamès in Aida and the soaring vocal refinement of Arturo in I puritani. Surveying the history of recorded singing from its infancy, encompassing the work of artists as masterful as Miguel Fleta and Ivan Kozlovsky, there is no finer example of bel canto tenor singing on disc than Spyres’s Polyeucte.

Singing Pauline in Les Martyrs, the captivating soprano Joyce El-Khoury again ventures into vocal territory that was the natural habitat of the late Leyla Gencer. Like Antonina in Belisario, another Gencer rôle that she recorded for Opera Rara, Pauline is no typical sighs-and-high-notes bel canto heroine. Attached before his rumored death to Sévère, Pauline is convinced by her father to take Polyeucte as her husband, whose conversion to Christianity is an affront to the pagan gods of her upbringing. The central crux of her predicament is that Sévère is not dead and eventually returns, covered in glory, as the Roman Emperor’s proconsul in Armenia. She still loves him, but Polyeucte’s determined integrity is not without its charms. Hers is a fate of questions for which there are no right answers. Why Pauline appealed to Gencer is obvious, and El-Khoury’s assumption of the rôle is even more complete. From the first bars of her Act One Prière, ‘Qu'ici ta main glacée bénisse ton enfant,’ it is apparent that the soprano is on ravishing form, the voice awesomely integrated and secure from bottom to top and the tone dark but entrancingly pure. Her voicing of ‘Mort à ces infâmes’ in Pauline’s Act Two scene with her father has the slashing forcefulness of a great Norma’s ‘I Romani a cento a cento, fian mietuti, fian distrutti,’ and the shock that emanates from her singing of ‘Sévère existe!... Un dieu sauveur, des ombres bords un dieu l'envoie!’ is heartrending. In El-Khoury’s and Kempster’s performances, Pauline and Sévère are as tempestuous a pair of troubled lovers as exist in opera, their destinies clashing in the Act Three duet ‘Souvenir cruel et tendre que sa voix vient de me rendre.’ Here and in ‘Ne vois-tu pas, qu'hélas! mon cœur succombe et cède à sa douleur!’ soprano and baritone spar with gladiatorial concentration, El-Khoury’s top notes electrifying the duet’s coda like lightning bolts. Pauline’s life hanging in the balance, El-Khoury detonates her lines in the Act Four trio with Félix and Sévère with virtuosic expressivity, her soaring ‘Oui, par la foir jurée’ matched by emotive readings of ‘O dévouement sublime!’ and ‘D'un chrétien rebelle epouse fidèle a toi j'en appelle.’ In the opera’s finale, as Pauline is transformed by faith and the example of Polyeucte’s nobility from a woman in crisis to a tragic heroine suited to the Comédie-Française of Corneille and Racine, El-Khoury employs her plaintive tones to illuminate the significance of lines such as ‘Seigneur, de vos bontés il faut que je l'obtienne!’ and ‘Pour toi, ma prière, ardente et sincère.’ The catharsis that she makes of ‘Miracle soudain...Lumière immortelle sa flamme nouvelle embrase mon sein!’ is extremely poignant: in Polyeucte’s arms she finally claims the peace of mind that has eluded her throughout the opera. El-Khoury’s technique never deserts her, however: not one passage of the music asks for more than she can give. Suggesting that any singer is Gencer’s equal is the kind of assertion that provokes hostility among aficionados, but as a dramatic portrayal El-Khoury’s Pauline is the peer of Gencer’s. As idiomatic bel canto vocalism, this performance surpasses not only Gencer’s towering efforts but also Maria Callas’s unforgettable Paolina in the famed 1960 La Scala Poliuto.

Opera lovers are a bewildering lot. We like what we like and dislike what we dislike, not always with justification that adheres to the tenets of basic logic. It seems unreasonable that audiences willing to endure, even embrace the marathon durations of Wagner’s mature operas and many of the Baroque works revived in recent years should ignore a score of the quality of Donizetti’s Les Martyrs. The past forty years have often found Opera Rara leading the conversation about unjustly-neglected gems of the operatic past. With a recording of Les Martyrs that rivals the label’s most exalted achievements, Opera Rara and some of today’s finest singers again reveal to opera lovers of what pleasures our prejudices have deprived us.

