GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione—David Pershall (Figaro), Cecelia Hall (Rosina), Andrew Owens (Il conte d’Almaviva), Tyler Simpson (Don Basilio), Donald Hartmann (Dottor Bartolo), Stephanie Foley Davis (Berta), Ryan Hill (Fiorello), Jacob Kato (Un sergente), Christian Blackburn (Un notaro); Greensboro Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Joel Revzen, conductor [David Holley, Producer and Stage Director; James Bumgardner, Chorus Master; Jeff Neubauer, Lighting Designer; Greensboro Opera, UNCG Auditorium, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 12 January 2018]

George Bernard Shaw may never have actually said that youth is wasted on the young, at least not with those exact words, but the sentiment is very true to Shaw’s guardedly cynical world view. Could even the thorny Dubliner have thought that the marvels of youth were wasted on the young Gioachino Rossini? Fate dealt the prodigy of Pesaro a most ingenious paradox from the start, decreeing that he would be born on 29 February 1792, and, while his crib may not have been padded with music paper as Mozart’s must have been, the lad squandered no time in steadying his artistic gait. Rossini already had no fewer than sixteen operas, not all of them successful, under his belt when his iconic melodramma giocoso Il barbiere di Siviglia was first performed in Rome on 20 February 1816, nine days before his twenty-fourth birthday. Utilizing Cesare Sterbini’s enchantingly witty adaptation of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville ou la Précaution inutile, the young Rossini’s opera fell victim to the Roman audience’s lingering affection for Giovanni Paisiello’s 1782 setting of Il barbiere di Siviglia, a now-neglected score that in 1816 was still performed frequently throughout Italy. Vindication of Rossini’s musical cunning was not long in coming, however, establishing within a decade that Beethoven was right when he predicted that the popularity of Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia would persist as long as Italian opera continued to be performed.

The universal resonance of Beaumarchais’s story, the timeless cleverness of Sterbini’s words, and the perennial charm of Rossini’s score make staging Il barbiere di Siviglia an easy decision for opera companies large and small, but few companies present the work with the boundless imagination, musicality, and sheer fun that were the hallmarks of Greensboro Opera’s production. Since taking the helm as the company’s Artistic Director in June 2013, David Holley has steered Greensboro Opera towards markedly heightened artistic integrity and hard-won financial security. Both by bringing the 2015 convention of the National Opera Association to Greensboro and by casting Greensboro Opera’s productions with singers with wide-ranging credentials, Holley has increased Greensboro’s stature as a noteworthy operatic destination. This production of Il barbiere di Siviglia, produced and directed by Holley, embodied the rejuvenated company’s mission of making opera on a world-class level accessible to all residents of central North Carolina.

Using eye-pleasing scenery by Peter Dean Beck and costumes by Susan Memmott Allred, on loan from Utah Opera, Holley’s production created on the stage of UNCG Auditorium a Barbiere di Siviglia that was at once gratifyingly familiar and rousingly novel. Barbiere di Siviglia is a piece that many directors immerse in deluges of stock gestures and purposeless foolishness. A singer himself, Holley is sensitive to the physical demands of singing and supervised a staging of Rossini’s fast-paced musical gambol in which every movement was inspired by music and text. Too often, productions of Il barbiere di Siviglia and the singers who populate them seem awkward because they attempt to make the opera funny. The comedy exists in the score and libretto: a production’s success depends upon finding, not inventing it. Aided by the expert guidance of stage manager Shelby Robertson and assistant stage managers Caroline Stamm and Abigail Hart, the singers assembled by Holley exhibited natural comedic timing, the thoughtful illumination of their antics by Jeff Neubauer’s lighting designs ensuring that the audience’s attention was always focused on the nucleus of the action. With all participants in the production collaborating to realize Holley’s vision with complete conviction, the true focus was on Rossini—precisely where it should be in any performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia.

