FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809 – 1847): Symphonies Nos. 1 – 5—Karina Gauvin (soprano – Symphony No. 2), Regula Mühlemann (soprano – Symphony No. 2), Daniel Behle (tenor – Symphony No. 2); RIAS Kammerchor (Symphony No. 2); Chamber Orchestra of Europe; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in Grande salle Pierre Boulez, Philharmonie, Paris, France, 20 – 22 February 2016; Deutsche Grammophon479 7337; 3 CDs, 200:10; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

‘Hier stehe ich: ich kann nicht anders.’ With these seven words or a sentiment of similar brevity, one man changed the course of history in ways that continue to enrich, embolden, and embitter mankind. The publication in 1517 of Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum, commonly known in English as the Ninety-Five Theses, ignited a conflagration of religious dissent that singed Europe and dispersed its smoke over every square millimeter of the globe. At the center of the inferno, the man whose thinking emitted the fateful sparks was Martin Luther, an Augustinian theologian whose questioning of the ethics of Catholic sales of indulgences is now believed by scholars to have been intended to provoke contemplation and quiet reform rather than outright philosophical revolution. In addition to the enduring, still-evolving ramifications of his theological paradigm shift, Luther exerted an influence of virtually incalculable significance on human culture. Without Luther’s pioneering translation of Biblical texts into the German vernacular and composition of hymns and chorales, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions, Georg Friedrich Händel’s Messiah, Johannes Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem, and countless other seminal works of art might never have emerged from the minds of their creators.

Three hundred years after Luther’s issuance of the Ninety-Five Thesis, the eight-year-old scion of a well-respected German Jewish family of intellectuals was impressing his society with a rapidly-developing musical precocity that rivaled that of Europe’s greatest Wunderkind, Mozart. Born in the independent city of Hamburg on 3 February 1809, nine days before another of the Nineteenth Century’s preeminent geniuses, Abraham Lincoln, was born on the opposite shore of the Atlantic, Felix Mendelssohn benefited from as normal a childhood as a prodigy could expect. Without the necessity of earning a living via musical means, Mendelssohn’s father did not seek to profit from his son’s boyhood feats of musical prowess as Mozart’s had done a half-century earlier. Like Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, Mendelssohn the composer was a master of form whose work expanded the creative possibilities of building new musical structures upon firmly-established foundations. Also like Mozart, Mendelssohn was destined for a brief life, but the breadth and significance of his accomplishments are remarkable—and in no genre more so than in the symphony.

Complemented by the dozen string symphonies composed during his adolescence, Mendelssohn’s five symphonies—or, as is now the preferred designation, his four symphonies and symphonic cantata—are cornerstones of German Romanticism, scores in which the stylistic advancements of the Eighteenth Century were propelled into the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Recorded in sound of astonishing clarity during performances in the Grande salle Pierre Boulez of Paris’s much-discussed Philharmonie, Deutsche Grammophon’s new accounts of Mendelssohn’s Symphonies featuring the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin sound as novel as they must have done during their composer’s lifetime. ‘Hier stehe ich,’ Mendelssohn said in these innovative scores, but what more might his thwarted genius have achieved?

In the opening Allegro di molto movement of Symphony No. 1 in C minor (Opus 11 / MWV N 13), the Québécois Nézet-Séguin and his COE colleagues institute tempi, textures, and balances among sections of the orchestra that uncannily highlight the Classical accents of Mendelssohn’s musical language whilst also speaking his ardently Romantic dialect with absolute fluency. One of the most brilliant facets of Nézet-Séguin’s artistry is his ability to simultaneously emphasize both a piece’s drama and its lyricism, and that facet sparkles throughout the performances on these discs. The rhythmic vitality initiated in the first movement is equally evident in the Andante second movement, in which some conductors sacrifice momentum in pursuit of externalized, often wrongheaded emotional contexts for the fifteen-year-old composer’s music. In this performance, Nézet-Séguin avoids the traps of approaching Symphony No. 1 as juvenilia that requires delicate handling or as a mature masterpiece needing no advocacy. The confident playing of the COE musicians heightens appreciation of the confidence that the young Mendelssohn’s music exudes. Nézet-Séguin manages the third movement’s transition from Menuetto to Trio with elegance, following the music’s lead. The energy with which Mendelssohn infused the Symphony’s closing Allegro con fuoco movement courses through this performance, the COE’s string playing a model of taut ensemble. The composer’s beloved sister Fanny must have been delighted by the Symphony, which was first performed in celebration of her nineteenth birthday, and that elation is recreated in this performance. How many birthday gifts continue to provide such enjoyment after 193 years?

Composed in 1840 in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the invention of modern printing, Mendelssohn’s large-scaled Lobgesang (Opus 52 / MWV A 18), a cousin of Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Second Symphonies, was published after the composer’s death as his Symphony No. 2. Chronologically, its genesis followed that of the Italian Symphony, but it was never regarded by the composer as a symphony, an opinion that was honored by the scholarly edition of the Mendelssohn canon prepared for the composer’s bicentennial in 2009, in which the Lobgesang was classified as a choral work rather than a symphony. Nevertheless, the piece’s structure has much in common with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the duration of the final movement with vocal soloists and chorus exceding that of the instrumental movements combined. Under Nézet-Séguin’s leadership, the introductory Sinfonia possesses the grandeur necessary to prefacing so ambitious a work, but there are no traces of pomposity. The sincerity of the sense of ceremony that pervades the Maestoso con moto - Allegro lends the performance as a whole a welcome honesty. Nézet-Séguin interprets the subsequent Allegretto un poco agitato with straightforward vigor that contrasts markedly with the contemplative nuance of the conductor’s pacing of the Adagio religioso.

When the voices of the RIAS Kammerchor are first heard in the Allegro moderato maestoso chorus ‘Alles, was Odem hat, lobe den Herrn,’ the perceptiveness of Mendelssohn’s settings of the Biblical texts selected for his Lobgesang is immediately apparent. Enhanced by the uncommon clearness of the recorded sound, the choristers’ crystalline diction enables every syllable to be discerned. Joining the ladies of the chorus in ‘Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele,’ soprano Karina Gauvin offers excellent diction of her own, allied here with vocalism of unassailable concentration and poise. The tonal beauty of tenor Daniel Behle’s singing of the recitative ‘Saget es, die ihr erlöst seid durch den Herrn’ and Allegro moderato aria ‘Er zählet unsre Tränen’ is stirring, but the subtlety of his enunciation of text is no less impressive. Supported by conductor and orchestra, the choral reprise of ‘Saget es, die ihr erlöst seid’ resounds with probity.

In their Andante duet, ‘Ich harrete des Herrn,’ Gauvin and soprano Regula Mühlemann blend their very different voices with consummate skill, the Canadian soprano’s slightly heavier timbre providing a warm rose-gold setting for her colleague’s opalescent tones. The chorus ‘Wohl dem, der seine Hoffnung setzt’ is delivered with musical and emotional power, Nézet-Séguin’s conducting spotlighting the organic thematic development in even Mendelssohn’s most transparent writing. Behle’s mellifluous voicing of ‘Stricke des Todes hatten uns umfangen’ is answered by Gauvin’s radiant reading of ‘Die Nacht ist vergangen,’ and their RIAS Kammerchor comrades elucidate the meaningful intricacies of the exuberant Allegro maestoso e molto vivace ‘Die Nacht ist vergangen.’ Marked Andante con moto - Un poco più animato, the chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ is sung atmospherically, the sounds of the words used to conjure an aura of spiritual awe. The Andante sostenuto troppo duet ‘Drum sing’ ich mit meinem Liede ewig dein Lob’ receives from Behle and Gauvin a traversal of moving sensitivity, Mendelssohn’s melodic lines blossoming with the semblance of spontaneity. The Allegro non troppo chorus ‘Ihr Völker, bringet her dem Herrn Ehre und Macht!’ and final ‘Danket dem Herrn und rühmt seinen Namen’ are performed without affectation: choristers, instrumentalists, and conductor all inhabit the music as though it were their own creation. Symphony, cantata, or hybrid, Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang is in this performance a genuine hymn of praise.

The editions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Symphonies employed by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Nézet-Séguin for the concerts that yielded these recordings were prepared by late British conductor and musicologist Christopher Hogwood, whose close acquaintance with Baroque and Classical repertories afforded him an unique perspective on Mendelssohn’s music. This is particularly valuable in Symphony No. 3 in A minor (Opus 56 / MWV N 18), the widely-known Scottish Symphony inspired by the composer’s travels through the Highlands and Scotland’s rugged islands. Whether or not his own globetrotting has instilled in Nézet-Séguin any special affection for Scotland, his affinity for Mendelssohn’s musical portrait of the country is unmistakable. The metamorphoses from Andante con moto to Allegro un poco agitato, Assai animato, and Andante come prima in the Symphony’s first movement are exaggerated by many conductors at the expense of continuity, but Nézet-Séguin finds within each change of tempo its core relationship with the movement’s broader structure. In the Vivace non troppo movement that follows, the electricity of the musicians’ playing illuminates Highlands landscapes in the listener’s mind’s eye. The impact of the polarity of the subsequent Adagio could hardly be greater, but here, too, Nézet-Séguin and COE only accentuate the disparities that are inherent in the music, playing what Mendelssohn wrote as he wrote it and inviting the listener to share in the labor of interpretation. As realized in this performance, the evocative effervescence of the Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assai movement mimics the crashing of the sea upon Scotland’s craggy coastline. The appeal of this music is difficult to resist in the context of half-hearted performances: here, the mighty Hebrides themselves might be swept away by the force of the music making.

Dating from 1833, in which year the score was premièred by the London Philharmonic Society, Symphony No. 4 in A major (Opus 90 / MWV N 16), christened by the composer as his Italian Symphony, is perhaps Mendelssohn’s most familiar work in symphonic form, and its profusion of sun-drenched tunes is a formidable attraction. The picturesque immediacy of the writing in the Scottish Symphony is paralleled and perhaps exceeded by that in the Italian, and every Mediterranean detail of Mendelssohn’s musical depiction of bella Italia is affectionately illustrated by Nézet-Séguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The whir of traffic in the congested streets of Rome buzzes in their playing of the Allegro vivace, and their performance of the Andante con moto suggests the relaxed ambiance of the emblematic passeggiata. Nézet-Séguin perfectly judges Mendelssohn’s ‘Con moto moderato’ instruction in the Menuetto, his tempo precisely suited to the music and COE’s truly terpsichorean playing of it. The Presto Saltarello is among the few pieces of Classical Music to have enjoyed life beyond its natural habitat. Recognized by listeners who have never seen the interior of a concert hall, its frenetic opening subject is unforgettable. Regrettably, many performances of the Italian Symphony are all too forgettable, but the rendering of the Saltarello that concludes this performance of the Symphony is representative of a fusion of engaging moxie with irreproachable musicianship. This is not German fare that has been artifically flavored with Italian herbs but a festa italiana prepared by a chef d’orchestre with cosmopolitan flair.

It is hardly surprising that a composer as respectful of and responsive to music of prior generations as Mendelssohn should have drawn considerable inspiration from history. As vibrant as the musical vistas in the Scottish and Italian Symphonies is the aural homage to spiritual renewal in the Reformation Symphony, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor (Opus 107 / MWV N 15). Negotiating the shift from Andante to Allegro con fuoco in the opening movement with his customary attention to the composer’s motivations for the change, Nézet-Séguin leads this performance of the Reformation with controlled zeal. The COE strings’ articulation in the Allegro vivace compels admiration, and the orchestra’s brass playing is praiseworthy throughout the performance. Kettledrums have never been more effectively—and sometimes startlingly—recorded than on these discs. Leading into the recitative that announces the Symphony’s final chorale, the Andante radiates the simplicity that is the nucleus of the greatest works of art. Nézet-Séguin observes the reverence of Mendelssohn’s treatment of Martin Luther’s ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,’ guiding the orchestra in a display of sonorous solemnity. Navigating the Andante con moto, Allegro vivace, and Allegro maestoso sections with grace, conductor and musicians resolve Mendelssohn’s Reformation with an exhibition of the power of music to communicate universal ideals of endurance and hope that require neither words nor creeds.

In analyses of the development of the modern symphony from its origins in Baroque models to the Twenty-First-Century incarnations, the vital rôle played by Felix Mendelssohn is often undervalued and sometimes altogether overlooked. The important contributions of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, and Mahler to the symphony’s Darwinian progress are universally acknowledged, but Mendelssohn’s Symphonies, though widely respected, are encountered less frequently in the repertories of the world’s great orchestras than those of his illustrious fellow symphonists. The quincentennial of Martin Luther’s instigation of the Protestant Reformation is an apt occasion for a reappraisal of Mendelssohn’s Symphonies. As in any repertoire, the most persuasive argument on behalf of the quality of Mendelssohn’s music is made by playing it as the composer intended it to be played, seeking meaning and relevance within the scores. Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe accomplish this as compellingly in these performances of Mendelssohn’s Symphonies as in their DGG survey of Mozart’s mature operas, soon to be expanded by a recording of La clemenza di Tito. Mendelssohn’s Symphonies pose challenging questions to conductors and musicians, but the performances on this new release find answers that are not exclusively but wholly right.

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Ottone, re di Germania, HWV 15—Max Emanuel Cenčić (Ottone), Lauren Snouffer (Teofane), Pavel Kudinov (Emireno), Ann Hallenberg (Gismonda), Xavier Sabata (Adalberto), Anna Starushkevych (Matilda); Il pomo d’oro; George Petrou, conductor [Recorded in Villa San Fermo, Lonigo, Italy, 22 June - 2 July 2016; DECCA483 1814; 3 CDs, 203:07; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

England in 1723 was in some ways perhaps not unlike the Holy Roman Empire in the Tenth Century. The death of the heirless Queen Anne in 1714 ended the Stuart dynasty and, according to the anti-Catholic dictates of 1701’s Act of Settlement, conferred the British crown upon a Continental head. In 1723, Anne’s second cousin and successor George I was in the ninth year of his thirteen-year reign and still embroiled politically and socially in defending the legitimacy of the Hanoverian occupancy of the British throne. Attending to his royal duties whilst entertaining London society with a mistress—perhaps his secret wife—as his de facto consort and perennially feuding with his recalcitrant son, the eventual George II, the first King George clung to his adopted throne with Teutonic tenacity. Many of Britain’s political players were none too impressed by the mandated German subjugation of the halls of power, but London’s music lovers welcomed at least one vassal of the Hanoverian court, one whose tenure in the English capital had actually begun in the twilight of Queen Anne’s reign: Georg Friedrich Händel.

Nearly a millennium earlier, the Holy Roman Empire was also governed by a German-born prince, the Saxon Otto II, son of Otto the Great and husband of Theophanu, a niece of the Byzantine emperor. Crowned co-emperor alongside his father by Pope John XIII in 967, the younger Otto’s continued rule after the death of Otto I in 973 was secured. Like that of George I, Otto II’s administration was not fated to be long-lived, extending for only a decade and a few months until the young emperor’s death at the age of twenty-eight. Though the fraction of the Tenth Century during which Otto II sat on the imperial throne was a time of relative calm, the succession of his three-year-old son plunged the Holy Roman Empire into unrest like that against which Otto I fought. Ironically, Otto II’s operatic adversaries, Adalbert of Italy and his duplicitous mother Willa of Tuscany, figured little if at all in the emperor’s affairs: Willa is known to have died in 970, and Adalbert is thought by historians to have followed her in death no later than 975 but likely in 971. Even in the Twenty-First Century, far more is conjectured than actually known about the life of Otto II, but to Britons in the third decade of the Eighteenth Century he must have seemed an apt candidate for musical exhumation.

Premièred at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket on 12 January 1723, Händel’s opera Ottone, re di Germania bridged the gap between Hanoverian Britain and the Tenth-Century Holy Roman Empire. The timely significance of an operatic tale of the machinations of a Germanic monarch and those supporting or opposing him surely was not lost on London audiences and would likely have ensured some degree of success for the new work, but Ottone conquered London with its music. Writing for an ensemble of world-renowned singers, Händel produced a score of extraordinary quality and inspiration, setting a new standard for his own efforts and paving the way to his annus mirabilis, 1724, in which year he composed Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Rodelinda, and Tamerlano. Intriguingly, much of the opera’s beauty arises from its inherent ambivalence: in Ottone, not even the basest villainy is wholly without noble objectives. Like those of many Eighteenth-Century operatic intriguers, the conniving of Ottone’s players is, depending upon the individual listener’s predilections, either captivatingly or confoundingly convoluted, but the opera’s drama is surprisingly palatable for modern listeners in this exhilarating new DECCA recording. Perceiving the antics of today’s politicians in Ottone’s plot hardly stretches the imagination. If only the voices that bark in legislative debates, press conferences, and incessant media coverage were as alluring as those that sing Händel’s music on these discs!

The scheming of the pseudo-historical figures who sing it notwithstanding, Händel’s music for Ottone is both beautiful and shrewdly characterful, the orchestrations that support the voices in several of the most beguiling arias intensifying the listener’s perceptions of aspects of the personalities that they portray. Dulcetly played by the continuo, the delicate accompaniment to Teofane’s exquisite aria ‘Falsa imagine’ is an example of Händel’s theatrical savvy and musical ingenuity at their most refined: in an aria that only threats of tossing her out of a window are said to have persuaded the first Teofane to sing, the plaintive music conveys the newly-arrived princess’s confusion and trepidation before she utters a word. It is perhaps this heightened atmosphere of musical and dramatic characterization that draws from conductor George Petrou one of his strongest recorded performances. Here leading the first-rate orchestral forces of Il pomo d’oro, Petrou supports the cast in bringing Händel’s characters to life, the tempi that he selects for arias right for both the music and the singers. The volleys of fiery bravura singing that modern listeners expect in Händel’s operas are present in Ottone, but this score shares with Tamerlano an emphasis on introspective contemplation. The vigor with which that contemplation transpires on these discs is evidence of the effectiveness of Petrou’s approach. Owing both to his galvanizing conducting and il pomo d’oro’s fantastic playing, this is the rare Händel recording that is as gripping as any staged performance in an opera house—more than many staged performances, in fact. This is a recording that must be heard by those listeners who believe that Händel’s operas and performances of them are dull.

The cast for whom Ottone was written could only with considerable planning have been rivaled in the Eighteenth Century: such a strong sextet of singers having been assembled for this recording is but one of the many vocal glories of this Ottone. In the opera’s 1723 première, the rôle of Matilda, the title character’s cousin and Adelberto’s intended bride, was sung by Anastasia Robinson, a singer with a constantly-evolving range for whom Händel composed a half-dozen of fine parts including Cornelia in Giulio Cesare. Filling Robinson’s shoes in this performance is Ukrainian mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych. A vibrant presence in recitatives throughout the performance, Starushkevych sings Matilda’s Act One aria ‘Diresti poi così?’ assertively, her technique equal to the demands of Händel’s music and the character’s appetite for revenge. The unique timbre of her voice ensures that Matilda is never lost in the twists of the opera’s serpentine plot. Her finest music comes in Act Two, and Starushkevych phrases ‘Ah! tu non sai quant’il mio cor sospira’ incisively. The immediacy of her delivery of ‘All’orror d’un duolo eterno’ is complemented by the reliable solidity of her intonation. This Matilda duets engagingly with Gismonda in ‘Notte cara,’ rejoicing in the progress of their plan to free Adelberto from Ottone’s clutches. Starushkevych reveals the full depths of her artistry in ‘Nel suo sangue, e nel tuo pianto’ in Act Three, performing the aria with focused tone and dramatic ardor, reveling in the offended lady’s desire for vengeance. Hints of unevenness are occasionally apparent in her vocal production, but her depiction of Matilda in this performance of Ottone induces eager anticipation for Starushkevych’s next appearance on disc.

Having originated the rôle of Pallante for Händel in the 1709 Venetian première of Agrippina, bass Giuseppe Maria Boschi reunited with Händel in London, where he participated in the first performances of several of the composer’s operas. His rôle in Ottone was Emireno, né Basilio, Teofane’s buccaneering brother, and Boschi’s eminently capable successor in this performance is Russian bass Pavel Kudinov. All three of Emireno’s arias are challenging, but Kudinov conquers their difficulties with singing of vigor and virtuosity. In Act One, Kudinov gives an account of ‘Del minacciar del vento sì ride quercia annosa’ that bristles with always-musical machismo. Then, the bass voices ‘Le profonde vie dell’onde’ in Act Two with a keen sense of the character’s motivations, dispatching the divisions with minimal effort. The aria ‘No, non temere, o bella’ in Act Three exposes a less bellicose facet of Emireno, and Kudinov polishes it with cultured, caressing vocalism. Entirely convincing as both a corsair and the brother of the empress consort, Kudinov is most compelling as an exponent of Händel’s music.

The part of Adelberto, the dutiful pawn in his mother Gismonda’s stratagems to usurp both Ottone’s throne and his bride, was created in 1723 by Gaetano Berenstadt, the castrato for whom Händel also wrote Tolomeo in Giulio Cesare and the title rôle in Flavio. As he confirms with his singing on this recording, there is no better-qualified modern interpreter of Adelberto’s music than countertenor Xavier Sabata. The ambivalence of Adelberto’s predicament finds in Sabata’s artistic temperament an ideal outlet, and his music might have been written for the countertenor’s voice. Adelberto’s entrance aria in Act One, ‘Bel labbro, formato per farmi beato,’ is a sublime piece, and Sabata sings it marvelously, his rounded, evenly-produced tones effortlessly tracing the aria’s expansive lines. His account of the vastly different ‘Tu puoi straziarmi’ blazes, ignited by Adelberto’s disdainful defiance of the victorious Ottone. Encountering his rightful fiancée Matilda as he is led away to prison in Act Two, Adelberto expresses his longing to learn fidelity and humility from his betrothed’s example in ‘Lascia, che nel suo viso,’ and Sabata sings the aria mesmerizingly. The sudden burst of sincerity in the spirit of a man whose path in the opera has heretofore been guided by duplicity is movingly evinced by the singer with sounds of tranquil beauty. His character battling meteorological and metaphysical tempests in Act Three, the countertenor traverses ‘D’innalzar i flutti al ciel’ with vocal confidence that enhances the subtlety of the psychological nuances of his portrayal. An antagonist but never truly a blackguard, Adelberto is one of Händel’s most interesting characters: in Sabata’s performance, he is a conflicted but sympathetic man who ultimately wins Matilda’s and the listener’s affections.

It was also in Venice in 1709 that Händel’s artistic path crossed that of soprano Margherita Durastanti, who created the title rôle in Agrippina. When their paths crossed again in London a decade later, she resumed her collaboration with Händel by singing the title rôle in Radamisto, Sesto in Giulio Cesare, and Gismonda in Ottone. So admired was Durastanti in London that her daughter, born in 1721, counted among her godparents the king himself, George I. Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg reminded listeners with her recent solo recording with il pomo d’oro, Carnevale 1729, that she is one of today’s foremost performers of Baroque repertory; an artist and a lady deserving of the admiration of royalty. Even with many wonderful recordings to her credit, Hallenberg’s performance as Gismonda in this Ottone is a milestone. From her first line of recitative, she commandeers the opera’s drama, at once appalling with her character’s incessant lust for power and touching with her genuine love for her son. In Gismonda’s opening aria, ‘Pur che regni il figlio amato,’ Hallenberg’s affinity for the part is affirmed, and she follows this with an animated but utterly stylish performance of ‘La speranza è giunta in porto.’ There is treachery beneath the surface of Hallenberg’s singing of ‘Pensa ad amare,’ but who could refuse anything asked by the source of such refined, appealing sounds? Allowing her maternal instincts a rare moment of exposure as her son is imprisoned in Act Two, Gismonda articulates her impulse to comfort Adelberto in ‘Vieni, o figlio, e mi consola,’ music in which the proud woman’s façade is infiltrated by candor. Here and in the duetto with Matilda, Hallenberg amazes with the intelligence of her vocal acting, never employing tonal beauty, of which she has tapped a seemingly inexhaustible vein, solely for its own sake. ‘Trema, tiranno’ in Act Three is a return to vehemence, and it is sung with potency and precision. Humanity is not a quality that would be immediately associated with Gismonda, but she has greater depth than some singers have bothered to explore. Hallenberg creates a fully three-dimensional character who loves as strongly as she hates and who sings as though it were notes rather than heartbeats that sustain her.

It was as Teofane in the first production of Ottone that Italian soprano Francesca Cuzzoni made her much-anticipated London début. In the following year, she would achieve artistic immortality with her portrayals of Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare, Asteria in Tamerlano, and the title rôle in Rodelinda, but it was as Teofane that she won the hearts of musical London. With singing that is both freshly youthful and refreshingly mature, soprano Lauren Snouffer besieges the listener’s heart, and her success is indisputable. Threats of physical violence were required to persuade Cuzzoni to sing Teofane’s first aria in Act One, the exquisite ‘Falsa imagine, m’ingannasti,’ but, Händel’s promise to toss her out of a window having prevailed, the soprano relented, sang the aria to great acclaim, and eventually sang it in virtually every venue in which someone would pay to hear her. If Snouffer required any convincing of the aria’s merit, her own performance of it should have eradicated any doubt. Her phrasing is light but not brittle, and her breath control is undaunted by the long melodic lines. The soprano brings to ‘Affanni del pensier’ energetic and sweetly feminine vocalism that conjures a persona both wounded and strong-willed. Snouffer voices ‘Alla fama, dimmi il vero’ and ‘S’io dir potessi al mio crudele’ in Act Two with abundant imagination and clear comprehension of Händel’s musical language. In Act Three, ‘Benchè mi sia crudele’ is enunciated with emotion as responsive to the text as to the music, and the soprano emits a stream of pure, flawlessly-tuned sound in ‘Gode l’alma consolata.’ She sings her part in the ecstatic duetto with Oronte, ‘A’ teneri affetti il cor s’abbandoni,’ an ancestor of ‘O namenlose Freude’ in Beethoven’s Fidelio, joyously, the voice radiating reclaimed happiness. With a flickering vibrato on sustained tones, Snouffer’s voice recalls that of Toti dal Monte, and her technique is reaching the high level of her natural talent. She is an intuitive singer who realizes that Teofane’s music needs only to be sung honestly and tastefully in order to be extraordinary, and it is the combination of honesty and taste that makes her singing in this Ottone extraordinarily satisfying.

The rôles that Händel wrote for the alto castrato Senesino are some of the most difficult parts in Baroque repertory to cast for modern performances. The brawn in the lower register that contemporary accounts attribute to Senesino eludes many countertenors, and female singers often lack timbres suited to credibly portraying heroic male characters like Orlando, Giulio Cesare, Andronico in Tamerlano, and Bertarido in Rodelinda. As Ottone in this performance, countertenor Max Emanuel Cenčić honors Senesino’s legacy with singing of muscle and musicality. Alternately sensual, serene, and rabble-rousing, Cenčić’s timbre possesses both the lower-register resonance and the bold masculinity that Ottone’s music requires. Always an alert, communicative artist in recitatives, Cenčić introduces Ottone’s seductive thoughtfulness with a lushly romantic account of ‘Ritorna, o dolce amore, conforta questo sen.’ [In the 1726 London revival of Ottone, Senesino returned to the title rôle. Unusually for a revival featuring a rôle’s originator, Händel made significant revisions to Ottone’s music, three of which are sampled on this recording. ‘Ritorna, o dolce amore’ was replaced by ‘Io sperai trovar riposo,’ which Cenčić here sings authoritatively, and ‘Cervo altier,’ also thrillingly delivered in this recording’s appendix, was inserted earlier in Act One.] The rollicking ‘Dell’onda ai fieri moti’ is voiced with bravado befitting an emperor.

Braving the dramatic gauntlet of Act Two, Cenčić sings ‘Dopo l’orrore’ charismatically, his technical assurance conveying the emperor’s dignity, and the spectrum of feelings that he imparts in ‘Deh! non dir, che molle amante’ is wondrous. Starting Act Three, the crestfallen Ottone seeks his beloved Teofane, and Cenčić sings ‘Dove sei, dolce mia vita?’ wrenchingly, the rising figurations representing Ottone’s growing despair voiced with particular emphasis. The despondency that grips Ottone in the accompagnato ‘Io son tradito’ floods Cenčić’s voice, and he pronounces the words with deliberateness that evinces shame and disbelief. As the countertenor sings it here, the superb ‘Tanti affanni ho nel mio core’ is the opera’s musical climax, the character’s churning emotions limned by vocalism free from artifice. [Surprisingly, ‘Tanti affanni’ was replaced in 1726 by ‘Un disprezzato affetto,’ a markedly inferior piece which Cenčić nonetheless sings well.] The gleam that his voice projects as he joins Snouffer in ‘A’ teneri affetti il cor s’abbandoni’ evokes irrepressible delight. Cenčić’s performances sometimes overwhelm with flamboyance rather than finesse, but he is an artist whose excesses shroud a profound interpretive vulnerability. In this performance of Ottone, simplicity is the crux of his portrayal. This is an Ottone who lives, one whose life matters to the listener not because he is an emperor but because he is a man, flawed and fascinating.

That Londoners in 1723 embraced a musical portrait of long-dead participants in a thousand-year-old political fracas should substantiate the absurdity of Twenty-First-Century debates about the relevance of opera. It is universally acknowledged that beauty is in the eye of the beholder: so, too, is the relevance of art. It is unlikely that any composer ever put a character upon the stage with the goal of inspiring an observer to say, ‘Yes, of course! He reminds me of Uncle Fred in Des Moines!’ That is not the nature of opera’s relevance. Opera is what those who perform and hear it make of it, and its relevance is born of perspective, not practicality. The musicians involved with this recording make Händel’s Ottone, re di Germania a passionately-sung, sumptuously-played examination of the conflicts between love and ambition. Voices are the essence of opera, and singing of the quality heard on this recording is always relevant.

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Parsifal, WWV 111—Lars Cleveman (Parsifal), Katarina Dalayman (Kundry), Sir John Tomlinson (Gurnemanz), Detlef Roth (Amfortas), Tom Fox (Klingsor), Reinhard Hagen (Titurel), Robert Murray (Erster Gralsritter), Andrew Greenan (Zweiter Gralsritter), Sarah Castle (Knappe, Blumenmädchen), Madeleine Shaw (Knappe, Blumenmädchen, Stimme aus der Höhe), Joshua Ellicott (Knappe), Andrew Rees (Knappe), Elizabeth Cragg (Blumenmädchen), Anita Watson (Blumenmädchen), Ana James (Blumenmädchen), Anna Devin (Blumenmädchen); Hallé Youth Choir, Trinity Boys Choir, Royal Opera Chorus; The Hallé; Sir Mark Elder, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in concert at the BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, London, UK, on 25 August 2013; The Hallé CD HLD 7539; 4 CDs, 258:35; Available from The Hallé, Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In the long, complicated history of human endeavor, a conundrum with which many societies and intellectuals have contended is the assessment of the true value of art. From a doggedly practical perspective, art fails modern efficiency standards’ litmus test of tangible value by having no effect on the fit, form, or function of man’s existence: art neither fills the lungs with oxygen nor causes the heart to beat. During the darkest days of World War II, as pragmatic a thinker as Sir Winston Churchill argued that art made the ferocious battle to preserve the British way of life worthwhile, however, recognizing art as a manifestation of humanity’s ascent out of barbarity. Who can view Michelangelo’s Pietà, awed by the serene honesty of its emotion, and not believe at least for a moment that the figures are of flesh rather than of marble? Who can gaze at Ansel Adams’s photographs of the American West and not surrender at least for a moment to an unspoiled communion with nature? Whether the medium is sculpture, still life, sonnet, or song, art is a conduit between man and his nature, and few artists have dedicated themselves as completely to facilitating man’s exploration of his own accomplishments and absurdities as did Richard Wagner. After indelibly altering the development of opera in the Nineteenth Century with scores as revolutionary as the politics of his youth, he crowned his career with Parsifal, an opera that fascinates, confounds, and provokes as potently in 2017 as when it was premièred in 1882 at the second Bayreuther Festspiele. Parsifal exerts no influence on the elementary functions of the universe, but hearing such music as the opera contains can convince even the casual listener that there is meaning in the most mundane mechanics of living.

Like many details of Wagner’s self-propagated mythology, the oft-repeated account of Parsifal’s genesis dating to a sun-drenched Good Friday experienced on the Swiss estate of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck in 1857 is equal parts hyperbole and outright fabrication. Impressed by reading first Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, with which he became acquainted in 1845, and, a decade later, the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Wagner indeed resolved in 1857 to adapt the story of the Arthurian Grail Knight Percival to music, but the notion was set aside until 1865, by which time he had completed Tristan und Isolde and drafted Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, operas in which the Celtic and Teutonic origins of the Percival legend and its literary incarnations were also evident. Another quarter-century would pass—and witness the composition of the behemoth Der Ring des Nibelungen and the construction of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus—before Wagner again turned his attention to Parsifal. Completing the libretto and composing the music of Parsifal occupied Wagner for more than two years, from February 1877 until his finalization of Act Three in April 1879. Beginning with the Act One Vorspiel in 1878, fully scoring the opera required another three-and-a-half years. After such a vast gestation, the titanic Bühnenweihfestspiel reached the stage of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus on 26 July 1882, with a cast that included tenor Hermann Winkelmann, soprano Amalie Materna (Brünnhilde in the first complete Bayreuth Ring), and Emil Scaria as Parsifal, Kundry, and Gurnemanz. Thus began the continuing narrative of one of Western civilization’s most momentous artistic phenomena.

Saying that the demands made by Parsifal on singers, instrumentalists, and conductors are formidable is an understatement of Wagnerian proportions. When scoring Parsifal, Wagner was cognizant of the opera’s literal and symbolic functions as the summation of his life’s work, and he crafted the work with music of incredible complexity and difficulty. Under the sagaciously-wielded baton of Sir Mark Elder, The Hallé’s musicians attain in the first bars of the Vorspiel that precedes Act One an exalted level of excellence that persists throughout this performance, recorded in concert in Royal Albert Hall during the 2013 BBC Proms. The Hallé’s execution of the diaphanous string writing in the Karfreitagmusik and Verwandlungsmusik shimmers with the ethereal mysticism that the dramatic situations require, and the orchestra’s brass and woodwind players, not least the contrabassoon, elsewhere employed by Wagner only in his lone completed Symphony, deliver their parts with exceptional accuracy. The Hallé’s mastery of Parsifal rivals that of the finest Bayreuth orchestras. Their exemplary work is mirrored by the superb singing of the Trinity Boys Choir, the Hallé Youth Choir, and the Royal Opera Chorus, respectively led by Michael Holiday, Richard Wilberforce, and Renato Balsadonna. Not even the most fervent Wagnerian can deny that Act One of Parsifal is a leviathan of Biblical dimensions, one that outstays its welcome in many performances. Likewise, the opera’s final pages can be lost in a treacly haze. In this Parsifal, Elder, the Hallé, and the combined choruses provide the musical and dramatic clarity, continuity, and propulsion that the score needs in order to achieve all that Wagner intended. With virtually no distracting reminders of the provenance of the recording, this performance mesmerizingly conveys the power and poetry of Parsifal.

Epitomizing the hypnotic vigor of this performance is the ensemble of Blumenmädchen, sopranos Elizabeth Cragg, Anna Devin, Ana James, and Anita Watson and mezzo-sopranos Sarah Castle and Madeleine Shaw. The ladies’ euphonious sounds conjure the seductive atmosphere missing from so many performances of their scene. Shaw is also a Stimme aus der Höhe whose words have ramifications, and she is joined by Castle and tenors Joshua Ellicott and Andrew Rees in the quartet of fresh-voiced Knappen. As the Gralsritter, tenor Robert Murray and bass-baritone Andrew Greenan sing handsomely, their exchanges with Gurnemanz and the Knappen phrased with alert handling of the text. In generations past, one could hear voices of the caliber of those of Montserrat Caballé, Hilde Güden, Gundula Janowitz, James McCracken, Kurt Moll, and Kostas Paskalis as Blumenmädchen, Knappen, and Gralsritter in performances of Parsifal. The casting of these parts in this performance recalls those bygone days of Wagner singing.

Further expanding the vocal distinction of this performance is the unexaggerated, truly sung Klingsor of American baritone Tom Fox. Parsifal’s villain is portrayed in many performances as a wheezing caricature with little dramatic impetus—and often with very cavalier approaches to intonation. As sung by Fox in this performance, however, Klingsor is a reptilian conniver who wields vocalism as entrancing as his sorcery. From his first ‘Die Zeit is da,’ Fox traverses Klingsor’s music with focused, flinty tone. When he summons Kundry with ‘Dein Meister ruft dich Namenlose, Urteufelin, Höllenrose,’ the injury of the girl’s shame strikes at the listener’s heart. Fox finds nuances in ‘Furchtbare Not! So lacht nun der Teufel mein, dass einst ich nach dem Heiligen rang?’ that few Klingsors bother to seek, and he declaims ‘Seine Wunde trägt jeder nach heim! Wie das ich euch gönne!’ electrifyingly without bawling. There are suggestions of the defeated but defiant Wotan in Fox’s singing of ‘Halt da! Dich bann' ich mit der rechten Wehr! Den Toren stelle mir seines Meisters Speer!’ Fox lends Klingsor the intrigue of a fallen and not merely an evil man, and this interpretive imagination allied with his secure vocalism makes him one of the most engaging Klingsors on disc.