Beaming bel cantists: Soprano Joyce El-Khoury as Pauline (left) and tenor Michael Spyres as Polyeucte (right) in Opera Rara’s concert performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Les Martyrs at Royal Festival Hall, 4 November 2014 [Photo © by Russell Duncan]

CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI (1567 – 1643): Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria—Fernando Guimarães (Ulisse), Jennifer Rivera (Penelope), Aaron Sheehan (Telemaco), Leah Wool (Minerva), João Fernandes (Nettuno, Il Tempo), Owen McIntosh (Giove, Pisandro), Sonja DuToit Tengblad (Giunone, La Fortuna), Krista River (Ericlea), Abigail Nims (Melanto), Daniel Shirley (Eurimaco), Daniel Auchincloss (Eumete), Marc Molomot (Iro), Christopher Lowrey (L’Humana Fragilità, Phaeacian Sailor), Sara Heaton (Amore), Jonas Budris (Anfinomo, Phaeacian Sailor), Ulysses Thomas (Antinoo, Phaeacian Sailor); Boston Baroque; Martin Pearlman, conductor [Recorded in Mechanics Hall, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, 27 – 30 April 2014; Linn Records CDK 451; 3 CDs, 176:00; Available from Linn Records, Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Whether literal or figurative, homeward journeys have since the evolution of artistic endeavors as a mode of expression been a prevalent theme in art, music, literature, and cinema. Separation and the effort of one person to be reunited with another are bound with the threads of virtually every human emotion, and the necessity of companionship is perhaps man’s most basic psychological need. Nowhere is this theme more eloquently and insightfully explored than in Homer’s Odyssey, the epic but timelessly simple tale of a man’s exacting labor to return home to his wife. Having braved the horrors of war, that man endures obstacles even more terrible that complicate his task. As Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth,’ nor are the roads that restore lovers to one another seamlessly paved. Thus is Odysseus, Homer’s hero, thwarted by both gods and mortals in his prolonged struggle to return from the ruins to Troy to his native Ithaca and the arms of his wife Penelope. A victim in part of his own pride, Odysseus manfully confronts Calypso, Charybdis, and Circe, but putting his own house in order is an undertaking that nearly overwhelms him. Scholars debate precisely who wrote The Odyssey and when, but, like arguments about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, this misses the point, which is that the work’s enduring cultural significance is derived from the universality of its subject. Neither Claudio Monteverdi nor his Venetian audience in the 1639 – 1640 Carnevale season, when his opera Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria was first performed, had greater personal experience with fallen civilizations, seductive nymphs, and vengeful gods than a listener in 2015, but few people who have heard Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria in the ​375 years since its première have never said goodbye to a loved one, anxiously awaited someone’s return, or been plagued with doubts and fears about what the future holds. Whether he was a man, a persona, or merely the invention of a literary tradition, Homer captured the strife of separated spouses in The Odyssey with rare perceptiveness, and Monteverdi incisively translated their emotions into the exalted language of music in Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria.