Factotum della città: baritones David Pershall as Figaro (left) and Ryan Hill as Fiorello (right) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, January 2018
[Photo by Star Path Images, © by Greensboro Opera]

That what is now universally recognized as Il barbiere di Siviglia’s overture is one of the most familiar pieces of Classical Music would not surprise Rossini, who was fond enough of it—and was sufficiently idle—to have previously used it to open both Aureliano in Palmira and Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, a pair of his serious operas. The eventual popularity of its third companion, with the comedic tone of which it fits handily despite sharing no thematic material with the balance of the score, ensured that Barbiere was its final destination. Energized by conductor Joel Revzen’s nimble negotiations of the music’s abrupt changes of pace and mood, the Greensboro Opera Orchestra’s playing of the spry Sinfonia set the tone for an evening of well-rehearsed and high-spirited musical merrymaking.

Throughout the performance, Revzen adopted tempi that kept the show moving without bullying the singers. Perhaps the greatest challenge of Barbiere for conductors and directors is the disproportionate duration of Act One, but Revzen and Holley ensured that members of the Greensboro audience were not glancing at their watches and wondering how many more bars would whizz past before the interval. Accompanied by Revzen, the secco recitatives churned with the excitement of feisty Spaniards consumed by amorous intrigue. The Temporale in Act Two, enacted by Holley with a welcome avoidance of nonsensical stage business, had the effect of a discharge of the dramatic electricity that crackled through the preceding scene. Occasionally, Revzen’s conducting lost momentum, most noticeably in solo numbers, and there were sporadic mishaps in the orchestra, none of which upset the overall musical equilibrium of the performance. Under the direction of chorus master James Bumgardner, the twelve gentlemen of the Barbiere chorus—Christian Blackburn, Ian DeSmit, John Huff, Lucas Johnston, Jacob Kato, Brian Kilpatrick, Mark Loy, Wesley McLeary-Small, Wendell Putney, Ben Ramsey, D’Andre Wright, and John Warrick—both sang and acted their parts to perfection, portraying Conte Almaviva’s band of hired musicians and the too-eager recruits of Seville’s constabulary with gusto that matched the orchestra’s playing. Like their colleagues behind the scenes, orchestra, chorus, and conductor gave of their best in service to Rossini.

Il conte e la sua Rosina: tenor Andrew Owens as Conte Almaviva (left) and mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina (right) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, January 2018
[Photo by Star Path Images, © by Greensboro Opera]

With music like Rossini’s to sing, even small rôles in Barbiere di Siviglia need large personalities with vocal talents to match, and in Greensboro Opera’s performance they had them. Supplementing their choral duties, Kato and Blackburn were valuable assets to the performance as the police sergeant dispatched to investigate the cause of the tumult chez Bartolo in the Act One finale and the notary summoned to formalize Bartolo’s union with Rosina in Act Two. Baritone Ryan Hill was an unusually sonorous Fiorello, launching the opera’s opening scene with a handsomely-voiced ‘Piano, pianissimo, senza parlar.’

In too many performances of Barbiere, the ladies who portray Bartolo’s housekeeper Berta look and sound as though they may have studied the rôle under the tutelage of Rossini himself. A particular joy of Greensboro Opera’s Barbiere was the casting of mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis as a Berta who sang powerfully in every scene in which she appeared without prompting fears that she would need to be defibrillated at the end of every phrase like a broken-down bel canto incarnation of Offenbach’s Olympia. A dramatic whirlwind in the Act One finale, Foley Davis delivered a wonderful account of Berta’s Act Two arietta ‘Il vecchiotto cerca moglie,’ rising to top A with ease. Ideally, a Berta should sound as though she might be a capable Rosina: Foley Davis would undoubtedly be considerably more than capable and was a magnificent Berta.