German bass Reinhard Hagen—an aptly-named Wagnerian—is a Titurel who evinces the character’s suffering without inflicting it upon the listener with pained, ugly singing. The sorrow, frustration, and exhaustion that shape Hagen’s singing of ‘Mein Sohn Amfortas, bist du am Amt?’ are derived not from the singer’s vocal production but from the text, and the dignity at the heart of the bass’s delivery of ‘Im Grabe leb’ich durch des Heilands Huld’ adds a measure of distinction to his portrayal of a man who is all too often depicted as a whining cipher. Titurel has as much about which to complain as any character in opera, but most winsome is the Titurel whose tribulations are expressed not in ranting but in song, as Hagen exhibits in this performance. When his voice resounds with ‘Oh, heilige Wonne! Wie hell grüsst uns heute der Herr!’ on this recording, Titurel initiates a prolonged catharsis via which the opera’s agonies are ultimately relieved. Like Fox’s Klingsor, Hagen’s Titurel is an atypically detailed characterization that benefits from uncommonly solid singing.

Prior to this BBC Proms performance, Freudenstadt-born baritone Detlef Roth’s Amfortas was heard in five consecutive Bayreuth seasons, an achievement that places him in the company of George London, Thomas Stewart, and Bernd Weikl among the Festspiele’s longest-serving exponents of the part. His singing on these discs confirms that Roth’s Amfortas was as comfortable in Kensington as on the Green Hill. In Act One, Roth sings ‘Recht so! Habt Dank! Ein wenig Rast’ nobly, and the suggestiveness of his ‘Du, Kundry? Muss ich dir nochmals danken, du rastlos scheue Magd?’ intensifies the significance of the relationships among Kundry and the other players in Parsifal’s drama. The baritone gives both ‘Wehe! Wehe mir der Qual! Mein Vater, oh! noch einmal verrichte du das Amt!’ and ‘Des Weihgefässes göttlicher Gehalt erglüht mit leuchtender Gewalt’ the histrionic force that these passages lack in many performances, but the timbre often seems at odds with the music: when brawn is wanted, suavity is supplied. Roth’s Amfortas is an active participant instead of a ceremonial observer in Act Three, his statement of ‘Mein Vater! Hochgesegneter der Helden!’ voiced with awe and assurance. The sincerity of this Amfortas’s query of ‘Wer will mich zwingen zu leben, könnt ihr doch Tod mir nur geben?’ markedly enhances the emotional impact of the opera’s final scene. Even in the context of a recording of a concert performance, Roth’s ingratiating singing impressively creates and maintains genuine dramatic presence, but the ears often crave a more robust sound.

There is no question that Sir John Tomlinson is among England’s most distinguished Wagnerians. His portrayal of Hunding in Die Walküre remains remarkable for the menace that the bass conveyed without shouting, and he was the rare König Marke in Tristan und Isolde whose heartbreak was as palpable as his ire. Tomlinson sang Titurel powerfully in Daniel Barenboim’s studio recording of Parsifal and engrossingly depicted Gurnemanz in the 1993 Berlin production, also conducted by Barenboim, that was released on Laser Disc and VHS. Twenty-two years later, the intelligence and insightfulness of his interpretation of Gurnemanz are undiminished, but the intervening decades have exacted an unmistakable toll on the voice. Tones in the middle of the generally range retain the orotundity familiar from the best years of Tomlinson’s career, but resonance is lost below the stave. Pitches are almost always accurate, but notes above B♭₃ wobble. The long narration with which Gurnemanz opens Act One is a fearsome test of both a singer’s stamina and his ability to sustain dramatic momentum in music of relative stasis. His first notes in ‘He! Ho! Waldhüter ihr, Schlafhüter mitsammen, so wacht doch mindest am Morgen!’ introduce Gurnemanz as a man of unyielding seriousness of purpose, and Tomlinson enunciates ‘Er naht: sie bringen ihn getragen’ and ‘Ich wähne, ist dies Schaden, so tät’ er euch gut geraten’ with appropriate gravitas. The very different demands of ‘Oh, wunden-wundervoller heiliger Speer! Ich sah dich schwingen von unheiligster Hand!’ and ‘Titurel, der fromme Held, der kannt’ ihn wohl’ are met with the understanding that comes only from long acquaintance with the music, and the bass elucidates the mysticism with which Wagner inundated ‘Deine Mutter, der du entlaufen, und die um dich sich nun härmt und grämt.’

Absent from Act Two, Gurnemanz returns in Act Three, wearied by age and calamity, to guide Parsifal to the resolution for which he has hoped. The weight of the years that separate Parsifal’s first appearance from his return to the Domain of the Grail is heard in Gurnemanz’s voice as he sings ‘Von dorther kam das Stöhnen,’ and the immediacy of this Gurnemanz’s utterance of ‘Wie anders schreitet sie als sonst!’ reminds the listener of the human elements of the drama’s metaphysical stakes. ‘So kennst auch du mich noch? Erkennst mich wieder, den Gram und Not so tief gebeugt?’ seems to issue from both the soul and the throat. Tomlinson’s singing of ‘O Gnade! Höchstes Heil! O Wunder! Heilig hehrstes Wunder!’ is deeply moving, the effort in the vocal projection reflecting the character’s long perseverance. With ‘So ward es uns verhiessen, so segne ich dein Haupt, als König dich zu grüssen,’ the bass makes palpable Gurnemanz’s realization that an end to the misery that has surrounded him for so long is nigh. The solemnity of Tomlinson’s voicing of ‘Mittag: Die Stund' ist da: gestatte Herr, dass dich dein Knecht geleite’ discloses the breadth of the character’s faith. There are flaws in Tomlinson’s singing that, assessed individually, undermine his musical portrait of Gurnemanz. They cannot be ignored or said not to matter, but they are easily forgiven when the cumulative performance is so memorable. Gurnemanz sometimes becomes a curmudgeon who prattles on beyond the boundaries of audiences’ attention spans, but Tomlinson is here a Gurnemanz whose cautionary tales are the lifeblood of a timely parable.

Recently a riveting Fricka in Stockholm’s Ring des Nibelungen, Swedish soprano Katarina Dalayman enriches this recording of Parsifal with a Kundry of psychological subtlety and vocal security, one who, complementing Fox’s Klingsor, is refreshingly free of shrieking and silliness. The Kundrys of Kirsten Flagstad, sadly reaching modern ears in complete form through sonic murk, and Maria Callas, whose interpretation of this part that she sang only five times is preserved solely in a RAI concert performance that was sung in Italian, are very different, but there are reminders of both in Dalayman’s London performance. Neither Flagstad’s tonal amplitude nor Callas’s dramatic incisiveness is a natural component of Dalayman’s artistry, but her Kundry is all the more remarkable for rivaling much of what Flagstad and Callas respectively achieved with more voice and more ferocity. In Act One, Dalayman’s Kundry is less insinuating than guardedly introverted, each word seemingly considered before it is uttered. Her ‘Von weiter her als du denken kannst. Hilft der Balsam nicht, Arabia birgt dann nichts mehr zu seinem Heil’ is the pronouncement of a troubled woman, not a treacherous temptress, and the ardor with which she asserts ‘Ich helfe nie’ transcends the all-purpose malevolence in which many singers cloak Kundry. Dalayman phrases ‘Den Vaterlosen gebar die Mutter, als im Kampf erschlagen Gamure’ with vehemence rather than venom.

The contrast between the Kundry of Act One and the woman who hurtles into Act Two is particularly arresting in this performance. Here, too, Dalayman has obviously devoted great thought to her rôle, eschewing the snarling and sneering that are sometimes substituted for interpreting Kundry. The soprano’s stinging ‘Ach! Ach! Tiefe Nacht...’ unleashes in four words the essence of the character, the battle against the fate to which her actions condemned her awakening an animalistic brutality aimed as much at herself as at either Klingsor or Parsifal. The fervor of Dalayman’s account of ‘Oh, ewiger Schlaf, einziges Heil, wie, wie dich gewinnen?’ is heightened by the beauty of her tone. Confronting Parsifal, equally her tormentor and her deliverer, this Kundry launches ‘Hier weile, Parsifal! Dich grüsset Wonne und Heil zumal’ with sure aim. The phenomenal condition of Dalayman’s voice throughout the performance is epitomized by the spectacular top B with which she recalls Kundry’s ridicule of the dying Christ. Reduced in Act Three to cries of ‘Dienen... Dienen...,’ this indomitable woman is nevertheless far more than an apparition on the fringes of the male-dominated society. As depicted by Dalayman in this performance, Kundry claims her rightful place in the lineage of Wagner’s redemptive heroines extending from Senta to Brünnhilde, donning the mantle of a tragic heroine. Joining her Brünnhildes in recorded concert performances of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung with the Hallé and Elder, Dalayman’s Kundry in this recording is a compelling impersonation by one of today’s most probing Wagnerians of one of Wagner’s most enigmatic characters.

On records and on stage, Parsifal’s music has been sung by a remarkably broad array of voices, ranging from the bronzed sounds of Lauritz Melchior to the pewter-hued effusions of Jon Vickers and the Mediterranean timbre of Plácido Domingo. An impressive Siegfried in the same Stockholm Ring in which Dalayman portrayed the character’s imperious step-grandmother, as well in the Hallé’s Götterdämmerung, Swedish tenor Lars Cleveman is as recorded here a Parsifal whose voice occupies a position near the center of that spectrum. His is a reasonably youthful but muscular sound, and the steadiness of his singing throughout the range and at all levels of dynamics earns appreciation. The bravado of the good-natured but largely doltish Parsifal of Act One rings in Cleveman’s traversals of ‘Gewiss! Im Fluge treff’ ich, was fliegt!’ and ‘Ja! Und einst am Waldessaume vorbei, auf schönen Tieren sitzend, kamen glänzende Männer,’ his demeanor casual but committed. He sings ‘Ich schreite kaum, doch wähn’ ich mich schon weit’ boyishly. Like his Kundry, this Parsifal is transformed in Act Two into an altogether different figure. Cleveman communicates the shifting sentiments of ‘Noch nie sah ich solch zieres Geschlecht’ and ‘Ihr wild holdes Blumengedränge, soll ich mit euch spielen, entlasst mich der Enge!’ with pointed diction, and the raw virility of his voicing of ‘Nie sah ich, nie träumte mir, was jetzt ich schau’, und was mit Bangen mich erfüllt’ is exhilarating and illuminating. The zeal with which he sings ‘Amfortas! Die Wunde! Die Wunde! Sie brennt in meinem Herzen’ and ‘Auf Ewigkeit wärst du verdammt mit mir für eine Stunde’ adds a facet of virility to his portrayal, increasing Parsifal’s credibility as a Romantic—if not a romantic—hero.

The passive, puerile Parsifal of Act One is metamorphosed by Cleveman into a man of action in Act Three, the tenor’s sinewy singing of ‘Heil mir, dass ich dich wieder finde!’ followed by a steely but expressive ‘Zu ihm, des’ tiefe Klagen ich törig staunend einst vernahm.’ Addressing Kundry with an imaginatively-phrased ‘Du wuschest mir die Füsse, nun netze mir das Haupt der Freund,’ his comportment is softened by tenderness. Matured by experience, this Parsifal voices ‘O wehe, des höchsten Schmerzentags!’ and ‘Nur eine Waffe taugt: die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug’ with personal consequence. The character’s exclamation of ‘Oh! Welchen Wunders höchstes Glück!’ can seem artificial and slightly foolish, but Cleveman’s delivery grants it credence. Like Siegfried in the Ring, Parsifal can annoy when his man-child mannerisms are overemphasized, but Cleveman fashions a sensible balance between exuberance and sobriety. Most importantly in this gargantuan rôle, he sings attractively and with adequate reserves of hardiness for climaxes.

Since the opera’s first performance in 1882, Parsifal’s merits have been heatedly debated, some listeners perceiving in the score a deterioration of Wagner’s abilities and others deeming it the most perfect product of the composer’s genius. An objective analysis of the score would likely yield an opinion that neither wholly substantiates nor refutes either extremity, but objectivity is not among the earnest Wagnerian’s traits. For that matter, Parsifal is not conducive to compromise, the qualities that define it making it anything but a ‘take it or leave it’ opera. Whether individual listeners love or loathe it, Parsifal’s success in performance depends upon the same factors that allow works by Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, or Puccini to sink or soar: cogent conducting, playing, and singing. With all of these factors to its credit, this is a Parsifal that soars.

[1] ANTONIO DE CABEZÓN (circa 1510 – 1566), VINCENZO CAPIROLA (1474 – after 1548), MARCHETTO CARA (circa 1465 – 1525), MARCO ANTONIO CAVAZZONI (circa 1490 – circa 1560), JOAN AMBROSIO DALZA (fl. 1508), FABRIZIO DENTICE (circa 1539 – 1581), JOSQUIN DESPREZ (circa 1452 – 1518), JACOPO FOGLIANO (1468 – 1548), PHILIPPE DE MONTE (1521 – 1603), RANIER (fl. early 16^th Century), CLAUDIN DE SERMISY (circa 1490 – 1562), BARTOLOMEO TROMBONCINO (1470 – after 1534), ANTONIO VALENTE (circa 1520 – 1580), CLAUDIO VEGGIO (circa 1510 – after 1543), and ADRIAN WILLAERT (circa 1490 – 1562): Il Cembalo di Partenope– A Renaissance musical tale featuring music in and around 16^th-Century Naples—Catalina Vicens, harpsichord [Recorded in the National Music Museum, Vermillion, South Dakota, USA, during May 2015; Carpe Diem Records CD-16312; 1 CD, 66:35; Available from Carpe Diem Records, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] VINCENT PERSICHETTI (1915 – 1987): Harpsichord Sonatas and Serenade—Christopher D. Lewis, harpsichord [Recorded at Belvedere Estate, Belvedere, California, USA, 14 – 18 March 2016; Naxos 8.559843; 1 CD, 65:16; Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In some glorious hour in human history, the communications among people and their societies were magnificently altered by the harnessing of music. In the play of wind among trees, the gurgling flow of water, and the innumerable melodies of nature, the earth has always resounded with music, but with man’s contrived mimicry of nature’s voices was born a diversion so perfect that not even centuries of constant change have spoiled it. As music’s path has wound through countless cultures, an astounding diversity of styles and traditions has been accumulated—and with them an ever-expanding arsenal of instruments echoing the sounds emerging from the minds of the custodians of music’s evolution.

In 1397, a writer in Padova recorded an innovation that was destined to hew from the bedrock of musical invention a path that, 620 years after that fateful mention of the development of the ‘clavicembalum,’ continues to be extended into new artistic territory. Likely devised as an amalgamation of the organ and the Medieval psaltery, the harpsichord was by the end of the Fifteenth Century familiar in various forms throughout Western Europe. In guises that would be recognized by Twenty-First-Century observers, the harpsichord became the prevalent keyboard instrument of the Baroque, prized in both solo and continuo capacities until it was supplanted in the second half of the Eighteenth Century by prototypes of the modern piano. Biding its time in opera houses’ orchestra pits and private collections until pioneering artists like Wanda Landowska and Igor Kipnis returned it to concert halls and recording studios, the harpsichord is now espoused by some of the Twenty-First Century’s most gifted composers and musicians. Approaching the instrument from vastly different periods in its history, two of today’s most enterprising artists guide listeners through enchanting treks into neglected niches of the harpsichord’s bounteous repertory via discs as personal as they are accomplished. It is not only in All That Jazz that ‘everything old is new again’: music, too, is cyclical, and these releases reaffirm that so much of the future can be found in the past by those willing to seek it.

Before the advent of motion pictures with sound, films were often accompanied by live music, utilizing music’s power to conjure and complement visual imagery. The efficacy of verbal storytelling is challenged by the limitations of language, but music transcends the necessity of understanding words. Among today’s exponents of early repertory for the harpsichord, there is no more talented a musical raconteuse than Chilean harpsichordist Catalina Vicens, and with Il Cembalo di Partenope she not only weaves a kaleidoscopic tapestry with musical threads but creates her own context for the chosen music in an imaginatively-conceived and thoughtfully-written ‘Renaissance tale,’ both printed in the accompanying liner notes and available for download as an audio book narrated by Vicens’s own melodious voice. Masterfully recorded by Carpe Diem Records in one of America’s foremost artistic treasures, the National Music Museum on the Vermillion campus of the University of South Dakota, the vehicle for Vicens’s musical pilgrimage to Sixteenth-Century Naples is the world’s oldest known harpsichord still in playable condition. Any suspicions of pedantry roused by this fact are wholly unfounded: a wealth of scholarship contributed to the making of this disc, of course, but Vicens’s playing takes the listener on a visceral adventure that blows dusty academia aside with a gale of timeless artistic prescience.

Little is known about many of the composers whose music is included on Il Cembalo di Partenope, but the acquaintance provided by Vicens’s playing puts to rest any doubts about the skills possessed by these little-remembered names and the quality of their work. Launching her voyage with a crisply-phrased account of Antonio Valente’s Fantasia del primo tono, published in 1576, this brilliantly expressive artist exploits the unique sound of the instrument, a Neapolitan model by an unidentified maker that likely dates from the first quarter of the Sixteenth Century, to evoke aural souvenirs of late-Renaissance Naples. Vincenzo Capirola’s ‘La villanella,’ first printed in 1517, is played with the grace of a dove soaring above the Duomo di San Gennaro. Vicens revisits the music of Valente with his Gagliarda napolitana, beguilingly done, and she explores the Spanish influence in Naples, a viceroyalty of the Aragonese House of Trastámara during the first half of the Sixteenth Century, with an elegant traversal of Antonio de Cabezón’s Obra sobre cantus firmus. One of his era’s preeminent tunesmiths, Bartolomeo Tromboncino anticipated the work of Francesco Cavalli in music of melodic fecundity. Vicens delivers his ‘Amor quando fioriva’ with hypnotic charm, and she finds in the thematic material of the enigmatic Ranier’s ‘Me lassera tu mo’ an entrance into a mysterious world of complex, startlingly modern emotions. Her period-appropriate but unexaggeratedly theatrical performances mine the lodes of sentimental significance in Joan Ambrosia Dalza’s Calata ala spagnola and Tromboncino’s ‘Poi che volse,’ making each piece a thought-provoking tableau within her panorama of Neapolitan life.

Regarding Vicens’s prevailing concept as a window opened to the extraordinary vistas of an ordinary day in a vibrant city, morning gives way to afternoon in the harpsichordist’s touchingly sincere performance of Dalza’s Pavana alla ferrarese. The blazing Neapolitan sun reaches its zenith in the sonic skies of Jacopo Fogliano’s Ricerchare and Marchetto Cara’s ‘Cantai mentre nel core,’ both presented with characteristic intensity that never threatens to obstruct appreciation of the music’s historical provenance. Perhaps also by Cara, ‘Per dolor mi bagno el viso’ receives from Vicens a traversal of understated grandeur that contrasts with the almost secretive intimacy of her playing of Tromboncino’s ‘Stavasi amor’ and ‘Che farala che dirala.’ The singular sonorities of Marco Antonio Cavazzoni’s ‘Recercada di mã ca’ are spellbinding as realized by Vicens, whose articulations of rhythmic and harmonic patterns awaken in the instrument beneath her fingers the distant voices not only of Luigi Rossi, Monteverdi, and Cavalli but also those of Stravinsky, Tippett, and Glass. Though precious little information about his life exists, the importance of Josquin Desprez’s music in the ongoing maturation of Western polyphony cannot be overstated. Vicens’s playing of Cavazzoni’s treatment of Desprez’s ‘Plus ne regres’ assumes a pivotal position in the narrative of Il Cembalo di Partenope: here, the sun sets on the horizon of the musician’s Neapolitan landscape, heralding the transitions to night and new ages in musical expression.

With her playing of ‘Vi’ recercada,’ attributed to Claudio Veggio, Vicens affectionately guides her tale towards its conclusion, caressing the music with a mother’s tenderness. Emotional honesty is also at the core of her account of Cavazzoni’s ‘Madame vous aves,’ her focus on elucidating the composer’s ingenuity enhanced by the lightness of her touch. Veggio’s own Recercada per b quadro and his setting of Claudin de Sermisy’s ‘Tant que vivray’ draw from Vicens tempests of artistic temperament that metamorphose the harpsichord into a vessel that whisks the listener to destinations beyond the physical senses’ perceptive capabilities. What she achieves within the scope of historical accuracy with Fabrizio Dentice’s Volta de spagna and Valente’s retooling of Philippe de Monte’s ‘Sortemplus disminuita’ is remarkable, this centuries-old music sounding as though it were being created anew as Vicens performs it. Returning to Valente first with his adaptation of Adrian Willaert’s ‘Chi la dirra’ and then with his Recercata del primo tono, Il Cembalo di Partenope’s expedition, like a party descending from the summit of Everest, retraces familiar ground but with new awareness of its originality.

In opera, it has often been said that there are no small rôles, only singers of diminutive artistic stature who fail to take advantage of the opportunities that composers offer them. Vicens asserts with her playing on this disc that there is in the harpsichord repertory no ‘old music’; no music, that is, that cannot be reinvented and rejuvenated by an artist attuned to the veins of unchanging humanity in even the most archaic pieces. When the music on Il Cembalo di Partenope was new, Naples was a bustling metropolis, the second largest city in Europe and a cosmopolitan crossroads of art and trade rivaled only by Paris. Vicens’s playing reverberates with the authentic voices of Sixteenth-Century Naples, and how current they sound!

Born in Philadelphia in 1915, American composer and pedagogue Vincent Persichetti exerted an influence on the music of his native country that now, thirty years after his death in 1987, remains insufficiently appreciated. Not least in his tenure on the Juilliard faculty, during which his students included Leonardo Balada, Richard Danielpour, Philip Glass, Lowell Liebermann, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and Peter Schickele, Persichetti’s teaching furthered the legacy of his own studies with Fritz Reiner and Olga Samaroff, fusing a thorough grounding in European traditions with strikingly original elements of American modernism. The advancement of the composer’s individual compositional idiom during the 1950s coincided with his burgeoning acquaintance with the harpsichord, and his compositions for the instrument—ten sonatas, the fifteenth of his Serenades, the twenty-fourth of his Parables, and his Little Harpsichord Book—chart the course of Persichetti’s stylistic progress. Three decades separated the completions of his first and second Harpsichord Sonatas, bridging a period in his career during which some of his most memorable music was created. In addition to his symphonies, chamber music, and piano sonatas, all of which merit places in the repertories of talented ensembles and soloists, Persichetti’s insightful and approachable tome on Twentieth-Century harmony should be required reading for every student of music of that period.

Starting his public career as a pianist and composer whilst still an adolescent, Persichetti was a precocious artist, and the spirit of his youthful mastery electrifies the performances of his music on this handsomely-recorded Naxos disc by Welsh harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis. As in his previous recordings for Naxos, the eloquence of Lewis’s playing of Persichetti’s music belies his youth. The notion of a young musician having an ‘old soul’ is silly if rather poetic, but Lewis is an artist whose sensibilities encompass a near-boundless array of musical styles. Playing the first three Sonatas on this disc on a resplendent Pleyel concert harpsichord of the type preferred by Wanda Landowska and employing an instrument completed in 1997 by San Francisco-based maker Kevin Fryer after a Seventeenth-Century Flemish model by Ioannes Rucker for the remaining Sonatas and Serenade, Lewis perpetuates the initiative begun by Vicens, broadening listeners’ experiences with the harpsichord by venturing further into the immense trove of music composed for the instrument.

Completed in 1951, Persichetti’s first Sonata (Opus 52) is in many ways a transitional work in which the composer’s avant garde proclivities are tempered by increasing lyricism. The Sonata’s first movement, itself a transition from Andante sostenuto to Allegro, is played by Lewis with an outpouring of energy that ignites the sparks that crackle in the music. The subsequent Adagio movement is a sort of tonal oasis and is handled in this performance with well-considered sensitivity that deprives the piece of none of its potency. The following Vivace is dispatched with the sizzle of summer lightning, its technical demands effortlessly met by Lewis. The artistic growth exhibited by Sonata No. 3 (Opus 149), written in 1983, is unmistakable, Persichetti’s voice now more confident. Lewis’s performance highlights the assurance of the composer’s work. As played here, it is not the bracing harmonic complexities of the opening Allegro moderato that compel admiration but the intuition with which they are executed, revealing the organic logic with which the music was constructed. Lewis’s tempo for the Adagietto revels in the music’s inherent expressivity without impeding its momentum, and the bravado with which he plays the Allegro molto, again successfully targeting the soul of Persichetti’s score, is both exciting and enlightening.

A product of 1984, Sonata No. 5 (Opus 152) also reflects the shifting priorities not only of Persichetti’s mode of composition but also of writing for the keyboard in general. Here and in the subsequent Sonatas on this disc, thematic development exerts greater emotional force, exemplified by the Fifth Sonata’s slyly stirring Moderato. Lewis maintains precisely the attitude of informed ambivalence that lures the listener into the intricacies of the music. There is nothing ambivalent about his sensual, seductive playing of the Andante or the rousing ebullience with which he traverses the Allegro, however. Another three years passed before the completion of Sonata No. 8 (Opus 158) in 1987, the final year of his life, and in that interim Persichetti further refined his command of writing for the harpsichord. The depth of Lewis’s response to Persichetti’s music is apparent in the immediacy with which his playing exposes the continuous transmutations of the composer’s artistry. Both the Andante sostenuto and Allegro ma grazioso movements are presented with complete comprehension of the manner in which the composer manipulated thematic material to achieve intriguing and sometimes deceptive continuity. The buoyancy of the rhythmic figurations of the concluding Allegro con moto is ideally conveyed by Lewis’s effervescent performance.

Sonata No. 9 (Opus 163) followed the Eighth Sonata in 1987, but the atmosphere that it inhabits scarcely resembles that of the earlier work. In the Moderato first movement, the pace of Lewis’s playing manifests the sobriety of Persichetti’s writing with surprisingly moving simplicity. There is a formality in the Andantino that the harpsichordist here translates into clear-eyed emotional honesty, extracting from the music the essence of the composer’s inspiration. The surging Allegro erupts from Lewis’s fingers. Also dating from 1987, the fifteenth of Persichetti’s Serenades for various instruments (Opus 161) is the most ostensibly Baroque of Persichetti’s works for harpsichord, but its Prelude introduces this as a piece that looks to the future more palpably than it looks to the past. In the Prelude and the Episode that follows, Lewis emphasizes the music’s tunefulness, and his performance of the Bagatelle combines playfulness with technical prowess. His account of the Arioso truly sings. The inviolable concentration with which Lewis rips through the Capriccio meaningfully fulfills Persichetti’s goal of reawakening the demonstrative potential of the harpsichord.

When Wanda Landowska recorded Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations for the first time in 1933, the harpsichord was little more than an entry in musical encyclopedias. The small portion of its music that clung to familiarity was appropriated by pianists, few of whom were concerned with preserving the specific technique that the harpsichord’s mechanism necessitated. Nearly a century later, perhaps even Landowska would be astonished by the harpsichord’s near-miraculous return to prominence. Miracles are not wrought by men, but the harpsichord’s comeback has been catapulted into reality by artists of virtuosity and vision like Catalina Vicens and Christopher D. Lewis. Like Norma Desmond, Landowska would likely not have been comfortable with the term ‘comeback,’ not for her beloved harpsichord: ‘it’s a return,’ and, with discs like these two to its credit, an abundantly welcome one.

SIR EDWARD ELGAR (1857 – 1934): The Dream of Gerontius, Opus 38—Andrew Staples (Gerontius), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (The Angel), Thomas Hampson (The Priest, The Angel of the Agony); Staatsopernchor Berlin, RIAS Kammerchor, Konzertchor und Jugendchor der Staatsoper Unter den Linden; Staatskapelle Berlin; Daniel Barenboim, conductor [Recorded in conjunction with live performances in Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin, Germany, 16 – 17 and 19 – 20 September 2016; DECCA483 1585; 2 CDs, 94:01; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

The isolation that often separates artists from their societies has been both a part and a product of the creative process since man first expressed himself in verse, song, and imagery. In the Biblical narrative of Eden, man’s relative proximity to divinity isolates him from the meaner inhabitants of earth, a chasm between humanity and the natural world made arrestingly visual in Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Cappella Sistina. In Shakespeare, the artistic temperament of Prospero encloses him away from the other players in his drama, and Hamlet’s brooding solitude engenders an emotional distance that not even Horatio can span. There are moments of compassion and conviviality, sometimes even genuine comfort, but full communion among artists and their surroundings is too often thwarted by mistrust and misunderstanding. This isolation, equally crippling and liberating, is a central focus of Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 1865 poem The Dream of Gerontius, an examination of a soul’s transition from life to afterlife that in the 1880s appealed to Antonín Dvoŕák, a man of great faith in a time of rapidly-spreading secularism, as a potential subject for a large-scaled choral work. Never taken up by the Czech composer, Newman’s words were ultimately matched with music by Sir Edward Elgar, whose Dream of Gerontius was composed in fulfillment of a commission from the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival and first performed—poorly, history records—at that gathering on 3 October 1900. It was an auspicious point of departure for choral music in the Twentieth Century and a lone artist’s warning to a world already on the brink of total war.

From the informed perspective of the Twenty-First Century, it is difficult to fathom that Elgar, the most quintessentially English of composers, was in a real sense an artist without a country. A devout Catholic in an unyielding Protestant society, Elgar was at odds with the artistic establishment of which his own music was a vital component. Though the ceremonial toll exacted by his faith was considerably higher than the true professional cost, the official patronage and recognition that he was denied by the country of which he was the undisputed musical monarch cannot have failed to awaken in Elgar a feeling of disenfranchisement. That Cardinal Newman was himself a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism undoubtedly intensified the allure of his words for Elgar, who received as a wedding gift an annotated copy of Newman’s poem that had belonged to General Gordon, the self-appointed martyr of the 1885 massacre of Khartoum. Possessing an uncanny intuition for selecting texts that, even when undeniably pompous, stoked his creative genius, Elgar brought to Newman’s words a wealth of imagination that was manifested in music of tremendous difficulty and still-potent beauty. Not even the score winning the esteem of Richard Strauss spared Elgar the indignities of seeing both his instructions that Dream of Gerontius not be termed an oratorio ignored and the work’s Catholic point of view modified to suit Anglican tastes. Not quite four months remained in Queen Victoria’s long reign at the time of Gerontius’s first performance: already in danger of becoming an anachronism, Elgar propelled himself and his reluctant countrymen into tuneful but terrifying modernity.

A committed advocate for Elgar’s music in concert halls and recording studios, Buenos Aires-born conductor Daniel Barenboim continues his survey of the composer’s music for DECCA with a superlatively-engineered account of The Dream of Gerontius recorded in conjunction with much-discussed performances in Berlin’s Philharmonie. DECCA’s sonics capture the frisson of live performance with virtually none of the distracting blemishes, and the venue’s spacious acoustic is a worthy setting for the sumptuous but sinewy playing of Staatskapelle Berlin, a source of strength throughout the performance. This recording is among Barenboim’s finest outings as a conductor, his pacing of the score meriting favorable comparison with long-respected performances led by Sir Malcolm Sargent, Sir Adrian Boult, and Sir John Barbirolli. The ‘Lento, mistico’ marking of the Prelude’s opening is meticulously observed, and the orchestra’s wind playing here and throughout the performance is superb. Following with the score, it is possible to note Barenboim’s reaction to virtually every shift in tempo or dynamics. When the music calls for vehemence, the conductor does not shrink from it, but the dramatic thrust of this Gerontius is never forced. Aided by DECCA’s production team, Barenboim and the orchestra attain—and maintain—aural balances in which details of Elgar’s orchestrations, particularly his inspired writing for the harp, are consistently audible within appropriate perspectives. Instructions such as ‘crescendo ed agitato,’ ‘naturale,’ and ‘affrettando’ have logical, discernible meaning in this performance. Considering his decades-long relationship with the music of Richard Wagner, Barenboim’s insightful handling of musical textures is not surprising, but there is much about his leadership of this Dream of Gerontius that profoundly surprises and gratifies. Above all, Barenboim and his German colleagues prove that suggestions that this music is too English to be wholly effective beyond Britain’s borders are as idiotic as they are ill-founded.

Under the direction of chorus masters Martin Wright and Justin Doyle, the combined personnel of the Staatsopernchor and RIAS Kammerchor bring to this performance of Dream of Gerontius irreproachable musicality, immaculate intonation, excellent diction, and complete comfort with Elgar’s demanding choral writing—an accomplishment that infamously eluded the choir by which the music was first performed. As the Assistants observing Gerontius’s final hours on earth in Part One, the choristers deliver ‘Kyrie eleïson’ with an apt aura of supplication, and their singing of ‘Be merciful, be gracious; spare him, Lord’ is entrancingly pleading. Darker sentiments increase the fervor of the chorus’s entreaties with the evocation of iniquity in ‘Rescue him, O Lord, in this his evil hour,’ but the faithful sincerity of ‘Go, in the name of Angels and Archangels’ is touchingly conveyed. The Berliners revel in portraying the Demons who haunt Gerontius’s second Part, voicing ‘Lowborn clods of earth, they aspire to become gods’ and ‘The mind bold and independent’ with exhilaratingly infernal ferocity. The religious ardor of their performances of the Angelicals’ ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’ and ‘Glory to Him, who evermore by truth and justice reigns’ equals the zeal of their demonic utterances, and in both the earthly voices’ ‘Be merciful, be gracious; spare him, Lord’ and the Purgatory-bound souls’ ‘Lord, Thou hast been our refuge’ their vocalism capitalizes on the music’s potential to startle and soothe. The English choral tradition is rightly legendary, but the choral singing on this recording confirms that Berlin is as natural a home for Gerontius as Birmingham.

In his singing of the Priest and the Angel of the Agony, American baritone Thomas Hampson wields the vocal and histrionic gravitas that the music needs without pushing the voice. In Part One, he phrases the Priest’s ‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!’ with keen response to the text, breathing life into Elgar’s poignant setting of the Latin words. Greater effort is expended in Hampson’s singing in this performance than in his previous recordings of similar repertory such as the title rôles in Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Paulus, but his years of experience have honed his interpretive skills without diminishing his vocal control. As the Angel of the Agony in Part Two, the baritone voices ‘Jesu! by that shuddering dread which fell on Thee’ with stern authority, the words receiving as much of the singer’s scrutiny as the notes. Even with so many fascinating operatic characterizations to his credit, this is among Hampson’s best recorded performances. An exceptionally persuasive rendering of Elgar’s forthright music on his own terms, Hampson’s singing in this Dream of Gerontius is also a lesson for young singers in the art of preserving the voice by safeguarding both the technique and one’s artistic integrity.

It is now nearly a quarter-century since the impeccably-schooled voice of British mezzo-soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers first counseled a recorded Gerontius in his preparation for divine judgment. Interacting with the Gerontius of Anthony Rolfe Johnson under the baton of Vernon Handley, she was a serene presence as the Angel. Like Hampson, Wyn-Rogers has managed her career with rare intelligence, and her sagacity has fortified the voice against the ill effects of passing time. With her pianissimo statement of ‘My work is done, my task is o’er,’ building to a secure fortissimo E at the top of the stave, she recreates the emotional honesty of her 1993 performance and adds a new dimension of restrained rapture. There is in her assertion of ‘You cannot now cherish a wish which ought not to be wished’ a sense of gentle reprimand, the singer’s adherence to Elgar’s ‘espressivo’ direction supported by the conductor. The mezzo-soprano differentiates ‘It is because then thou didst not fear, that now thou dost not fear’ and ‘They sing of thy approaching agony’ with subtle inflections rather than overstated emoting, and her voicing of ‘And now the threshold, as we traverse it, utters aloud its glad responsive chant’ and ‘O happy, suffering soul! for it is safe’ exudes the assurance of triumphant faith. Wyn-Rogers’s singing in this Dream of Gerontius is never more beautiful than in ‘Softly and gently, dearly ransom’d soul,’ her timbre glimmering. Like Hampson’s, Wyn-Rogers’s vocalism is now marginally more laborious than in years past, but the rewards are also more special. As a young singer in training, Wyn-Rogers won the Royal College of Music’s prize honoring contralto Dame Clara Butt, for whom Elgar composed his Sea Pictures: with her singing in this performance of Dream of Gerontius, she earns the distinction anew.

Much of the attention garnered by the performances of Dream of Gerontius that produced this recording was focused on who did not sing the title rôle, a surely unintentional affront to the very gifted artist who stepped in and furnished a beautifully-sung, unaffectedly moving interpretation of Gerontius. Created in the work’s 1900 première by Edward Lloyd, a tenor acclaimed for his singing of rôles in sacred works by Sir Arthur Sullivan and Sir Hubert Parry, Gerontius has been sung by a broad spectrum of voices ranging from the lyric instruments of Gervase Elwes and Heddle Nash to the Wagnerian heft of Jon Vickers and John Mitchinson. In Berlin in 2016, the part was sung by native Londoner Andrew Staples, a tenor whose artistry recalls the interpretive finesse and honeyed tones of Elwes. As the man facing death in Part One, Staples lofts Gerontius’s words on plumes of ideally-supported tone, declaiming ‘Jesu, Maria — I am near to death’ with dulcet simplicity. His exhortation to ‘Rouse thee, my fainting soul, and play the man’ is suitably inspiriting, and, like Hampson, the tenor excels in Elgar’s Latin word painting, voicing ‘Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus, de profundis oro te’ with expressive immediacy. Staples sings ‘I can no more; for now it comes again’ with a sudden rush of trepidation, and his ‘Novissima hora est; and I fain would sleep’ is the exclamation of a man wearied by life.