Employing a new performing edition of the score prepared by Martin Pearlman, who also conducts this performance, Boston Baroque’s and Linn Records’ recording of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria is a tantalizing reevaluation of an opera that is, depending upon one’s perspective, either a great early masterpiece of opera or a dull piece of disputed authorship. Scholarship in the past quarter-century has disavowed the formerly oft-repeated allegation that Il ritorno is not truly the work of Monteverdi. Like the Shakespearean libretti that Boito wrote for the aged Verdi, Giacomo Badoaro’s libretto for Il ritorno was likely devised as bait to lure Monteverdi, past the age of seventy and settled in Venice to supervise the composition and performance of sacred music at the Basilica di San Marco, back into the theatre. Thankfully, the ruse was successful. In previous decades, the dissimilarities between Il ritorno and Monteverdi’s more-frequently-performed L'incoronazione di Poppea, his latest surviving opera, were cited as evidence supporting the argument against the veracity of the attribution of the earlier opera to Monteverdi, but it now seems more likely that a genius like Monteverdi merely responded to very different dramas with markedly contrasting compositional idioms in the manner of Verdi’s varied sonic landscapes for the Spain of Don Carlos, the Egypt of Aida, and the England of Falstaff. With an incomplete manuscript that, true to Seventeenth-Century fashion, leaves many questions unanswered, Il ritorno is a challenge to any conductor, and Pearlman’s new edition does not solve all of the opera’s riddles. Taking a thoughtful, middle-of-the-road approach that takes surviving source materials at face value, Pearlman’s work yields a performing edition that maintains the lean textures of the score but also lends an understated modernity to the opera, revealing that even in 1640 the roots of the music of Stravinsky and Messiaen were growing. Pearlman occasionally seems to have fallen victim to the fear of putting too great a personal ‘stamp’ on his edition of Il ritorno, and this leaves passages sounding inert: Benjamin Britten’s adaptations of music by Purcell are radical by comparison but exemplify one artist’s refinement of another’s efforts. Pearlman is to be applauded for eschewing the popular practice of interpolating music and text from other sources to replace scenes missing from the libretto and manuscript score: Il ritorno functions handily enough without them. Boston Baroque’s team of virtuosi execute their parts with considerable aplomb, but Pearlman’s leadership is sluggish and dispiriting. This performance often stalls when the drama most needs momentum, and the task of salvaging the opera’s unique histrionic profile is left to the singers.

First encountered as L'humana fragilità, Il tempo, La fortuna, and Amore in the opera's Prologue, countertenor Christopher Lowrey, bass João Fernandes, and sopranos Sonja DuToit Tengblad and Sara Heaton launch the performance with attractive, mostly stylish singing. Lowrey’s 'Mortal cosa son io, fattura humana' is phrased with real distinction, and his lovely timbre and confident manner are evident when he returns later in the opera as a Phaeacian sailor and a member of the Coro marittimo. Fernandes makes a somewhat blunt impression in Tempo’s ‘Salvo è niente dal mio dente’ but is heard to greater advantage as Nettuno in the opera proper. In the fifth scene of Act One, his voicing of ‘Superbo è l'huom ed è del suo peccato cagion, benchè lontana’ is effective, only the lowest notes lacking authority, and his stately delivery of ‘Son ben quest'onde frigide’ in the seventh scene of Act Three holds its own against Giove’s and Giunone’s utterances. Singing Fortuna’s ‘Mia vita son voglie, le gioie, le doglie’ charmingly, Tengblad radiates nobility in Giunone’s ‘Gran Giove, alma de' Dei, Dio delle menti, mente dell' universo’ in the seventh scene of Act Three. Heaton makes Amore’s ‘Dio de' Dei feritor mi dice il mondo Amor’ a powerful statement, and her sweet timbre is a notable asset in the Coro in cielo.

As Penelope's petulant suitors, the Mnesteres, tenors Jonas Budris and Owen McIntosh as Anfinomo and Pisandro and bass-baritone Ulysses Thomas as Antinoo are appropriately exasperating but unfailingly musical. Thomas’s gruff presence and bitingly masculine voice are deployed with wit in Antinoo’s ‘Sono l'altre Regine coronate di servi e tu d'amanti’ in the fifth scene of Act Two, and he makes ‘Compagni, udiste: il vostro vicin rischio mortale vi chiama a grandie risolute imprese’ in the same act’s eighth scene a compelling statement of the character’s slimy credo. It is a testament to the potency of Thomas’s performance that the listener wants to string the legendary bow and eliminate Antinoo even before Ulisse can do it. McIntosh also sings Giove, in whose ‘Gran Dio de’ salsi flutti’ in the fifth scene of Act One he is the very model of divine authority. He interacts with Tengblad’s Giunone splendidly in the seventh scene of Act Three, evincing touching sincerity in his voicing of ‘Per me non avrà mai vota preghiera Giuno.’