La calunnia è un venticello: bass-baritones Donald Hartmann as Bartolo (left) and Tyler Simpson as Basilio (right) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, January 2018
[Photo by Star Path Images, © by Greensboro Opera]

Following the trend started by Berta, it is apparent in many productions of Barbiere that Don Basilio has devoted many years to his parochial pursuits, with the vocal attrition to prove it. Rossini’s music for the rôle indicates that he expected Basilio to at least temporarily wield virility potent enough to make his conspiratorial machinations believably threatening. Basilio need not be genuinely menacing to make his mark, but there was a hint of sadism at the core of bass-baritone Tyler Simpson’s interpretation of the part that lent the not-so-holy man’s treachery atypical forcefulness. In this performance, Basilio’s encounter with Bartolo in Act One eerily foreshadowed Filippo’s fateful sparring with the Grand Inquisitor in Verdi‘s Don Carlo: laughter still reigned here, but the effect of casting a young, clarion-toned singer as Basilio was palpable. Expectedly, Simpson sang Basilio’s Act One aria ‘La calunnia è un venticello’ with galvanizing persuasiveness and vocal assurance, firing the repetitions of ‘colpo di cannone’ into the auditorium with Scarpia-like glee. Arriving for Rosina’s singing lesson in Act Two to the unexpected news of his replacement and dire illness, Simpson imparted Basilio’s bewilderment with a credibility that only an intelligent singer can achieve. Astutely-honed stagecraft shone in Simpson’s every note, word, and motion, especially in ensembles, and his vocalism was unfailingly secure and stimulating.

A un dottor della mia sorte: bass-baritone Donald Hartmann as Bartolo in Greensboro Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, January 2018
[Photo by Star Path Images, © by Greensboro Opera]

Every conservatory should offer mandatory courses designed to foster comprehension amongst prospective singers that comedy and stupidity are vastly different concepts. Rossini and Sterbini obviously intended Barbiere to be funny, but not even at its zaniest is the opera ever stupid. In this performance, that course was taught by bass-baritone Donald Hartmann, whose characterization of the vain, blustering Dottor Bartolo was hilarious because there were glimmers of vulnerability beneath the gaudy veneer of self-congratulatory smugness and implacability—and the wig that was surely borrowed from the estate of Georg Friedrich Händel. As a potential consort for Rosina, Hartmann’s Bartolo was amusingly ridiculous, but as a man of a certain age whose romantic possibilities are decidedly limited his desperation was deeper than mere farce. In the Act One scene with Basilio, Hartmann was transformed from a bumbling grouch into a man with victory in sight as Basilio shared his plan to disgrace Conte Almaviva. The aria ‘A un dottor della mia sorte’ was sung with total mastery of its tricky phrasing and patter, and Hartmann’s Bartolo was the epitome of exasperated indignation in the madcap Act One finale. Catapulting into Act Two with a dejectedly ironic but never idiotic ‘Ma vedi il mio destino,’ this Bartolo exuded ennui during Rosina’s singing lesson but dearly relished showing off his own musical pedigree—in the course of which, as Shakespeare put it, a few strays clearly got over the wall—in the mock-archaic arietta ‘Quando mi sei vicina, amabile Rosina.’ Touchingly, he wistfully gazed after the heartbroken Rosina as the Temporale began, then believing her swain Lindoro’s intentions to be impure, suddenly sensitive to the sting of his dishonesty. Underestimating Rosina’s resilience and thwarted at every turn by her scheming with Figaro and the disguised Conte, Hartmann’s Bartolo accepted defeat with self-preserving affability. As ever, Hartmann deployed the sort of imposingly percussive singing that is precisely right for the music. He can probably sing Bartolo in his sleep, but this performance was so engaging that he might have been performing the rôle for the first time, Rossini’s music and Sterbini’s words sounding newly-minted.