In the depiction of the harrowing progress of Gerontius’s soul towards final judgment in Part Two, Staples avoids operatic ostentation, building his portrayal upon a foundation of subtlety and sensitivity. The wonder with which ‘I went to sleep; and now I am refresh’d’ is phrased is obviously heartfelt, and Staples communicates the breadth of the character’s faith with exquisitely-wrought performances of ‘I would have nothing but to speak with thee for speaking’s sake’ and ‘My soul is in my hand.’ When Gerontius’s soul sings ‘I hear the voices that I left on earth’ in this performance, it is with reverence rather than wistfulness. Like his Angel, this soul’s voice is most beguiling when embracing the resolution of the spiritual journey, Staples singing ‘Take me away, and in the lowest deep there let me be’ with grace that not even Nicolai Gedda effectuated. Virtually every Gerontius on disc offers his own unique qualities, but Staples’s interpretation on these discs arises from as complete a mastery of the rôle’s diverse challenges as any singer has exhibited in recent memory.

Proving that The Dream of Gerontius is a work of immense significance in the career of its composer and the histories of English choral music and Western art is a responsibility that this recording and the artists who participated in it do not bear, but were this the sole evidence with which to assess the score’s value the judgment would be an affirmation of the widespread acclaim that the music has kindled in the 117 years since it was first heard. This performance of Elgar’s candid paean to the transfiguring tribulations of an artist’s soul achieves what any performance of The Dream of Gerontius should do: the isolation that is so inherent a part of an artist’s existence can perhaps never be eradicated, and perhaps should not be, but this Gerontius’s dream of reminding the listener of the universality of man’s fears, failings, and reliance upon hope comes marvelously to fruition.

JEFFREY RODEN: threads of a prayer, Volume 2—Jakub Fišer and Štěpán Ježek, violin; Szymon Marciniak, double bass; Wolfgang Fischer, timpani; Tobias Fischer, organ; Sandro Ivo Bartoli, piano [Recorded in Reitstadel, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Germany, 20 – 22 May 2016; Solaire Records SOL1004; 1 CD, 53:01; Available from Solaire Records and major music retailers]

Who hears the prayers of those whose voices have been stifled? What deities are there to comfort those who have learned to seek peace in annihilation? Which are the Psalms to read over the corpses of those who never found love? Where are the places in which those who have no home can find rest? There are few things more injurious to the integrity of an artist’s work than seeking philosophical agendas in it, but there are artists whose endeavors transcend the traditional boundaries of the media in which they work. To experience the music of Jeffrey Roden solely with the ears would be akin to viewing the canvases of Frida Kahlo and perceiving only fantastical colors, hearing none of the voices that scream from her images and feeling none of the wounds that tear at the paint. Continuing the journey begun with the 2016 release of the breathtakingly original first volume [reviewed here], the second volume of Solaire Records’ threads of a prayer introduces another quartet of Roden’s works in performances that utilize sound as only one medium of their existence. This is music that must be lived, not merely heard, and the performances on this disc make passive listening impossible.

Describing the first work on the disc, the field, as a trio for violin, double bass, and timpani is to impose upon the music a measure of formality that its ethos unmistakably rejects. Produced, engineered, and edited by Solaire Records founder Dirk Fischer, the disc’s soundscape is itself a component of the field’s impact. Crawling out of primordial silence like the first sprout of a germinating seed, the music spreads its tentative rhythmic steps upon crumbling tonal ground, seeking the strength to stand and survey its surroundings. Included in Solaire’s typically engaging liner notes, Roden’s poem ‘the field’ proposes a literary translation of the field’s aural message.

mist
ribbon like
rising
above the sacred grove
where there
will be
a great
suffering
cast upon
the beauty
of the earth

Played by Jakub Fišer, first violin of the Bennewitz Quartet, double bassist Szymon Marciniak, and timpanist Wolfgang Fischer, the piece is poetry in its own right, the music uncannily paralleling the complexities of humanity in the manners in which the parts coexist, sometimes seeming to shun interaction and then coveting their collisions as invigorating, life-affirming connections. Rarely are the double bass and timpani as communicative as Roden, Marciniak, and Fischer make them, and there is sweetness in Fišer’s tones even when stridency is the composer’s mandate. Applying the imagery of Roden’s words to the music, beauty materializes as an inalienable element of the ‘great suffering,’ particularly when beauty is prized above all other conditions. As performed here, the field is a musical parable that warns of the quiet destruction that lurks behind the masks that beauty wears.

Scored for violin, double bass, and organ, as we rise up recalls Baroque trio sonatas in concept if not in content. Here, too, Roden’s part writing casts the instruments as participants in an unscripted drama, emphasizing the significance of both their individual voices and their contributions to the ensemble. If the field is a cautionary parable steeped in apprehensive sadness, as we rise up is the reactionary explosion of impotent anger that groans, ‘I told you so!’ As in the field, there is unnerving beauty within the strands of the music, however: in this piece, it is the random, horrible beauty of chaos. One of the most extraordinary facet’s of Roden’s artistry is his ability to find the music in cataclysm and share it with listeners without dictating a desired response. Any composer can write tragic music, but only a complete artist can discern and transpose into sounds within the capacities of instruments the raw music of tragedy. Fišer’s Bennewitz Quartet colleague Štěpán Ježek phrases the violin lines with dexterity and imagination, and Marciniak matches his flawless intonation. As played by Tobias Fischer, the electric organ is not unlike the chamber organs frequently employed in Baroque music, its sonorities in as we rise up serving as a freely-deployed ground bass in the mode of Buxtehude and Pachelbel. The violence in the music disturbs more deeply for being enacted with such concentrated expressivity. Played so hypnotically, as we rise up is wondrously distressing. Is this truly external music, or is Roden ingeniously echoing the music of discontent that roars in each listener’s mind?

A noteworthy interpreter of music in a mind-boggling variety of idioms, Italian pianist Sandro Ivo Bartoli has fashioned an estimable career on his own terms, extracting from the instruments that he plays their own unique personalities rather than suppressing them with an artificial persona of his devising. His ambitions are driven by the demands of the music that he plays, not by the dictates of commercialism or meaningless celebrity. His technique is remarkable, the clarity of his articulations of even the most complex passages reminiscent of Rudolf Firkušný’s playing of music by Chopin or Martinů, but it is not the action of his fingers and wrists that marks Bartoli’s performance of Roden’s threads of a prayer as the work of a great artist. Under his touch, the warm-toned Steinway that he plays is transformed by Roden’s music from an instrument of wood, iron, and steel into a creature of flesh and blood, one whose voice utters the threads of its prayer with urgency.

The symbiosis between music and musician in Bartoli’s account of the first of Roden’s 6 pieces for the unknown for piano is stunning. In sequence, the six pieces constitute a tone poem that examines variations on the theme of unspoken feelings. The pianist’s playing of the second piece shimmers with subdued yearning, expanded in the third piece into a grandiose but subtle discourse between the musics of sound and silence. A lauded exponent of Franz Liszt’s piano music, Bartoli performs the fourth of the 6 pieces no less dazzlingly. The interpretive virtuosity required by Roden’s music is vastly different from the nimbleness necessitated by Liszt’s extroverted exhibitionism, but Bartoli’s emotive adroitness equals the marvels of his fingering. Like the final movements of a Baroque suite, the fifth and sixth pieces further develop the thematic material of the foregoing pieces, but there is no resolution in Roden’s music. Perhaps the unknown aspect referenced in the 6 pieces’s title is the absence of temporal definitions: this is not music that can be measured in seconds or minutes, with pauses for polite applause. Roden writes and Bartoli in this performance plays in Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness style, the music flowing with the naturalness of thought. Roden’s creative energy dwells in the unknowable, but what is known is that this is momentous music, fittingly performed.

When pressing ‘Play’ in order to hear a recording of music by Jeffrey Roden for the first time, the only certainty is that the sounds that emerge will be incomparably original, provocative, and utterly unfeigned. Hearing this second volume of threads of a prayer brings to mind history’s chronicle of the afternoon of 19 November 1863, when Abraham Lincoln managed to more eloquently convey the feelings of a nation battered by war in fewer than three hundred words than a celebrated orator had done in two hours. As performed on this disc, Roden’s music does with modest means what Frida Kahlo could do with a single painted blossom. Spurning the elitism that now oppresses the composition, performance, recording, and hearing of Classical Music, this is music of the people, by the people, and for the people—people willing to listen with both their ears and their souls.

NED ROREM (born 1923): Our Town—Matthew DiBattista (Stage Manager), Donald Wilkinson (Dr. Gibbs), Glorivy Arroyo (Mrs. Soames), Brendan P. Buckley (George Gibbs), Margot Rood (Emily Webb), Angela Hines Gooch (Mrs. Webb), Stefan Barner (Joe Crowell), Jonas Budris (Frank), Jason Connell (Sam), Rachele Schmiege (Lady in the Balcony), Graham Wright (Man in the Audience), David Kravitz (Mr. Webb), Stanley Wilson (Simon Stimson), Krista River (Mrs. Gibbs); Monadnock Music; Gil Rose, conductor [Recorded at the Rogers Center for the Arts, Merrimack College, North Andover, Massachusetts, USA, 13 – 14 August 2013; New World Records80790-2; 2 CDs, 123:25; Available from New World Records, Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

One of the great fascinations of opera is observing the divergent ways in which literary source materials are adapted for the stage. In many instances, great works of literature prove poorly suited to operatic treatment, whereas poetry, prose, and drama of lesser quality thrive in partnerships with music. The works of Ovid, Shakespeare, Schiller, and Pushkin are lodes of operatic potential mined again and again by composers known and forgotten, but which qualities account for the prevalence of these authors’ texts among operatic endeavors? Why is a writer such as Sir Walter Scott a frequent inspiration for composers while the novels of Charles Dickens are rarely given operatic treatment? In this sense, opera is a realm of missed opportunities. What heights of expression could Verdi have reached with Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale? What might Bartók have made of an opera based upon a plot taken from the phantasmagorical imagination of Edgar Allan Poe? What fires might have been ignited by Richard Strauss in the frigid Nordic environs of an Ibsen scenario?

Offering a case study in the difficulties that often complicate marriages of words and music, the journey of Thornton Wilder’s iconic play Our Town from page to operatic stage was anything but easy. First performed in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1938, Wilder’s dramatization of small-town American life and the deceptively stereotypical relationships among the inhabitants of the invented burgh of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, gave contemporary theatre one of its cornerstone works, one in which all artifice was stripped away in pursuit of an undiluted, unsentimental examination of humanity’s absurdities. Our Town’s operatic potential was recognized almost as quickly as its cinematic appeal, but first Wilder and later his estate denied usage rights even to as lauded a composer as Leonard Bernstein, whose promise as an adapter of Our Town was exhibited in his unwieldy but touching opera A Quiet Place. Though his score for the 1940 film version of the play and his own opera The Tender Land hint at how an operatic Our Town by Aaron Copland might have sounded, Wilder and his literary executors were right to seek for Our Town the sort of organic connection between text and composer that Colette’s L’enfant et les sortilèges found with Maurice Ravel.

The much-anticipated product of the Wilder estate’s trust in one of America’s most gifted composers of Art Songs, Ned Rorem’s Our Town was jointly commissioned by Indiana University, Aspen Music Festival, Lake George Opera Company, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Opera Boston, and California’s Festival Opera. With a deftly-crafted libretto by J.D. McClatchy, author of the Metropolitan Opera’s clever English abridgments of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rorem’s opera was first performed by Indiana University Opera Theater on 24 February 2006. In the subsequent decade, performances have followed throughout the United States and in the UK. Too many contemporary operas, especially those in English, are governed by the aesthetics of Broadway rather than those of opera, presumably a misjudgment born of well-intentioned efforts at closing the gap between the often-lampooned traditions of grand opera and modern audiences’ technology-shaped sensibilities. In his music for Our Town, Rorem achieved a style that sounds derived from rather than imposed upon Wilder’s text, providing the playwright’s characters and scenarios a distinctly operatic identity that engages without pandering to popular tastes.

Musically, Rorem’s score is a thoughtfully-crafted work of great emotional depth that punctiliously preserves the play’s groundbreaking metatheatrical structure. Complementing Wilder’s stipulation that the play be performed with minimal scenic effects, the composer’s music is generally sparse, the instrumental part writing supporting communication of the text with little post-Wagnerian orchestral commentary. The innate lyricism and whimsy familiar from Rorem’s art songs are also present in Our Town, but they are integrated into a discernible dedication to begetting musical and dramatic continuity. That the score’s tonal language is approachable and logical is not indicative of simplicity or a lack of originality. There are suggestions of Britten’s Albert Herring in Rorem’s music for Emily’s and George’s awkward courtship, and the disconcerting atmosphere of Tippett’s Knot Garden is recalled by Our Town’s final scene. Naturally, there are also fleeting reminders of Rorem’s 1965 Strindberg-based opera Miss Julie, but the sonic landscapes of Our Town are predominantly unique to the composer’s musical portrait of Grover’s Corners.

In this world-première recorded performance by Monadnock Music, situated by New World Records in an acoustic evocative of a small theatre appropriate for the intimate intricacies of Our Town’s—Wilder’s or Rorem’s—emotional relationships, Gil Rose’s conducting provides Rorem’s score with advocacy akin to Beecham’s Berlioz, Böhm’s Richard Strauss, and Mackerras’s Janáček. Above all, Our Town is a theatrical experience that must not be allowed to wallow in saccharine sentimentality, and Rose never allows the momentum in this performance to decelerate. The nods to the familiar strains of popular hymns and the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream are handled by Rose with adroitness equal to the cleverness with which Rorem plaited them into the score, and the conductor’s tempi consistently realize the composer’s intentions. Perpetuating the ethos of Rose’s leadership, the Monadnock musicians’ playing is rhythmically, intonationally, and temperamentally precise. Our Town is an opera in which both music and drama are driven by words, and Rose and the instrumentalists ensure that the orchestra converses with the singers in this performance without overwhelming or upstaging them.

Even with a handful of largely inconsequential characters being unheard [as a matter of family pride, I must object to the elimination of Grover’s Corners’ steadfast milkman, Howie Newsome], Rorem’s Our Town requires a large cast of singers capable of creating individual characterizations that convincingly weave into playwright’s and composer’s tapestry depicting life in Grover’s Corners. The Monadnock Music choristers—sopranos Lindsay Conrad, Rachele Schmiege (heard, too, as the Lady in the Balcony), and Sarah Kornfeld; mezzo-sopranos Thea Lobo, Christina English, and Stephanie Kacoyanis; tenors Stefan Barner, Jason Connell, and Jonas Budris (also depicting George’s friends and baseball teammates Joe Crowell, Sam, and Frank); and baritones Jonathan Nussman, Jacob Cooper, and Graham Wright (doubling as the Man in the Audience)—impress individually and in ensemble, their singing of the traditional hymns that are an integral part of the opera’s story unfailingly musical but credibly congregational.

The doggedly conventional Mrs. Soames is enlivened by mezzo-soprano Glorivy Arroyo’s clarion vocalism and dramatic vigor, not least in the Act Three scene in the cemetery in which her spirit chastises George for his display of grief at Emily’s grave. Similarly, tenor Stanley Wilson is an aptly cantankerous Simon Stimson. Exasperatedly rehearsing the church choir in Act One, Wilson sings both ‘Music isn’t good when it’s loud / Leave loudness to the Methodists’ and ‘I want them to feel / All I get is squeals!’ with an unmistakable aura of artistic superiority. When Stimson sings from his grave in Act Three, the tenor exhibits great depth of feeling in his delivery of ‘Here is our peace, here is our hope.’ There are parallels between the ambiguity of reality in Our Town and Bohuslav Martinů’s exploration of a similar theme in his opera Julietta, and the singers in Monadnock Music’s performance of Rorem’s score convey the emotional emptiness of Grover’s Corners’ society by delivering their parts so meticulously. The composer’s writing for the townspeople is music that revels in what the Quakers termed ‘the gift to be simple.’ Poetry, this music suggests from the perspective of Grover’s Corners, is for people with offices in skyscrapers and suburban housewives who wear trousers and read magazines. One feat of Rorem’s ingenuity is exemplified by his creation of music that exposes but never openly ridicules or condemns the banality of ordinary lives.

Portraying George’s and Emily’s parents, baritone Donald Wilkinson and mezzo-soprano Krista River as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs and baritone David Kravitz and soprano Angela Gooch as the Webbs bring their characters into sharp focus, using Rorem’s vocal lines to create vivid but uncaricatured portraits of these stalwarts of small-town social hierarchy. In the Act Two scene in which Mr. Webb offers George advice about building the foundations of a successful marriage, Kravitz voices ‘Patience and an open heart, George, that will suffice’ with both sincerity and humor, the warmth of his tone imparting the character’s paternal tenderness. The Act One duet for Dr. and Mrs. Webb, ‘The moon just sits and waits,’ is beautifully done, and Wilkinson responds to a question about temperance in Grover’s Corners with a wry statement of ‘Some folks keep a little liquor in the medicine chest.’ Gooch phrases one of the most significant lines in the opera, Mrs. Webb’s remark to Emily in Act One that ‘You’re pretty enough for all normal purposes,’ straightforwardly, unmistakably limning the long-established desirability of finding one’s destined place in life and filling it without complaint. At Emily’s and George’s wedding in Act Two, Gooch’s unexaggerated articulation of ‘Why on earth am I crying’ offers a momentary glimpse behind the façade of imperturbability cultivated by the denizens of Grover’s Corners. Despite their adherence to the paradigms with which they are comfortable, Emily’s and George’s parents are the bridges that connect the youngsters with both the antiquated ideals of their native town and novel notions. The capably-voiced utterances of the quartet of singers to whom the rôles are entrusted in this performance affirm that it is with the elder Gibbses and Webbs that our town begins to seem more like their town.

The young lovers George and Emily are brought to life with charm and disarming dramatic verisimilitude by tenor Brendan Buckley and soprano Margot Rood. It is their conscious efforts at being unremarkable—Emily’s bewildered contemplation of the journeys of idiosyncratically-addressed letters and George’s decision to forgo college in order to manage his uncle’s farm, for instance—that differentiate them from their neighbors. For most of the residents of Grover’s Corners, fitting in comes naturally. In their characters’ bumbling romance, Rood and Buckley sing fervently but with appropriate restraint. Rorem has not made them a New England Tristan and Isolde, and they draw from their music well-considered accents of thoughtful young people gently nudging themselves and one another beyond the reaches of their familial safety nets. The ambivalence expressed in the wedding scene in Act Two, epitomized by the couple’s anxious internal queries of ‘What am I doing here,’ is echoed in the conviction with which the singers voice these words. The psychological nuance that George and Emily display is at odds with their environment, and Rorem’s music recalls Britten’s juxtapositions of simple and complex emotions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the context of an audio recording, one cannot see George as the grieving husband whose public mourning in Act Three inspires the deceased Mrs. Soames’s disapprobation: if the singer cannot win the listener’s sympathy with his vocal acting, a measure of George’s hesitant originality is unrealized. Occasionally encountering problems at the top of his music’s range, Buckley is a persuasive George; if not a bonafide operatic lover in the fashion of Puccini’s tenor protagonists, an earnest fellow who sings handsomely. Rood, too, is taxed by some of her music, not least in Act Three, but her resilience is laudable. The immediacy of her performance in the throes Emily’s impassioned rejection of reclaimed life brings to mind the young Galina Vishnevskaya’s conflicted Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin. Buckley and Rood dive into George’s and Emily’s intertwined emotional depths but are never in peril of drowning in them. Musically, even their momentary struggles are resourcefully used as aspects of effective, affecting portraits of two of American theatre’s most iconic characters.

Playing the part of the omnipresent Stage Manager, a sort of Evangelist in Wilder’s, McClatchy’s, and Rorem’s Everyman’s Passion, tenor Matthew DiBattista faces formidable musical and histrionic challenges. In spoken theatre, the proverbial fourth wall can be broken by merely targeting a receptive face in the audience when enunciating lines, but opera audiences are accustomed to having words and notes hurled at them by unimaginative singers. In opera, the crucial difference between an aside upon which the listener eavesdrops and a line directed specifically to the listener can be virtually imperceptible. That DiBattista handily initiates one-sided dialogue with the listener in this performance of Our Town is evidence not only of his theatrical savvy but also of his trust of the communicative capabilities of Rorem’s music. DiBattista’s Stage Manager is at once the musical personification of Wilder, McClatchy, Rorem, and Grover’s Corners itself: both narrator and participant, he propels the drama by melding into it. The tenor’s singing of ‘They don’t understand, do they? They never understand’ in Act One is resigned rather than accusatory, and the bright sheen of his timbre lends his diction an edge that heightens the impact of his words. The subtly of DiBattista’s voicing of ‘It’s quiet in our town of an afternoon’ suggests a mixture of ennui and relief. At the start of Act Two, a similar mood permeates his statement of ‘Well, friends, three years have gone by.’ In Act Three, DiBattista’s Stage Manager guides the newly-dead Emily sensitively, allowing her to make her own decisions and learn from the errors of her experiences. The Stage Manager’s music traverses a wide range, and DiBattista’s upper register is intermittently strained by Rorem’s demands. His performance is hauntingly memorable in ways that actors’ portrayals of the Stage Manager rarely are, however. DiBattista’s singing exudes true concern for the people with whom the Stage Manager interacts, including the listener, and he earns the attention and appreciation of his audience.

Its creator’s stipulations for minimalist staging notwithstanding, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is a masterwork of modern American theatre that in performance can leave an observer feeling that something is missing. In many productions, it is difficult to feel for Emily, George, and their neighbors the sort of sympathy that audiences have for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and Miller’s Willy Loman. Wilder undoubtedly intended for audiences to be enlightened, not enamored, by his characters, but, whether it is Wilder’s Emily, Brecht’s Mutter Courage, or Kushner’s Prior Walter upon the stage, efforts at edifying the mind are aided incalculably by allure that enchants the senses. Even the doldrums of Grover’s Corners impart their lessons more readily when they are dressed in the colors of New England sunsets and autumn foliage. Hearing this moving opera performed so appealingly fosters the impression that what has been missing from performances of Our Town is Ned Rorem’s music.

BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ (1890 – 1959): Cantatas – Legenda z dýmu bramborové nati (H 360), Otvírání studánek (H 354), Romance z pampelišek (H 364), and Mikeš z hor (H 375)—Prague Philharmonic Choir; Pavla Vykopalová (soprano), Ludmila Kromková (contralto), Martin Slavík (tenor), Jiří Brückler (baritone), Petr Svoboda (baritone); Jaromír Meduna (narrator); Daniel Havel (recorder), Jan Pařík (clarinet), Jan Vobořil (French horn), Josef Hřebík (accordian), Ivo Kahánek (piano), Patrik Lavrinčík (drumming on chair), Jakub Fišer (1st violin), Štěpan Ježek (2nd violin), Jiří Pinkas (viola); Lukáš Vasilek, conductor [Recorded in the Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic, 22 – 23, 26, 29 October, 21 December 2015, 10 January and 28 April 2016; SupraphonSU 4198-2; 1 CD, 68:13; Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Though he was indisputably one of the greatest Czech artists of his own or any other generation, Bohuslav Martinů remains an infrequent guest in the repertoires of American choirs, orchestras, and other musical institutions. Born in the Bohemian town of Polička in 1890, Martinů was an accomplished violinist and a composer who, like Mozart, excelled in many musical genres. A contemporary during his seven decades of life of Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, the Second Viennese School, and Igor Stravinsky, he underwent a creative evolution that encompassed styles ranging from late Romanticism to Modernism, explored in a vast array of works that display ingenuity, insightfulness, and intelligence. By the time of his death in 1959, Martinů’s place among Czech voices in Classical Music rivaled the long-established significance of Dvořák and Janáček, but America has been less welcoming to him than to his illustrious countrymen. With this recording of the four remarkable Cantatas composed by Martinů during the last five years of his life, Pražský filharmonický sbor—the Prague Philharmonic Choir—and Supraphon, the label responsible for many of the finest recordings of Czech repertoire, give today’s listeners an extraordinary gift: here, in sixty-eight minutes of music, the souls of a man and his art are shown to be as strikingly original and thought-provoking in 2017 as they were six decades ago.

Many periods during the Twentieth Century were difficult times in which to be a Czech artist with a strong social conscience, and Martinů felt the stings of his fatherland’s struggles as sharply as Chopin felt Poland’s injuries a century earlier. Profoundly troubled by the political tide that swept Czechoslovakia into the Eastern Bloc in the years that followed World War Two, the composer ultimately found in the poetry of Miloslav Bureš (1930 – 1978), also a native of Polička, a renewed faith in the resilience and indomitable spirit of the Czech people. Though Martinů died nearly a decade before the rise of Slovak reformer Alexander Dubček and the Prague Spring of 1968, the four cantatas with texts by Bureš that he composed between 1955 and 1959 exhibit the national pride and quest for intellectual independence that characterized the later liberalization movement.

Led by Lukáš Vasilek, the performances of the cantatas on this disc are sung by the Pražský filharmonický sbor with fervor that illuminates Martinů’s music, bringing to each phrase an unwavering commitment to musical accuracy and textual clarity. Like much Czech music, Martinů’s cantatas are shaped by the cadences of language, and the choristers’ superb diction allows even attentive listeners with no comprehension of Czech to follow the narrative progress of each cantata. That Vasilek understands and appreciates these pieces is evident in every moment of these performances, his confident handling of music that is most difficult when it seems most simple disclosing an absolute comprehension of the composer’s word settings. Receiving from Supraphon the gift of sound that reproduces the singular acoustics of Prague’s Rudolfinum with tremendous fidelity, chorus and conductor seize this opportunity to share these treasures of their shared cultural heritage. Their efforts produce performances that, once heard, become adopted components of the listener’s own cultural identity.

Completed in 1956, Legenda z dýmu bramborové nati (The legend of smoke from potato tops, H 360) is scored for soprano, contralto, and baritone soloists, mixed chorus, recorder, clarinet, French horn, accordion, and piano. Any listener who questions Martinů’s adroitness as an orchestrator will find details in this music that wholly dispel skepticism. Respectively played by Daniel Havel, Jan Pařík, and Jan Vobořil, the composer’s writing for recorder, clarinet, and French horn is magical, and these musicians’ sounds combine with those of Josef Hřebík’s accordion and Ivo Kahánek’s piano to create sonorities that sometimes mimic the quaint timbre of the organ in a village church. In the cantata’s opening passage, the choristers sing ‘Ta dobrá pramenů a svělta’ with sonorous authority and are answered by soprano Pavla Vykopalová with ably-voiced statements of ‘Ta dobrá panímáma’ and ‘V tom kraji kameni a říček.’ The choir’s delivery of ‘Potkala se se svým v poli’ is mesmerizingly beautiful, and first contralto Ludmila Kromková’s firm incantation of ‘Můj synku milý’ and subsequently baritone Petr Svoboda’s burnished account of ‘Matko moje milá’ complement the sublime poise of the choral singing. The immediacy with which ‘Když spěchali pláteníci na trh toho rána’ is declaimed by the chorus contrasts tellingly with Vykopalová’s ethereal voicing of ‘Zatím ona v plášti zrajícího žita.’ She and Kromková briefly visit the musical world of Norma and Adalgisa with their sensitively-phrased management of ‘Vesničanku, která sotva umí otčenáš a zdrávas.’ Their unaffectedly earthy singing of ‘Nepoznali ji’ prompting Svoboda’s powerful but poetic ‘Tito chlapci jako srnci ostražití, bdělí,’ the choristers conclude Legenda z dýmu bramborové nati with the unmistakable sincerity of their traversal of ‘Boží máti, sestřenice jeřábu jak plamen čistá.’ This is a true resolution rather than only an end: in this performance, the cantata’s drama, both austere and timeless, transports the listener to an emotional destination, different for each individual but invariably compelling.

Otvírání studánek (The opening of the springs, H 354) is the earliest of the cantatas, dating from 1955, and it is among Martinů’s most engaging works. Written for narrator, soprano, contralto, and baritone soloists, female chorus, two violins, viola, and piano, the music explores the timbres of the instruments individually and in ensemble, creating unique sounds evocative of Bohemian folk music. This cantata’s story is propelled by the spoken narration, and Jaromír Meduna’s recitations emerge from the music with the melodious flow of an oboe. Members of the acclaimed Bennewitz Quartet, violinists Jakub Fišer and Štěpán Ježek and violist Jiří Pinkas play with verve and unpretentious virtuosity that echo the eloquence of Meduna’s speaking, and Kahánek’s pianism is again a source of momentum. The gravitas with which the choristers sing ‘I studánky chtějí býti čisté’ establishes the ethos of the performance, and the resonance of their vocalism is continued in Meduna’s delivery of ‘Tak je to u nás v horách všude.’ Bridged by the recitation of ‘Do půlkruhu obstoupili pramen,’ the choir’s singing of ‘Vedl je přes trávu, před kvítí’ and ‘Králko, milá králko’ exudes mystical connection with the text. Vykopalová’s sparkling voice is deployed with delicacy in ‘Jsem rubínka opuštěná,’ and first the choristers with ‘V tý májový době přicházíme k tobě’ and then Meduna with ‘Tam, kde bylo bahna nejvíce’ perpetuate the nuanced honesty of the soprano’s expressivity. The sequence of the choir’s ‘Když studánku a stružku vyčistili,’ contralto Kromková’s ‘Studánko hlubáňko, kdes tak dlouho byla,’ Vykopalová’s ‘Vítám tě, sasanko, na břehu,’ and Meduna’s ‘Královnička poklekla na šátek rozprostřený’ winds through Bureš’s words and Martinů’s settings of them like an expedition into a much-loved but ever-changing landscape. Prefacing the narrator’s articulation of ‘Jako by studánku za ruce vzali,’ the choristers’ communication—and it is an aural incarnation of the words rather than mere singing—of ‘Zlý moci zahánímn’ conveys the subtle intensity of the poet’s imagery. BaritoneJiří Brückler intones ‘Potkal jsem jeseň’ with rugged charm. There is in the choir’s performance of ‘Studánko hlubáňko’ a moving, humbling universality: these voices are all voices, their singing both that of men and women and of all mankind.

Composed in 1957, Romance z pampelišek (Romance of the dandelions, H 364) is the most inventive of these cantatas, its unusual writing for soprano and tenor soloists, mixed a cappella chorus, and drumming on chair engendering an atmosphere unlike anything else in Martinů’s body of work. Wonderfully realized in this performance by Patrik Lavrinčík, the chair’s percussion recalls the rhythmic use of cajón integrated into modern flamenco by Paco de Lucía, Lavrinčik’s careful execution of Martinů’s instructions giving the cantata an erratic but exciting pulse. Coursing through the music like blood circulated by that pulse, the choir sings ‘Kdybys byl aspoň holubem’ at the cantata’s start with flawless ensemble and timing. Vykopalová enunciates the soprano soloist’s ‘Ach, co jsem se, milý, co jsem se nahledala’ with technical assurance, little troubled here or elsewhere by the range of the music. Following the choir’s tautly-balanced ‘Sedmý rok tvé vojny jak zlé mračno plyne’ with an equally keenly-judged ‘Do prstýnku pro tebe i s kapičkou rosy,’ Vykopalová’s vocalism is fleetingly reminiscent of that of Jana Valášková. Tenor Martin Slavík’s timbre is ideal for ‘Nad ní v tichu krouží holub bílý,’ which he sings with apt emotional directness. ‘Ach, to není holub, to se junák vrací’ and ‘Sedm vrchů přešel a sedm řek k tomu’ reveal the choir’s impeccable training and the skill with which these master musicians translate that training into singing of incredible precision and histrionic power. Joining the chorus in ‘Já mu vzkážu tolik štěstí’ and then soaring unaided in ‘Vzkážu mu i tolik zdraví,’ Vykopalová again proves to be an uncommonly gifted interpreter of Martinů’s challenging music. The humanity that emanated from the chorus’s singing of the final bars of Otvírání studánek also permeates their performance of ‘Ó! Sedm let, to byla dlouhá doba.’ Their total faith in Martinů’s genius makes the inner logic of the music’s construction and the depth of the composer’s affection for the words palpable.

An offspring of the final year of Martinů’s life, Mikeš z hor (Mikeš of the mountains, H 375), requiring an ensemble of soprano and tenor soloists, mixed chorus, two violins, viola, and piano, simultaneously seems autobiographical, accusatory, and aphoristic. Each of these cantatas is highly personal, but Martinů’s own voice resounds more discernibly in Mikeš z hor than in almost any of his other vocal compositions. Whether this was knowingly and intentionally a valedictory piece can only be conjectured, but it is a score in which the composer spoke directly to the world about the past, present, and future of the land of his birth. As in Otvírání studánek, Fišer, Ježek, Pinkas, and Kahánek collaborate to coax from their instruments torrents of tone that unite the polish of the concert hall with the vivacity of the village naměstí. Slavík’s attractive tenor is used with great finesse in ‘Jak povědět, co vítr psal na květy pláněk?’ Vykopalová captures the frisson of the choir’s ‘Šlehá prutem, hej!’ with her intelligent reading of ‘A ony všechny na svých hřbetech.’ Her singing of ‘A kopce, bochánky zelené,’ a majestic valley between the imposing peaks of the choristers’ incantations of ‘A vždycky dvěma o zem opřenz’ and ‘Kolem je všechno zelené a pěkné jako v písni,’ manifests the brilliance of Martinů’s treatments of Bureš’s poetic conceits. Punctuated by the chorus’s fervent ‘Ale co ty jinovatkou posypané chlumy,’ Slavík’s accounts of ‘Země, jak sám sebe v tobě přeberu’ and ‘Jak vyrvat od kořene mráz i fujavici z mraků’ breathe life into the words, heightening the cantata’s cumulative dramatic impact. The choir’s declamations of ‘Pohromy a války!’ and ‘Rozhrnout mraky bouří vzedmuté a vidět do jara a zeleně’ and Vykopalová’s impassioned ‘Všechno je tu vytesáno do povětří’ culminate in their stirring combined outpourings of ‘Ty, jejich bože, dej těm kozlíkům nést’ and ‘A za nimi jako zlatý oblak včely.’ Slavík voices ‘Pro ten příběh šel jsem do pohádky’ with unexaggerated poignancy, pronouncing the words with linguistic and expressive crispness. The resignation beneath the surface of the choir’s radiant singing of ‘Dodnes s Mikešovým stádem dobře je mi’ is extracted from both music and words. Through this performance, Martinů and Bureš communicate with the listener in language that needs no translation.

One of the most dangerous and often ill-considered actions in Classical Music is proclaiming a performance or recording definitive. Mercedes Capsir’s and Lina Pagliughi’s Lucias were considered definitive by some listeners until Maria Callas’s was heard, and fisticuffs like those to which Eighteenth-Century divas Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni reputedly resorted in battling for dominance are hardly an unimaginable outcome of a discussion of whether Kirsten Flagstad, Martha Mödl, Astrid Varnay, Birgit Nilsson, or some other contender was the greatest Brünnhilde or Isolde. Virtually all recordings have advocates who assert their supremacy, and this is one of foremost joys of music: what one listener hears as mediocrity, another hears as magnificence. In truth, Pagliughi’s, Capsir’s, and Callas’s Lucias are all valuable, and the listener who dismisses Flagstad’s Isolde in deference to Mödl’s portrayal does Wagner a grave disservice. Nevertheless, there are recordings that define or redefine listeners’ perceptions of individual works, composers, repertory, or performers. Pražský filharmonický sbor’s recording of Bohuslav Martinů’s four late cantatas invites the listener into the intricacies of this oracular music, encouraging surrender to the hypnotic interplay between music and text rather than doggedly advocating specific interpretations. In the context of this release, then, perhaps definitive is not the proper adjective. Unlike so many new recordings, fine though some of them are, this disc was necessary.

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883), RICHARD STRAUSS (1864 – 1949), and FRANZ SCHREKER (1878 – 1934): Liederabend—Brenda Roberts, dramatic soprano; Christian Schmitt-Engelstadt, piano [Recorded in performance on 14 September 2001; 1 CD / Digital Download, 40:18; Available from CD Baby]

More diverting than the travails of Dickens characters in many cases are tales from the careers of creatures more fantastical and enigmatic than even Uriah Heep, Mr. Murdstone, and Daniel Quilp: opera singers. Singers’ lives both on and off the world’s stages brim with great expectations, hard times, and experiences that are at once the spring of hope and the winter of despair. Careful singers endure. Embodying William Faulkner’s oft-quoted affirmation, conscientious artists prevail. Amongst the chronicles of bad choices, overzealous ambitions, and abused natural gifts, there are occasional beacons of self-cognizance, well-informed decision making, and unimpeachable musicality, artists whose cognitive abilities are as refined as the products of their vocal cords. Shining amidst these exemplars of nurtured talent and continuously-honed technique is the career of American dramatic soprano Brenda Roberts. Renowned as the youngest singer to brave the demands of any of the three incarnations of Brünnhilde in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the composer’s own Bayreuther Festspiele, her voice bears few of the scars of the sort of imprudence that such a distinction suggests. The story of Roberts’s career to date is a cautionary tale in a vastly different sense than the misadventures of some of her fellow American exponents of Hochdramatische repertoire. Hers is a fire fueled on her own terms, not stoked to unsustainable pyrotechnics and prematurely extinguished.