Mezzo-soprano Krista River impersonates Penelope's aged nurse Ericlea with an ideal blend of authentic Seventeenth-Century broad comedy and open-hearted honesty, all while singing capably and often beautifully. Mezzo-soprano Abigail Nims devotes a wealth of imagination to her performance as Penelope's young maidservant Melanto, delivering her lines in the second scene of Act One, including the delightful ‘Duri e penosi son gli amorosi fieri desir,’ with disarming freshness of tone and emotional directness. Later, in the act’s tenth scene, Nims’s Melanto sings ‘Cara amata Regina, avveduta e prudente per tuo sol danno sei’ to her mistress with incredible poise, and in the eighth scene of Act Three she delivers ‘Ericlea, che vuoi far, vuoi tacer or parlar?’ with accents of profound uncertainty. As Melanto’s doting lover Eurimaco, tenor Daniel Shirley is endearing, his beguiling singing of ‘Bella Melanto mia, graziosa Melanto, il tuo canto è un incanto, il tuo volto è magia’ cajoling the listener as much as Melanto.

Tenor Daniel Auchincloss is enchanting as the faithful swineherd Eumete, his aristocratic phrasing of ‘Oh come mal si salva un Regio amante da sventure e da mali’ in the eleventh scene of Act One belying the character’s humble state. In the subsequent scene, Auchincloss erases any doubts about the pervasiveness of Eumete’s distaste for Iro, his singing of ‘Iro, gran mangiatore, Iro, divoratore, Iro, loquace! Mio pace non perturbar. Corri a mangiar! a crepar!’ seething with loathing. Then, in the tenth scene of Act Two, he voices ‘Io vidi, o pellegrin, de' Proci amanti l'ardir infermarsi’ with extraordinary grace, and ‘Forza d'occulto affetto raddolcisce il tuo petto’ in the fourth scene of Act Three receives from Auchincloss a performance of consummate artistry. The voice is a plangent instrument, used by the singer in this performance to portray a character whose social status does not inhibit his loyalty, integrity, and generosity of spirit. As the parasitic Iro, tenor Marc Molomot throws himself into the part with abandon, his taunting of Eumete in the twelfth scene of Act One epitomized by his disdainfully ironic articulation of ‘Pastor d'armenti può prati e boschi lodar.’ It is to Iro that Monteverdi entrusted the scene that opens Act Three, ‘O dolor, o martir che l'alma attrista,’ begun by an eight-bar cry of woe that has become one of the most famous passages in Seventeenth-Century opera. Molomot’s comically impassioned delivery, perhaps ideal for a staged performance of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, is over the top in the context of a studio recording. The tenor is an intelligent, thoroughly stylish singer whose every vocal gesture is founded upon respect for the music, but in this instance simply singing the notes would have been preferable.

Leah Wool’s sumptuous mezzo-soprano voice glows in Monteverdi’s music for Minerva, whose benevolent omniscience guides Ulisse’s progress along the twisting path from the carnage of Troy to his wife’s arms. In the eighth scene of Act One, Wool voices Minerva’s counsel to Ulisse, ‘Cara a lieta gioventù che disprezza empio desir,' with keen sagacity and prepossessing tone, and her singing of ‘Tu d'Aretusa al fonte intanto vanne ove il pastor Eumete, tuo fido antico servo’ in the ninth scene is wonderfully unaffected. Again advising the frustrated Ulisse in the ninth scene of Act Two, Wool’s Minerva phrases ‘O coraggioso Ulisse, io farò che proponga la tua casta consorte giuoco’ with bolstering confidence. In the sixth and ninth scenes of Act Three, she makes vigorous impressions with her singing of ‘Fiamma è l'ira, o gran Dea, foco è lo sdegno’ and ‘Ogni nostra ragion sen porta il vento’ without distorting the vocal lines or her own sophisticated artistry.

Tenor Aaron Sheehan​, one of America’s most versatile and reliably stimulating singers, finds in Telemaco a rôle tailor-made for his effortlessly-produced voice. In the scene that opens Act Two, he shapes ‘Lieto cammino, dolce viaggio, passa il carro divino come che fosse un raggio’ with the weariness of a young man pushed to his breaking point by circumstances beyond his control. The expressivity of his increasingly confident interjections in the third scene heightens the impact of the music, his account of ‘Che veggio, ohimè, che miro?’ establishing the atmosphere of wonder for Telemaco’s recognition of and reunion with his father. Returning to his mother’s court in the eleventh scene, the dutiful son relays to Penelope a portion of the saga of his search for Ulisse. Sheehan’s mellifluous singing of ‘Del mio lungo viaggio i torti errori già vi narrai, Regina' is superb. Throughout the performance, this valuable singer molds a portrayal of Telemaco that is notable for meeting all of Monteverdi’s demands with imperturbable vocal and dramatic charisma.

American mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera succeeds in fashioning an impersonation of the forbearing Penelope that, in terms of sensitivity, profundity, and vocal freedom, can be ranked alongside the unforgettable portrayal by her countrywoman Frederica von Stade on the outmoded recording conducted by Raymond Leppard. Penelope opens the opera proper with her riveting lament ‘Di misera Regina non terminati mai dolenti affani,’ which Rivera makes all the more moving by refraining from over-emoting. The delicacy with which she sings the dramatically intense plaint ‘Deh torna Ulisse, Penelope t'aspetta’ is exquisite, the satiny texture of the voice caressing the music but maintaining a high level of emotional animation. Her elocutions of ‘Torna il tranquillo il mare’ and ‘L'huomo qua giù ch'è vivo’ are subtly differentiated but united by the singer’s depiction of Penelope’s ardent longing for her husband’s return. In the fifth scene of Act Two, in which Penelope confronts her lewd suitors, Rivera reveals the character’s resilience with her telling communication of a single line, ‘Non voglio amar, non voglio!’ The breadth of her connection with her rôle is confirmed in the eleventh scene of Act Two, when, as Penelope converses with Telemaco, she sings ‘Beltà troppo funesta, ardor iniquo di rimembranze indegno’ with very personal eloquence. Forced to circumspection by the fate to which she has been subjected, Penelope is slow to accept that the man who appears before her in Act Three truly is Ulisse, but when she allows herself to believe what has for so long seemed impossible Rivera’s voice takes on a blithe warmth. Penelope’s despair can too easily seem like exhausting self-pity, but Rivera infuses her portrait of the steadfast queen with flashes of a vibrant personality that render the character not only credible but atypically engaging.

Singing the title rôle, Portuguese tenor Fernando Guimarães is a revelation. Compared with several of the singers who have recorded Ulisse, especially the baritones, Guimarães’s voice is light for the music, but the dividends paid by his artistic investment enrich the performance considerably. Guimarães makes a stirring impression in the seventh scene of Act One, the wonderment that he evokes in ‘Dormo ancora o son desto?’ persisting in the​ eighth scene with Minerva, in which he sings ‘Sempre l'human bisogno il ciel soccorre’ with singularity of purpose and handsomely-shaded tone. In the ninth scene, his iron-willed ‘O fortunato Ulisse!’ is an exuberant moment. Then, in the ninth scene of Act Two, this Ulisse responds to Minerva’s intervention with a heady account of ‘Perir non può chi tien per scorta il cielo.’ Guimarães’s singing surges with exhilarating verve in the scene in which Ulisse at last vanquishes and slaughters Penelope's impudent suitors. In the opera’s final scene, as Ulisse and Penelope are finally fully restored to one another, Guimarães joins Rivera in an erotically-charged performance of ‘Non si rammenti più de' tormenti’—unlike ‘Pur ti miro, pur ti godo’ in L’incoronazione di Poppea, a sensual lovers’ duet that Monteverdi almost surely composed himself. Ulisse has fared well on recordings, amassing fine performances from burly ‘modern’ voices as well as Early Music specialists, but Guimarães sets new standards of technical achievement and the simple but impalpable art of bel canto.

The prospect of performing Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, whether on stage or in studio, presents an array of questions. Composers and conductors as diverse as Vincent d’Indy, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Luigi Dallapiccola, Ernst Krenek, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Hans Werner Henze have offered answers to these questions, and with this recording Martin Pearlman offers his own solutions to some of the problems left by Monteverdi’s manuscript and surviving materials from the Seventeenth Century. A definitive Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria is an evasive creature, but the one heard on these expertly-recorded discs is an agreeable, often enjoyable manifestation of Monteverdi’s great genius. The grandeur of this Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria is in the casting, however: Fernando Guimarães is an Ulisse whose homecoming is genuinely deserved, and Jennifer Rivera and Aaron Sheehan are a Penelope and Telemaco whose constancy merits a happy ending.