Un nobile soldato e la sua signora: tenor Andrew Owens as Conte Almaviva (left) and mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina (right) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, January 2018
[Photo by Star Path Images, © by Greensboro Opera]

Returning to Greensboro to portray the lovesick Conte Almaviva, tenor Andrew Owens repeated the triumph of his portrayal of Don Ramiro in Greensboro Opera’s 2015 production of La Cenerentola, again confirming the validity of his Rossinian credentials with singing of seemingly effortless virtuosity. From his first entrance, Owens’s Conte radiated the confidence of an aristocrat tempered by the anxiety of a young man still finding his footing as a lover. Owens’s tastefully-ornamented account of the cavatina ‘Ecco ridete in cielo spunta la bella aurora’ seemed marginally cautious, but his ascents to the top As and B in bravura flourishes were flawless. It was a humorous if anachronistic invention to have this Conte begin Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore instead of Lindoro’s serenade, but Owens went on to declare ‘Io son Lindoro che fido v’adoro’ with dulcet tones and a spectacular trill, supported by the fine playing of guitarist Kevin Dollar. Invigorated by Rosina’s requital of his interest, this Almaviva rocketed through the duet with Figaro on wings of love, voicing ‘Su vediamo, su vediam di quel metallo’ with uncontainable joy. Owens launched the Act One finale with panache, bringing the lovable inebriation of Mayberry’s Otis to the operatic stage, and he returned at the start of Act Two with a bevy of perfectly-timed repetitions of ‘Pace e gioia’ as an hysterically arthritic Don Alonso. In the sequence of quintetto, terzetto, and finale ultima, the tenor’s voice soared through the difficult tessitura and fiorature, his timbre beautiful from the bottom of the stave to his gleaming top C, and his acting was boundlessly charismatic. Time constraints deprived Owens of the opportunity to sing the Conte’s seldom-performed aria ‘Cessa di più resistere,’ but his depiction of the character lacked nothing else.

La futura contessa: mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina in Greensboro Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, January 2018
[Photo by Star Path Images, © by Greensboro Opera]

The Rosina of mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall has matured appealingly since she performed the rôle with North Carolina Opera in 2016. The prevailing youthfulness of her characterization remains unchanged, but there is now greater seriousness in her negotiations of Rosina’s predicaments. In Greensboro, Rosina was pert and playful but also mindful of the consequences of her actions and the lifelong implications of perhaps finding herself married to Bartolo. Aside from trills that never fully materialized, she made her entrance in Act One with beguiling singing. Her traversal of the cavatina ‘Una voce poco fa qui nel cor mi risuonò’ was delightful despite a lack of crispness in her executions of fiorature. Here and in the duetto with Figaro, ‘Dunque io son tu non m’inganni,’ she avoided unnecessary aspiration in her coloratura singing, however, and she immersed herself in the capers of the Act One finale without forcing either the voice or the comedy. Smiling beneath her prim ginger wig, a creation of Trent Pcenicni, she sometimes looked uncannily like the very young Beverly Sills. In Rosina’s lesson scene in Act Two, Hall eschewed the practice of interpolating music from other scores and sang Rossini’s authentic ‘Contro un cor che accende amore’ brilliantly, encountering no difficulties with its top As. Her voice could not always be heard amidst the cacophony of the quintetto, but her declamation of ‘Ah! qual colpo inaspettato!’ in the terzetto rang out boldly. Gratifyingly, hers was a Rosina who did not posture and pout: her emotions were softer and more subtle but always discernible. In Hall’s performance, Rosina was determined but not truly minxish, her good nature never obscured by her willingness to resort to capriciousness—in other words, she gave Rosina her own unique character rather than portraying her as a coloratura Carmen. Vocally, she was stronger in her middle and upper registers than at the bottom of the range. Dramatically, her performance divulged no weaknesses.