Her rightly storied portrayal of the Siegfried Brünnhilde at 1974’s Bayreuther Festspiele, an achievement shared with Wagnerians throughout the world via radio broadcast, is but one page in an extensive performance diary that has taken her to opera’s most hallowed halls, from Lyric Opera of Chicago for Strauss’s Elektra—another broadcast performance—and New York’s Metropolitan Opera for the Färberin in the same composer’s Die Frau ohne Schatten to Teatro alla Scala for Ortrud in Wagner’s Lohengrin and the Wiener Staatsoper for Strauss’s Salome. Born in the small northwest Indiana town of Lowell, Roberts set her sights on a career as an opera singer whilst still a schoolgirl and never deviated from that goal, eventually studying at Northwestern University with noted pedagogue Hermanus Baer, a tireless advocate of understanding and mastering the physiological components of singing in order to realize the voice’s full potential whose pupils also included Sherrill Milnes. Her successes on the world’s stages have not diminished Roberts’s lifelong commitment to unceasing vocal training and exploration of new repertoire. Her Carnegie Hall début occurred as recently as 2011, when she sang the music heard in this recorded Liederabend, as well as Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Following rather than coercing the path of the voice’s development, Roberts continues to exhibit the shrewd judgment that has enabled her to navigate the perils of a career as a singer and among singers.

Recorded in 2001, the present disc is the work of a major artist as well as an exceptionally capable and prepared vocalist. Composed in 1857 and 1858, at the apex of their creator’s passionate but almost certainly platonic obsession with his patron’s wife and host in comfortable exile, Wagner’s Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme (WWV 91)—later christened as the Wesendonck-Lieder, taking the name of the author of their texts and the object of Wagner’s infatuation, Mathilde Wesendonck—are the most familiar selections in Roberts’s Liederabend. Familiarity unfortunately does not equate to an overabundance of superlative recorded performances of the Lieder, so this recording by a singer for whom Wagner’s music is congenial territory is atypically welcome.

‘Der Engel’ is frequently offered in recital by singers who do not perform all five of the Wesendonck-Lieder, intensifying debate about whether Wagner’s intention was for the Lieder to constitute an interconnected cycle in the manner of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Schumann’s Dichterliebe or for the songs to be separate entities linked only by the common authorship of their texts. Rather than clearly espousing either view of the songs’ structure, Roberts focuses on the emotional content of the texts, her superb diction used as a catalyst for the chain reactions with which Wagner builds musical and dramatic tension. Supported in all of the performances on this disc by the elegant, rhythmically alert playing of pianist (and acclaimed organist) Christian Schmitt-Engelstadt, the rare pianist who faithfully observes Wagner’s marking of ‘sehr sart und weich’ at the start of ‘Der Engel,’ Roberts likewise honors the composer’s instruction of ‘Sehr ruhig bewegt.’ The second Lied, ‘Stehe Still,’ also bears a mandate of ‘Bewegt,’ and soprano and pianist discharge this beautifully. In the passage beginning with ‘Wesen in Wesen sich wieder findet,’ in which Wagner requested that the vocal line be sung ‘Sehr ruhig und mäßig,’ Roberts manages the piano ascents to the top of the stave dulcetly. Prefiguring thematic material later heard in the Vorspiel to Act Three of Tristan und Isolde, ‘Im Treibhaus’ was the last of the Lieder to be composed, but Roberts wisely concentrates on the song in its proper context rather than as a study in miniature for Tristan und Isolde. The precision of her intonation, extraordinary for so large a voice, is invaluable in the chromatic writing of ‘Im Treibhaus.’

It cannot be claimed that Mathilde Wesendonck was a major poet, but when a singer traverses the restless line cresting on top A♭ with which Wagner allied her words in ‘Schmerzen’ with the attention to note values and textual clarity that Roberts brings to her performance the earnest Frau Wesendonck’s endeavors assume heightened importance. Poetically, the finest of Wesendock’s texts is that used by Wagner in ‘Träume,’ in which Tristan’s and Isolde’s ecstatic love duet was born. Roberts and Schmitt-Engelstadt unerringly blend the piano vocal line with the pianissimo accompaniment, and the soprano again impresses with the accuracy of her pitches, not least in the A♭-A♮-B♭-B♮-C-B♮-C-C♭ sequence on the words ‘sanft an deiner Brust verglühen’ and the consequential descent from B♭♭₄ to C₄ on ‘sinken’ in the Lied’s final bars. Roberts refuses to wallow in sentimentality in her singing of these songs, approaching them not as exalted products of a legendary genius but as songs that require no ostentatious grandstanding. Still, this performance of the Wesendonck-Lieder is an indispensable document of Roberts’s preeminence as an interpreter of Wagner’s music.

Virtually all of Richard Strauss’s 174 Lieder for voice and piano are performed with some degree of regularity, but even within this trove there are songs that seldom appear on singers’ recital or recorded programmes. Published in 1918, the Sechs Lieder of Strauss’s Opus 67 are works of great difficulty, appealingly tuneful in the fashion of the composer’s most popular songs but also bitingly modern. The Drei Lieder der Ophelia are settings of passages from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and they suggest that Ophelia might have been as engaging a Strauss operatic heroine as Salome, Elektra, Ariadne, and the Marschallin. Roberts and Schmitt-Engelstadt perform the first of the Ophelia-Lieder, ‘Wie erkenn​’ ich mein Treulieb vor andern nun,’ idiomatically, Roberts’s integration of the climactic top G♯ into her expansive phrasing identifying her as a Strauss singer to the manner of Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Sena Jurinac, and Irmgard Seefried born. Her singing of the frenzied vocal line of ‘Guten Morgen, ’s ist Sankt Valentinstag’ conveys the girlish bawdiness of the text, her top A projected with an apt demonstration of the vigor with which Ophelia hurls her words at Claudius in Hamlet. The darkest of the Drei Lieder der Ophelia, ‘Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss’ is characterized by alternating passages of grim lyricism and manic episodes in triple meter, the vocal line again rising to top A. Here, aided by Schmitt-Engelstadt’s committed playing, Roberts proves herself to be as estimable a Shakespearean heroine as a Strauss singer. Pronouncing the words of Karl Simrock’s translation of Hamlet with the instincts of a great tragedienne, she finds and discloses to the listener the significance of each of Strauss’s shifts of musical direction, elucidating both the character’s and the composer’s psychological motivations.

Employing texts from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West-östliche Divan, the Drei Lieder aus den Büchern des Unmuts des Rendsch Nameh are the second half of Opus 67, and these songs contrast markedly with the Drei Lieder der Ophelia. The first of the Goethe songs, ‘Wer wird von der Welt verlangen,’ embodies the cynicism that lurks beneath the surfaces of these songs, and the unaffected performance that it receives from Roberts highlights the sagacity with which Strauss mined the loads of philosophical profundity in Goethe’s words. ​In addition to alluding to his Alpensinfonie, Strauss visited the melodic realm of his then-unperformed opera Die Frau ohne Schatten in ‘Hab’ ich euch den je geraten,’ the ‘borrowed’ melodies soaring above the low-lying vocal writing. The plunges to the bottom of the voice do not trouble Roberts, whose intonation is as secure below the stave as elsewhere. Entitled ‘Wanderers Gemütsruhe’ by Strauss, ‘Über’s Niederträchtige niemand sich beklage,’ should be counted among the composer’s finest Lieder. The Lied’s unmistakable kinship with the weary, wistful moods of music dating from three decades later, in the last months of Strauss’s life, is made all the more apparent by the emotional sincerity of Roberts’s singing. Her delivery of the line ‘Wandrer! Gegen solche Not wolltest du dich sträuben?’ is no stentorian outburst: the words are truly sung, not shouted, and the top B♭ is caressed. Many singers perform Strauss Lieder, but far fewer perform these Strauss Lieder—and fewer still perform them well. It is not surprising that an accomplished Salome, Elektra, and Färberin is closely acquainted with Strauss’s music, but Roberts’s performances of the Sechs Lieder of Opus 67 revel in the intimacy that many singers fail to perceive.

It is not inaccurate to assert that Franz Schreker’s music is widely neglected, but the obscurity imposed upon his Lieder is particularly inexplicable and unjust. First published by the Viennese firm Eberle in 1904 and likely composed in 1899, the Fünf Lieder of Schreker’s Opus 4 present many challenges to both singer and pianist, challenges that, when met, reward performers and listeners as marvelously as those of the most popular Lieder. Leo Tolstoy’s words inspired Schreker to writing of unquestionable brilliance in ‘Unendliche Liebe,’ and Roberts reaches first the top A and then the fortissimo top G with obvious reserves of power. The text of ‘Frühling’ is by Karl Freiherr von Lemayer, and Roberts and Schmitt-Engelstadt bring the words to life by punctiliously heeding Schreker’s ‘Zart bewegt’ direction. Theodor Storm’s words in ‘Wohl fühl’ ich wie das Leben rinnt’ are similarly enlivened by Roberts’s vocalism. The technical acumen with which she executes the diminuendo on ‘du bist mein letztes Glück’ should be studied by all aspiring Lieder singers. There is an almost Baroque sensibility to Schreker’s setting of Julius Sturm’s text in ‘Die Liebe als Recensentin,’ and the fidelity of Schmitt-Engelstadt’s realization of the composer’s ‘Zierlich’ marking enables the soprano to traverse the vocal line with perfectly-gauged but what seems like near-improvisatory freedom. The arching phrases of ‘Lenzzauber’ uplift Ernst von Scherenberg’s text, and singer and pianist perform the song with flawless cooperation, both of their instruments singing in tandem. The modicum of toil that it costs her gloriously repaid, Roberts’s sterling top B recalls the fresh-voiced ease of her dashingly youthful Brünnhilde and the blazing top C with which she conquered Bayreuth. That a quarter-century lay between that Bayreuth Siegfried and this Liederabend is scarcely apparent. Voices evolve as they mature, and too few singers demonstrate cognizance as complete as Roberts’s of the fact that artistry must also evolve.

Much as they have suffered in the world’s conservatories and theatres in recent years, large voices have almost never been treated kindly by microphones. Among all of the products of the extensive time that she spent in recording studios throughout her career, only her 1972 recording of the title rôle in Puccini’s Turandot—a part that she never played on stage—conveys a true-to-life sense of the amplitude of Dame Joan Sutherland’s voice as heard in opera houses and, in some cases, on noncommercial recordings. A similar assessment of Kirsten Flagstad’s recordings is not unjustified: her 1954 Norwegian Radio performance with piano accompaniment of ‘Im Abendrot,’ the fourth of Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, is perhaps the single best recording via which to appreciate the pure impact of her voice. There is a disturbing trend of substituting volume for projection evident in the work of many of today’s singers, precipitating forcing that is especially dangerous for large voices. Recorded without the exhaustive processing that renders many discs technological rather than vocal feats, this Liederabend is a rare instance of a recording permitting the listener to encounter a remarkable voice without non-musical impediments. Merely as a recording of one of America’s great voices, this disc is uncommonly enjoyable. As an artistic journey through Lieder by three masters of the form led by the sapient proprietress of that great voice, it is a Liederabend to quiet the laments of those who wrongly believe that the insightful, imaginative, and indefatigably musical interpretation of song is a dead art.

[1] CARL MARIA VON WEBER (1786 – 1826), FERDINARD HÉROLD (1791 – 1833), GIACOMO MEYERBEER (1791 – 1864), GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868), GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1858), FROMENTAL HALÉVY (1799 – 1862), and HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803 – 1869): Écho—Joyce El-Khoury, soprano; The Hallé; Carlo Rizzi, conductor [Recorded in The Stoller Hall, Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester, UK, in February 2017; Opera Rara ORR252; 1 CD, 79:15; Available from Opera Rara and major music retailers]

[2] DANIEL AUBER (1782 – 1871), GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868), GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848), FROMENTAL HALÉVY (1799 – 1862), HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803 – 1869), and GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Espoir—Michael Spyres, tenor; The Hallé; Carlo Rizzi, conductor [Recorded in The Stoller Hall, Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester, UK, in February 2017; Opera Rara ORR251; 1 CD, 78:25; Available from Opera Rara and major music retailers]

It is unlikely that the existence of any species botanical or zoological has been as vehemently debated as the endangerment, extinction, or survival of bel canto. That the pillars of bel canto rest on the shoulders of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini is little disputed, but the parameters of this ephemeral subspecies of Western music are otherwise difficult to define. Unlike many of the passion-fueled feuds over matters of operatic esoterica, the questions of whether or when the death knell for bel canto sounded are logical considerations. Bel canto has no Fort Sumpter and Appomattox, no convenient and clearly-documented beginning and end. Examining a score like Francesco Cavalli’s 1651 La Calisto, it is obvious in the music for Diana and Endimione that the seeds of bel canto are present, but have they germinated? Is ‘Vivo in te, mio caro bene,’ Händel’s duet for Asteria and Andronico in his 1724 Tamerlano, a prototype of the bel canto lovers’ duet or the thing itself? The quest to understand its past is a vital component of the preservation and perpetuation of any art form, but to obsess over pinpointing the precise moment in operatic history at which its stylistic origins yielded the fully-fledged practice of bel canto is to entomb a still-warm body in a sepulcher of pedantry. For the past four decades, Opera Rara performances and recordings have brought bel canto as inherited from its Nineteenth-Century guardians into the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, and that journey reaches new destinations with two enchanting new releases.

With this pair of discs, homages to two of the Nineteenth Century’s most influential singers by a pair of the Twenty-First Century’s most significant artists, Opera Rara again ventures into the realm of recital discs, returning to territory explored by the label’s invaluable Il Salotto and 100 Years of Italian Opera series. Écho and Espoir, soprano Joyce El-Khoury’s and tenor Michael Spyres’s explorations of music sung by their artistic ancestors Julie Dorus-Gras and Gilbert Duprez, not only continue the tradition of Opera Rara’s extraordinary achievements in recording bel canto repertory but on their own merits raise the stakes for today’s singers with bel canto aspirations. Tastefully supported by The Hallé and Carlo Rizzi, whose playing and conducting exude thorough knowledge and incontestable affection for the music, El-Khoury and Spyres sing with involvement that transforms the recording studio into the stage of an opera house, guiding the listener into the unique dramatic milieu of each selection. Many recital discs are afflicted by blandness that results from removing arias from their proper contexts, but Écho and Espoir are wonderfully successful at conjuring the requisite atmospheres in which the music thrives. Opera Rara’s engineering is not always flattering to El-Khoury or Spyres: as heard on these discs, both of their voices sporadically have harder edges than their performances in the world’s opera houses have revealed. Still, both singers are on magnificent form, and the discs convey the visceral excitement that their singing incites.

Begun in Valenciennes in 1805, the long life of Julie-Aimée-Josèphe van Steenkiste coincided with one of the most tunefully tumultuous eras in the evolution of opera. Known professionally as Julie Dorus-Gras after her 1833 marriage to a violinist in the Paris Opéra orchestra, this extraordinary soprano exerted influence on that musical evolution similar to that wielded by her contemporaries Giulia Grisi, María Malibrán, Giuditta Pasta, and Pauline Viardot. In the course of her own evolution, via which she allied natural talent with technical mastery and interpretive sophistication, Dorus-Gras studied with the widely-acclaimed Italian tenor Marco Bordogni, Rossini’s first Conte di Libenskof in Il viaggio a Reims; the composer Ferdinando Paër; and the respected baritone Henri (né François-Louis Henry), who created Sulpice in La fille du régiment for Donizetti and whose pupils also included Cornélie Falcon. During her lauded career, she was a practical muse to a number of composers, the litany of characters first sung by Dorus-Gras populated by Pauline in Donizetti’s Les Martyrs (a rôle that El-Khoury thrillingly performed in concert and recorded in studio for Opera Rara, partnered by Spyres), Teresa in Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, Oscar in Auber’s Gustave III, Princesse Eudoxie and Ginérva in Halévy’s La Juive and Guido et Ginérva, and Alice and Marguerite de Valois in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and Les Huguenots. By the time of her death in 1896, Dorus-Gras had suffered the fate of many long-lived singers of her time: with a few notable exceptions, the rôles for which she was renowned were no longer present in the international repertoire. Recreating the musical prowess and dramatic directness for which Dorus-Gras was celebrated, El-Khoury proves that the music with which her predecessor’s reputation was made is as impactful now as it was more than a century-and-a-half ago.

In addition to her Pauline in Opera Rara’s Les Martyrs in concert and on disc, El-Khoury’s Donizetti credentials include a triumphant turn as the titular Queen of Scots in Seattle Opera’s 2016 production of Maria Stuarda. The title rôle in Donizetti’s most enduringly popular opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, was sung in the work’s 1835 première by Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani, but Julie Dorus-Gras contributed indelibly to Lucia’s conquests of Europe’s opera houses and the esteem of their audiences. El-Khoury’s ‘écho’ of Dorus-Gras’s Lucia is a performance of the Act One cavatina ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ and cabaletta ‘Quando rapito in estasi.’ In the cavatina, El-Khoury dispatches the fiorature cleanly, but it is her legato that compels admiration. The trills and top Cs in the cabaletta do not come as effortlessly to El-Khoury as to Sutherland and Sills, but the younger soprano shares with Callas, Gencer, and Zeani a particular talent for using bravura writing as an expressive tool. As encountered in this music, El-Khoury’s Lucia is unusually thoughtful and self-assured, potentially making the character’s eventual descent into madness all the more harrowing. In only this aria and cabaletta, El-Khoury gives a more complete and original vocal and dramatic portrait of Donizetti’s and Sir Walter Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor than many sopranos achieve in performances of the full opera.

The infrequency with which Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable has been performed in the past century is indicative of the difficulty of the music. One of the scores that defined Grand Opéra for Nineteenth-Century audiences, Robert’s principal rôles are as near-impossible to cast with complete success as those in Verdi’s La forza del destino and Wagner’s Parsifal. Her accounts of music for Alice and Isabelle on this disc suggest that enterprising opera companies—and Opera Rara’s microphones!—should capitalize on El-Khoury’s affinity for this music by scheduling Robert le diable for her. To Alice’s Act One romance ‘Va, dit-elle, va, mon enfant’ the soprano brings the evenness of tone throughout the compass that makes her singing of lyric repertoire so satisfying, combined here with absolute command of Meyerbeer’s hybridized musical style. Her singing of Alice’s Act Three couplets, ‘Quand je quittai la Normandie,’ is equally enjoyable, the momentum of her singing drawn from her discerning enunciation of the text. Isabelle’s Act Four cavatine ‘Robert, toi que j'aime et qui reçus ma foi’ is perhaps the score’s most familiar number, and El-Khoury’s performance of it on Écho affirms the legitimacy of the piece’s continued prominence in sopranos’ concert repertories long after Robert le diable disappeared from opera houses. This is demanding music, dauntlessly sung, but it is again El-Khoury’s connection with the character and her emotions that earns the greatest praise.

It was in Hector Berlioz’s 1841 arrangement with recitatives replacing the original spoken dialogue, contrary to Berlioz’s wishes, that Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz became known and appreciated in Paris, and it is the French adaptation in which Dorus-Gras sang Agathe. Continuing that legacy, El-Khoury performs Agathe’s scene and aria in French, shaping the difficult vowels with naturalness that eludes many French-born singers. This is especially noticeable in the recitative, in which she articulates ‘Hélas! sans le revoir, faut-il fermer les yeux?’ with such immediacy that the listener has no need to consult the printed text in order to sense the interrogatory frisson of the scene. El-Khoury continues to build tension in her traversal of ‘Ma prière, solitaire, de la terre vole vers Dieu!’ Her cathartic realization of the aria’s climax is wholly stylish but shows Wagner’s heroines to be close on the horizon. Berlioz’s own music is sampled with the scene for Teresa from Act One of Benvenuto Cellini. Here, too, El-Khoury’s handling of words is keenly perceptive. The introductory recitative ‘Les belles fleurs!...Un billet... Cellini!’ is sung with burgeoning passion, and the air ‘Entre l’amour et le devoir un jeune cœur est bien à plaindre’ receives from singer, orchestra, and conductor a performance that seems to come from the stage rather than the recording studio. Though their voices are very different in timbre and weight, El-Khoury’s singing of this music by Weber and Berlioz is delightfully reminiscent of the little-remembered Suzanne Sarroca’s vocalism.

The singer of any Fach who takes on music from Gioachino Rossini’s Guillaume Tell is a brave adventurer unafraid of tests of stamina and technique. Even removed from its setting in the full opera, Mathilde’s Act Two romance is a formidable trial, looking forward to Élisabeth’s ‘Toi qui sus le néant’ in Verdi’s Don Carlos more than back to music for Rossini’s other soprano heroines. Rossini was Italian, of course, but the musical language of ‘Ils s’éloignent enfin’ is as unmistakably French as the text. El-Khoury voices both the recitative and the aria ‘Sombre fôret, désert triste et sauvage’ plaintively but with technical steel beneath the artistic platinum. This is also true of her performances of arias by Ferdinand Hérold and Fromental Halévy. The Entr’acte and Isabelle’s air ‘Jours de mon enfance’ from Act Two of Hérold’s Le pré aux clercs are delivered with consummate musicality by orchestra and soprano. Rachel’s air ‘Assez longtemps la crainte et la tristesse ont habité les murs de ce palais’ from Act Three of Halévy’s La Juive is sung with perfectly-judged pathos and delicate but resilient phrasing. In her performances on Écho, El-Khoury’s tone remains focused, steady, and darkly beautiful from the bottom of the range to D₆. That alone qualifies her as a legitimate successor to Dorus-Gras, but El-Khoury claims this music as her own. No mere echo, this disc is the product of a creative spirit in whom Dorus-Gras would undoubtedly recognize a Twenty-First-Century protégée.

Bel canto trio: (from left to right) conductor Carlo Rizzi, tenor Michael Spyres, and soprano Joyce El-Khoury
[Photo by Henry Little, © by Opera Rara]

A native Parisian, Gilbert-Louis Duprez was born in 1806 and, in but one of many parallels with the life and career of Julie Dorus-Gras, died in 1896. Of great significance in the development of his singular technique were his studies with Alexandre-Étienne Choron, a brief-tenured director of the Paris Opéra, where Duprez ultimately shared primo uomo laurels with Adolphe Nourrit, a fellow tenor with an extensive range and groundbreaking approach to their Fach’s highest tones, which theretofore had been produced by falsettone. Taking modal resonance to the top of the range without employing falsetto as previous generations of tenors had done, Duprez was a potent force in the development of modern tenor singing. He appeared as Arnoldo in the first Italian production of Guglielmo Tell and originated the name part in Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, but he was—and still is—primarily associated with the music of Donizetti. In addition to creating one of the cornerstone tenor rôles of Italian bel canto, Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor, Duprez also originated Ugo in Parisina d’Este, Fernand in La favorite, Polyeucte in Les Martyrs [a part originally intended for Nourrit], and the title rôle in Dom Sébastien. Now principally remembered for his exhilarating upper register, Duprez was clearly an artist with patrician sensibilities that complemented those of Dorus-Gras and other eminent musicians of his time. The same can be said of Michael Spyres. The highest tones on Espoir are stunning, but it is the youthful exuberance of Spyres’s singing that truly astonishes. Duprez himself would surely be gratified—and more than a little threatened—to hear his music sung so appealingly.

Though still overshadowed by Verdi’s setting of Shakespeare’s complex examination of prejudice, stereotypes, and uncontrollable jealousy, Rossini’s Otello has gained traction in the international repertory in recent years. The French version of the opera remains virtually unknown, however; a neglect that deprives listeners of music no less characterful than that of Le siège de Corinthe, Moïse et Pharaon, and Guillaume Tell. Rossini’s reaction to the newly-minted do di petto is widely documented, but it is impossible to imagine the composer objecting to any aspect of the performance that Otello’s Act One cavatine ‘Venise, ô ma patrie’ receives from Spyres, The Hallé, and Rizzi. The tenor’s singing is at once tender and thorny, lending this abbreviated portrayal of the character credibility as lover, soldier, and statesman. Musically, there is no finer performance in any language of any of Otello’s music on disc.

Spyres sang Enrico in Donizetti’s Rosmonda d’Inghilterra in the 2016 Opera di Firenze concert presentation in which Alberto Sonzogni’s new critical edition of the score was performed for the first time. Prior to that outing and a subsequent production in Bergamo, Donizetti’s hometown, the opera had by all indications not been heard since the Nineteenth Century except in a 1975 staging in Belfast and a 1994 studio recording of the complete opera with Bruce Ford as Enrico, both produced by Opera Rara. Here revisiting Enrico’s Act One scene, Spyres phrases the recitative ‘Dopo i lauri di vittoria son pur dolci i fiori al prode’ with innate affinity for Donizetti’s style, following the composer’s lead in verbal emphases. He launches the aria ‘Potessi vivere com’io vorrei’ with panache, easily taming the music’s ferocities. Neither the broad melodic arches nor the exposed top D♭ in the protagonist’s Act Two air ‘Seul sur la terre’ from Dom Sébastien overwhelms Spyres’s technique, and his performance of Fernand’s anguished recitative ‘La maîtresse du Roi!’ and exquisite aria ‘Ange si pur, que dans un songe j’ai cru trouver, vous que j’aimais!’ from Act Four of La favorite is a deeply-felt interpretation of music approached by some singers as a vehicle for meaningless vocal display. Spyres’s ringing top C is the utterance of a young man experiencing crippling crises of conscience and faith.

It is astounding to recall that many performances of Lucia di Lammermoor in generations past ended with Lucia’s mad scene, omitting the sublime final scene for Edgardo in which Donizetti reached his greatest heights as a composer of lyric tragedy. Though it was Duprez who first sang this music, it might have been composed specially for Spyres, whose performance of the scene on Espoir resounds with unaffected despair and desperation. His ‘Tombe degli avi miei’ is an inward musing, addressed as much to the spirits of his ancestors as to the tombs of which he speaks, and he sings ‘Fra poco a me ricovero’ with grace redolent of John McCormack’s 1910 recording of the aria. Duetting with the cello in ‘Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali,’ Spyres traces the vocal line with incredible poise and the freedom in the upper register that the music demands but so seldom receives.

The operas of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber and Fromental Halévy have made far less progress than those by Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini in reintroducing themselves to the public, but several productions and recordings in the past decade have demonstrated that Auber’s and Halévy’s scores deserve modern listeners’ attention. The tenacity with which Spyres sings music from Auber’s Le lac des fées inspires curiosity about what other riches hide among Auber’s overlooked operas. The tenor vocalizes Albert’s Act One recitative ‘Ils s’éloignent! je reste...’ with urbane diction and a palpable depiction of the character’s ambivalence. The skillfully-crafted air ‘Gentille fée, au doux sourire’ is handsomely sung, its musical prosody effectuated with technical savvy. Halévy’s La Reine de Chypre was among its composer’s most popular works during the Nineteenth Century, but its charms did not survive the changing tastes that followed the operatic innovations of Verdi and Wagner. Gérard’s air ‘De mes aïeux ombres sacrées’ and cabaletta ‘Sur le bord de l’abime’ from Act Four of La Reine de Chypre are here performed with dizzying virtuosity by Spyres, the repeated acents to top B♭ managed with aplomb.

No music from Halévy’s forgotten Guido et Ginérva seems to have been recorded before Spyres entered the studio to make Espoir, and his voicing of Guido’s Act Three scene does much to make amends. Opening the scene with an aptly luminous reading of ‘Dans ces lieux, Ginérva, ta dernière demeure,’ he then voices the air ‘Quand renaîtra la pâle aurore’ superbly, seconded by Gareth Small’s brilliant playing of the trumpet obligato, an invention not unlike the instrument’s function in Ernesto’s scene at the beginning of Act Two of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. The dramatically momentous duet for the title characters from the fourth act of Guido and Ginérva is the sprawling centerpiece of Espoir, and Spyres is joined by El-Khoury in a potent performance of the scene, their voices blending like two tributaries joining to form a mighty river. When Spyres sings ‘Tu seras donc pour moi sans cesse inexorable,’ it is with Guido’s emotions channeled through his own, and he and El-Khoury voice ‘Ombre chérie! ombre adorée!’ as though expressing their feelings with top Ds were the most basic mode of communication. Could Duprez and Dorus-Gras have sung this music so well?

Paris was unquestionably the operatic capital of Europe during the Nineteenth Century, and the lure of success in the city on the Seine was no less irresistible to Verdi than it had been to Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. Revised with a French text for performance at Salle Le Peletier in 1847, Verdi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata became Jérusalem, but it was in translation back into Italian that the revised score was espoused by Leyla Gencer and Jaume Aragall in the 1960s. Spyres here sings Gaston’s Act Three scene in the original French with which Duprez was acquainted, and he declaims ‘L’infamie!... prenez, prenez ma vie!’ rousingly. The air ‘Ô mes amis, mes frères d’armes’ is intoned with zeal that discloses how engaging a performance can be without wandering beyond the boundaries of the proper style.

One of the finest events in the 2017 BBC Proms series was a performance of Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust in which Spyres sang the name part with alluring tone and poetic sensitivity that would have pleased even the prickly Goethe. Spyres’s portrayal of the title rôle in Terry Gilliam’s production of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini at English National Opera was also fantastic, and he offers a spectacular performance of Cellini’s Act Two scene on Espoir. The words of ‘Seul pour lutter, seul avec mon courage’ are for Spyres like the molten metals that Cellini metamorphosed into works of art. Molded by the tenor’s musicality, his singing of ‘Sur les monts les plus sauvages’ is a work of art in its own right, the golden top notes glimmering.

It is fitting that the scene for Edgardo and Lucia that ends Act One of Lucia di Lammermoor should be included on both of these recitals, as part of the programme of Écho and as a bonus track in the digital download version of Espoir available from Opera Rara. The camaraderie with which El-Khoury and Spyres sing ‘Verrano a te sull’aure i miei sospiri ardenti,’ this fearless Edgardo soaring to his written top E♭, is representative of all of the music making on Écho and Espoir. As Dorus-Gras and Duprez must have done when learning, rehearsing, and inaugurating the public history of the music on these discs, Joyce El-Khoury and Michael Spyres interact not as star singers flexing their egos but as fellow musicians dedicated to the common task of providing the listener with memorable performances of music worth hearing. This should be the goal of all musicians who have the good fortune to find themselves before microphones, and with Écho and Espoir these musicians and Opera Rara again get it right. Bel canto carries on!

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Aida—Leah Crocetto (Aida), Marina Prudenskaya (Amneris), Carl Tanner (Radamès), Gordon Hawkins (Amonasro), Morris Robinson (Ramfis), Soloman Howard (Il Re d’Egitto), Madison Leonard (Gran Sacerdotessa), Frederick Ballentine (Messaggero); Washington National Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Evan Rogister, conductor [Francesca Zambello, Director; E. Loren Meeker, Associate Director; RETNA, Original Sketches and Concept Design; Michael Yeargan, Set Designer; Anita Yavich, Costume Designer; Mark McCullough, Lighting Designer; Jessica Lang, Choreographer—Washington National Opera, Opera House, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC, USA; Sunday, 10 September 2017]

In Italian opera’s wondrous evolution from Paisiello to Puccini in the Nineteenth Century, more than half a century of the art form’s history was dominated by a single composer: Giuseppe Verdi. From the première of Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio in 1839 until the last laugh of Falstaff in 1893, Verdi’s operas were the musical manifestations of the turmoil and triumphs that engendered Italian unification and nationalism. Beyond Italy’s borders, far more composers were influenced by Verdi’s work than would ever have admitted it, and it was from Verdi’s heroines that Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Mimì, Cio-Cio San, Minnie, and Liù received their lifeblood. Now, 116 years after Verdi’s death, affection for his music is stronger than ever. Operatic laity have never hesitated to declare passionate devotion to Verdi’s operas, but elitists and so-called connoisseurs have often hidden their tears for Gilda and Violetta. Perhaps Aida inspires fewer tears than some of her sisters, but few of opera’s protagonists have sparked imaginations and won devotion as Aida has done in the century-and-a-half since she first sang in 1871. Obliged throughout so much of the opera to take refuge within her own guarded hope for deliverance, sustained only by dreams of a life ever receding further into impossibility, she is the rare Verdi heroine for whom escape is feasible. When she might flee to the cherished land of her birth, Aida prefers death in the arms of her lover. Her ultimate choice is not the enslavement of living without the love for which she braved the perils of a princess’s hatred but the liberation of death on her own terms. She is a modern woman in an ancient setting, made timeless by music that throbs with every beat of her tormented heart.

The longtime slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts, ‘a great nation deserves great art,’ can be easily adapted for the opera house. Grand stages deserve—and demand—grand opera. As the intimate theatres in which opera’s infancy and childhood transpired gave way to more expansive spaces, the dimensions of the music written to fill them—the music of opera’s tempestuous adolescence—also grew more imposing. Horns found work as more than harbingers of distant huntsmen, and string sections became small towns. The complex stage machinery of Baroque and Classical opera incorporated every relevant technological advancement, bringing everything from live animals to running water to the world’s opera houses. The charismatic Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, Ismail the Magnificent, undoubtedly wanted an opera that reflected his epithet to inaugurate the opera house built in Cairo as a part of his initiatives to modernize and cosmopolitanize the Egyptian capital. Though the first production suffered the ill effects of the Franco-Prussian War, the score that Verdi produced in fulfillment of the Khedive’s commission ingeniously amalgamated elements of Italian lyricism and Parisian grand opera in a work requiring grandiose scenic effects, episodic dance, and voices of the highest calibre. The set pieces of Verdi’s early and middle periods are still present, but the skill with which Verdi integrated them into the opera’s through-composed structure yielded a piece with tremendous theatrical impact. His republican sensibilities incensed, Verdi bitterly objected to the first Cairo performance of Aida playing to a specially-invited audience of aristocrats and dignitaries. The composer’s revenge goes on unabated: aside from Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Mimì, few operatic heroines have touched as many ‘ordinary’ lives as Aida continues to do everywhere that opera is performed.

Seeking Aida: a display of artwork by RETNA in Kennedy Center’s Hall of Nations in conjunction with Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, 10 September 2017
[Photo by the author]

In an absence as inexplicable as many of Washington’s political quagmires, which is to suggest that money is likely at least partly responsible, Aida has not been staged at Kennedy Center since 1990, when the cast included Aprile Millo and Maria Noto as Aida, Vladimir Popov as Radamès, and Stefania Toczyska as Amneris. That the 1990 production failed to win its scheduled leading lady’s approval is part of American opera lore, but Kennedy Center’s new effort, a production shared with San Francisco Opera, Seattle Opera, and Minnesota Opera, is a colorful, even flamboyant experience in which audiences are asked not only to listen to Verdi’s music but also to ponder why the characters sing it. Under the direction of WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello, whose work exhibits an uncanny gift for finding new but valid ways of interpreting familiar repertory. Her groundbreaking productions of Berlioz’s Les Troyens and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen enriched these works’ performance histories with visions both innovative and intuitive. With the assistance of Associate Director E. Loren Meeker, whose gorgeous production of Madama Butterfly for North Carolina Opera is among that company’s greatest artistic successes, Zambello staged Aida with an apparent goal of bringing the opera’s narrative closer to modern audiences without distancing it from Verdi and his librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni.

The political fray that serves as the backdrop against which Aida’s personal dramas play out was meaningfully integrated into the production, emphasizing the tense atmosphere in which Aida’s, Amneris’s, and Radamès’s lives intersect. The tableau of Amneris and Radamès receiving the acclaim of the Egyptian people in the Triumphal Scene was reminiscent of images of Eva and Juan Perón on the balcony of Casa Rosada, and the subjugation of the conquered Ethiopians evoked scenes of oppression from Biblical times to Tiananmen Square. Jessica Lang’s athletic but artistic choreography was characterized by a range of motions both stylized and natural: muscles and emotions moved in tandem, and the dancers—Patrick Coker, Julie Fiorenza, John Harnage, Eve Jacobs, Kana Kimura, Milan Misko, Thomas Ragland, Rachel Secrest, and Jammie Walker, complemented in the entertainment for Amneris at the start of Act Two by a troupe of splendidly acrobatic boys—executed Lang’s steps expertly. The vehemence of the Egyptian priests’ calls for the slaughter of their Ethiopian prisoners was a timely reminder of the sickening toll of fanaticism, making the horrors of Aida’s life at the mercy of her foes real for the audience. Art cannot and must not always be comfortable and comforting. Art plays a vital rôle in altering perceptions and ending prejudices, and in doing so it must press observers to face truths that are less threatening when ignored. Zambello’s Aida is not a Boudicca, Jeanne d’Arc, or Libuše, but she is a woman with a fully-developed social conscience that did not impede her ability to loft Verdi’s melodies to the farthest reaches of the auditorium.