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): La gazza ladra—Giulio Mastrototaro (Fabrizio Vingradito), Luisa Islam-Ali-Zade (Lucia), Kenneth Tarver (Giannetto), María José Moreno (Ninetta), Bruno Praticò (Fernando Villabella), Lorenzo Regazzo (Gottardo), Mariana Rewerski (Pippo), Stefan Cifolelli (Isacco), Pablo Cameselle (Antonio), Maurizio Lo Piccolo (Giorgio), Damian Whiteley (Il pretore del villaggio); Classica Chamber Choir, Brno; Virtuosi Brunensis; Alberto Zedda, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in the Kurhaus Bad Wildbad, Germany, during the XXI ROSSINI IN WILDBAD Festival, 1 – 2 and 4 July 2009; NAXOS 8.660369-71; 3 CDs, 180:12; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon, iTunes, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Opera is an art that defies the mandates of reason. It is often said that lightning does not strike twice in the same place, which of course is not true, but that faulty conventional wisdom is circumvented by the fact that Guillaume Tell is not the only one of Gioachino Rossini’s operas remembered almost solely for its frequently-played Overture. Though his opera semiseria La gazza ladra was heard throughout Italy and beyond in the decade following its 1817 première at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, all but the work’s Overture, known for its exciting use of percussion and its distinctive woodwind subject, disappeared from the repertory after the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Hearing a performance of the complete score as delightful as this 2009 ROSSINI IN WILDBAD traversal, recorded by NAXOS with clear, well-balanced sound of tremendous immediacy, raises the question of why such a fantastic opera could have fallen into obscurity. Thus, though, are the pitfalls of opera. Fashions change, voices evolve, and both opera houses and, in the past century, record labels responded accordingly. Fortunately, another aphorism has proved applicable to opera: like life, opera is basically cyclical, and works of true brilliance have only to wait for the wheel of fortune to revolve them back into the light of public attention. Rossini possessed an unique gift for making the ridiculous not only genuinely amusing but often surprisingly moving, as well, and La gazza ladra, its libretto by Giovanni Gherardini based upon Théodore Badouin d’Aubigny’s and Louis-Charles Caigniez’s La pie voleuse, is perfectly summarized in the Preface of a synopsis of the French melodrama, published in London in 1815. ‘The basis of the plot appears almost too simple and too improbable,’ the now unknown editor wrote, ‘but genius renders trifles unimportant, and experience proves what appears improbable to have been true.’ The historical basis for La pie voleuse was no trifle: the young lady who inspired Rossini’s Ninetta was executed before the avian perpetrator of the crimes of which she was convicted was discovered. The ultimate outcome for Rossini’s heroine is considerably more felicitous. With a recording of the quality of this NAXOS set, skillfully engineered by Norbert Vossen and Siggi Mehne to render the ‘live’ circumstances of the recording sessions utterly unobtrusive, making the opera’s case with the public, the future of La gazza ladra suddenly seems far more propitious, too.

Long a champion of Rossini’s music and of peeling away layers of tradition in order to return performances to standards that the composer himself would have recognized, Italian conductor Alberto Zedda turned his perspicacity to La gazza ladra three decades before this Wildbad production, completing his definitive critical edition of the score in 1979. Invaluable as his contributions to Rossini scholarship are, it is in the orchestra pit in a performance of any of Rossini’s operas that his artistry is at its most admirable. Eighty-one years old at the time of the performances recorded by NAXOS, Zedda conducts with his customary blend of elegance and zeal. While maintaining ingratiating flexibility that permits affectionately lyrical expansion where appropriate, there is no deviation from the high benchmarks of rhythmic tautness that he imposes upon himself and the musicians under his direction. The story that alleges that Rossini composed La gazza ladra at record speed whilst sequestered under lock and key until the score was completed is likely apocryphal or at least considerably embellished, but the spontaneity of the music is undeniably remarkable, its fecund tunefulness perhaps masking its difficulties to the casual listener. Heard on a number of NAXOS recordings sourced from Wildbad productions, the Virtuosi Brunensis musicians, directed by Karel Mitáš, live up to the name of their ensemble, never failing to meet both composer’s and conductor’s demands. The most admirable quality of Zedda’s conducting of this performance is its natural logic: a tremendous wealth of thought undoubtedly informs his work, but nothing seems ponderous: in short, every scene sounds how a scene in a Rossini opera should sound. This is true, too, of the orchestra’s playing. The jovial Overture, its woodwind figurations evoking the cawing of the eponymous winged bandit, is played splendidly, the snare drums setting a mock-martial tone that contrasts meaningfully with the famous principal theme. From that start, the Virtuoisi Brunensis follow Zedda’s lead in mining the significance of every crescendo and accelerando. Prepared by Pavel Koňárek, the carefully-blended voices of Classica Chamber Choir of Brno are a particularly effective, wonderfully musical group of townspeople, especially in the opening chorus, ‘Oh che giorno fortunato,’ and the act finales. Gianni Fabbrini’s fortepiano accompaniment of secco recitatives also upholds the frolicsome spirit and lofty musical caliber of the performance. The lifeblood of opera is solo singing, but what a difference top-quality work by conductor, orchestra, and choristers makes!