I tre conspiratori allegri: (from left to right) tenor Andrew Owens as Conte Almaviva, mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina, and baritone David Pershall as Figaro in Greensboro Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, January 2018
[Photo by Star Path Images, © by Greensboro Opera]

Operatic Spain is a natural habitat for baritone David Pershall, who revisited the land of flamenco, previously the setting for his exhilarating Escamillo in Greensboro Opera’s 2017 staging of Bizet’s Carmen, with a captivating portrayal of Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia, the rôle in which he débuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2015. There is no more familiar entrance aria in opera than Figaro’s Act One cavatina ‘Largo al factotum della città,’ and with his crowd-pleasing performance of the number Pershall introduced his Figaro, one by whom the top Gs were not feared. Pershall’s singing was a reminder of a bygone era in which ‘big sing’ baritones like Robert Merrill and Nicolae Herlea included Figaro in their repertoires. In the ebullient duet with the Conte, the baritone voiced ‘All’idea di quel metallo’ incisively, his Figaro’s ideas seeming to genuinely be extemporaneously engendered by the clinking of coins in his hand. Then, implementing his plan to facilitate her rendezvous with the Conte, he joined Rosina in a rollicking account of their duetto, singing ‘Di Lindoro il vago oggetto siete voi, bella Rosina’ with irrepressible conviviality. Like Merrill and Herlea, navigating Rossini’s labyrinths of fiorature does not come naturally to Pershall, but his technique is equal to even Figaro’s most intricate vocal filigree, as he elatedly demonstrated in the Act One finale. As Figaro’s stratagems teetered on the brink of disaster in Act Two, Pershall emphasized the barber’s resourcefulness, taking charge with the authority of a Hollywood director—authority that the lovers under his protection were often too distracted by their canoodling to heed. The seat-of-his-trousers bravado of his vocalism in the quintetto was diverting, and his Figaro’s euphoric extolling of the efficacy of his handiwork in the terzetto truly earned the audience’s laughter. With such a skilled Figaro at the center of the action, there was never any doubt that all would end well, but one of the most endearing aspects of Pershall’s performance was its spontaneity. Still, not even the most genial Figaro succeeds solely with his acting of the part, and it was Pershall’s vibrant, ruggedly masculine singing that made the strongest, most lasting impression.

Perhaps more so than any other musical genre, and more so in the Twenty-First Century than ever before, opera is a community effort that depends upon a carefully-managed coordination of artistic, financial, and logistical collaborations. Putting on good shows with good singers is not sufficient to ensure an opera company’s survival. An opera company must look beyond the stage upon which its productions come to life for the raw materials with which to build its future. Most vital amongst these raw materials is involvement in the host community. Under David Holley’s stewardship, Greensboro Opera’s rôle in its community has metamorphosed from the elitist indulgence typical of opera in the United States to an advantageous cultural symbiosis. With this fantastic, superbly-sung production of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Greensboro Opera’s standing in both its local and global communities is solidified: no longer just Greensboro’s hometown opera, Greensboro Opera is a home for opera performed as composers and librettists intended.

YORK BOWEN (1884 – 1961), VOLKER DAVID KIRCHNER (born 1942), NIKOLAUS VON KRUFFT (1779 – 1818), ESA-PEKKA SALONEN (born 1958), ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810 – 1856), and JÖRG WIDMANN (born 1973): Debut– Music for Horn—Ben Goldscheider, horn; Daniel Hill, piano [Recorded in Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton, UK, 22 – 24 September 2017; Willowhayne Records WHR045CD; 1 CD, 74:36; Available from Willowhayne Records, Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Six decades after his death, one man’s name continues to reverberate in the affections of English-speaking people who appreciate the complex art of horn playing: Dennis Brain. Sufficiently esteemed beyond the linguistic and musical diasporas of Britain to have inspired Francis Poulenc to compose his moving Elégie for horn and piano on the day after the musician’s untimely death in a motorway crash, Brain came in his brief life to dominate public awareness of his instrument to a degree that perhaps no other Twentieth-Century musician managed to do. A virtuoso of both technique and style, Brain displayed a remarkable understanding of the evolution of writing for the horn, including in his repertoire music ranging from Eighteenth-Century concerti by Joseph Haydn and Mozart to then-new pieces created for him by his contemporaries. The world’s orchestras are continually populated with capable horn players, but lamentations for the lack of musicians of Brain’s caliber among today’s horn sections are misleading. In truth, like singers of the stature of Kirsten Flagstad and Maria Callas, a horn virtuoso of Brain’s technical and interpretive abilities is ever exceedingly rare. The emergence of Hertfordshire-born horn virtuoso Ben Goldscheider is therefore all the more exciting. A musician whose credentials belie his youth, Goldscheider proclaims with this impressively-engineered, absorbing Willowhayne Records release that he is poised to honor Brain’s legacy with his own once-in-a-generation artistry.