Trema, o rea schiava: (from left to right) tenor Carl Tanner as Radamès, mezzo-soprano Marina Prudenskaya as Amneris, and soprano Leah Crocetto as Aida in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, September 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

This Aida leapt from imagination to stage via the concept design and sketches of graphic artist RETNA (né Marquis Duriel Lewis). Patrons who expected a graffiti artist’s Aida were either surprised or disappointed. His was no glitzy but generic Hollywood-esque Old Kingdom with cardboard pyramids and potted palms. Rather, the opera house’s stage became the epicenter of a functioning totalitarian state in which clerical authority superseded even royal prerogative. RETNA’s sketches produced artwork that dressed the stage in dazzling jewel tones. The visual symbolism incorporated into virtually every aspect of the production was remarkable for both looking authentically Egyptian and being wholly original. Even without an ankh to be seen, the production was more faithful to Verdi’s score and Ghislanzoni’s libretto than many stagings that go to ridiculous lengths in efforts at achieving ‘authenticity.’ Bringing to his work on this production nearly fifty years of experience, Michael Yeargan designed sets that were ideal canvases for RETNA’s graphics. Intelligently illuminated by University of North Carolina School of the Arts alumnus Mark McCullough’s lighting designs, the sets were dynamic without being distracting. The military attire central to Anita Yavich’s costume designs for the male characters would not have been out of place in Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, Gaddafi’s Libya, or Mubarak’s Egypt, and Aida’s simple dress contrasted starkly with the stunning citrine, pure white, and sapphire gowns for Amneris. The visual components of this Aida amplified the emotions of Verdi’s music and Ghislanzoni’s words, not grasping at manufactured relevance but harnessing the wealth of pertinence that already exists in the opera’s drama.

Conductor Evan Rogister paced the performance with energy, but his leadership was occasionally undermined by idiosyncratic tempi and breakdowns in coordination between stage and pit. Balances and timing in the largest ensembles were fortunately spot on, but there were instances in which principals and conductor disagreed about niceties of phrasing. Still, Rogister cued the singers impressively, and his conducting was attuned to the subtleties of Verdi’s orchestrations. Verdi composed a large-scale Overture for Aida as an afterthought but ultimately preferred the simpler Preludio with which he originally launched the opera. At Rogister’s slow tempo, the music seemed almost Impressionistic: unexpectedly, Pelléas et Mélisande loomed as prominently on the musical horizon as Otello. Throughout the performance, the WNO Orchestra’s playing was marvelous, with the masters of the difficult herald trumpets in the Triumphal Scene earning particular admiration for their flawless intonation. The rhythmic bite of the musicians’ performances of the dance interludes—the Danza sacra delle sacerdotesse (actually della sacerdotessa in this production) in the second scene of Act One, the Danza di piccoli schiavi mori in the second scene of Act Two, and the Ballabile in the Triumphal Scene—gave these passages the momentum that they need. Chorus Master Steven Gathman rehearsed the WNO Chorus to a level of preparation that rendered the choral singing one of the finest elements of the performance. As Pharaoh’s army, the Egyptian populace, the captive Ethiopians, and the priests standing in judgement of Radamès, the choristers sang fantastically. Unlike their colleagues at Teatro alla Scala and the Metropolitan Opera, WNO’s chorus and orchestra cannot boast of career-long acquaintances with Aida, but their performance benefited tremendously from the absence of routine.

Son tua rivale…Figlia dei Faraoni: mezzo-soprano Marina Prudenskaya (left) as Amneris and soprano Leah Crocetto (right) as Aida in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, September 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program is a phenomenal source of young talent with which to populate the casts of the company’s productions, and enjoyment of this Aida was markedly enhanced by the presence of well-trained singers with voices of true quality in rôles in which mediocrity is all too frequently encountered. As the Messaggero who brings the momentous news of the Ethiopians’ invasion of Egypt, tenor Frederick Ballentine voiced ‘Il sacro suolo dell’Egitto è invaso dai barbari Etiopi’ incisively, his voice secure throughout the range of the music. In the second scene of Act One, soprano Madison Leonard sang the exotic exhortation ‘Possente Fthà, del mondo spirito animator’ with attractive tone and excellent breath control. Both of these young artists will be welcome additions to the rosters of the world’s opera companies.

Another alumnus of WNO’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, bass Soloman Howard has already offered audiences a plethora of evidence of his mastery of Verdi repertory, which he will expand further with his portrayal of Sparafucile in North Carolina Opera’s January 2018 production of Rigoletto. As the Re d’Egitto, the rôle of his Metropolitan Opera début, the strikingly handsome singer’s Pharaoh exuded the confidence that comes with unflappable comfort with the music. Vocally, his performance began promisingly and continued to gather strength with each successive phrase. In Act One, Howard voiced ‘Alta cagion v’aduna, o fidi Egizii’ with firm, rounded tone, and he declaimed ‘Iside venerata di nostre schiere in vitte già designava il condottier supremo’ with the majesty of a man in communion with his deities. His ‘Su! del Nilo al sacro lido’ radiated patriotic fervor. In Act Two’s Triumphal Scene, Howard’s Re addressed Radamès with a robust ‘Salvator della patria, io ti saluto,’ but his solemn delivery of ‘Al tuo consiglio io cedo’ suggested that a shrewd statesman lurked behind the warmongering façade. In the long performance and recording histories of Aida, many voices have been heard in the Re’s music that caused listeners to wonder whether it might have been Pharaoh’s wobbling that dislodged the Sphinx’s nose. There was no wobbling in this performance to endanger the integrity of Egypt’s infrastructure, but the sheer power of Howard’s vocalism was awesome.

Re e guerriero: bass Soloman Howard as il Re d’Egitto (center) in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, 10 September 2017
[Photo by the author]

Imposing bass Morris Robinson was a Ramfis who towered over his countrymen, in stature and in menace. A priest who did not hesitate to use violence to advance his agenda [even the unoffending Messaggero fell victim to his fists], this Ramfis was unmistakably an ancestor of the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlo. In Aida’s opening scene, he sang ‘Sì: corre voce che l’Etiope ardisca sfidarci ancora’ zealously, and ‘Gloria ai Numi! ognun rammenti ch’essi reggono gli eventi’ poured from him like the surging Nile. ‘Mortal, diletto ai Numi, a te fidate son d’Egitto le sorti’ in the scene in the Temple of Vulcan was dispatched with near-fanatical ardor. There was no lunging for the top F: the note was in the voice, and Robinson found it effortlessly. The rugged brawn of his singing was stirring, but his handling of the lovely cantabile ‘Nume, custode e vindice di questa sacra terra’ was also riveting. It was obvious in his granitic ‘Ascolta, o Re’ in the Triumphal Scene that this Ramfis expected his advice to be heeded. It was equally apparent in ‘Vieni d’Iside al tempio’ in Act Three and in the Judgment Scene in Act Four that neither Amneris’s despair nor her fury were of the slightest consequence to Ramfis. Robinson voiced ‘Spirto del Nume, sovra noi discendi!’ lithely. His thunderous repetitions of ‘Radamès!’ were terrifying: the final utterance of the name, each syllable forcefully articulated, was haunting. In a sense, Ramfis is the last man standing when Aida reaches it conclusion. Aida and Radamès have perished, Amneris is devastated by guilt, and the legitimacy of the King’s reign has been weakened by his espousal of a traitor. In some performances of Aida, these outcomes seem to be the work of destiny, but Robinson was a Ramfis who manipulated the drama from the start. When his machinations were enacted with singing of such vigor and security, the ambitions of this Ramfis could not be thwarted.

Avanti a lui tremava tutto l’Egitto: bass Morris Robinson as Ramfis (center) in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, 10 September 2017
[Photo by the author]

His portrayal of the title rôle in Opera Carolina’s 2014 production of Nabucco confirmed Gordon Hawkins to be one of today’s most accomplished Verdi baritones. In WNO’s 2016 staging of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, his unforgettable Alberich disclosed Hawkins’s ability to markedly influence a performance even as a character whose time on stage is relatively brief. As Amonasro in WNO’s Aida, these feats merged exhilaratingly. First seen among the humiliated Ethiopians in Act Two’s Triumphal Scene, the nobility of Hawkins’s Amonasro was discernible despite the monarch’s efforts at remaining anonymous. His cry of ‘Non mi tradir!’ to Aida was as much a royal decree as a statement of desperation, and the top Fs that punctuated his plea for the conquering Egyptians to show mercy, ‘Questa assisa ch’io vesto vi dica che il mio Re,’ were galvanizing. The voice sometimes sounded unsteady, but Amonasro’s music is ferocious, and Hawkins’s voice is a large instrument used with such control that moments of strain were not worrying.

Reuniting with Aida along the banks of the Nile—evoked by sounds of a nocturnal riparian setting in Verdi’s score if not visually in this production—in Act Three, Hawkins sang ‘A te grave cagion m’adduce, Aida’ muscularly. Then, his account of the cantabile dolcissimo ‘Rivedrai le foreste imbalsamate’ was tenderly paternal. There is pitifully little tenderness in Amonasro’s bullying of Aida, and Hawkins hurled ‘Su, dunque! sorgete, egizie coorti!’ at her ruthlessly, roaring the top F♯. As Aida implored him to take pity on her suffering, Hawkins’s Amonasro retreated, covering his face with his hands and clearly feeling the sting of his own cruelty. A father’s compassion returned in the baritone’s voicing of ‘Pensa che un popolo vinto,’ and the ascent to top G♭ was now an expression of victory rather than viciousness. His shout of ‘Di Napata le gole!’ after Radamès unwittingly revealed the secret of the Egyptians’ intended route into battle bore the weight of the blow that turned the opera’s course inexorably towards tragedy. Amonasro is an intriguing anomaly in Verdi’s studies of parent-child relationships, but he is not the heartless brute that some singers portray. There was unusual depth in Hawkins’s realization of the part, and he sang Amonasro’s music with aptitude that is even more unusual today.

Ciel! sua padre: baritone Gordon Hawkins as Amonasro in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, 10 September 2017
[Photo by the author]

Some of the best singing heard at the 2017 Bayreuther Festspiele was supplied by mezzo-soprano Marina Prudenskaya, whose Waltraute in Götterdämmerung brimmed with urgency and vocal opulence befitting a daughter of Wotan. [She returns to Bayreuth in 2018 to sing Fricka and Schwertleite in Die Walküre.] Looking as glamorously regal as Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, Prudenskaya was a calculating Amneris who toyed with Aida and sprang her fatal trap with feline sensuality. The core of her interpretation was restraint, however: there was no excess, not one superfluous gesture. In her Act One duet with Radamès, Prudenskaya intoned ‘Quale insolita gioia nel tuo sguardo!’ caustically, but her purring of ‘Vieni, o diletta, appressati’ in the subsequent trio with Aida and Radamès was slyly casual. Later, celebrating Radamès as the gods’ choice to lead the Egyptians into battle, she voiced ‘Di mia man ricevi, o duce, il vessillo glorioso’ with conspicuous affection.

The scene for Amneris and her attendants that opens Act Two can seem out of place. The ladies in Amneris’s company are identified by Ghislanzoni as slaves but were courtiers in Zambello’s production, a believable departure from the libretto: Amneris shaming Aida before gossiping Egyptian ladies heightened the scene’s dramatic significance. Merely as a setting for Prudenskaya’s supple singing of ‘Ah! vieni, vieni, amor mio,’ the scene was gratifying. In the duet with Aida that follows, the mezzo-soprano unleashed an avalanche of duplicity with ‘Fu la sorte dell’armi a’ tuoi funesta.’ Affected sweetness pervaded her singing of the cantabile ‘Io son l’amica tua’ and ‘Ebben: qual nuovo fremito ti assal, gentile Aida?’ The character’s fury explodes with ‘Trema, vil schiava,’ and Prudenskaya’s heated performance ignited both music and text. Perhaps having learned from the examples of interpreters of Amneris who burn out before meeting the demands of Act Four, there was perceptible caution here and in her traversal of ‘Venga la schiava, venga a rapirmi l’amor mio,’ the treachery imparted by inflection rather than volume. At the start of Act Three, this Amneris responded to Ramfis’s instruction to pray with a touchingly sincere ‘Sì; io pregherò che Radamès mi doni tutto il suo cor.’ The savagery of her censure of Radamès’s treason at the act’s end was intense but tempered by sadness.

To seek a comparison in Prudenskaya’s German repertoire, Act Four of Aida is for Amneris an ordeal similar to what Fricka faces in Act Two of Die Walküre. Alone with her thoughts as the act begins, Amneris contemplates the consequences of her jealousy. Musing over Aida’s escape from Amneris’s clutches, Prudenskaya infused ‘L’abborrita rivale a me sfuggia’ with bile, but she avoided vocal harshness. Confronting Radamès for the last time, this Amneris attempted to maintain a calm detachment in ‘Già i sacerdoti adunansi arbitri del tuo fato,’ but as she sang of her love being supplanted by anger she became increasingly frantic. Her voice seething with emotion, Prudenskaya dominated the pair of exposed top B♭s. Amneris’s loathing of Ramfis and his self-serving exercise of pseudo-religious authority erupted in the Judgment Scene, but the voice was never unduly pushed. The sudden frailty of her ‘Ohimè!...morir mi sento’ and ‘Numi, pietà del mio straziato core’ was a moving indication of Amneris’s love for Radamès. Even the bright, sonorous top A with which she ended the scene was guarded, the ire directed at Amneris’s flawed character as much as at the hypocritical priests. In the opera’s final scene, Prudenskaya sang ‘Pace t’imploro, salma adorata’ as a broken woman. Prudenskaya was an uncommonly cerebral Amneris, a vulnerable woman aware of her power but also powerless. There were ensemble passages in which she could not be heard as clearly as her colleagues, but this perceptive artist took the ethos of the production to heart by looking beyond the notes on the page and sharing with the audience why her Amneris sang them.

Di mia man ricevi, o duce, il vessillo glorioso: tenor Carl Tanner as Radamès (left) and mezzo-soprano Marina Prudenskaya as Amneris (right) in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, September 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Hailing from Arlington, Virginia, a stone’s—or a Washington Nationals pitcher’s—throw across the Potomac from Kennedy Center, tenor Carl Tanner is the standard bearer for the mostly-extinct and little-remembered tradition of his fellow American tenor Barry Morell. Musical, insightful, and effective in lyric and heavier rôles, he shares with Morell the under-appreciated distinction of being an exceptionally reliable artist who brings to virtually every performance the preparedness and dedication that some singers only fitfully exhibit. As Radamès in this Aida, Tanner was bold and charismatic, his singing stentorian when appropriate and always aptly romantic. In the opera’s first scene, his Radamès daydreamed with a schoolboy’s enthusiasm about being chosen to command Egypt’s troops. It is often alleged that Richard Strauss hated the tenor voice, but only in Die Frau ohne Schatten did he rival Verdi’s ‘gift’ to the tenor in Act One of Aida. Beset by the recitative ‘Se quel guerrier io fossi!’ and romanza ‘Celeste Aida’ with only a few moments of warmup, Radamès immediately earns sympathy, but no forgiveness was necessary for Tanner’s performance. He brought to ‘Celeste Aida’ genuine legato and unflinching attack on its three top B♭s. In the following duet with Amneris and the trio that ensues, he sparred almost playfully with Prudenskaya, but the change in his attitude upon Aida’s entry was appreciable in his enunciation of ‘Dessa!’ Radamès having been announced as the celestially-appointed leader of the Egyptian army, Tanner voiced the cantabile ‘Nume, che Duce ed arbitro sei d’ogni umana guerra’ in the second scene with bravado, the repeated top B♭s in the scene’s final pages conveying the character’s pride and elation. In Act Two’s epic Triumphal Scene, Tanner approached both ‘Re: pei sacri Numi, per lo splendore della tua corona’ and ‘Spento Amonasro, il re guerrier, non resta speranza ai vinti’ with the simplicity of a decent man speaking his mind rather than the complexity of a schemer considering the implications of his words.

Se quel guerriero io fossi: tenor Carl Tanner as Radamès in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, September 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Rendezvousing with Aida in their duet in Act Three, Tanner’s Radamès was again the free-spirited youth with absolute faith in the kindness of fate. Singing ‘Pur ti riveggo, mia dolce Aida’ with disarming passion and gleaming tone, he made Aida’s task of learning from him the Egyptians’ intended route into battle all the more distressing. He shaped his performances of ‘Nel fiero anelito di nuova guerra il suolo Etiope si ridestò’ and ‘Sovra una terra estrania teco fuggir dovrei!’ with sensitivity, making an admirable endeavor to comply with Verdi’s request for a dolce top B♭. The duped Radamès betrayed by Amneris to the bloodthirsty Ramfis, Tanner fired a preemptive volley with his clarion ‘Sacerdote, io resto a te,’ his top As formidably heroic.

The scene for Radamès and Amneris in Act Four contains some of the most breathlessly tense music that Verdi wrote, and Tanner and Prudenskaya engaged in a battle of wills that was an eery counterpart to their first meeting in Act One. Tanner eschewed bitterness in his traversal of ‘Di mie discolpe i giudici,’ rejecting Amneris’s arguments resolvedly but not unkindly. At the end of an arduous afternoon, Tanner sang particularly beautifully in the opera’s final scene. The resignation expressed by his reading of ‘La fatal pietra sovra me si chiuse’ was palpable, and his mezza voce in ‘O terra, addio’ gave Radamès’s final moments humanity and humility, not least by enabling him to avoid resorting to falsetto on the top B♭s. Especially at the top of the range, Tanner was happiest at full volume, but his happiness was never prized above adherence to the composer’s wishes. Tanner sang Radamès’s music extremely well, but the foremost achievement of his performance was his credible depiction of Radamès as a man whom both Aida and Amneris could love.

O terra, addio: soprano Leah Crocetto (left) and tenor Carl Tanner as Radamès (right) in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, September 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Soprano Leah Crocetto, who returns to Kennedy Center in March 2018 to sing Elisabetta in WNO’s production of Verdi’s Don Carlo, was an Aida whose experience in the rôle in the San Francisco première of Francesca Zambello’s production was apparent in every musical and dramatic detail of her performance. The first Aida, Antonietta Anastasi-Pozzoni, was acclaimed in Milan for her portrayal of Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust but transitioned in the years after Aida’s troubled Cairo première to singing mezzo-soprano rôles, making it impossible for modern Verdians to surmise precisely how her voice sounded. Aida was sung in the opera’s first European production at La Scala, considered by Verdi to be the true première, by Teresa Stolz, a versatile singer who was denied the honor of creating the rôle in the Egyptian première by musical politics and for whom Verdi also wrote the soprano solos in his Messa da Requiem. Though she reintroduced Leonora to the public in the first performances of Verdi’s revision of La forza del destino, Stolz also had extensive and much-lauded bel canto credentials. Her refined singing in San Francisco Opera’s 2015 production of Verdi’s Luisa Miller affirmed Crocetto to be an artist worthy of Stolz’s legacy, and her Aida for Washington National Opera was a noteworthy personal and professional success.

Making her first entrance in Act One, Crocetto moved gracefully but deliberately, from the start establishing Aida as a woman of royal lineage subjected to the profound shame of servitude. Joining the trio with Amneris and Radamès, she sang ‘Ohimè! di guerra fremere l’atroce grido io sento’ urgently, her soaring top As and fortissimo top B rousing but unexaggerated extensions of the line. Aida’s aside of ‘Mio padre!’ when it is learned that Amonasro was the leader of the invading Ethiopians was delivered by Crocetto with special emphasis, her character daring to envision her freedom restored. She voiced ‘Per chi piango?’ with dignity, lofting her top C over the ensemble with technical finesse. The challenges of ‘Ritorna vincitor!’ were overcome with lavish assurance. The soprano’s slashing top B♭ crowned an incendiary account of ‘L’insana parola, o Numi, sperdete!’ Crocetto encapsulated the essence of Aida’s anguish with her wrenching ‘I sacri nomi di padre...d’amante.’ Impressive as her full-throttle singing was, it was her ravishingly hushed voicing of ‘Numi, pietà, del mio soffrir!’ that was most memorable.

The dramatic magnitude of Crocetto’s ‘Ritorna vincitor!’ was redoubled in Aida’s Act Two duet with Amneris. Voicing ‘Felice esser poss’io lungi dal suol natio’ mesmerizingly, the soprano projected Aida’s misery and trepidation across the footlights without distorting the musical line. Cresting first on a top B♭ and then on a brilliant fortissimo top C, she gave ‘Che mai dicesti! misera!’ and the agitated ‘Ah! pietà!...che più mi resta?’ wealths of expressivity. The voices of many Aidas are lost in the tumult of the Triumphal Scene, but Crocetto was always audible—and always heard with pleasure. Her exclamation of ‘Che veggo!... Egli?... Mio padre!’ was a poignantly private moment in one of opera’s most opulent public scenes. Verdi’s assault on the soprano’s upper register in the final minutes of Act Two is unrelenting, but the indefatigable consistency of Crocetto’s high notes prevailed.

Celeste Aida: soprano Leah Crocetto in the title rôle of Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, September 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Deceived by Amneris’s false report that Radamès fell in battle but learning that he survived only to lose him to Pharaoh’s proclamation that Amneris’s hand in marriage is to be his reward for valor, Aida’s churning emotions are vented in her solo scene in Act Three. Crocetto phrased ‘Qui Radamès verrà!’ with dramatic uncertainty, Aida’s anxiety about her arranged meeting with Radamès evident in the soprano’s meticulous management of Verdi’s shifts in dynamics. The romanza ‘O patria mia’ is one of opera’s most familiar arias and for many opera lovers it is a test upon which an Aida’s merit depends. Crocetto sang the romanza’s opening passages with total concentration, and the words were the source of propulsion in her rapt account of the cantabile ‘O fresche valli dolce.’ Rogister’s slow tempo forced her to break the line climbing to the top C in order to take a breath, but she instinctively recovered her phrasing as she descended from the well-sustained C. Immersed in the drama, she did not await applause but uttered ‘Ciel! mio padre!’ to startling effect, spurring the audience to feel Aida’s surprise at finding Amonasro intruding upon her reverie. In their duet, Crocetto’s Aida sang ‘Deh! fate, o Numi, che per noi ritorni’ meaningfully and countered her father’s accusations with a pained but sublime ‘Padre!...a costoro...schiava non sono.’ Questioning Radamès with Amonasro’s exhortations in her heart, her ‘Nè d’Amneris paventi il vindice furor?’ was surprisingly confrontational, but the unstoppable tide of Aida’s love for Radamès flooded Crocetto’s singing of ‘Fuggiam gli ardori inospiti di queste lande ignude.’

Slowly revealing her presence to Radamès in the final scene of Act Four, Crocetto’s Aida pronounced ‘Son io’ delicately, the words clearly intended solely for her beloved’s ears. She mastered the tricky writing in ‘Vedi? di morte l’angelo radiante a noi s’appressa,’ transitioning the mood of the scene from one of despondency to one of transfiguration. Crocetto and Tanner performed ‘O terra, addio’ like one singer with two voices, emphasizing the catharsis of their characters’ deaths. Alternately humbling herself before Amneris, scrutinizing her conflicting loves for Radamès and her homeland, or weathering her father’s denunciation, Aida never enjoys true happiness during the course of the opera, and she takes control of her life only by choosing to end it. Crocetto’s performance provided great happiness, however. When sung and acted so compellingly, Aida, too, has her revenge on her oppressors.

As in all of Verdi’s late operas, the real marvel of Aida is its juxtaposition of intimate emotions with storytelling on the grandest of scales, and that grandeur is in the music and the ways in which individual sentiments and universal themes are intertwined. Aida does not need camels and endless parades of shendyt-clad supernumeraries. Aida needs great voices and a thoughtful setting in which they can sing this amazing music, and Washington National Opera’s Aida gave Verdi and those who love his operas a rare opportunity to savor those needs being outstandingly satisfied.

Bravi, tutti: (from left to right) bass Soloman Howard as il Re d’Egitto, baritone Gordon Hawkins as Amonasro, tenor Carl Tanner as Radamès, conductor Evan Rogister, chorus master Steven Gathman, soprano Leah Crocetto as Aida, and mezzo-soprano Marina Prudenskaya as Amneris in Washington National Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, 10 September 2017
[Photo by the author]

Apologies to the artists for the poor quality of the curtain-call photographs.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Il sogno di Scipione, K. 126—Stuart Jackson (Scipione), Klara Ek (Costanza), Soraya Mafi (Fortuna), Krystian Adam (Publio), Robert Murray (Emilio), Chiara Skerath (Licenza); The Choir and Orchestra of Classical Opera; Ian Page, conductor [Recorded in the Church of St. Augustine, Kilburn, London, UK, 16 – 19 October 2016; Signum Classics SIGCD499; 2 CDs, 108:14; Available from Classical Opera, Signum Records, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

What a music lovers’ paradise the Alpine oasis of Salzburg must have seemed in 1771. Beneath its imposing Eleventh-Century hilltop Schloss, Salzburg had grown from its Roman roots as an important center of salt mining to the archiepiscopal seat of some of Europe’s most well-connected prelates, the rulers of the independent Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg. Exercising both clerical and secular authority from the Middle Ages until the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, Salzburg’s Prince-Archbishops cultivated a cosmopolitan court that by the middle of the Eighteenth Century was housed in a town that boasted of Baroque opulence uncommon north of the Dolomites. It was for the Salzburg court that the violinist, pedagogue, and composer Leopold Mozart left his native Augsburg, another of the Holy Roman Empire’s self-sufficient Prince-Archbishoprics, in 1743. Thirteen years later, on 27 January 1756, Mozart and his wife welcomed their final child, a son christened as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus, whom the proud father later famously deemed ‘the miracle which God let be born in Salzburg.’

By December 1771, Salzburg was distinguished by a flourishing musical society that, in addition to the fifteen-year-old Mozart, his father, and his twenty-year-old sister, included Johann Michael Haydn, younger—and artistically worthy—brother of the famous Franz Joseph Haydn. Published in the year of Wolfgang’s birth, the elder Mozart’s tome on violin technique, still an invaluable source of information for scholars of historically-accurate performance practices, had advanced acknowledgement of Leopold’s standing as a master of the instrument throughout Europe. It was in this setting that the adolescent Mozart’s Il sogno di Scipione sprang to life. Planned as an homage to the reign of Prince-Archbishop Sigismund von Schrattenbach, an enlightened patron friendly to the Mozarts, performance of the azione teatrale was hindered by the Prince-Archbishop’s untimely death. As history recounts, the younger Mozart’s professional relationship with von Schrattenbach’s successor to the archiepiscopal throne, Hieronymus von Colloredo, was anything but cordial, but it began with a celebratory performance of a brief excerpt from Il sogno di Scipione that concluded with an adaptation of Licenza’s aria specially revised to flatter the new Prince-Archbishop—an auspicious inauguration of what proved to be a contentious association.

Ultimately, Il sogno di Scipione is not known to have been performed in the form in which Mozart originally set Pietro Metastasio’s libretto until 1979, in which year it was staged in the city for which it was written with a cast who also recorded the score in studio. Featuring an ensemble of renowned Mozarteans including Peter Schreier, Lucia Popp, Edita Gruberová, and Edith Mathis under the direction of Leopold Hager, Scipione’s first recorded outing remains an enjoyable performance that plausibly conjures the musical environment of Eighteenth-Century Salzburg. This new recording from Signum Classics, masterfully produced and engineered by Andrew Mellor, writes an engaging new chapter in Il sogno di Scipione’s history with a cast of singers competitive with the finest Mozarteans of previous generations and music making of timeless excellence.

There are a number of clever names among today’s musical ensembles, many of which are largely meaningless. ‘What’s in a name?’ Shakespeare’s Juliet opines, both articulating a fateful query with implications that she and her Romeo are never able to wholly transcend and succinctly expressing one of humanity’s gnawing conundrums: is the value of a thing meaningfully affected by the name by which it is identified? A ‘royal philharmonic’ might be addressed as such without being regal in bearing or patronage or truly being a friend of music, but there could be no more aptly descriptive or well-deserved name for the ensemble that provides the musical foundation for this recording of Il sogno di Scipione than Classical Opera. In this score, Mozart’s compositional style remains a work in progress, the orchestral and vocal writing reminiscent more of the operas of late-career Hasse and Mysliveček than of Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte. Already a shrewd musical innovator at the age of fifteen, Mozart nevertheless wrote music that highlights the limited philosophical and psychological nuances of Metastasio’s words, old-fashioned even in 1771. [Mozart would return to a Metastasio libretto two decades later in La clemenza di Tito, one of his most emotionally profound works for the stage.]

Classical Opera’s founder and Artistic Director Ian Page again proves as skilled and sagacious an interpreter of Mozart’s music as the first seventeen years of the Twenty-First Century have seen—as Leopold Mozart might have surmised, a musical talent gifted by providence to the new millennium. Page’s leadership of this recording exhibits the crucial understanding that Il sogno di Scipione is neither a conventional Classical opera seria like Mysliveček’s Il gran Tamerlano, a direct contemporary of Scipione, nor a seminal work of the significance of Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Il sogno di Scipione is an important step in Mozart’s development as a composer of secular vocal music and an enjoyable, often sophisticated work in its own right, however, and Page’s management of this performance of the score allows the listener to hear the music as Mozart would have expected it to sound. Serious artist though he was from an astonishingly young age, irreverence was a vital aspect of Mozart’s character, and not even his most solemn music lacks joy. Page’s conducting, the choristers’ vibrant singing of ‘Germe di cento eroi’ and ‘Cento volte con lieto sembiante,’ and the orchestra’s flawlessly-articulated playing exude not only the humor that Mozart wove into the score but an unmistakable elation at the opportunity to recreate this invigorating work. Whether their instruments are voices, violins, or batons, too many artists seemingly fail to appreciate that performing on stage or in studio is a privilege. Page and Classical Opera do not take for granted that Il sogno di Scipione is a piece that modern listeners want to hear: rather, they offer today’s listeners a performance of Il sogno di Scipione that must be heard, both by lovers of Mozart’s music and by those who simply enjoy splendid performances of good music.

The top calibre of the vocal talent assembled for this recorded performance of Il sogno di Scipione is apparent in every bar of secco recitative, enlivened in this performance by the continuo playing of harpsichordist Christopher Bucknall, cellist Luise Buchberger, and double bassist Cecelia Bruggemeyer. Traversing Mozart’s musical paths under the guidance of Page and the continuo, the singers make the recitatives genuine conversations among the work’s historical and allegorical characters. To both the revision of Licenza’s aria ‘Ah, perchè cercar degg’io’ that was likely performed in celebration of the 1772 coronation of Prince-Archbishop von Colloredo and the original, more elaborate version of the aria soprano Chiara Skerath brings technical accomplishment worthy of the music and ably-projected, appealing tone. Her account of the aria and its introductory recitative constitutes a true narrative. Similarly, tenors Robert Murray and Krystian Adam sing superbly as Emilio and Publio. Murray delivers Emilio’s aria ‘Voi colaggiù ridete’ with virtuosity and vigor, the stylistic panache and attractiveness of his vocalism recalling the Mozart singing of Léopold Simoneau. Adam’s performances of Publio’s demanding arias ‘Se vuoi che te raccolgano’ and ‘Quercia annosa su l’erte pendici’ impress with technical finesse and tonal focus that is unimpeded by Mozart’s divisions.

As the dueling Fortuna and Costanza, sopranos Soraya Mafi and Klara Ek meet the challenges of their music with assurance and persuasiveness: weighing the merits of their competing cases would be a Herculean task for even the most savvy Scipione! Mafi delivers Fortuna’s aria ‘Lieve sono al par del vento’ with ideal vocal amplitude, conveying both the literal and figurative meanings of the text. The deftness of her bravura singing lends Fortuna credibility as the bringer of earthly pleasures, her vocalism always a pleasure to hear. Mafi’s interpretation of ‘A chi serena io miro’ is no less intelligent, and her silvery, dexterous vocalism is still finer. Ek offers a sparkling reading of Costanza’s ‘Ciglio che al sol si gira’ in which ornamentation—the composer’s and the soprano’s—serves a clearly-defined dramatic purpose. Like Mafi, Ek is even more effective in her character’s second aria. The unaffected brilliance of her singing of ‘Biancheggia in mar lo scoglio’ imparts the absolute sincerity of Costanza’s mission, depicted by Mozart with purity of form that is perceptible in Ek’s performance. Both singers occasionally venture higher in cadenzas than is wholly comfortable, but these risks are products of the ladies’ immersion in the arguments they are charged with presenting. Their voices are sufficiently contrasted to enable immediate identification, and two instruments could hardly have been better matched for these rôles, in the casting of which Mozart would surely have wanted equals like Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni or Giulia Grisi and Giuditta Pasta. History does not permit certainty about the identities of the singers by whom Mozart may have intended Fortuna and Costanza to have been sung, but he could not have failed to have been pleased by Mafi and Ek.

Tenor Stuart Jackson was the excellent Soliman in Classical Opera’s standard-setting recording of Mozart’s Zaide, and he is here a fantastic interpreter of the title rôle in Il sogno di Scipione. Such are the difficulties of the consul’s music that his dream can easily become a nightmare for listeners, but Jackson sings so ably, adroitly, and affably that this Sogno is a consistent delight. In Scipione’s first aria, ‘Risolver non osa,’ Jackson makes the character’s indecision and ambivalence palpable, his unflinching negotiation of the fiorature suggesting the rapid-fire interplay of ideas in Scipione’s mind. Then, he delivers ‘Dì’ che sei l’arbitra del mondo intero’ with an apparent sense of a responsible ruler’s integrity. Complementing his soft-grained timbre with a lightness of touch that lends his portrayal of Scipione a vein of tenderness and vulnerability, the tenor sings sweetly even when taxed by Mozart’s vocal gymnastics. In his intrepid ascents into the vocal stratosphere at and beyond top C, Jackson perpetuates the tradition of haute-contre singing prevalent in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century, producing the highest notes with a handsomely-wielded voix mixte. In its wonderful way, Jackson’s Scipione is as memorable as Ernst Haefliger’s Belmonte, Stuart Burrows’s Don Ottavio, and Fritz Wunderlich’s Tamino; in other words, Mozart singing of the highest quality.

Not every note committed to parchment by Mozart bears the unmistakable mark of genius, but his least-inspired music possesses a level of craftsmanship superior to that of the efforts of all but the most talented of his contemporaries. What, in part, makes Ian Page’s and Classical Opera’s performances and recordings of Mozart’s pre-Idomeneo theatrical works invaluable is the avoidance of well-meaning but ill-advised endeavors to inflate the music’s importance. Left to its own devices, genius reveals itself without meddlesome provocation, and this is a performance of Il sogno di Scipione in which the budding genius of the score’s adolescent composer is all the more evident for being celebrated without exaggeration. The equilibrium that was so prized an aspect of Classicism, both in antiquity and in Eighteenth-Century music, but is so often missing in today’s opera performances is the hallmark of this Sogno di Scipione and of Classical Opera’s work in general. That, dear Juliet, is what’s in this name.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Otello—Russell Thomas (Otello), Mary Elizabeth Williams (Desdemona), Nmon Ford (Iago), Ben Bliss (Cassio), Arthur Woodley (Lodovico), Kathryn Leemhuis (Emilia), Miles Mykkanen (Roderigo), Norman Garrett (Montano), Sean Mayer (Un araldo); Atlanta Symphony Chorus and Orchestra; Robert Spano, conductor [Atlanta Symphony Hall, Atlanta, Georgia, USA; Saturday, 7 October 2017]

In the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, notions of farewell and retirement in the Performing Arts have become increasingly farcical. The invaluable lesson of an important artist like Dame Janet Baker bidding the stage adieu whilst still at the height of her abilities is seldom heeded. Rather, stages groan beneath the dead weight of egos too bloated to appreciate that their legacies are better served by memories of great performances than by careers prolonged by performances that the most forgiving admirers prefer to forget. After the completion and première of Aida in 1871, Giuseppe Verdi felt that the time for his final bow had come, his three decades of prominence in the repertories of Europe’s opera houses having advanced the evolution of Italian opera as markedly as Monteverdi’s work had done two centuries earlier. Aida was the work of an artist still in command of the finest of his faculties, but Verdi justifiably felt that he had earned a quiet retirement. Keen to avoid overstaying his welcome in the world’s opera houses, the composer retreated to the relative peace of his villa near Le Roncole, the town of his birth. Like the green-eyed monster that prowls in the play’s drama, it was into the idyllic environment of Verdi’s self-imposed artistic exile that William Shakespeare’s Othello soon intruded, the treachery in this instance not Iago’s but that of publisher Giulio Ricordi and composer and librettist Arrigo Boito.

Perhaps fittingly for a Shakespearean subject, the course of the gestation of Verdi’s and Boito’s Otello was anything but smooth. Verdi’s history with Boito was complicated, the latter having been allied with a cabal that, in supporting the composer and conductor Franco Faccio, who later conducted the first productions of the revised Simon Boccanegra, the Milan adaptation of Don Carlos, and Otello, mocked and criticized Verdi as an exemplar of an operatic ancien régime. The alleged-to-be-passé composer was sufficiently pleased with Boito’s work on the revision of the Simon Boccanegra libretto, likely undertaken at least in part as a gauge of Verdi’s capacity for magnanimity, to overlook the affront to his artistic integrity, and, clandestinely securing the assistance of Verdi’s wife, Ricordi managed over a period of several years to slowly and diplomatically steer the non-committal composer’s interest towards a setting of Othello with Boito as librettist. Adamant that, like Rossini in the decades of his life following the completion of Guillaume Tell, he was content to observe rather than participate in the mayhem of opera, Verdi worked intermittently on his score for Otello, periods of prolonged inactivity alternating with bouts of creative concentration. The work that emerged from these toils proved to be worth the wait: receiving its world première at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala on 5 February 1887, Otello was immediately and almost universally acclaimed as a triumph for both Verdi and Boito. 130 years after the opera’s first performance, Otello retains still-astonishing musical modernity and dramatic credibility, qualities that exploded from the stage in Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance of the opera. This traversal of the score gloriously elucidated the perceptiveness with which Verdi explored the appalling ugliness of humanity via music of timeless, time-halting beauty.