Almost none of Rossini’s operas except Guillaume Tell has as extensive a cast as La gazza ladra. Engaging singers capable of performing the opera’s lead rôles—to say nothing of performing them well!—is an expensive proposition, often leaving little in the budget for casting secondary rôles. This recording is distinguished by a cast with no weak links—a feat even rarer than performances of La gazza ladra. With as accomplished a singer as Australian bass Damian Whiteley on hand to sing—rippingly—the lines of il pretore del villaggio in the Act Two Quintet, ‘Ahi qual colpo,’ the bar is set very high. Bass Maurizio Lo Piccolo, a pupil of the consummate Rossini singer Simone Alaimo, sings strongly as Giorgio, a lackey of the smarmy Podestà, and tenor Pablo Cameselle is a benevolent, light-voiced Antonio, the jailer who, having witnessed the Podestà’s efforts at capitalizing on his amorous designs on Ninetta, dedicates himself to proving her innocence and setting her free.

Tenor Stefan Cifolelli sings the peddler Isacco’s brief cavatina in Act One, ‘Stringhe e ferri da calzette,’ attractively, and his bright timbre stands out from the crown in the Act One finale. Buenos Aires-born mezzo-soprano Mariana Rewerski tangoes through Pippo’s music appealingly, providing a properly effervescent account of the Brindisi in Act One, ‘Tocchiamo, beviamo.’ Her singing in the Act Two duet with Ninetta, ‘A mio nome, deh, consegna,’ is both beautiful and heartfelt, and she proves winningly resourceful in recitatives.

Ninetta’s employers and the parents of her beloved Giannetto, Fabrizio Vingradio and his wife Lucia, are portrayed with bumptious big-fishes-in-a-small-pond pretentions by bass Giulio Mastrototaro and mezzo-soprano Luisa Islam-Ali-Zade. Mastrototaro’s stalwart voice rolls out gratifyingly in recitatives and ensembles. Islam-Ali-Zade’s Lucia is an amusing but menacing harridan who redeems herself with a well-sung, wholly sincere performance of her aria in Act Two, ‘A questo seno,’ placed after the trial scene as Rossini intended. Convincing both in their characters’ accusations and their eventual admission of their error, Mastrototaro and Islam-Ali-Zade are decided assets in rôles that are prone to being liabilities.

In Bruno Praticò’s Fernando Villabella, Ninetta’s father, and Lorenzo Regazzo’s Gottardo, the dastardly Podestà, this performance benefits from the participation of two of the most gifted lower-voiced Rossinians of recent years. Running from arrest and punishment for desertion, Fernando is the inadvertent cause of Ninetta’s inability to defend herself when accused of stealing Lucia’s prized silver spoon. Having sold a piece of silver bearing the initials FV—her father’s, not Fabrizio Vingradio’s—to Isacco in order to obtain money to sustain Fernando during his fugitivity and the proceeds of the sale being found on her person when she is apprehended, Ninetta’s only choices are protecting her father with silence or betraying him with explanation of her innocence. When father and daughter duet in Act One in the finely-crafted ‘Come frenar il pianto,’ Praticò sings lovingly, using both music and text to figuratively caress his heartbroken daughter. He and Regazzo sing resonantly in the trio with Ninetta, ‘Siamo soli.’ Praticò makes Fernando’s aria in Act Two, ‘Accusata di furto,’ one of the highlights of the recording. When Fernando is reunited with Ninetta as a pardoned man at the opera’s end, the elation that Praticò’s vocalism conveys seems to spread over the whole cast. Regazzo’s Podestà is a scheming scoundrel from first note to last, but how delectable is his treachery! In the cavatina in Act One, ‘Il mio piano è preparato,’ Regazzo’s singing is the musical equivalent of a silent-film villain twirling his mustache, the voice produced with assured insouciance. In Act Two, the arrogance and humbug wooing in his aria ‘Sì, per voi, pupille amante’ are amusingly unctuous, and Regazzo’s singing gives great pleasure. Both gentlemen occasionally sacrifice tidiness of line for comedy, but it is unlikely that Rossini would have minded.