Ideally, a musician’s début recording should provide the listener with introductions not only to the player’s technique but, more importantly, to his artistic personality, as well. Any young musician given an opportunity to make a recording must be presumed to have achieved a respectable level of technical proficiency, but conservatories regularly produce phalanxes of able technicians. Beyond satisfying the listener’s curiosity about the player’s mastery of his instrument, the question that a début recording should answer is this: what makes this musician unique? As an exhibition of the singular qualities that set him apart from his colleagues, this disc is especially valuable, but Ben Goldscheider’s Debut is equally enjoyable as a recital of astutely-chosen pieces that survey the development of writing for the horn during the past two centuries. Crucially, Goldscheider approaches each work on its own terms, consistent in his command of the horn’s mechanics but also splendidly attentive to the ever-adapting styles of the music.

The Air for solo horn of German clarinetist, conductor, and composer Jörg Widmann is a logical starting point for the young musician’s exploration of his instrument’s and his own capacities for expression. Here and in all of the selections on the disc, his management of intonation and dynamics is impeccable, and the evenness of tone that he produces is indicative of superb breath control. Beauty is not always a trait that can be cited in assessments of brass playing, but the singing quality that Goldscheider achieves in his shaping of the lyrical lines of Widmann’s music is truly beautiful. A horn’s valves make smooth transitions among intervals reliant upon the player’s finesse, and Goldscheider impresses with extended spans of legato.

A contemporary of Beethoven, Viennese composer Nikolaus von Krufft was also a cofounder of the prestigious Wiener Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and an early champion of German Lied whose publication of a collection of finely-crafted songs in 1798 paved the way for Schubert and subsequent composers of Lieder. There are Lied-like episodes worthy of Schubert’s melodic prodigality in von Krufft’s skillfully-written Sonata for piano and horn in E major, in his performance of which Goldscheider is joined by pianist Daniel Hill. The collaboration between Goldscheider and Hill is indeed like that of a Lieder singer and accompanist, their playing following not only the dictates of the music but also the nuances of one another’s phrasing. In the opening Allegro moderato movement, reminiscent of Antonio Salieri’s similarly-conceived music for wind instruments, hornist and pianist share thematic material like voices in a Monteverdi madrigal, sustaining an elegant flow of melody. The central Andante espressivo is pensive without being melancholic, and Goldscheider interweaves his tones with the piano’s textures to conjure an atmosphere of Arcadian serenity. There are hints of Mendelssohn in the Moderato Rondo alla polacca that concludes the Sonata, hints that Goldscheider amplifies by playing with an effervescence that inspires the wish that Schubert might have written the obbligato in his Lied ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’ for horn rather than for clarinet.

A piece that contrasts markedly with von Krufft’s Sonata, Robert Schumann’s Opus 70 Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano harkens back in spirit if not in actual structure to Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ music. The introductory Adagio discloses an obvious kinship with the slow movements of Schumann’s string quartets and exquisite Opus 44 piano quintet. Hill’s performance displays an admirable understanding of the composer’s intricate writing for the instrument, and Goldscheider plays with a quintessentially Romantic suggestion of yearning, mining the emotional lodes of Schumann’s harmonic progressions. The energetic pulse of the Allegro courses through both musicians’ playing. Schumann’s chamber music is rarely genuinely extroverted, but Goldscheider and Hill unearth the subtle smiles in the Allegro and translate them into alluring sounds.