Scored for an orchestra of near-Wagnerian proportions, Otello makes grueling demands on every instrument included in its orchestrations—demands that were met in this performance with exceptional precision and fervor by the Atlanta Symphony musicians. From the first bars of the opera’s frenetic Allegro agitato opening, the ASO instrumentalists were involved in the performance in a way that opera house pit orchestras rarely are, the sea of musicians standing in for the tempestuous waters that imperil Otello’s vessel in the opera’s first scene. Ranging from diaphanous to demonstratively virtuosic, Verdi’s string writing was realized with accuracy and ardor by the ASO strings, with the cellists playing with special mastery, and the brasses, woodwinds, and percussion lifted their parts off of the pages of the score, bringing the music to life as characters in rather than accompaniment to the drama.

Giving voice to the populace who witness the fatal trajectory of Otello’s jealousy, the ASO choristers sang robustly under the direction of Norman Mackenzie, not least in the cacophonous Uragano that begins Act One and the Cypriots’ terrified monitoring of the storm. In this performance, the cries of ‘È salvo!’ wielded a cathartic impact similar to the penetration of newly-created light into the chaos of the first movement of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung. ‘Si calma la bufera’ and ‘Fuoco di gioia!’ were delivered with gusto, and, in more jovial mood, the choir’s singing of ‘Bevi, bevi con me’ crackled with excitement. In Act Two, the ladies began ‘Dove guardi splendono raggi’ with sweetness perpetuated by the choir’s voicing of ‘T’offriamo il giglio soave stel,’ and the boundless energy of the exclamations of ‘Viva! Evviva!’ in Act Three markedly raised the dramatic temperature of the scene. Mistakes are virtually inevitable in live performances and are an integral component of the excitement of opera, but the paucity of flaws in this performance, remarkable in a work as complex as Otello, was evidence of meticulous rehearsal that deprived the drama of none of its potent immediacy. This was neither a passive nor a routine traversal of the score: lofted by Verdi’s music, the spirit of Shakespeare’s tragedy filled Symphony Hall even when none of the principals was singing.

A much-discussed zenith of the 2017 Aspen Music Festival was a performance of Hector Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust in which ASO’s Music Director Robert Spano confirmed his credentials as one of today’s conductors most skilled at fully unleashing the dramatic potential of a theatrical score in a concert setting. The intelligence apparent in Spano’s conducting of La damnation de Faust inhabited every aspect of his leadership of this performance of Otello. Conducting a work like Otello requires far more than setting tempi and managing ensembles: Verdi’s music demands the presence of a tactician, not merely a timekeeper. In Spano, Otello had a musical strategist worthy of the legacy of his Atlanta predecessor Robert Shaw. The internal logic of Spano’s shaping of the public scenes recalled Toscanini’s pacing of the 1947 NBC Symphony broadcast performance, and the intimacy of the private moments among characters was achieved with conversational directness rather than exaggeration. By closely following Verdi’s indicated tempi and dynamics, Spano revealed the score’s still-fascinating novelty. Under his baton, Iago’s menace resounded in the orchestra, and passages of repose trembled with Desdemona’s innocence and Otello’s suspicion. Most impressively, Spano conducted each of Otello’s four acts with understanding of both its unique needs and its place in the opera’s broader structure. Eliminating the task of coordinating podium, pit, and stage in a fully-staged production makes Otello slightly less daunting—but only very slightly. Spano presided over a performance of Otello in which, without costumes and scenery, the drama sprang to life in the listener’s imagination.

Few studio recordings and even fewer staged productions of Otello have benefited from casting as uniformly strong as that of ASO’s performance. As the Araldo in Act Three, bass Sean Mayer voiced ‘La vedetta del porto ha segnalato’ commandingly, compellingly establishing the atmosphere for the scenes that followed. Baritone Norman Garrett enunciated Montano’s ‘È l’alato Leon!’ and ‘Capitano, v’attende la fazione ai baluardi’ in Act One and the character’s critical interjections in Act Four with conviction and steady, muscular tone. To Lodovico’s ‘Il Doge ed il Senato salutano l’eroe trionfatore di Cipro’ in Act Three and febrile lines in Act Four bass Arthur Woodley brought rugged musical solidity and dramatic commitment. Tenor Miles Mykkanen was a Roderigo who was noteworthy for the right reasons, foremost among which was the vocal opulence epitomized by his singing of ‘Il rostro piomba su quello scoglio!’ in Act One. The young tenor’s voice moved through Roderigo’s music with assurance and lent the duplicitous character a reptilian but engagingly virile charisma.

Though her lines are comparatively few, Emilia is considerably more important to Otello’s plot than a conventional operatic confidante like Ines in Il trovatore. Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Leemhuis portrayed Emilia with sincerity, ably conveying both the lady’s concern and compassion for Desdemona and her increasing fear of her husband Iago and his manipulation. In the expansive ensemble at the core of Act Two, Leemhuis sang ‘Il tuo nefando livor m’è noto’ handsomely and with clear comprehension of Emilia’s pivotal if involuntary rôle in the fatal trap being laid by Iago. Her vocalism again shone in ensemble in Act Three, the singer’s clear diction deepening her characterization. Leemhuis’s Emilia matured as a dramatic entity in Act Four, her query of ‘Era più calmo?’ already bearing the weight of impending tragedy. Responding to the sounds of Desdemona’s struggle with Otello, this Emilia quickly subdued panic in a desperate effort to rescue her mistress from unjust accusation and retribution. Denouncing her own husband’s maleficent handiwork, she uttered ‘Iago, smentisci quel vile assassino’ with disgust, and her voicing of ‘Costui dalla mia man quel fazzoletto svelse a viva forza’ throbbed with sadness and anger. Emilia can easily be marginalized by the powerhouse confrontations of Desdemona, Otello, and Iago, but Leemhuis’s Emilia was a woman who would not be sidelined despite moments in which her best efforts at projecting her lovely tones into the auditorium fell victim to the orchestral din.

As Cassio, the unwitting pawn in Iago’s relentless pursuit of fatal checkmate against Otello, tenor Ben Bliss sang appealingly, lending the character legitimacy as a potential suitor for Desdemona. Performances often fail to recognize that, in order to be a meaningful cog in Iago’s cruel machinations, Cassio must be accepted by both Otello and audiences as a viable rival for Desdemona’s love: unless the rôle is sung as romantically as Bliss sang it in this performance, Cassio can seem like a shallow, rather stupid boy in a very dangerous man’s world. Bliss’s Cassio was an eager narrator in the opera’s opening pages, relaying ‘Or la folgor lo svela’ and ‘Essa infiora questo lido’ with a troubadour’s communicativeness. Cassio’s combustive temper began to simmer in the tenor’s heated articulation of ‘Questa del pampino verace manna,’ contrasting tellingly with his dulcetly-phrased ‘Come un armonico liuto oscillo.’ Bliss effortlessly braved the repeated top As, his upper register hearteningly unforced. In the scene with Iago at the start of Act Two, this Cassio acquiesced all too willingly to Iago’s suggestion that he seek Desdemona’s intercession in reversing his demotion. In Act Three, the singer’s accounts of ‘Questo nome d’onor suona ancor vano per me’ and ‘Miracolo vago dell’aspo e dell’ago’ were both nuanced and tonally mellifluous, and Bliss sang Cassio’s lines in Act Four with urgency and horror. In Otello’s 130-year performance history, a number of eminent lyric tenors have sung Cassio in the early years of their careers. His sterling performance in ASO’s Otello promised that Bliss with continue the tradition of Anton Dermota, Giuseppe Zampieri, John Alexander, and Giuliano Ciannella.

Sì, pel ciel marmoreo giuro: (from left to right) tenor Russell Thomas as Otello, baritone Nmon Ford as Iago, and Maestro Robert Spano in Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, 7 October 2017
[Photo by Jeff Roffman, © by Atlanta Symphony Orchestra]

Iago is one of the most irredeemably evil figures in any of Shakespeare’s plays, and Verdi set his scheming to music that exudes inimical bravado. An Iago must choose whether he will be insinuating, openly hostile, or some combination of these traits, with the most imaginative of Iagos finding a balance between baseness and charm. Freed in ASO’s concert presentation from the necessity of projecting Iago’s motivations to the last row of an opera house, Panama-born baritone Nmon Ford focused on mining the riches in Verdi’s music, and his success was sensational. That a genuine Verdi baritone is one of opera’s most elusive creatures is an observation that few operaphiles who love Verdi’s music will dispute, but Ford’s credentials in rôles ranging from Nabucco to Rodrigo in Don Carlo qualify him as a viable candidate for that rare distinction. His Iago in ASO’s Otello thrilled with vocal authority and dramatic instinct, displaying the legitimacy of the singer’s assumption of Verdi repertory.

A viper is slain upon sight unless he arrays himself in comeliness that belies his venom, and Ford’s Iago slithered into striking distance of Otello by feigning absolute honesty and reliability. Asserting his presence in Act One, Ford sang ‘È infranto l’artimon!’ and ‘Suvvia, fa senno, aspetta l’opra del tempo’ suggestively, cloaking Iago’s agenda in uncomplicated amicability. His sly ‘Ei favella già con troppo bollor’ was followed by understated but unmistakably meaningful accounts of ‘Inaffia l’ugola!’ and ‘Chi all’esca ha morso,’ his easy trill and soaring top As further verifying his suitability for this rôle.

The true spectrum of Iago’s depravity began to show in Ford’s singing of ‘Non ti crucciar’ and the exchange with Cassio at the beginning of Act Two. The difficult triplets and high tessitura of ‘Credo in un Dio crudel’ were handily conquered by Ford, directing the listener’s attention to his pointed recitation of the text. The baritone’s ‘Ciò m’accora’ at the start of the scene with Otello was the turning point in his portrayal of Iago: here, certain destruction of his enemy came into view, and the transition from planning to execution was palpable in Ford’s performance. He sang ‘Cassio, nel primi dì del vostro amor’ with the requisite persuasiveness but mostly eschewed the unmusical snarling that many Iagos deploy in this scene. ‘È un’idra fosca’ bristled with hatred, the trill an eruption of loathing. In the ensuing ensemble, this Iago growled ‘Dammi quel vel!’ to Emilia with imperiousness that could not be refused. The self-satisfaction of his ‘Con questi fili tramerò la prova del peccato d’amor’ was staggering, and Ford sang both ‘Pace, signor’ to the raging Otello and ‘Divina grazia difendimi!’ with mocking smugness. Iago’s Andantino invention of Cassio’s dream, ‘Era la notte, Cassio dormia,’ and the caustic ‘Non v’alzate ancor!’ were intoned with deceptive grace. Thanks in no small part to Ford’s bold singing, the performance of the duet with Otello at the end of Act Two was rewarded with a standing ovation at the interval.

Luring first Cassio and then Otello headlong into his snare at the start of Act Three, Ford’s Iago delighted in the effectiveness of his wiles. After singing ‘Questa è una ragna dove il tuo cuor casca’ with unbridled viciousness, he fired the sadistic cry of ‘Ecco il Leone!’ into the auditorium like a missile armed with an emotional warhead: its detonation reduced Otello’s and Desdemona’s lives to rubble. Iago’s contributions to Act Four consist only of a fleeting chance for gloating, a brief denial of his wrongdoing, and flight, but Ford made even those moments count, running from the stage with a demonic smirk. His was as fully-acted an Iago as might be found in any staged production, but, more importantly, his was a fully-sung Iago, as well. Had Verdi wanted Iago’s villainy enacted in pitchless ranting, he would have written the rôle accordingly, but he wrote music for the character, a fact obscured by some performances of the part. Ford’s portrayal was a welcome reminder of how exhilarating Iago’s music can when it is sung as the score dictates—and as well as Ford sang it.

In recent years, the links among the bel canto of Verdi’s youth and his Shakespearean heroines in Otello and Falstaff have largely been severed, but hearing very different Desdemonas of past generations—Rosanna Carteri, Montserrat Caballé, Renata Scotto, and Dame Joan Sutherland, for instance—reminds listeners that the distance from Verdi’s early, bel canto heroines to Desdemona is shorter than it might superficially seem to be. In Carteri’s Desdemona, there are elements of Adina’s inherent goodness in L’elisir d’amore; in Caballé’s, reminiscences of Elisabetta’s foreboding in Roberto Devereux; in Scotto’s, hints of Lucia’s girlish innocence; and in Sutherland’s, echoes of the wronged wife in Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda. It is not insignificant that soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams, Atlanta’s Desdemona, was the stylish Elisabetta in Seattle Opera’s 2016 production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. Desdemona’s music possesses none of Elisabetta’s fiery bravura writing, but the English queen is in some ways as much a victim of her circumstances as Desdemona is condemned to be. Resplendently beautiful in a shimmering gown, Williams’s Desdemona was an angelic vision, a figure of feminine grace and purity out of her element in Otello’s gritty, bellicose world.

Greeting Otello in Act One with a radiant ‘Mio superbo guerrier!’ in which Verdi’s ‘sempre dolce’ marking was meticulously heeded, Williams placed the top A♭ with delicacy and certain intonation. In the love duet, she sang exquisitely, phrasing with romantic feeling and maintaining a hypnotic aura of nocturnal ecstasy. Williams answered the serenade that Desdemona received from the chorus in Act Two with a beguiling ‘Splende il cielo, danza l’aura’ that began an extended musical paragraph punctuated by a golden top B. Asking Otello to restore Cassio’s rank and good standing, Williams’s Desdemona voiced ‘D’un uom che geme sotto il tuo disdegno la preghiera ti porto’ with mesmerizing simplicity, making the emotional shifts of ‘Perchè torbida suona la voce tua?’ and ‘Se inconscia, contro te, sposo, ho peccato’ all the more moving, the singer’s well-supported lower register providing a sonorous foundation for her dolcissimo top ♭.

Williams rose magnificently to the challenges of Act Three, depicting Desdemona as a woman for whom the loss of dignity is as much death as the loss of life. She caressed the words of ‘Dio ti giocondi, o sposo dell’alma mia sovrano’ and ‘Tu di me ti fai gioco,’ seeking beyond his slashing anger and bitterness the familiar devotion and tenderness of her beloved husband. The soprano’s top C was an impassioned peal of anguish. Williams sang ‘E un di sul mio sorriso fioria la speme e il bacio’ eloquently, descending from the pair of top C♭s with irreproachable musicality.

From her first pained utterance of ‘Mi parea,’ it was clear that this Desdemona sensed and even welcomed the approach of death in Act Four. Williams performed the widely-known Canzon del Salice with vocal control that recalled Teresa Żylis-Gara’s singing of the music, the consonants of ‘Piangea cantando nell’erma landa’ used to propel the line. Williams was the rare Desdemona who sounded as though her sympathy was genuine when she sighed ‘Povera Barbara!’ The sudden deluge of her ‘Ah! Emilia, Emilia, addio,’ a passage not unlike Violetta’s ‘Amami, Alfredo’ in Act Two of La traviata, was heartbreaking. She proceeded cautiously through the succession of Es at the bottom of the stave with which Desdemona begins ‘Ave Maria, piena di grazia,’ generally avoiding chest register here and elsewhere, and the dividend was a serene top A ♭. Her ‘Chi è là?’ as Otello figuratively crept into her chamber was a rhetorical question: the character Williams created knew who was there and why he had come. There was vehemence but no rancor in this Desdemona’s final protestation of her innocence. Resigned to death at the hands of the man she loved, there was still adoration in her voice when she absolved Otello of responsibility for her murder. The sensuality in Williams’s portrayal gave Desdemona added psychological depth, rendering her a woman who chose to die in preservation of her blamelessness rather than a hapless victim. Like Ford’s Iago, though, it was the quality of Williams’s vocalism, utterly right for the music, that made her Desdemona memorable.

Già nella notte densa s’estingue ogni clamor: soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams as Desdemona (left) and tenor Russell Thomas as Otello (right) in Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, 7 October 2017
[Photo by Jeff Roffman, © by Atlanta Symphony Orchestra]

Paralleling the singular significance of Shakespeare’s titular moor of Venice in Elizabethan theatre, the title rôle in Verdi’s Otello is virtually sui generis in Italian opera. The name part in Boito’s seldom-performed Nerone and Puccini’s Johnson and Calàf are similarly daunting assignments for tenors, but Otello is his own game. With this performance, Atlanta resident Russell Thomas added this epic rôle to his repertory, expanding an already remarkable versatility that extends from the Verdi and Puccini canons to the title rôle in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, wearing whose crown he débuted at the 2017 Salzburger Festspiele. Having successfully sung other Verdi tenor rôles does not necessarily qualify a singer to take on Otello [hearing Thomas as Malcolm in Adrian Noble’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Metropolitan Opera in 2007 caused this listener to think him qualified to sing virtually any rôle he chooses to learn], but Thomas is a shrewd artist who makes repertory decisions based upon aptitude and readiness. That he was ready to sing Otello was declared emphatically by this performance.

The singer who approaches the progression of top G♯s, As, and B in Otello’s punishingly declamatory entrance music, ‘Esultate! L’orgoglio musulmano sepolto è in mar,’ without some degree of trepidation is either worryingly over-confident or the reincarnation of Leo Slezak. Tamagno, Martinelli, Vinay, and Vickers cannot have sung their first Otellos without anxiety, but whatever nerves Thomas felt were calmed by his obvious comfort with the music. The appearance of effortlessness that characterized Mario del Monaco’s singing of Otello’s entrance was revived in Thomas’s performance. Throughout the evening, his singing was notable for its blend of unaffected lyricism and stunning natural power. Returning to halt the tumult instigated by Iago, Thomas hurled ‘Abbasso le spade!’ into the fracas. Otello’s disappointment glowed in the tenor’s voicing of ‘Cassio, come obliasti te stesso a tal segno?’ Some Otellos are brutes who seem incapable of the lightness of touch necessary to win the heart of a woman like Desdemona, but Thomas’s Otello wooed Williams’s Desdemona anew in their blissful singing of ‘Già nella notte densa s’estingue ogni clamor.’ His gossamer top A ♭ and sotto voce singing were amorous weapons in this martial but sensitive Otello’s arsenal.

In the Act Two scene in which Iago planted the seeds that eventually germinated into a noxious weed of despair and death, Thomas voiced ‘Pel cielo, tu sei l’eco dei detti miei’ grandiloquently, the top B ringing out rousingly. Then, approached by his doting bride, his exclamations of ‘Non ora’ in response to her arguments on Cassio’s behalf were stinging—and more effective for being sung rather than shouted. The cruelty of his commands of ‘Mi lascia!’ seemed to wound this Otello as greatly as they hurt and confused Desdemona, and Thomas phrased ‘Forse perchè gl’inganni d’arguto amor non tendo’ with wrenching doubt and distress. Trading top B♭s with Williams, he dominated the ensemble. With the two words ‘Desdemona rea!’ the demeanor of Thomas’s Otello metamorphosed from vulnerability to an obsessive quest for vengeance. The zeal of his singing of ‘Ora e per sempre addio sante memorie’ was invigorating, and he and Ford collaborated in an account of ‘Sì, pel ciel marmoreo giuro!’ that satisfied as both great Verdi singing and riveting theatre.

In Act Three, Thomas’s portrayal of Otello was a keen case study of a deceived man whose bullying was born of insecurity. The mercilessness of his denunciation of Desdemona was startling, especially as it was so handsomely vocalized. Both ‘Grazie, madonna, datemi la vostra eburnea mano’ and ‘Giura e ti danna! were delivered with unstinting intensity that spilled over into Thomas’s tormented, stimulating ‘Dio! mi potevi scagliar tutti i mali della miseria.’ This performance of Otello’s despondent soliloquy, distinguished by one of the most dependable top Cs heard in this music since the death of Franco Bonisolli, was worthy of Shakespeare. There was a sickening delight in Thomas’s singing of ‘Questa giustizia tua mi piace,’ and his irascible ‘Fuggirmi io sol non so!’ left no doubt of the character’s resolve to kill his wife.

Otello’s predatory entrance in Act Four could hardly be more different from the stentorian trumpeting of his introduction in Act One, and Thomas further highlighted the disparity by suffusing his singing of Otello’s first lines in Act Four with maniacal determination. He brought an eery tranquility to ‘Diceste questa sera le vostre preci?’ and ‘Pensa ai tuoi peccati,’ invoking an honest concern for the sanctity of Desdemona’s soul. The divergent sentiments of ‘Bada allo spergiuero’ and the haunting ‘Calma come la tomba’ drew from Thomas singing of heightened textual specificity. ‘E il ciel non ha più fulmini?’ was sung with greater finesse than many Otellos can or care to manage, particularly on the rise to top A. Here voiced with superb legato, the similarities between Otello’s ‘Niun mi tema s’anco armato mi vede’ and Edgardo’s final scene in Donizetti’sLucia di Lammermoor were unusually discernible. Revisiting the words and music of the love duet in Act One, Thomas sighed ‘Un bacio ancora’ with a voice drained of life. Dramatically, experience in the rôle in staged productions will undoubtedly refine Thomas’s interpretation of Otello, but his inaugural effort impressively transcended its setting, offering the audience a noble characterization that allowed the listener to forget the formal attire, score, and music stand. Musically, Thomas needs only to sing the rôle as he sang it in this performance to be remembered as one of history’s great Otellos.

Otello is an opera that is not always successful in concert, and some of its pitfalls were not entirely circumvented in ASO’s performance. Soloists’ voices suffer less when battling an orchestra in a pit and an opera company’s smaller chorus, for instance, and staging can elucidate the workings of Iago’s cunning. There were passing moments in this performance in which its Otello’s aural impact was marginally diminished, but Otello’s dramatic might was never lessened. All of the advantages of performing Grand Opera in concert were achieved in this Otello, however. The sole priority of the performance was faithful service to Verdi’s genius, and that service was rendered on a monumental scale. Thank you, Verdi, for sacrificing years of your well-earned retirement to the composition of a score that inspired—and deserves—a performance such as this.

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Alcina, HWV 34—Angela Meade (Alcina), Elizabeth DeShong (Ruggiero), Ying Fang (Morgana), Daniela Mack (Bradamante), Rexford Tester (Oronte), Michael Adams (Melisso); Washington National Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Jane Glover, conductor [Anne Bogart, Director; Neil Patel, Set Designer; James Schuette, Costume Designer; Christopher Akerlind, Lighting Designer; Barney O’Hanlon, Choreographer; David C. Zimmerman, Hair and Makeup Designer; Washington National Opera, Eisenhower Theater, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC, USA; Saturday, 4 November 2017]

1735 was a remarkable year in the history of London’s Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The year began with the first production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Ariodante, a splendid setting of a story drawn from Ludovico Ariosto’s then-widely-known epic Orlando furioso, a source of inspiration for composers during and beyond the Eighteenth Century. Three months later, on 16 April, Covent Garden witnessed the première of another Händel adaptation of a subject derived from Orlando furioso, that of the sorceress Alcina and her ill-fated dalliance with the knight Ruggiero. Written for an illustrious cast that included soprano Anna Maria Strada del Pò in the title rôle, castrato Giovanni Carestini as Ruggiero, and tenor John Beard as Oronte, Alcina was liberally adapted from a libretto, now attributed by some musicologists to Antonio Fanzaglia, used seven years earlier by Riccardo Broschi, brother of the celebrated castrato Farinelli. Broschi ignited the words with bursts of bravura fireworks, but Händel gave the story psychological depth that transcended (and continues to transcend) the plot’s pseudo-Medieval pageantry. Since the dawn of the revival of interest in Händel’s operas in the second half of the Twentieth Century, a number of renowned sopranos have sung the title rôle in Alcina with varying degrees of success, but it was the soprano who was perhaps the least-obvious Händelian among them who contributed most thrillingly to the reversal of Alcina’s fortunes: Dame Joan Sutherland. It was in response to her now-legendary 1960 portrayal of Alcina in their city’s Teatro La Fenice that the Venetians awarded Sutherland the epithet La Stupenda, and, though she did not enjoy opportunities to return to her frequently, Alcina remained in her repertory for more than two decades. Sixty years after Sutherland’s first performances of Alcina, a new production by Washington National Opera brings a stupendous soprano who is in many ways the best-qualified successor to Sutherland to Kennedy Center for her own inaugural interpretation of Händel’s tempestuous heroine. The casting of Angela Meade in the title rôle may not have been the sole raison d’être for WNO’s staging of Alcina, but her performance fully demonstrated why, 282 years after it was first heard in London, Alcina remains a vital, engaging work of musical and dramatic ingenuity.

Like most of his operas, Alcina was largely forgotten by the time of Händel’s death in 1759, and the titular amorous conjurer would wait nearly two centuries until a pioneering Leipzig production in 1928 to again cast her spells. Less fantastical in scope than Francesca Caccini’s 1625 La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola di Alcina and Broschi’s L’isola di Alcina, premièred in Rome in 1728, Händel’s Alcina has nonetheless fallen victim in recent years to misguided direction that emphasized the absurdities rather than the still-relevant emotional conflicts in the story. Handsomely evoked by James Schuette’s attractive but not always flattering costume designs, the glowing jewel tones for Alcina and Morgana sharply offset by the drabness of Ruggiero’s and Bradamante’s fatigues, a vague but unmistakably modern locale stood in for the sorceresses’ mythical island in Anne Bogart’s WNO staging of Alcina. A practiced denizen of the theatre with wide-ranging credentials, Bogart’s work is characterized by an obvious dedication to finding inspiration within a piece rather than imposing prefabricated concepts upon it. Under her direction, her introduction to Washington National Opera, charisma was at the core of Alcina’s enchantment: psychological trickery was considerably more treacherous than threats of physical danger, and the performance was most effective when the singers were allowed to connect with the audience via Händel’s music without contrivance or affectation.

The play of Christopher Akerlind’s straightforward lighting on Neil Patel’s spartan sets and David C. Zimmerman’s delightfully uncomplicated hair and makeup designs heightened the contrast between Alcina’s and Ruggiero’s societies that was a principal feature of Bogart’s production, lending Alcina and Morgana an ethereal glamor, reminiscent of the era of Greta Garbo, that was at odds with the militaristic coarseness of the intruders on their island. Only Bradamante, disguising herself as her own brother Ricciardo in order to pursue her wandering betrothed but ultimately clothed in pure white as she reclaimed her rightful identity, seemed capable of inhabiting both worlds. With sequences devised to suit the gifts of the celebrated Marie Sallé, dance played an important part in Alcina at Covent Garden in 1735, and Barney O’Hanlon’s choreography brought movement to the Eisenhower Theater stage that honored this tradition without impeding the opera’s dramatic progress. Notably, this Alcina was uncommonly successful in presenting a cogent linear narrative, mostly avoiding any suggestion of the inert processions of arias in costume that weaken some performances of Händel’s operas. Eliminating the rôle of the boy Oberto, whose search for his missing father on Alcina’s island is dramatically superfluous despite Händel having given him lovely music, and substituting a two-part structure with the split logically placed after Alcina’s ‘Ah! mio cor! schernito sei!’ for Händel’s original three-act design, Bogart’s direction worked in tandem with her colleagues’ efforts to nurture an Alcina that was unafraid of humor but never sought to provoke laughter at the expense of Händel’s impeccably-crafted music.

Gli spettatori ad un matrimonio: (from left to right): soprano Angela Meade in the title rôle, mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as Ruggiero, baritone Michael Adams as Melisso, mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack as Bradamante, and soprano Ying Fang in Washington National Opera’s production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina, November 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Their ranks augmented by the inclusion of harpsichord and theorbo, respectively—and masterfully—played by Michael Baitzer and Richard Stone, the musicians of the Washington National Opera Orchestra exhibited undeniable absorption of the benefit of their occasional proximity in their Kennedy Center home to historically-informed practitioners like Lafayette Opera. A renowned interpreter of Baroque repertory, conductor and WNO débutante Jane Glover further advanced the production’s period-appropriate authenticity, judging tempi with comprehensive knowledge of Händel’s music and generally responding sympathetically to the singers’ needs. In comparison with the leadership of WNO conductors such as Philippe Auguin and the late Heinz Fricke, Glover’s conducting style is unorthodox, but Alcina is unlike Madama Butterfly and Die Walküre. Like Auguin and Fricke, though, Glover was immersed in the music at hand, and the orchestra reacted accordingly, delivering Händel’s score as authoritatively under Glover’s supervision as they have played music by Puccini and Wagner under Auguin’s and Fricke’s batons. Alcina’s crackling Overture was here a fitting preface to both the opera and the performance, its dance rhythms sharply defined by Glover’s beat, and the bits of Händel’s music for Madame Sallé that were retained were nimbly played. Trained by Steven Gathman, the reduced forces of the WNO Chorus sang their numbers vividly, no less involved with conveying the emotions of their music than the principals. Representing the natural and bestial mutations of Alcina’s enemies and discarded lovers, the choristers individually returning to normalcy as the magic that bound them was destroyed in the opera’s final scene came perilously close to mocking the reawakening of the children transformed into gingerbread by the Knusperhexe in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. In reality, it was Glover who brought continuo, orchestra, and chorus to life. In this performance, she was as passionate and persuasive an advocate as Alcina has known in the ninety years since the score’s introduction to the modern age.

Ruggiero’s tutor Melisso, as much a mentor in arms as a moral guide in this production, was sung with suavity and bravado by baritone Michael Adams, a WNO Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist whose technical finesse is matched by the fine quality of the voice. An imposingly masculine, assertive presence whenever he was on stage, Adams’s Melisso was equal parts confidant, mediator, and catalyst. The singer established the character’s pivotal rôle in the drama with his clear, confident manner in recitatives in Act One despite blocking that put him in awkward poses and had him incessantly walking in circles, flailing his arms, and mussing his hair, and his singing of Melisso’s sole aria, ‘Pensa a chi geme d’amor piagata,’ was both stylish and sensitive, accurate in both rhythm and intonation. Adams’s mastery of the production’s stagecraft was as complete as his comfort with the music was natural, and he revealed Melisso to be unexpectedly three-dimensional and himself to be a singer of ebullient charm and inviolable musicality.

Singing Oronte, Morgana’s paramour, WNO Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program alumnus Rexford Tester brought to his music a reedy tenor of timbre and texture virtually ideal for the music. The number of his collaborations with Händel indicates that John Beard was Hanoverian England’s foremost tenor, and the music that the composer created for him leaves no doubt about the quality of his voice. Not unlike Monteverdi’s writing for the hateful Nerone, Händel gave the scheming Oronte music that surely pleased Beard. As sung by Tester, Oronte’s music cannot have failed to please the Kennedy Center audience, as well. The young tenor’s account of the aria ‘Semplicetto! a donna credi?’ was distinguished by evenly-produced tone and undaunted negotiations of fiorature. Oronte’s aria ‘Tra speme e timore’ was lost to editorial prerogative, but Tester launched Part Two with a virtuosic traversal of ‘È un folle, è un vil affetto.’ It can be argued that the bel canto aria for tenor was born with Händel’s aria for Oronte in Act Three [Part Two in WNO’s production], ‘Un momento di contento dolce rende a un fido amante.’ More than a century before Donizetti wrote L’elisir d’amore, Händel perfected the formula that produced Nemorino’s ‘Quanto è bella, quanto è cara’ and ‘Una furtiva lagrima,’ and Tester’s performance of ‘Un momento di contento’ recalled the singing of tenors like Luigi Alva and Nicola Monti, singers who moved effortlessly between Baroque and bel canto repertories. Tester’s crisp vocalism gave Oronte added integrity, making the self-serving character uncommonly deserving of the musical riches with which Händel endowed him.

Una fidanzata in travesti: mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack as Bradamante in Washington National Opera’s production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina, November 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera

Argentine-born mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack is rapidly garnering recognition as one of her generation’s most talented and versatile singers. Blessed with beauty of voice and appearance, she is poised to achieve a level of stardom rare for opera singers in the years since the death of Luciano Pavarotti. If a mention of Pavarotti suggests some measure of sacrificing artistry in the pursuit of celebrity, the suggestion does not apply to Mack, whose reputation is founded upon the spirit, preparedness, and vocal opulence of her performances. Her portrayal of Bradamante in WNO’s Alcina provided abundant evidence of her boundless aptitude for lifting music and words off of the page and projecting them to audiences with singing of tremendous immediacy. Bradamante’s despair and desperation were apparent from Mack’s first entrance, and her encounter with the amorous Morgana further troubled the young woman’s mission to rescue Ruggiero from Alcina’s clutches. Mack delivered the aria ‘È gelosia’ with easy handling of the music’s difficulties and tasteful ornamentation. Similarly, her command of the bravura effects in the magnificent aria ‘Vorrei vendicarmi del perfido cor’ was astounding, and she impressed all the more by approaching the divisions not as vehicles for vocal showmanship but as organic components of Bradamante’s struggle to reclaim her lover’s affection. The apex of Mack’s characterization was her performance of ‘All’alma fedel l’amore placato,’ which poured from her with the awing inevitability of a waterfall. In the trio with Alcina and Ruggiero, Mack blended her voice with that of her Ruggiero sensually, rejoicing in her hard-fought triumph but continuing to guard against Alcina’s duplicity. Still, the most touching moment in Mack’s performance and the emotional dénouement of the production was a single knowing glance that Bradamante cast upon the vanquished Alcina: even whilst consumed by loathing for her rival’s villainy, Mack’s Bradamante felt the crippling pain of a fellow woman’s heartbreak. With acting as appropriate to the rôle as her singing was to the music, Mack gave this Alcina its conscience.

La bella sorella: soprano Ying Fang as Morgana in Washington National Opera’s production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina, November 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Similar in her petite stature and sparkling timbre to the inimitable Lily Pons, Chinese soprano Ying Fang depicted Alcina’s sister Morgana with singing of gossamer but never insubstantial beauty. She sang her Andante entrance aria, ‘O s’apre il riso, o parla, o tace,’ with a light touch, highlighting the character’s playfulness. A good-natured girl in love with the idea of being in love more than a calculating vixen who derived pleasure from hurting others, Fang’s Morgana was as much a victim of Alcina’s infatuation with Ruggiero as Alcina herself. In WNO’s production, ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’ was sung by Morgana as Händel intended rather than being reassigned to Alcina, and Fang sang the aria dazzlingly, her ascents above the stave unfailingly brought off with dizzying aplomb. Her coloratura singing was wonderful, but the simplicity of her voicing of ‘Ama, sospira, ma non t’offende,’ sung with the excellent violinist Michelle Kim on stage as though performing the aria as an entertainment for Alcina after the manner of Iopas’s ‘O blonde Cérès’ in Berlioz’s Les troyens [later having the horn players on stage during Ruggiero’s ‘Stà nell’Ircana’ made less sense], was hypnotic. Duetting with the ravishing cello obligato, Fang voiced ‘Credete al mio dolore, luci tiranne, e care!’ exquisitely: only a deaf Oronte could have failed to have been moved by her singing. Wielding vocalism of crystalline purity and technical prowess allied with disarmingly ingratiating stage presence, it is only because her colleagues were so capable that Fang did not completely steal the show.

Due donne ed il loro guerriero: (from left to right) soprano Angela Meade in the title rôle and mezzo-sopranos Elizabeth DeShong and Daniela Mack as Ruggiero and Bradamante in Washington National Opera’s production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina, November 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong returned to the rôle of Ruggiero, which she first sang with Wolf Trap Opera in 2008, with a decade of experience in an extensive repertory to her credit. Earlier in 2017, she partnered Sondra Radvanovsky as Adalgisa in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of Bellini’s Norma, and she joins Angela Meade later in the 2017 – 2018 Season as Arsace in the Metropolitan Opera’s much-anticipated revival of Rossini’s Semiramide. Ruggiero might seem an unlikely stop along the path from Adalgisa to Arsace, but DeShong’s performance proved that Händel’s music is a viable destination for any singer with the needed skillset and determination—qualities that DeShong possesses in spades. She sang both of Ruggiero’s arias in Händel’s Act One, ‘Di te mi rido, semplice stolto’ and ‘La bocca vaga quell’occhio nero,’ expertly, meeting both the musical and dramatic demands of the complex writing. The ariosi ‘Col celarvi a chi v’ama un momento’ and ‘Qual portento mi richiama la mia mente a rischiarar?’ received from DeShong performances of concentrated beauty, the voice most focused in the middle of the range, where the intonation of many singers of this repertory falter. Her reading of ‘Mi lusinga il dolce affetto con l’aspetto del mio bene’ was exemplary, the register shifts sometimes bringing to mind the fearless singing of Huguette Tourangeau, like DeShong an artist most appreciated in other repertory whose Händel performances were uniquely satisfying. This Ruggiero’s reassurance of Alcina of his undiminished fidelity was half-hearted at best, but there was nothing missing from the mezzo-soprano’s submersion in the part. ‘Verdi prati, selve amene’ is rightly one of Händel’s most familiar arias, now as it was in the Eighteenth Century, when Carestini’s singing of it drew praise from Charles Burney, and DeShong won the audience’s approbation with singing of beauty and expressivity. The challenges of ‘Stà nell’Ircana pietrosa tana’ were met unhesitatingly, and the rollicking martial air of the piece, undermined by a few missed notes from the horns, suited DeShong’s feisty persona perfectly. Like Mack, DeShong devoted close attention to maintaining balance with her colleagues in the trio with Alcina and Bradamante. DeShong’s articulations of fiorature were marginally imprecise in a few passages, but she never lost her vocal footing. She was a Ruggiero whose virtues made Alcina’s obsession and Bradamante’s devotion plausible, one who verified DeShong’s place in the annals of excellent Händel singing.