With recent releases of recordings of the title rôle in Händel’s Joshua (Accent), Ferrando in Mozart’s Così fan tutte (Sony Classical), and Mozart and Salieri arias (MDG) to his credit, Detroit-born tenor Kenneth Tarver is finally receiving some measure of the widespread recognition that his talent merits. His extraordinary voice has been heard in the world’s great opera houses, but his singing as Giannetto in this performance of La gazza ladra spurs curiosity about why his name is not synonymous with bel canto everywhere in the world in the way that Tito Schipa’s was seventy-five years ago. A dashing hero on stage, Tarver’s singing combines a beautiful timbre reminiscent of Cesare Valletti’s with dizzying virtuosity that enables him to conquer Rossini’s most throat-stressing passages with flabbergasting ease. Indeed, in this performance he sings Rossini’s volleys of coloratura like a great violinist playing Vivaldi’s most insanely difficult music for that instrument, every note in rapid-fire passagework given its due and every pitch placed with zinging precision. ‘Vieni fra queste braccia,’ Giannetto’s cavatina in Act One [not to be confused with the like-named number in Bellini’s I puritani], is dispatched with a dazzling display of expertise. Likewise, Tarver’s singing in the Act Two duet with Ninetta, ‘Forse un dì conoscerete,’ palpitates with dramatic involvement and ideally poised, dulcet tone. The only disappointment in this portrayal of Giannetto is instigated by Rossini: with Tarver on hand to sing the part in future, could he not have proactively composed more music for the character?

Spanish soprano María José Moreno depicts Ninetta as a good-natured young lady whose sunny disposition is tested but never eclipsed by the dire straits in which she finds herself. She sings the Act One cavatina ‘Di piacer mi balza il cor’ confidently, her negotiations of coloratura and easy management of the wide tessitura immediately earning appreciation. Rossini’s expressive writing in Ninetta’s duet with Fernando, ‘Come frenar il pianto,’ prefigures similar moments in the young Verdi’s operas, and Moreno cannily blends her pensive tones with Praticò’s brawny singing. Her security above the stave is exhibited both in the trio with her father and the Podestà, ‘Non so quel che farei,’ and in the act finales. The soprano’s keen talent for ensemble singing is again revealed in her performance of the Act Two duets with Giannetto, ‘Forse un dì conoscerete,’ and Pippo, ‘A mio nome, deh, consegna.’ She unites first with Tarver and then with Rewerski adroitly. It is in Ninetta’s Preghiera as she is led to execution, ‘Deh, tu reggi in tal momento,’ that Moreno’s voice is at its most beautiful. Such an assertion is hardly meaningful when her singing throughout the performance is so beguiling, however, and her innocent, fresh-as-spring-rain characterization is enchanting.

With the label’s extensive catalogue preserving a gallery of storied Rossini portraits including Lawrence Brownlee’s Lindoro in L’italiana in Algeri, Joyce DiDonato’s Cenerentola, Ewa Podleś’s Tancredi and Sumi Jo’s Amenaide, Michael Spyres’s Otello, and Ramón Vargas’s Conte d’Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia, the people responsible for planning and completing NAXOS recordings have learned a thing or two about recording Rossini’s operas over the past two decades. Adding more Rossinian star turns to the label’s discography, that knowledge here yields a recording of La gazza ladra that can be enjoyed without reservation. Hard is the heart that is impervious to this thieving magpie’s wiles.