Native Londoner York Bowen was renowned as both a violist and a horn player, so it is not surprising that his Opus 101 Sonata for horn and piano in E♭ major shows evidence of great affinity for composing for the horn. Even more so than in Schumann’s Sonata, horn and piano—and their players—are engaged in an eloquent, sometimes impassioned conversation. Though he was a contemporary of the leading exponents of the avant garde in British music during the first half of the Twentieth Century, Bowen’s compositional idiom was prevailingly Romantic, allying him more with Elgar than with Britten in his writing for the horn. This might have been perceived as a liability during the course of Bowen’s career, but it is a definite virtue in the context of his Opus 101 Sonata, composed in 1937. There is a pervasive, very British decorum in the Moderato espressivo movement that receives wonderfully gracious handling from Goldscheider and Hill, and the Poco lento maestoso that follows is played with sensitivity that never devolves into sentimentality. As in the final movement of the Schumann Sonata, Goldscheider and Hill bring to their performance of the Allegro con spirito in Bowen’s Sonata a tremendous emission of musical electricity, illuminating the savvy of the composer’s fusing of the horn’s and piano’s timbres. Perhaps the advocacy of a recorded performance as affecting as this one will propel the Sonata along the path to the greater recognition that it so deserves.

Building upon the tradition of music for horn and piano furthered by von Krufft’s and Schumann’s works, German composer Volker David Kirchner’s Tre poemi are evocative, challenging pieces that polish vastly different facets of Goldscheider’s musical persona. The shadows that lurk in ‘Lamento’ are dispelled by the purity of his pitch, the music’s straightforward emotion enhanced by the complete absence of artifice with which both Goldscheider and Hill deliver it. The joviality of ‘Danza’ is guarded, almost like an anxious breeze before a hurricane, but the musicians transport the listener to an uncomplicated celebration in a village town hall. ‘La Gondola funebre’ churns with the relentless motion of water, its mood more one of resignation than of despair. Hill’s playing is hypnotic, luring the listener into the recesses of the music and forcing confrontation with the horn, which seems to emerge from some enigmatic place deep within the harmonies. As Goldscheider plays, it is as though in his tones one is eavesdropping on one’s own thoughts.

Renowned in many musical circles more for his conducting than for his composing, Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen is without question one of the most imaginative musicians in recent memory. His compositional style is difficult to define within the boundaries of tradition parameters, but a compelling intensity often takes root and blossoms organically in his music. This is certainly true of his Concert Étude for solo horn. Its title notwithstanding, the Étude is anything but academic. It is undeniably a learned piece, but its wisdom is personal, not pedantic. The piece demands concentration and rhythmic precision that Goldscheider supplies, but he does not play with a student’s reticence. The years of life to his credit may be few, but the maturity of his performance of Salonen’s Étude is unmistakable. It is difficult music that is here executed with technique and expressivity in optimal equilibrium. Journalists speak of the question behind the question: Goldscheider reaches the music beyond the notes.

Debut is a deceptive disc. During its seventy-five minutes, it is possible to believe that playing the horn is a task at which anyone with good lungs and a bit of patience might succeed. Were it solely a task, perhaps more people could succeed at it, but even the casual music lover knows that more unfortunate Leonores than can be counted have suffered their performances of the formidable ‘Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin?’ being marred by poor horn playing and that many traversals of Mahler’s Second Symphony have sunk under the weight of horns’ faltering intonation. The physics of blowing into a twisted tube of metal provides the sound, but it is artistry that makes it music. Debut answers the necessary question about what separates Ben Goldscheider from the ranks of well-qualified horn players. He is a young man with a timeless gift. In his hands, the horn is not an instrument but a conduit for making emotions audible.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827), FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810 – 1849), FRANZ LISZT (1811 – 1886): Piano Works—Alexei Melnikov, piano [Recorded at Campus Fichtenhain, Krefeld-Fichtenhain, Germany, 1 – 3 March 2017; Acousence Classics ACO-CD 13217; 1 CD, 62:10; Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