Ombre pallide non più: soprano Angela Meade in the title rôle in Washington National Opera’s production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina, November 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Already an electrifying exponent of the title rôle in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena whilst still a student at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, Angela Meade has built a career that encompasses acclaimed performances of some of the most difficult rôles in the soprano repertoire. She débuted at Washington National Opera in 2013 as Bellini’s Norma, a part to which she returns at New York’s Metropolitan Opera after the conclusion of WNO’s Alcina. Like Sutherland’s, Meade’s is a larger sound than audiences are accustomed to hearing in performances of Händel’s music, but Alcina’s is not a demure, ‘small’ personality. There was audible—and welcome—restraint in Meade’s singing, but the extent to which she maintained fidelity to Händel’s score, eschewing the extravagant ornaments and cadenzas and interpolated top notes of which she is eminently capable, addressed any concerns about the voice’s aptness for Baroque rôles. She sang the Andante larghetto aria ‘Di’, cor mio, quanto t’amai’ with intensity and glistening trills, traits that also gave her account of ‘Sì: son quella, non più bella’ particular elegance. Meade was indeed a very sophisticated Alcina, truly a woman of the world rather than a backwater despot with a magic wand. Ending Part One in Bogart’s production, Meade unleashed a torrent of feeling in the inventive aria ‘Ah! mio cor! schernito sei!’ Händel here set Alcina apart from his other operatic heroines, shaping her musical profile with intervals and chromaticism as redolent of Lully’s Armide as of his own Cleopatra and Rodelinda, and Meade wrung the emotional sap out of every phrase of the music, distilling the surprisingly pungent tonalities into an elixir of intoxicating tragedy.

Surprised and stung by Ruggiero’s betrayal, Meade’s Alcina dug into the words of the accompagnato ‘Ah! Ruggiero crudel, tu non m’amasti!’ with unstinting force, and the soprano enunciated ‘Del pallido Acheronte spiriti abitatori’ not as a sort of Baroque mad scene but as a sudden awareness of blinding clarity. Sensing the twilight of the already-broken woman’s power, Meade voiced ‘Ombre pallide, lo so, mi udite’ with wrenching angst, her rage increasingly turned against herself. This was self-recrimination on a near-Wagnerian scale, echoed by Meade’s singing: in this performance, the music required nothing less. Alcina’s pair of arias in Händel’s Act Three are very different, and Meade sang ‘Ma quando tornerai di lacci avvinto il piè’ with a bitterness that rendered the sadness of ‘Mi restano le lagrime; direi dell’alma i voti’ extraordinarily touching. In the trio with Ruggiero and Bradamante, ‘Non è amor, nè gelosia,’ Meade hurled out Alcina’s lines with defiance, making a brave last stand before crumpling to the ground in defeat. Were this Alcina’s apologies and proposals of mercy sincere? There is no answer, but Meade inspired the listener to care enough to wonder. The histrionic pathos and formidable vocal solidity of her first Alcina offered mesmerizing glimpses of what Meade might achieve in music for a broad spectrum of opera’s long-suffering heroines: Gluck’s Armide, Mozart’s Elettra, Elisabetta in Verdi’s Don Carlo, the Kaiserin in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Cordelia in Reimann’s Lear, among many possibilities. What she achieved in Alcina’s music was, on Händel’s and her own terms, total success.

Händel’s operas may never be marketable in America. Whereas some later operas require the listener to turn up, settle into a seat, listen to pleasing tunes, laugh or cry as the situation dictates, and depart without any great expenditure of intellect, Händel’s operas ask the listener to follow sometimes long threads of recitative, believe that ladies with high voices portray men of virility and heroism, accept that halting the action to ponder emotional strife in ten-minute arias is inevitable, and embrace the unlikely as symbolic of reality. Among Händel’s operas, Alcina is neither the most dramatically cohesive nor the most musically inspired, but it is a score of emotional depth and artistic refinement that reward the modern listener willing to invest time, attention, and inquisitiveness when experiencing a performance. Like the score itself, Washington National Opera’s Alcina was not without problems, but it also was not without many moments of stirring, unforgettable music making. Curiosity may be fatal for felines, but, when it exposes them to singing such as this cast accomplished and this conductor facilitated, it can immeasurably alter the perceptions and gladden the hearts of open-minded opera lovers.

ARRIGO BOITO (1842 – 1918), STEPHANO DONAUDY (1879 – 1925), UMBERTO GIORDANO (1867 – 1948), RUGGERO LEONCAVALLO (1857 – 1919), PIETRO MASCAGNI (1863 – 1945), ANGELO MASCHERONI (1855 – 1905), AMILCARE PONCHIELLI (1834 – 1886), GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924), and LICINIO REFICE (1883 – 1954): Eternamente– The Verismo Album—Angela Gheorghiu (soprano); Joseph Calleja (tenor), Richard Novák (bass), Emmanuel von Oeyen (speaker); Pražský filharmonický sbor (Prague Philharmonic Choir); PKF – Prague Philharmonia; Emmanuel Villaume, conductor [Recorded in Smetana Hall, Municipal House, Prague, Czech Republic, on 22 – 24 November and 6, 7, 9, and 10 December 2016 (Gheorghiu) and in Temple Studios, Mistra, Malta, on 10 March 2017 (Calleja); Warner Classics0190295780241; 1 CD, 60:00; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

There is an inherent irony in the concept of verismo that not even the most ardent opera lover can deny. However powerfully it can manipulate listeners’ emotions, opera is not truly realistic: whether the music at hand is the sparse arioso of Monteverdi or the lush melodic effusion of Richard Strauss, ordinary people do not course through their daily lives in progressions of recitatives, arias, and ensembles. Still, there is a magnetism in opera that can only be attributed to connections among music, the artists who perform it, and the audiences who hear it.

The international career of Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu was catapulted from great promise to established stardom by such a connection: making her rôle début as Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata at London’s Royal Opera House in a 1994 production conducted by Sir Georg Solti, the young singer from Adjud refined the connection between Verdi’s suffering heroine and modern listeners. On stage and on disc, Gheorghiu has subsequently drawn audiences closer to music spanning a wide repertory. From the time of her Metropolitan Opera début as Mimì in La bohème on 4 December 1993 [her Musetta on that auspicious evening was Carol Neblett (1946 – 2017), to whose memory this review is dedicated] , the music of Puccini has figured prominently in Gheorghiu’s career, but the works of Puccini’s contemporaries have remained little-explored territory. With Eternamente, this long-anticipated Warner Classics release, Gheorghiu extends the mastery of her characterizations of Violetta and Mimì to the tempestuous heroines of verismo. Some degree of suspension of disbelief is perhaps required to take the passions of the music on this disc at face value, but appreciation of Gheorghiu’s singing, here wholly dedicated to the music’s dramatic impulses, requires no compromises.

Expertly supported by stylish playing by the PKF – Prague Philharmonia and idiomatic, mostly sympathetic conducting by Emmanuel Villaume, Gheorghiu is rightly the central focus of every selection on the disc, grasping the histrionic reigns with the authority of an operatic Sarah Bernhardt. Whether by circumstance, design, or a blend thereof, there is a vein of roughness in the soprano’s vocalism on this disc that lends urgency to her performances of these demanding pieces. Villaume is most effective when highlighting the lyricism that lurks in much of the music, but he is too savvy a musician to linger over moments of repose at the expense of momentum. He and Gheorghiu occasionally seem to disagree about the punctuation of musical paragraphs, perhaps a result of multiple takes in the recording process, but their collaboration benefits from these differences: in moments of discord, the antiseptic polish of the recording studio is overwhelmed by the thrillingly pungent aroma of theatrical greasepaint.

Eternamente’s opening sequence offers three excerpts from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, the score cited by many musicologists as the foundation upon which verismo was built. Prefaced by the Prague Philharmonic Choir’s glorious performance of the ‘Regina cœli,’ both immaculate of ensemble and wholly credible as the en masse effusion of a volatile Sicilian community, Gheorghiu’s account of Santuzza’s ‘Voi lo sapete, o mamma’ is equally defeated and defiant, the character exasperated and exhausted by her predicament. The tessitura of Santuzza’s music is not altogether comfortable for Gheorghiu, but she holds nothing back in her traversal of the romanza, launching the top As with abandon.

Those who supervised the making and release of this disc are to be praised for the candid disclosure of the fact that Gheorghiu’s and Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja’s vocals were not recorded in the same place or at the same time, a reality that in the cases of many other recordings has not been disclosed, however audible it may be. On the whole, there are few signs of Calleja’s contributions having been recorded separately and electronically melded with Gheorghiu’s singing in their performance of the exhilarating duet for Santuzza and Turiddu. Amazement resounds in Calleja’s voicing of ‘Tu qui, Santuzza,’ answered by the growing desperation evinced by Gheorghiu’s delivery of Santuzza’s lines. Calleja’s timbre and vocal amplitude are light for Turiddu, but the tenor capitalizes on the advantages of studio recording, successfully animating the character without forcing the voice. Even without the benefit of face-to-face interaction, Gheorghiu and Calleja compellingly enact the parlous contest between the ill-fated lovers.

Mascagni quipped that, the widespread popularity of Cavalleria rusticana having overshadowed his later, arguably better work, he was crowned before he was king. Though the progress of his own career was quite different from that of his colleague’s, Ruggero Leoncavallo might have expressed similar sentiments about the shadow cast by the popularity of his Pagliacci over the other high-quality scores that he produced. It is its rivalry with Puccini’s better-known setting that has prompted occasional interest in Leoncavallo’s La bohème during the past century, but Leoncavallo’s opera is both in some ways the more faithful adaptation of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de la bohème and a beautifully-crafted, touching work in its own right. Her singing of ‘Ed ora conoscetela’ on this disc imparts that Gheorghiu might prove to be an unusually persuasive advocate for Leoncavallo’s Mimì. The character’s resilience is apparent in this performance of her music, the singer’s sable timbre lending Mimì the world-weary grandeur of a Slavic heroine. Fleana’s ‘Tagliami! Abbruciami!’ from Leoncavallo’s seldom-performed Zingari also proves to be a good fit for Gheorghiu’s vocal estate: though the voice is no longer as pliant as it was when she charmed audiences as Adina in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, the darker colorations now at the singer’s command are employed with sagacity in these performances of Leoncavallo’s music.

The name part in Tosca and Magda in La rondine are Puccini rôles with which Gheorghiu is thoroughly acquainted, but she approaches these ladies’ arias that are included on Eternamente with laudable spontaneity. She sings Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’ fervently, her phrasing and ascent to the top B♭ confident and even coarse, intimating that the proximity of a man such as Scarpia taints her noble sentiments with vulgarity. Magda’s ‘Parigi! È la città dei desideri’ is delivered with special sensitivity, the nuances of the character’s dramatic profile clearly of personal significance to Gheorghiu. In both of these selections, the soprano exposes the dualities of the women she briefly portrays, delicacy and determination competing for dominance.

The exquisite ‘Spunta l’aurora pallida’ from Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele is forthrightly sung by Gheorghiu, her focused articulations of Margherita’s exhortations complemented by renowned bass Richard Novák’s impactful enunciation of the title character’s lines and more fine work by the Prague Philharmonic choristers. In Gheorghiu’s traversal of Stephana’s ‘No! se un pensier tortura’ from Umberto Giordano’s Siberia, the spirit of Rosina Storchio, the first Stephana, seems close at hand: Gheorghiu’s instinct for emoting through music is nowhere more skillfully deployed than in this music, in her performance of which suggestions of effort are transformed into expressions of the character’s complex, shifting emotions. Notes above the stave now require more calculated approaches than in past, but Gheorghiu artfully fuses vocal caution with dramatic abandon. Calleja is heard again—and again with total enjoyment—in the title character’s duet with Maddalena from Act Four of Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, ‘Vicino a te s’acqueta.’ Here, the effects of the voices having been recorded separately are more noticeable. Ecstatically greeting death with negotiations of punishing tessitura in tandem is more dependent than hurling insults upon precision of ensemble, and a marginal lack of frisson is perceptible. Nevertheless, this is high-octane singing by shrewd, stylish artists, and the spirit of the scene is emphatically imparted.

Several of the most intriguing minutes of Eternamente are devoted to a performance of the title character’s Shakespearean monologue ‘Suicidio! In questi fieri momenti’ from Act Four of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La gioconda. As in the music from Tosca and, to a slightly lesser extent, Andrea Chénier, the principal standard by which Gheorghiu’s navigation of the music is measured is Callas’s handling of the scene. In this context, however, the models that the Romanian soprano’s singing most readily brings to mind are those of Anita Corridori and Milka Stojanović, both uncommonly effective interpreters of Gioconda. Gheorghiu shares with Corridori a bluntness of attack that lends her portrayal raw power, but, like Stojanović, she rounds the sharp edges of her characterization with a tempering dose of decency. Musically, Gheorghiu traverses the scene with less effort than some very memorable Giocondas have expended, but this is a discernibly studio-bound reading, ever admirable but never remarkable.

The products of the excursions of masters of verismo into the realm of Art Song are infrequent destinations in singers’ recital journeys, making the inclusion of three songs, all performed here using tasteful orchestrations by Andrea Tudor, a notable novelty. Stefano Donaudy’s ‘O del mio amato ben’ is the vehicle for some of Gheorghiu’s most sincere and attractive singing on this disc, the melodic line spun with elegant phrasing and handsome tone. Though he is little remembered today, the ordained priest Refice scored a tremendous success with his opera Cecilia, premièred in Rome in 1934 with Claudia Muzio in the title rôle. It was whilst supervising rehearsals for a production of the opera mounted for Renata Tebaldi two decades later in Rio de Janeiro that Refice died, and Cecilia was later espoused by another celebrated mistress of verismo, Renata Scotto. Were she ever to have an opportunity to sing the title rôle in full, Gheorghiu would surely be a worthy heiress to the Cecilia mantle of Muzio, Tebaldi, and Scotto, and she here establishes herself as a puissant advocate for the composer’s music with her refined, reflective voicing of Refice’s song ‘Ombra di nube.’ It is from Angelo Mascheroni’s ‘Eternamente’ that this release takes its name, and Gheorghiu’s singing of the piece exudes an aura of heightened emotional engagement, aptly melodramatic but unexaggerated. Using the text as her blueprint, she builds an impressive musical edifice on the proper scale, the slow simmer of the vocal line brought to a boil by the soprano’s performance. The singing of Lieder has not been a cornerstone of Gheorghiu’s career to date, but her accounts of the songs on Eternamente are evidence of the broad compass of her interpretive gifts.

Some of the sopranos for whom Puccini, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Giordano, and their contemporaries wrote music were among the most renowned operatic personalities of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, and Angela Gheorghiu is unquestionably one of their best-qualified successors. The foremost practitioner of authentic verismo, the Italian soprano Magda Olivero, once remarked that ‘if one just sings, without putting in any heart or soul, it remains just beautiful singing, and not a soul that sings.’ The heart and soul of which Olivero spoke are the qualities that separate a true prima donna from the altre donne. They are also the qualities that have defined Angela Gheorghiu’s career. With Eternamente, she expands both her own and listeners’ sensibilities by venturing into neglected niches of verismo repertory. Propelled by an artist of Gheorghiu’s abilities, might not overlooked verismo scores prove just as deserving of rediscovery as the bevies of Baroque and bel canto works revived in recent years?

MARK ADAMO (born 1962): Becoming Santa Claus—Jennifer Rivera (Queen Sophine), Jonathan Blalock (Prince Claus), Matt Boehler (Donkey/Messenger), Hila Plitmann (Yan), Lucy Schaufer (Ib), Keith Jameson (Yab), Kevin Burdette (Ob); Members of the First United Methodist Church of Dallas Children’s Handbell Choir; The Dallas Opera Orchestra; Emmanuel Villaume, conductor [Recorded in performance at The Dallas Opera, The Winspear Opera House, AT&T Performing Arts Center, Dallas, Texas, USA, during December 2015; The Dallas Opera 888295497824 (DVD) / 888295497831 (Blu-ray); Available in DVD and Blu-ray and formats from CD Baby – WORLD PREMIÈRE RECORDING]

In their well-known song ‘Simple Gifts,’ the Shakers sing that ‘when we find ourselves in the place just right, ’twill be in the valley of love and delight.’ It is suggested that this ‘place just right’ is found via continual self-awareness and adjustment, turning one’s life to follow the meandering path of simplicity. This seems straightforward enough, but how complicated it is to be simple in the Twenty-First Century, when every variation of diversion—and perversion—is only a click, a swipe, or a verbal command away, not least in the season of tinsel and twinkling lights!

Too often, the holidays give directors and opera companies excuses to commit and perpetuate artistic atrocities like the plethora of confection-laden, stupidly saccharine performances of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. There are the heartless Nutcrackers and the progressions of Messiahs so dispiriting that the most ardent admirer of the music thinks that affection misplaced. Like so many aspects of contemporary life, the Arts have largely abandoned the contemplativeness of the holidays in pursuit of the coffers-filling commercialism, embracing the tinkles of coins in the till and ignoring the dormant wonder in the eyes of awed, challenged audiences. That The Dallas Opera upended this trend is surprising to no one familiar with the company’s initiatives and the integrity with which they are enacted, but the success of TDO’s world première of composer Mark Adamo’s Becoming Santa Claus must have stunned those for whom the holidays are defined by reluctant meetings with family, hours spent in queues in shopping malls, and meals with more calories than flavor.

Like Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, in which there are themes far darker than those explored in many productions, Becoming Santa Claus is not a pièce d’occasion to be performed only when the jingling of sleigh bells perforates the air. No, Becoming Santa Claus is not a festively-attired Ring des Nibelungen in which a department-store St. Nicholas and painted-snow North Pole stand in for Wotan and Walhalla, but Adamo produced a score in which the quest for individual purpose that is the soul of the story forms the foundation of the music’s structure. The development of thematic material in the music complements the interplay of ideas in the text, the musicality of the composer’s libretto meticulously matched with the poetry of his music. To listeners acquainted with Twenty-First-Century opera, the suggestion that a score is accessible to audiences lacking a high tolerance for tuneless droning implies an accusation of banality, but Adamo’s easily-absorbed idiom is sophisticated without demanding that the listener possess an above-average appetite for musical modernity. Both the vocal writing and the orchestrations in Becoming Santa Claus exude ingenuity, but the score’s complexities never mask the opera’s inherent simplicity. The operas of too few contemporary composers exhibit genuine affinity for writing for voices, and one of the greatest accomplishments of Becoming Santa Claus is the adroitness of Adamo’s vocal craftsmanship. Even when dizzyingly difficult, the angular vocal lines are singable and memorable—the hallmarks of effective opera whether composed by Mozart, Verdi, Gounod, Wagner, or Adamo.

In the world-première production preserved on this release, Adamo’s music and words burst into life in The Dallas Opera’s magnificent Winspear Opera House. Stage director and choreographer Paul Curran creates a world in which space is used with exactitude, his movements intrepidly danced by Kym Cartwright, Caradee Cline, Jason Fowler, Matt Holmes, Tom Klips, and Elise Lavallee. The claustrophobia of the opera’s critical emotional conflicts is made all the more gripping by the expansiveness of Curran’s direction, the principals’ individual isolation contrasting tellingly with the lavish brilliance of Gary McCann’s set and costume designs, evocatively illuminated by Paul Hackenmueller’s lighting. The magical transformation of the Winspear stage into a bustling environment in which the significance of moments of profound stillness is apparent is completed by Driscoll Otto’s imaginative projections. David Zimmerman’s wig and makeup designs balance creative uses of the singers as canvases upon which to paint portraits of the characters with practicality that minimizes impediments to motion and vocalism. Above all, the artisans assembled by TDO provided this inaugural production of Becoming Santa Claus with a pervasive atmosphere of open-hearted amazement that fosters the audience’s surrender to the nuances of the opera’s narrative.

Under the musical management of TDO Music Director Emmanuel Villaume, the performance of Becoming Santa Claus on this DVD is an inspiring and never coldly didactic traversal of a score that, as Händel said of his Messiah, was clearly intended to both entertain and enlighten. It is not a score without room for improvement: a few passages, especially those featuring the quartet of elves, could benefit from writing dedicated more to clear articulation of text—a few less words of which would perhaps also prove more effective—than to exploitation of the extremes of the singers’ ranges, and the opera’s dramatic momentum stalls in the final scene. A noted master of the operatic repertoire of his native France [following his début on the podium for Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in the 2004 - 2005 Season, Villaume’s engagements at The Metropolitan Opera have included performances of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Bizet’s Carmen, Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, and Massenet’s Manon and Thaïs], Villaume responds to the impressionistic aspects of Adamo’s shimmering tonalism with the same intelligence and energy that guided his leadership of TDO’s 1998 production of Gounod’s Faust. The virtuosic handling of Adamo’s music by TDO’s Orchestra is particularly apparent in Kirk Severtson’s and Brian Bentley’s respective playing of the celesta and harpsichord, the latter tuned a quarter-tone flat at the composer’s instruction, but all of the TDO musicians maintain a high level of achievement in their executions of their parts. The young ringers of the First United Methodist Church of Dallas Children’s Handbell Choir perform their task with charm. Collaborating with manifest camaraderie, TDO’s musical forces successfully recreate in sound the visual allure of the production.

Soprano Hila Plitmann as Yan, mezzo-soprano Lucy Schaufer as Ib, tenor Keith Jameson as Yab, and bass Kevin Burdette as Ob fearlessly deliver Adamo’s demanding music for the elves, their complete commitment to their rôles heightening the consequence of parts that might all too easily devolve into a collective cliché. Plitmann’s upper register emerges unscathed from the gauntlet of Adamo’s stratospheric writing, and Schaufer sings and acts with unerring musical and dramatic instincts. Yab’s and Ob’s music does not provide Jameson and Burdette with opportunities to reveal the finest elements of their considerable artistries, but their voices shine individually and in ensemble.

The presence in the dramatis personæ of Becoming Santa Claus of a singing messenger in the form of a donkey raises the specter of an operatic Shrek, but fears of that haunting are alleviated by the spiritedly human performance of the rôle by bass Matt Boehler. Like his colleagues in elven guise, Boehler faces music that tests his powers of intonational accuracy and projection across a broad compass. The part’s low center of vocal gravity is not ideal for Boehler, but the singer’s unflappable musicality and theatrical savvy triumph. Wholly avoiding barking and braying, Boehler utters his character’s messages with vitality and evenly-produced tone.

Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera brings to the rôle of Queen Sophine, Prince Claus’s mother and the figurehead of an oppressive social order, a well-trained, artfully-refined technique and credentials including acclaimed interpretations of an array of rôles in various styles. Imperious and imposing in this performance, she portrays Sophine as a flawed woman and a failing parent, a mother whose relationship with her child is affected by the shallowness of her own self-cognizance. The scion of an absent family, Sophine is the bridge between Claus and the duty to which he is bound, and she takes her responsibility as that link very seriously, to the detriment of her own identity. Of unmistakable importance is Adamo’s sympathetic music for the character, however: as in Verdi’s Rigoletto and Il trovatore, the struggling parent captured the composer’s heart. In Rivera’s performance, Sophine earns the observer’s affection, too. The chill of the queen’s persona is warmed by Rivera’s confidently beautiful singing, and her regal glamor gives way to a touching honesty, not as a near-miraculous metamorphosis but as total recognition of the maternal tenderness that defines her. Rivera reveals that the Sophine who terrorizes her court is a façade: beyond the insatiable pursuit of outward perfection is an overwhelmed, vulnerable woman grappling with the demands of raising a pubescent son.

At the core of TDO’s production of Becoming Santa Claus is boyishly handsome tenor Jonathan Blalock, whose portrayal of the adolescent Prince Claus is an understated tour de force. Vocally, the demands of the part are met with assurance, not least in the frequent flights above the stave, and Blalock enlivens Claus’s music with the same technical acumen that he deploys in Rossini’s writing for Conte Almaviva and Don Ramiro. Though he was an eleventh-hour replacement in this production, Blalock embodies his rôle with a naturalness that belies the opera’s fantastical concept. His Claus is the boy becoming Santa Claus, of course, but he is also a boy on the precipice of manhood, a relative of Saint-Exupéry’s petit prince who must find his own way of surviving in the world into which he was born. Endearingly convincing as a boy of thirteen, Blalock depicts Claus’s maturation as a palpable, sometimes painful transition. Even the timbre of his voice seems to undergo a shift from the bright patina of his early scenes to the burnished richness of the opera’s final quarter-hour. The character’s evolution from petulant selfishness to existential awareness is powerfully conveyed. Nevertheless, this is opera, and it is the voice that matters most. Blalock invigorates Claus with a voice kissed by starlight, here placed at the service of a characterization that is at once subtly perceptive and resoundingly uncomplicated.

Enjoyable as they can be, the world little needs new holiday spectacles of the Dickens and Disney varieties. The holidays should be a time of reflection, not of distraction, but bright lights and garish displays are more comfortably scrutinized than internal shadows. Without eschewing the technicolor pageantry of the season, Mark Adamo’s Becoming Santa Claus is essentially a very straightforward story. A boy destined to become a man of worldwide prominence must first grow into a man capable of understanding why the part that he plays is relevant. Presenting Adamo’s score with flair, finesse, and an omnipresent belief in the viability of modern opera, The Dallas Opera’s production of Becoming Santa Claus movingly affirms that, even for the most famous bringer of holiday joy, it is indeed a gift to be simple.

The little St. Nick: tenor Jonathan Blalock as Prince Claus in The Dallas Opera’s world-première production of Mark Adamo’s Becoming Santa Claus, December 2015
[Photo by Karen Almond Photography, © by The Dallas Opera]

Hear the Angel Voices—Carl Tanner, tenor; The Northwest Boychoir, The Northwest Sinfonia Choir; Northwest Sinfonia; Steven Mercurio, conductor [Recorded in Bastyr University Chapel, Seattle, Washington, USA, in March 2006; Timeless Music 17822 / Bounty Production 011301782229; 1 CD, 58:24; Available from Amazon (USA) and CD Baby]

In a time before crowdsourcing became necessary merely to advance a recording project beyond initial planning, record labels promoted and supported the artists on their rosters, a notion that must seem to today’s singers as mythical as dragons and unicorns. In that gilded age, not so long ago, recordings of holiday-themed music were virtually rites of passage for significant artists. The making of such recordings was an act of pandering to the masses, of course, but a bit of such pandering has ever been critical to the survival of the Performing Arts. Moreover, the predilections of the masses are not always embarrassingly plebeian. Surveying the history of recorded holiday music, which earnest collector, regardless of his faith, would willingly part with Richard Tucker’s cantorial recordings or Leontyne Price’s rightly legendary recital of Christmas music with Herbert von Karajan and the Wiener Philharmoniker?

Today’s lack of emphasis on preserving singers’ interpretations of holiday music old and new can likely be attributed equally to the financial challenges faced by Classical labels and the secularism prevalent in Twenty-First-Century society. Blame for the relative dearth of seasonal recordings by noteworthy artists of the current generation notwithstanding, the circumstances that yielded Hear the Angel Voices would be fortuitous in any era of recording history. Lifted in celebration of the Christmas season, the powerful voice of Virginia-born tenor Carl Tanner pours from this disc with inspiring candor. One of the few bonafide successors of Aureliano Pertile, Francesco Merli, Mario del Monaco, and Franco Corelli, Tanner is a Radamès and Calàf to the manner born who here leaves crooning to smaller voices and lesser artists. Even a generation ago, a disc of the quality of Hear the Angel Voices would have been heralded with full-page advertisements in pertinent publications and posters in brick-and-mortar music shops. Both the music industry and the way in which holidays are celebrated through music have changed, but great voices and great singing, rare as they are, remain comfortingly constant.

The backing that Tanner receives on Hear the Angel Voices from the choristers of Northwest Boychoir and Northwest Sinfonia Choir, the musicians of Northwest Sinfonia, and brilliant conductor Steven Mercurio rivals the best work of better-known ensembles on classic recordings of holiday music. The singing of the youngsters of Northwest Boychoir merits comparison with the efforts of their counterparts in Tölz and Vienna, and their adult colleagues sing no less admirably. Mercurio wields an extraordinary talent for making music of any style or vintage sound newly minted, and he guides the orchestra in performances in which the players’ instruments seem to sing in tandem with the tenor’s voice. The traditional carols that constitute the heart of Hear the Angel Voices—‘Joy to the World,’ the beguiling Schubert melody of ‘Mille cherubini in coro’ (a piece much loved by Luciano Pavarotti), ‘Adeste Fideles,’ ‘Silent Night,’ and ‘The First Noel’—are sung not with the formality of the opera house but with the fervor of a family church. Tanner addresses his utterances to the Christ child and those assembled in rejoicing rather than to the back row of a grand auditorium or the casual record buyer.

Acclaimed singers of every Fach include ‘O Holy Night,’ Adolphe Adam’s operatic ‘Cantique de Noël,’ in their holiday repertoires, but few of the most renowned among them sing the piece as well as Tanner sings it on this disc. In his performances of each of the selections included on Hear the Angel Voices, Tanner looks to the text for inspiration, focusing his interpretive choices on subtleties of the words. The grandeur of Adam’s music is an ideal vehicle for the tenor’s surging vocalism, but the lovely, more delicate ‘All is Well’ receives from him a reading no less eloquent. Tanner’s account of ‘Panis Angelicus’ from César Franck’s Opus 12 Mass, a setting of a text attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas, returns to this frequently-heard number the atmosphere of reverence with which its composer originally imbued it. This singer has considerable vocal amplitude at his command, but nowhere on Hear the Angel Voices does he substitute volume for emotional directness when expressing exultation.

Often credited to early Baroque composer Giulio Caccini, the first of the ‘Ave Maria’ settings included by Tanner on Hear the Angel Voices is actually the work of Twentieth-Century Russian composer Vladimir Vavilov. Joining a litany of accomplished artists who have recorded the piece, Tanner performs the song with an uplifting absence of affectation. The second ‘Ave Maria’ on the disc makes use of a melody woven by Charles Gounod into the gossamer textures of the C-major Prelude (BWV 846) from Book One of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Wohltemperirte Clavier, and Tanner follows the meandering vocal line with intensity that builds to an exhilarating climax. Unlike many singers, he never ignores the fact that Albert Hay Malotte’s dramatic treatment of ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ almost an operatic scena, is a heartfelt plea for deliverance from man’s evils. Here, too, the momentum of Tanner’s performance is thrilling.

Since it was first sung by Bing Crosby on his NBC radio show on 25 December 1941, Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ has become a staple of musical holiday celebrations throughout the world. In his voicing of the song, Tanner recaptures the wide-eyed wonder that Berlin felt as he composed the song during an unexpected California snowfall on New Year’s Day, 1940. The same sentimental authenticity emanates from Tanner’s voicing of ‘Little Drummer Boy,’ written for the Harry Simeone Chorale. Not to be confused with the number featured in A Charlie Brown Christmas, the song ‘Christmas Time is Here’ recorded by Tanner is the work of McLean, Virginia-based composer Katherine Chrishon. If the song was not crafted specially for Tanner, it might have been: his mastery of the demands of both music and text is authoritative.

Adapted from the Intermezzo of the composer’s incidental music for Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne, Georges Bizet’s ‘Agnus Dei’—a misnomer, really, as Bizet neither knew nor approved of the use of his tune—was first recorded in 1936 by Beniamino Gigli. Tanner’s traversal is laudably free of the bull-in-the-china-shop over-singing in which some tenors have indulged in this music, but there is nothing twee in Tanner’s approach. It is impossible to imagine Mel Tormé singing ‘Celeste Aida’ or ‘Nessun dorma,’ but Tanner sings Tormé’s signature holiday number ‘The Christmas Song’ delightfully, achieving complete comfort with the song on his own terms. Throughout Hear the Angel Voices, Tanner is in excellent voice, his upper register projected with an audible ease atypical for larger instruments. His seriousness is no less than it would be were he recording music by Verdi or Puccini, but every song on this disc is placed within a context of jubilation and abiding faith.

More than money and loyalty, perhaps what is most damagingly missing from today’s Performing Arts community is sincerity. When Richard Tucker recorded cantorial music, it was undoubtedly with the hope of selling records, but it was also with his experiences in the synagogues and Jewish congregations of metropolitan New York City filling his heart. Leontyne Price was surely pleased to earn a few dollars by recording ‘Sweet Little Jesus Boy,’ but who can question the legitimacy of the shame evinced by her singing of Christ’s humble birth? Like Tucker and Price, Carl Tanner is the steward of one of America’s important voices. With Hear the Angel Voices, he stands with them as one of America’s foremost voices of praise. It is regrettable that industry cynicism now deprives listeners of new recordings of holiday music by many of their favorite Classically-trained singers, but Hear the Angel Voices is all the more invaluable for being a lone light in a world darkened by greed.

JAKE HEGGIE (born 1961) and TERRENCE MCNALLY (born 1938): Great Scott—Joyce DiDonato (Arden Scott), Ailyn Pérez (Tatyana Bakst), Frederica von Stade (Winnie Flato), Nathan Gunn (Sid Taylor), Anthony Roth Costanzo (Roane Heckle), Kevin Burdette (Eric Gold, Ghost of Vittorio Bazzetti), Rodell Rosel (Anthony Candolino), Michael Mayes (Wendell Swann), Mark Hancock (Tommy Taylor), Manuel Palazzo (Amor); The Dallas Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Patrick Summers, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in performance at The Dallas Opera, The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Dallas, Texas, USA, on 30 October and 1, 4, and 7 November 2015; ERATO0190295940782; 2 CDs, 155:59; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers – WORLD PREMIÈRE RECORDING]

In a conversation that yielded the title posthumously given to what has become one of Thomas Wolfe’s most popular works, the journalist Ella Winter remarked to the North Carolina-born author, ‘Don’t you know you can’t go home again?’ The novel to which the title You Can’t Go Home Again was ultimately assigned tells of an author whose autobiographical fiction was uncomfortably and unflatteringly real for the neighbors who appear in the story, flimsily disguised. Only in optimistic cinematic epics do conquering heroes return home to universally appreciative welcomes: in the messy actualities of everyday life, few people achieve prominence in any arena without also garnering resentment. One of the greatest trials faced by an artist is that of remaining true to his own experience without betraying the confidences of his fellow journeyers; as Emily Dickinson wrote, to ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant.’ How does one return to discussing the weather with a friend whose life was unceremoniously put on display and then put aside?

A study of the complications of coming home is the crux of Jake Heggie’s and Terrence McNally’s opera Great Scott, premièred and recorded by The Dallas Opera in Autumn 2015. Universally acknowledged as one of the world’s most significant opera singers, Arden Scott returns to her hometown to star in a production of a long-neglected bel canto masterwork unearthed by her own musical sleuthing. Championed by the gregarious patroness of the local opera company, American Opera, Arden herself has found a protégée of sorts, the wily Tatyana. Still in the town she abandoned in pursuit of the notoriety she craves is Arden’s high-school sweetheart, now a single father and renowned architect. In the collisions of these personalities and the characters who surround them, Great Scott invites the audience to participate in the conspiratorial process of making opera whilst navigating the minefield of egos, insecurities, and vulnerabilities with minimal carnage.

McNally is right to contend in his informative, enjoyable, and predictably literary introductory essay that accompanies this CD release that Great Scott should not be classified as a comic opera. As he knows all too well from the research into the career of Maria Callas that shaped his 1995 play Master Class, singers’ lives are rarely comedies, no matter how funny episodes in them may be. The sacrifices made by singers in the pursuit of their careers are never to be played for laughs, especially by those who profit from artists’ loneliness, failed relationships, and missed family events. This, Canio might say, is the lesson of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci: Art is a deadly serious business transacted by people who sometimes can only pretend to be happy. The dichotomy between the humorous mishaps of the stage and the tragedies large and small of artists’ personal lives is the defining ethos of Great Scott. There is abundant comedy in McNally’s witty, often bawdy text, not least in the exchanges for Arden, Arts patron Winnie Flato, and Arden’s former flame, architect Sid Taylor. Arden’s interjection of ‘This shit is hard!’ in her rehearsal of the cadenza of Rosa Dolorosa’s aria and Sid’s correction of Arden’s compliment on his beautiful design for the town library [‘No, it’s fucking amazing!’] are two of the funniest lines in recent opera, but the sentiments that they express are far deeper than conversational humor. The greatest eloquence of McNally’s punctiliously-crafted libretto is its utter lack of pomposity. All of the players are given words that sound wholly right for the characters—and for the singers who portray them, for that matter. McNally has no need to resort to stretches of prose to advance the plot and outbursts of poetry to develop the characters: every person on stage speaks with an individual voice, and, as in any worthwhile opera production, the drama falls into place all around them.

From the mock-Rossinian crescendo of the opera’s rollicking Overture to the madcap Act One finale and the frenetic, touching, almost Mozartean frisson of Act Two, Heggie created a score in which traces of the raw emotions of Dead Man Walking, the quest for understanding of The End of the Affair, the wistfulness of Three Decembers, and the magniloquence of Moby-Dick are fused in a communicative cyclone that sweeps McNally’s words across the footlights. Heggie proves in his writing for the fictitious rediscovered Nineteenth-Century masterpiece at the center of McNally’s scenario to be a latter-day master of bel canto, but Great Scott emphatically is not a pastiche. Rather, the music is a remarkably clever chameleon with different colors for each twist of the plot. In the near-catastrophic rehearsal of Rosa Dolorosa, Figlia di Pompei that transpires in Act One, Heggie conjures the turbulent climate of a musical Noises Off, but there are moments of soothing tranquility in the eye of the storm. Arden’s articulations of self-doubt, her defense of young Tommy, and her awkward reunion with Sid are set to music of the unadorned expressivity expected of the composer of Pieces of 9/11.

Only someone who loves and respects the art form as completely as he understands it could depict the first night of a much-anticipated operatic production as vividly as Heggie does in Act Two of Great Scott. The continuity with which the transitions from Rosa Dolorosa’s action to backstage antics are managed is worthy of Shakespeare’s—and Britten’s—Midsummer Night’s Dream. Great Scott is a fantastically enjoyable opera turned inside out, but it is also a deeply affectionate paean to the people who make opera happen. Great Scott’s diva, the upstart scheming to replace her, the preening primo uomo, the exasperated conductor, and the long-suffering stage manager are all clichés to some extent, but, energized by McNally’s words, Heggie made them astonishingly genuine people: lovers, parents, rivals, friends. In the opera’s final scene, punctuated by Tommy’s return for a forgotten skateboard, Arden breathes the same air inhaled by the Marschallin in her final moments in Der Rosenkavalier. At peace with the past, embracing the present, and equally anxious and excited about the future, she sheds the artifice of Great Scott and fully, exultantly becomes simply Arden. Her transfiguration is accompanied by music of dazzling serenity, music via which Heggie reminds the listener that the greatest voices of opera are also voices that hush infants’ cries, comfort injured children, and whisper words of apology, acceptance, love, and farewell.

Supervising the circus of bringing opera to the stage is like second nature for conductor Patrick Summers, and his leadership of this performance of Great Scott both expands his reputation as a conductor of modern repertory and confirms that he shares Heggie’s appreciation for the genre and the brave souls who make singing it their lives’ work. Though the obvious benefits likely outweigh the difficulties, it nonetheless must be terrifying for a conductor to début the music of a living composer, especially one of Heggie’s abilities, but Summers has learned from performances of standard, time-tested repertory that the relevance of music of any vintage relies upon excitement, not excesses or excuses. The excitement that his conducting of Great Scott generates ultimately engulfs pit, stage, and audience. Particularly impressive is his response to audience laughter, with which he may have received assistance from the editing of the recording. So persistent and well-timed is the laughter on these discs that Heggie might have scored it as an instrument in the orchestra, and Summers paces the performance with great care for ensuring that not a word of the text is lost to the collective mirth. The contributions of TDO’s Chorus and Orchestra are almost miraculous: in Act One, for instance, it is possible to believe that the curtain was erroneously raised on a volatile private rehearsal, but the musicianship is unfailingly professional. Their tasks are made easier by the affable approachability of Heggie’s style, but rhythm and intonation are as important in Great Scott as in Rigoletto, Lohengrin, and Turandot. Great Scott is a demanding score despite its charms, and the irreproachable performances by Summers and TDO’s choral and orchestral forces invaluably aid the music in casting its spells.

Regrettably, the Amor of dancer Manuel Palazzo can only be imagined in the context of an audio recording, but the prominent part in Great Scott’s drama played by Mark Hancock’s Tommy Taylor, Sid’s young son, is wonderfully evident. Arden’s male colleagues in American Opera’s production of Rosa Dolorosa, Figlia di Pompei, Anthony Candolino [‘a high-strung singer with a boisterous personality and a top that he is eager to share with the world’] and Wendell Swann [‘a handsome man who wears his matinee idol title proudly and earns his Don Juan reputation daily’], are portrayed with spot-on realizations of their respective identities by tenor Rodell Rosel and baritone Michael Mayes. Both characters are distant relatives of the tenor in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, and these expert singing actors fill their lines with rousing tone and absolute credibility. Few denizens of the theatre could fail to relate to Anthony’s statement in Act Two that ‘no man over twenty should be asked to wear a toga,’ delivered by Rosel with deadpan comic skill. Wendell Swann could hardly be more different from convicted murderer Joseph De Rocher, the rôle in Heggie’s Dead Man Walking for his performances of which Mayes has received great praise, but his turn as the libertine singer is equally successful.

Doubling as conductor Eric Gold and the ghost of Rosa Dolorosa’s composer Vittorio Bazzetti, who appears to Arden as she contends with panic in her preparations to sing Rosa Dolorosa’s grueling music, bass Kevin Burdette is the vodka in this operatic cocktail: effortlessly blending into the ensemble, his sonorously-sung performance emerges with slyly intoxicating hilarity. An ingenious exponent of rôles such as Donizetti’s Dulcamara in L’elisir d’amore and Sulpice in La fille du régiment, Burdette possesses an exceptional talent for highlighting the intelligence and humanity in characters often portrayed by other singers as imbeciles. Maestro Gold is in no way moronic, and Heggie’s music provides Burdette with welcome opportunities to display the splendid caliber of his voice. Similarly versatile, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is an artist seemingly capable of singing any repertory with unimpeachable authority, and his detailed, demonstrative depiction of the stage manager Roane Heckle—a name worthy of a Dickens novel—in Great Scott is an example of his best work. Like any stage manager worth his salt, Roane veritably earns a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star during the preparation and première of American Opera’s production of Rosa Dolorosa, Figlia di Pompei, and Costanzo’s singing imparts the character’s manic predicament without even momentarily lapsing into hectoring. Feisty, flirtatious, and genuinely funny, Costanzo is a perfect foil for Burdette.

It is indicative of the effectiveness of Ailyn Pérez’s embodiment of ‘young, talented, fiercely ambitious soprano from Eastern Europe’ Tatyana Bakst that, throughout much of the opera, she inspires a gnawing craving for Tatyana and Arden—or anyone with pugilistic skills superior to Tatyana’s—to come to blows in the fashion of Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni. Wielding a voluptuous timbre and a tremendous top D, Pérez’s Tatyana is a vixen with as many virtues as vices. As the story progresses, the relentlessness with which Tatyana vamps her way along the path to stardom gradually hints that she is a woman with her own demons. Her singing of the national anthem at the Super Bowl is to a certain degree a Pyrrhic victory—a contest without a prize. Though Heggie’s music for the character is daunting, Tatyana is a quintessential ‘party rôle,’ and, liberated from the necessity of carrying the weight of operatic drama upon her shoulders, Pérez is enchanting, singing with unforced élan. Undiplomatic as it is to say so, every singer either knows or is Tatyana, but Pérez’s Tatyana is a fully-drawn portrait of a still-to-be-tamed stage animal rather than a two-dimensional archetype. After all, what is a diva without her temperament?

To Heggie’s music and McNally’s words for Sid Taylor, whose path in life after Arden’s departure from their hometown has been anything but smooth, baritone Nathan Gunn brings verbal clarity, emotional candor, and vocal swagger that match his leading-man stage presence. Chest-thumpingly sure of himself as an architect, Gunn’s Sid is endearingly gauche in his encounters with Arden. There is a suggestion of good-natured competitiveness in his boasting of his professional achievements, but Gunn emphasizes the embarrassment at the heart of Sid’s bravado. His son Tommy is the bridge between Sid and Arden, and the famous singer’s protection of Tommy unmistakably softens the single father’s resolve, reintroducing him to the Arden he loved before opera became her paramour. When Gunn voices ‘Wow, you’re beautiful’ in Act Two, the listener feels the pangs of reawakened passion that resound in his words. The baritone’s vocalism is occasionally slightly unsteady, most noticeably at the ends of phrases, but he uses this to his dramatic advantage, heightening the life-altering implications of his casual banter. Conventional wisdom and the laws of physics assert that opposites attract, but there is no doubt that Arden could only be content with a partner who is her intellectual equal. That is a tall order, but Gunn’s Sid rises charismatically to the challenge.

Mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade is one of Heggie’s most trusted collaborators, having created the rôle of Mrs. De Rocher in the 2000 world première of Dead Man Walking and inspired some of the composer’s finest music, and patroness of the Arts Winnie Flato in Great Scott is a marvelous vehicle for her. The part is sympathetically written, but Heggie holds nothing back, and von Stade’s singing justifies every musical choice. Superb singing has been a hallmark of von Stade’s performances since the beginning of her career and is no more surprising now than in decades past, but the self-effacing humor of her characterization of the happily-divorced Winnie is unexpectedly beguiling. Experience in rôles like Thomas’s Mignon and Debussy’s Mélisande has made von Stade an artist who looks beyond obvious interpretive devices in search of the truest essence of a character, and she finds in Winnie’s psyche a maelstrom of emotions that are outwardly reflected in her stress over the production of Rosa Dolorosa, Figlia di Pompei. Her Winnie is a compendium of benevolent patronesses from Christina of Sweden to Jacqueline Badger Mars: surrogate mother, confidante, source of encouragement, and indefatigable proponent. Arden’s success or failure in Rosa Dolorosa is vicariously Winnie’s, as well, and the fate of American Opera is not merely a matter of collecting a return on an investment. It is impossible to overlook the symbolism, von Stade being so integral to the vitality of both American opera and opera in America. From this perspective, Great Scott is in part a letter of thanks to von Stade, one that needed to be written, and she reads it in tones that, as Beethoven put it, come from and aim for the heart.

Only Heggie, McNally, and the singer herself can say (and they would likely say very different things!) whether there is more Arden Scott in Joyce DiDonato or more Joyce DiDonato in Arden Scott. What the listener cannot fail to discern is how completely the mezzo-soprano is immersed in the rôle. Even amongst the Baroque, bel canto, and later rôles in which she has won acclaim [Arden’s tongue-in-cheek observation about having sung her 900^th Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia surely drew a sigh of commiseration from her portrayer], DiDonato’s Arden is a remarkable achievement. It should not be presumed that she gives any more of herself in her portrayal of Arden than in performances as Elena in La donna del lago or Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, but she conspicuously adopts Arden as a spiritual sister. Spotlighting the intricacies of a singer’s craft, DiDonato guides the audience into the peculiar, often secretive world of an artist’s routine.

The apex of Act One is Arden’s self-searching monologue, and the immediacy with which DiDonato announces ‘I want to matter’ closes the gap between artist and rôle, for here she enunciates the dearest desire of every earnest singer. Battered by the competing expectations of triumph as Rosa Dolorosa and pressure to début a new, starkly different modern rôle written for her, ‘Medea Refracted,’ Arden teeters on the precipice of artistic collapse, unsure of how to reconcile what she feels that she must do as an artist with what she longs to do as a woman. Confronted in Act Two by the ghost of Vittorio Bazzetti, the desperation and crippling uncertainty that Arden faces in ‘You’ll never be her’ are stingingly poignant. The fluency with which DiDonato sings Rosa Dolorosa’s bravura flourishes is fantastic, but it is her lyrical singing of Arden’s music that thrills and moves. Fiorature are produced by technique, her performance intimates, but singing at its most unaffected emerges as much from the soul as from the diaphragm. As recorded, a few notes at the extreme top of her range tax DiDonato, but, like Gunn, she magnifies flickers of vocal effort into flames of dramatic expression. In terms of feats of technical prowess, Arden Scott is not DiDonato’s most awe-inspiring assignment, but she is an emotional powerhouse whose sensibilities spurred DiDonato to give one of the most thought-provoking performances of her career.

An artist’s life is an enigmatic, ever-changing equation in which ability, ambition, self-promotion, and self-preservation must be carefully balanced. Opera is not conducive to treading lightly, but recognizing and respecting one’s own boundaries are necessities of enduring a career as a singer. The glamour of opera often distracts audiences from the gritty realities of singers’ lives, which is as it should be, but it is easy for audiences to blur the distinctions among persons and personas. There is no shortage of glamour in Great Scott, but there is grit, too. It is the grit of brushing off failures, laughing at oneself, and learning to measure homeward journeys not in miles but in smiles. Take it from Arden Scott: you can go home again but only when you realize that home is a sense of peace, not a point on a map.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827): A Beethoven Odyssey, Volume 5 – Piano Sonatas Nos. 5, 6, 7, and 10—James Brawn, piano [Recorded at Potton Hall, Suffolk, UK, 20 – 22 April 2017; MSR ClassicsMS 1469; 1 CD, 71:12; Available from MSR Classics, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

The trouble with the axioms that people often spout as substitutes for original thoughts is that they have an annoying habit of being true. Though so obvious as to seem ridiculous, it cannot be denied that every journey, great or small, begins with a single step—and not necessarily with a step in the right direction. Whether one’s destination is a physical location, a state of being, or a tangible accomplishment, progress is achieved by continually placing one foot ahead of the other, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively. The distances from the piano in one’s childhood home to the stages of the world’s great concert halls can only superficially be measured in meters or miles. What cannot be quantified is the distance traversed in a musician’s artistic development, a continual voyage in which the only finite destination is failure. To succeed is to keep moving even when at rest: Art arises when the ordinary acquiesces to stasis.

One of the most remarkable journeys in Western Music began in 1796 with the publication of Beethoven’s Opus 3 Piano Sonatas. In the three decades of life that remained to him after the introduction of these first three sonatas, Beethoven advanced music for solo piano from the progressive but quintessentially Classical forms inherited from Haydn and Mozart to the fully-fledged Romanticism of Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms. In the interim between the introduction of the Opus 3 Sonatas and his completion in 1822 of his thirty-second and final Sonata, the incredible Opus 111 Sonata in C minor, Beethoven altered the mechanics of writing for the piano in a manner that necessitated pianists’ reinvention of playing techniques. The intricacies of Haydn’s and Mozart’s works for piano were products of the polite drawing rooms of the Habsburg empire, but, as his career progressed, the focus of Beethoven’s composition of sonatas for piano migrated from aristocratic milieux to public concert halls. Not even in his nine symphonies did Beethoven traverse as much stylistic territory as in the Piano Sonatas, which collectively constitute a body of work for keyboard as significant as Bach’s Wohltemperirte Clavier.

In the eight decades since Artur Schnabel first recorded a complete cycle, many pianists have documented their individual interpretations—or lack thereof—of the Beethoven Sonatas in live and studio recordings. Among these recordings are instances of uninflected playing, innumerable idiosyncrasies, and occasional intersections of technical prowess and interpretive insight. Notable in the company of discs of special merit are the first five volumes of MSR Classics’ A Beethoven Odyssey, of which this fifth volume is the latest—and in some ways the finest—installment. To state that this disc is superior to its four brethren is akin to saying that For Whom the Bell Tolls is a finer book than either Death in the Afternoon or The Sun Also Rises: preferring one does not diminish the value of the others. Played on a warm-toned Steinway instrument, the performances on this disc of four of Beethoven’s most experimental Piano Sonatas are superbly-executed steps that propel the listener along a legitimately Homeric journey. A Beethoven Odyssey shares with Schnabel’s 1930s recordings an unerring sensibility for recognizing each Sonata’s individual qualities and its unique contributions to the development of Beethoven’s pianistic artistry. Whether approached as the continuation of a wonderful series or as a stand-alone recording of a fascinating quartet of Beethoven’s early Piano Sonatas, Volume Five of A Beethoven Odyssey leads the listener on a marvelously fulfilling voyage of discovery.

The personal odyssey of James Brawn began in England and has taken him to performance venues throughout the world via Australia and New Zealand. His direct connections with Claudio Arrau, Solomon Cutner, and Rudolf Serkin are audible in the fluidity of his playing of Beethoven’s music on this disc, his articulations of rapid passagework recalling Serkin’s nimble-wristed playing. It is to be hoped that any pianist who enjoys opportunities to record Beethoven sonatas in studio is capable of executing the scores with technical proficiency, but acumen of the level exhibited by Brawn cannot be taken for granted. Nevertheless, it is not mastery of the keys that captures the imagination in the performances on this disc. Only in his mid-forties, Brawn wields an interpretive maturity of which many pianists cannot boast even at the ends of their careers. A musician can learn how to meaningfully dissect and reassemble a piece, but the musical intuition that shaped Schnabel’s interpretations of Beethoven sonatas cannot be taught. Brawn plays the Sonatas on this disc from within: before his fingers press the keys, the music already flows inside of him. Each Sonata is therefore an excerpt from a larger narrative in progress, presented by Brawn with context drawn from rather than imposed upon Beethoven’s music.

The three Sonatas of Beethoven’s Opus 10 were composed between 1796 and 1798, a volatile time during which the composer was in his late twenties. Having relocated to Vienna from his native Bonn half a decade earlier, Beethoven was greatly affected by the stormy political climate of the Austrian capital: in addition to the Opus 10 and other Piano Sonatas, the final four years of the Eighteenth Century witnessed work on his first half-dozen string quartets and Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. The Allegro molto e con brio movement that introduces Sonata No. 5 in C minor (Opus 10, No. 1) is like a time capsule in which Beethoven buried components of his stylistic evolution for discovery by future generations of pianists. Already adventurous in his use of Classical sonata form, the composer exploited the full timbral spectrum of the instruments of his time. Brawn recreates the magic of Beethoven’s symphonic breadth of expression on the modern instrument at his disposal, phrasing with grandeur that never inhibits interpretive intimacy. The elegant Adagio molto is played with simplicity that allows its melodic development to flow organically to the movement’s ideally-managed cadence. Beethoven was a pioneering advocate of the metronome, but rhythmic rigidity is ruinous to performances of his music. Brawn’s playing of Sonata No. 5’s Prestissimo Finale is characterized by subtle rubato, not least in his realization of the thematic links to the familiar motif from the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

The opening Allegro movement of Sonata No. 6 in F major (Opus 10, No. 2) was conceived on a broad scale, its straightforward interplay of ideas engendering a rich vein of melody that Brawn taps with palpable feeling but an absolute lack of sentimentality. In his playing of Beethoven, Brawn consistently wins appreciation for displaying how much more touching the music can be when the listener is encouraged to contemplate the composer’s rather than the pianist’s emotional evocations. Eschewing tradition by substituting an Allegretto minuet for the expected slow inner movement, Beethoven established an atmosphere of uncomplicated contentment atypical of his work in general. Here, Brawn’s performance is mesmerizing: unafraid of figuratively loosening his tie and unbuttoning his collar, he plays the movement with the unaffected joy with which the young Beethoven might have played it for his own amusement. Brawn’s easy command of the contrapuntal writing in the recapitulation of the concluding Presto is thus all the more apparent. In this movement, the defining trait of the pianist’s artistry is concentration, his performance exuding the complete surrender to its spell required by the music.

Sonata No. 7 in D major (Opus 10, No. 3) is the most expansive of the Opus 10 Sonatas, anticipating much of Beethoven’s later work in both mood and scale. The Presto with which the Sonata begins is almost Brucknerian in scope, its sonorities stretching the boundaries of what one expects from piano literature of the last decade of the Eighteenth Century. The immediacy of Brawn’s rendering of the music emphasizes its novelty: even played on a modern Steinway with particularly well-integrated tonal and dynamic compasses, the music sounds surprisingly daring. The D-minor Largo e mesto is devastatingly beautiful in the manner of the slow movements in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Fifth Piano Concerto, its subtly-contrived cantabile effects anticipating the sublime beauties of the late String Quartets. Brawn is too intelligent to overreach in his interpretation of this music, trusting the score to enchant without interference. Both the Menuetto and Trio and the valedictory Rondo are marked allegro, but Brawn highlights the contrasts between the two movements. There is still a measure of Rococo grace in the minuet, but the Rondo sheds formality in favor of the virtuosic exuberance of which Beethoven would become a prolific exponent. Brawn’s navigation of the bravado writing is predictably impressive, but it is again the guileless heart of his playing that brings the listener closer to Beethoven’s own spirit.

Dating from 1798 – 1799, Sonata No. 10 in G major (Opus 14, No. 2) is a slightly later work, the companion of the E-major Sonata that Beethoven subsequently arranged for string quartet. Brahms, Mahler, and Britten rivaled Beethoven in artful manipulation of forms and functions, but the metamorphosis that sonata form undergoes in this compact piece has few equals in the piano canon. Brawn was wise to include this Sonata alongside its Opus 10 cousins: in this company, the radicalism of Beethoven’s invention in the tenth Sonata is complemented rather than contradicted by its recorded companions. The condensed energy of the Allegro springs from Brawn’s fingers, but his reading of the movement is one of total control. By maintaining rhythmic precision, he provides a stage upon which the music’s inherent variety dances excitingly. The pianist plays the tripartite variations on the Andante’s almost hymn-like theme with great resourcefulness, his phrasing accentuating the nuances of Beethoven’s cunning treatment of the principal subject. The unanticipated fortissimo chord that ends the movement is discharged with power and a suggestion of the wry humor that Beethoven surely intended it to impart. A rondo in disguise, the Allegro assai Scherzo is a whirlwind of harmonic hairpin turns and melodic dead ends. As diverting as Brawn’s playing of the fanciful notes is his instinctual handling of the pregnant pauses around which Beethoven constructed the movement. This is Beethoven at his most playful, and Brawn responds with effervescent charisma. In truth, though, all of his performances on this disc convey the irrepressible joy of his music making.

Pianists inevitably long to add their personal impressions to the recorded legacy of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, and there are some among them whose singular concepts of this extraordinary body of work add new dimensions to listeners’ understanding and enjoyment of the Sonatas. Rarest of all the pianists who record the Sonatas are those whose endeavors are dedicated to amplifying Beethoven’s pianistic voice with the aid of their own distinctive voices. It is among these few pianists, the true followers of Schnabel, that James Brawn’s work places him, and this fifth volume of his Beethoven Odyssey makes the 190 years since Beethoven’s death seem like mere moments. These are James Brawn’s own interpretations, but it is not difficult to imagine Beethoven’s playing echoing in them.

[1] FRANZ LISZT (1811 – 1886): Songs for Bass Voice and Piano—Jared Schwartz, bass; Mary Dibbern, piano [Recorded in St. Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral, Dallas, Texas, 25 – 27 April 2017; Toccata ClassicsTOCC 0441; 1 CD, 68:07; Available from Toccata Classics, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] REYNALDO HAHN (1874 – 1947): Amour sans ailes– Songs of Reynaldo Hahn—Zachary Gordin, baritone; Bryan Nies, piano [Recorded in Schroeder Hall, Green Music Center, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California, USA, 8 – 9 October 2016; MSR ClassicsMS 1649; 1 CD, 46:06; Available from MSR Classics, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

The celebrated soprano Alma Gluck (1884 – 1938) once said that ‘the sincerity of the art worker must permeate the song as naturally as the green leaves break through the dead branches in springtime.’ Gluck was a daughter of cultural climates very different from those of the Twenty-First Century, but how remarkable it is to find her referring to herself and her counterparts not as singers, musicians, interpreters, or artists but as art workers! Perceptions of a successful musician’s life are often warped by fantasies of flitting from continent to continent in first class, sipping champagne of exalted vintage, and performing with the aura of a deus ex machina descended in order to rescue audiences from their own barbarism. Lives such as this are now as rare as handwritten letters and true privacy, and what remains is the difficult, sometimes disheartening work of preserving niches for the cultivation and enjoyment of art amidst the confusion of modern living.

Both the viability and the validity of the musical forms that the heroes of the Twentieth Century safeguarded through two World Wars depend upon the diligence of the art workers to whom Gluck appealed, and never is any winter of discontent endured by those who love song except by clinging to the hope for the emergence of voices that bring vernal renewal—voices like those heard on two of 2017’s most captivating recordings. Toccata Classics’ disc of songs by Franz Liszt performed by bass Jared Schwartz and pianist Mary Dibbern and MSR Classics’ homage to the songs of Reynaldo Hahn featuring baritone Zachary Gordin and pianist Bryan Nies are wondrously verdant bursts of life in a cultural winter that seems destined to be destructively long-lived.

The lives of few composers in the history of Western Classical music have been as eventful as that of Franz Liszt. Born in 1811 in the Hungarian town of Doborján, known since the end of World War I as the Austrian hamlet of Raiding, Liszt was the son of an accomplished musician who was a colleague of Joseph Haydn in service to the Esterházy family. Encountering Salieri, Beethoven, and Schubert during his first fifteen years of life, the young Liszt inaugurated a lifelong series of seminal musical acquaintances encompassing a panoply of composers as diverse as Berlioz, Chopin, and Saint-Saëns that would eventually culminate in his daughter Cosima marrying Richard Wagner. In a long career often touched by personal tragedy, Liszt witnessed virtually the whole evolution of Nineteenth-Century Romanticism, both advocating for its development using his wide-ranging influence and advancing its progress with his own compositions.

For listeners whose familiarity with Liszt’s music is defined by the brazen, sometimes bombastic virtuosity of works like his Hungarian Rhapsodies and Piano Concerti, the many delicate qualities of his Lieder may be surprising. Indeed, the fact that Liszt composed songs at all is seldom considered in assessments of his artistry. [Beautiful recordings of Liszt Lieder by sopranos Hildegard Behrens and Dame Margaret Price regrettably seem to be known far less widely than they deserve to be.] Fusing elements of the styles to which he was exposed in Vienna during his youth and in Paris, to which metropolis he relocated soon after the death of his father in 1827, Liszt was a masterful composer of songs, as the performances on this insightfully-arranged Toccata Classics disc affirm. There are in these songs moments of the exhilarating musical exhibition expected of the composer’s work, but far more abundant are unexpected subtleties of musical invention and response to text. History does not portray Liszt as a man of Chopinesque sensitivity, but the portrait conjured by his songs and these performances of them depict an artist of wit, intellectual profundity, and keen understanding of humanity.

All of the Lieder included in their unmistakably affectionate survey of Liszt’s songs are here sung by a bass voice for the first time on disc, but this is also the world-première recording of the song with which Schwartz and Dibbern launch the disc, ‘Weimars Volkslied.’ A circa 1853 setting of a text by Peter Cornelius, the song wields an unaffected sophistication that belies its ‘Volkslied’ title and recalls the work of the Mendelssohn siblings, Fanny and Felix. Singer and pianist revel in the song’s emphatic style, Dibbern playing the fanfare-like figurations with the exuberance of bells tolling on a civic holiday. This contrasts markedly with Schwartz’s smooth singing of the song’s lyrical interludes.

First composed in 1843 – 1844 and revised in 1864, the earlier version of ‘Pace non trovo’ from the Tre sonetti di Petrarca is frequently included in recitals by lyric tenors, who cherish its ascents to D♭₅, but its demands are no less daunting—and its rewards no less plentiful—in the later transposition for lower voice. The performance that the song receives from Schwartz and Dibbern makes a very strong case for the version for bass, this bass’s singing evoking the authentic voice of the poet with the inherent dignity of his delivery. Respectively using words by Ferdinand von Saar and Alfred de Musset, ‘Des Tages laute Stimmen schweigen’ from 1880 and ‘J’ai perdu ma force et ma vie’ from 1872 are very different pieces that here benefit from the same virtues of expertly-managed singing and unfailingly communicative pianism. In each of the songs on this disc, in fact, Dibbern gets at the heart of the music’s ethos, providing Schwartz—and Liszt and the poets, as well—not with accompaniment but with a true partner in conversation.

Likely one of the earliest songs presented on this disc, ‘Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher’ is a visceral, almost operatic adaptation of words by Alexandre Dumas père in which Liszt rivals the dramatic storytelling of Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco and Tchaikovsky’s Orleanskaya deva on a considerably smaller scale. Schwartz sings the piece superbly, articulating the text with great attention to the emotional depth of Dumas’s diction. Dibbern’s performance dazzles, too, the anxious pounding of the heroine’s heart, the doubts, the fears, and the pangs of patriotism echoing in her playing, not supporting the words but instigating them.

Aside from ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’ an 1849 setting of a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and an elegant employment of words by Heinrich Heine in ‘Du bist wie eine Blume,’ both lucidly performed here, several of the finest songs on this disc use texts by poets whose names are unlikely to be known by listeners whose first languages are not French or German. The words of ‘Sei still’ are the work of Adelheid von Schorn, and they inspired Liszt to writing of striking starkness that is chillingly conveyed by Schwartz’s dusky but dulcet lower register. The resonance of the bass’s bottom octave is also an important component of the panache of his performance of ‘Le Juif errant,’ in which Pierre-Jean de Béranger’s words are handled by composer and pianist with finesse. Schwartz and Dibbern react to the song’s emotional gradations with uncompromising directness—the only effective approach to this piece. Ferdinand Freiligrath penned the words that sparked Liszt’s creativity in ‘O lieb, solang du lieben kannst!’, and the music is widely known even if the poet and his work are not. Its ebullient melody borrowed from the third of the composer’s much-played Liebesträume for solo piano, this is surely Liszt’s best-known song, but Schwartz and Dibbern perform it as though it has never been heard before, their shared musicality triumphing over the hint of lugubriousness that results from assigning the song to a bass voice.

If the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson seems an unlikely source of material for Liszt, the many felicities of the composer’s 1879 treatment of ‘Go not, happy day’ reminds the listener that appearances are deceiving. There are passages in this song in which distant kinship with Gerald Finzi’s vocal writing is apparent, but the linguistic fluidity of Liszt’s word setting is as compelling in English as in languages with which he was more acquainted. The Indiana-born Schwartz sings English with particular clearness, giving vowels and consonants equal weight, and the transparency with which both he and Dibbern perform the music is deeply affecting. The author of many texts set to music by his friend Franz Schubert, Franz von Schober also served as literary stimulus for Liszt’s 1849 ‘Weimars Toten,’ commissioned to mark the centennial of Goethe’s birth. Schwartz and Dibbern create an aptly commemorative atmosphere, immersing themselves in Liszt’s striking musical homage to the great poet and the city in which he died. Already a musical relationship of uncommon congruity in their Toccata Classics recording of mélodies by Ange Flégier, the partnership between bass and pianist is here refined to an even more admirable class of artistic expression. On this disc, their music making is as Liszt’s must have been when he sat at the piano in Rome’s Villa Medici in 1886, surrounded by Claude Debussy, Victor Herbert, and Paul Vidal: shorn of all extravagance and ego, these are performances by and for friends.

If the hallmark of effective Lieder is a consistent profusion of distinguished melodies whereby the listener experiences words on a level that transcends conversational comprehension, the songs of Franz Liszt recorded by Jared Schwartz and Mary Dibbern are exceptionally persuasive representatives of their genre. Liszt’s undervalued mastery of the composition of Lieder notwithstanding, any music performed with the passion heard on this disc would earn appreciation. Here, at last, is a recording of Lieder for bass worthy of comparison with Kurt Moll’s and Cord Garben’s magnificent Orfeo recital of Schubert Lieder.

As captivating and inexplicably overlooked by musicians capable of performing them idiomatically as the Liszt songs recorded by Jared Schwartz and Mary Dibben, the lusciously lyrical mélodies of Reynaldo Hahn are not unknown to connoisseurs, especially those with interest in the music of fin-du-siècle Parisian salons, in which Hahn’s music was immensely popular. When the gorgeous melodic lines of Hahn’s songs caress the ears, however, it is virtually impossible not to wonder why such music is not performed as frequently as the ubiquitous Italian canzonette that litter singers’ repertoires. In the seven decades since Hahn’s death in 1947, perhaps something crucial has been lost in musical translation. This MSR Classics release, recorded by Swineshead Productions engineer David v.R. Bowles with the ambient clarity that the music requires, restores Hahn’s songs their rightful place alongside the works of Henri Duparc, Gabriel Fauré, Édith Piaf, and Charles Aznavour as a pillar of French chanson.

Though their milieux were very different, there are many parallels in the circumstances of Hahn’s and Liszt’s formative years. Born in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, in 1874, Hahn was the child of an affluent family with strong ties to Europe, bonds which sustained the family’s prosperity when they were forced to seek refuge from the political volatility that ravaged Venezuela in 1877. As Liszt had done after the death of his father a half-century earlier, Hahn found a new home in Paris, where the vibrant musical scene bewitched his imagination and whetted his appetite for composition. Admitted at the age of ten to the Conservatoire de Paris, by which institution the similarly-aged Liszt was denied tuition, Hahn studied with Gounod, Massenet, and Saint-Saëns, absorbing their music with a seemingly boundless curiosity. Throughout his career, he was an avid consumer of Paris’s operatic offerings, maintaining a presence at the Opéra as noteworthy as that of Gaston Leroux’s phantom. Beyond his gift for creating haunting melodies, there was nothing spectral about Hahn’s talent, however. Unlike Liszt’s Lieder, the best-known of which are overshadowed in modern awareness by his orchestral and piano music, Hahn’s songs form the nucleus of their composer’s renown. Even so, hearing them sung outside of France is a rare gift.

Like their colleagues’ performances of Liszt’s songs, Gordin and Nies bring to their traversals of the twenty-one songs on Amour sans ailes an artistic alliance of near-perfect symbiosis. Recalling the gist of Algernon’s remark in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest that ‘women only call each other sister when they have called each other a lot of other things first,’ it is intimated in the disc’s liner notes that the camaraderie between Gordin and Nies was not fostered without hindrance, but sorting out differences has in their case facilitated an uninfringeable sense of purpose that is audible in the first bars of their urgent but unexaggerated performance of the Victor Hugo setting ‘Réverie.’ In this and all of the selections on the disc, Gordin sounds like an exemplar of a Fach long thought to be extinct: the uniquely French baryton-Martin. Uniting a plush lower octave, smooth navigation of the passaggio, and well-supported falsetto, the baritone sings this music as though he composed the songs himself, projecting a sense of spontaneity even when meticulous care governs his phrasing.

The texts of Hahn’s Chansons grises are the work of Paul Verlaine, whose ambiguous imagery finds in Nies’s playing a stage upon which to act out its cunning dramas. In the lovely ‘Chanson d’automne,’ the singer’s enunciation of the poet’s words is amplified by the pianist’s understated intensity. In ‘Tous deux,’ too, Nies enhances the interpretive impact of Gordin’s singing by playing as though the vocal line were an extension of the piano part. Gordin voices ‘L’Allée est sans fin...’ and ‘En Sourdine’ with close attention to their shifting moods, and his reading of the sublime ‘L’heure exquise’ is lofted upon a current of diaphanous expressivity propelled by Nies’s rhythmic sharpness. The impact of ‘Paysage triste’ is heightened by both singer and pianist approaching the piece without so much as a hint of preciosity, allowing words and music to reach the listener uninhibitedly. ‘La bonne chanson’ is just that: an undeniably well-crafted song. The performance that it receives from Gordin and Nies wholly justifies the title. Hahn returned to Verlaine’s poetry in ‘L’incrédule’ and ‘Fêtes galantes,’ songs with little in common except for the poet’s words and the composer’s sagacious uses of them, and Gordin sings them with flawless cognition of their singular characters and seductive tone.

The expressivity of Alphonse Daudet’s words in ‘Trois jours de vendange’ is realized by Gordin with expertly-judged emphasis echoed in Nies’s rendering of the piano’s side of the dialogue. Similarly, the nuances of Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle’s texts in Études latines are engagingly explored without ever being over-accentuated. Gordin voices ‘Lydé’ with seductive charm, and his account of ‘Pholoé’ scintillates, the voice cascading through the soundscapes created by the piano. The related spirits of ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Dans la nuit,’ settings of texts by Jean Lahor and Jean Moréas, are enlivened by Gordin’s earnest singing, and his moving performance of Hahn’s adaptation of Augustine-Malvina Blanchecotte’s ‘La chère blessure’ grows from the fertile soil of Nies’s emotive playing.

Like Liszt’s setting of Tennyson, Hahn’s uses of Mary Robinson’s verses in Love without wings displays an affinity for recognizing and tapping the innate musical potential of English words—a trait lacked by many native English-speaking composers. A gentle wistfulness permeates Gordin’s singing of ‘Ah! Could I clasp thee in mine arms,’ and the serene resignation with which he voices ‘The fallen oak’ transitions to ambivalent playfulness in ‘I know you love me not,’ all animated by vocalism of exquisite control. The collaboration between voice and piano is nowhere more efficacious than in Gordin’s and Nies’s performance of ‘L’énamourée,’ their joint commitment to the music reaching into the shadows of Théodore de Banville’s text. Composed in 1913, ‘À Chloris,’ a setting of verses by Théophile de Viau, is perhaps the most familiar of Hahn’s songs, but its familiarity breeds no contempt in Gordin’s and Nies’s presentation. Rather, the pianist plays with the vigor of first discovery, and the baritone’s chic singing triggers memories of Gérard Souzay. Above all, though, Gordin recognizes that this is not music that should be whimpered or whined: whilst listening to this disc, one is unlikely to ever feel compelled, as one sometimes does when hearing Souzay performances, to exclaim, ‘Just sing, s’il vous plaît!’ Simply singing—which is not to be confused with singing simply—is what Gordin does best.

Respect is in some instances the cruelest manifestation of damning with faint praise. Respect is too often misused in musical societies as an excuse for inattention and ignorance. The casual listener professes to respect a composer’s or a musician’s artistry and leaves it at that: if one expresses an all-encompassing respect, is it really necessary to actually know an artist’s work and its context? One of the many victories of this pair of discs is answering that question with irrefutable evidence of the folly of dismissing insufficiently-remembered music with respectful disinterest. Like Alma Gluck, Jared Schwartz, Zachary Gordin, Mary Dibbern, and Bryan Nies clearly realize that the art worker’s toil never ends. Were she able to hear the performances of songs by Franz Liszt and Reynaldo Hahn on these discs, Gluck would undoubtedly congratulate this quartet of art workers on jobs done exceptionally well.