On 15 July 1909, the Leipzig-born pianist Wilhelm Backhaus entered the fledgling HWV studio, then only seventeen months along in its life in the wake of its formation as a branch of the Gramophone Company, and recorded a six-minute abridgment of Edvard Grieg’s Opus 16 Piano Concerto in A minor. Twenty-five years old at the time, Backhaus was already well advanced in a career that would endure war, political upheaval, and unfortunate associations. Though hardly the first recording of music for piano and amounting to nothing more than a small fragment of one of the cornerstones of the piano repertory, those six minutes of Grieg were revolutionary. With that recording, an acknowledged master of the instrument recognized and validated the legitimacy of the art of recording piano music. It was an auspicious development in the relationship between music and technology, a relationship that in the subsequent century has evolved in ways that even a visionary like Backhaus could not have foreseen.

Whether the medium is acetate, vinyl, magnetic tape, plastic, or digital coding, the objective of recording music for piano has remained constant: by faithfully reproducing the combinations of sounds that a musician cajoles from the piano, a recording preserves an unique performance via which the distances that separate composer, performer, and listener are closed. In this sense of sharing the emotional proximity between music and musician with the listener, Alexei Melnikov’s Acousence Records recital of music for piano by Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt is a noteworthy success. What makes this disc so special, however, is the opportunity that it affords the hearer to experience the artistic coming of age of a pianist with traits much like those that Backhaus brought to the HMV studio in 1909. Insightful, intelligent, adventurous, and abidingly musical, Melnikov is a young artist who life and training span two millennia but whose passion for the communicative power of music is shown by this disc to be of timeless profundity.

A prize winner in a number of prestigious international competitions, native Muscovite Melnikov was born in 1990, beginning his journey at a time of extraordinary change in his homeland. Especially in an era in which any child with a keyboard, a means of recording video, and an internet connection can aspire to being the next online sensation, he is now hardly a novice, but neither the extensiveness of a musician’s experience nor his age constitutes maturity. In this instance, it is his playing—recorded by Acousence in an appealingly intimate acoustic ambiance that places the listener at the pianist’s side, sensing the movement of his fingers and wrists and the vibrations of the strings before him—that divulges the state of Melnikov’s artistic cultivation. The hallmarks of nationalistic schools of pianism are now only memories that can be revisited in recordings from prior generations, but there are in Melnikov’s playing on this disc reminiscences of the style of his countryman Sviatoslav Richter, not least in the obvious commitment to approaching music without agenda or artifice. It is virtually impossible to wholly avoid egotism in achieving the level of technical mastery necessary to focus on interpreting complex pieces rather than getting the notes right, but Melnikov channels the drive to perform at his best into a conscious desire to be the catalyst that facilitates listeners’ reactions to composers’ musical narratives. The three pieces selected for this disc are very different in substance and structure but strikingly similar in the immediacy of their emotional storytelling, and it is as a teller of these stories that Melnikov seizes the imagination.

Composed during the first years of the Nineteenth Century, a period of great personal struggle during which the composer was compelled to confront his increasing deafness, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor (Opus 57)—not given its traditional appellation of Appassionata until a decade after the composer’s death—continues after more than two hundred years to be regarded as one of the most difficult sonatas in the standard repertory. Like much of Beethoven’s music, the Appassionata is susceptible to being made ridiculous by pianists who overdo the histrionics in wrongheaded pursuits of metaphysical context for the Sonata. The music is brooding and bleak, but it is music, not a series of aural hieroglyphics awaiting decoding. Melnikov executes the score without affectation, focusing on what exists in the music rather than on its Existential implications.

Unsurprisingly, the writing in octaves that is a vital component of Beethoven’s presentation of thematic material in the Sonata’s opening Allegro assai movement makes no demands to which Melnikov’s technique is not equal, and the fluidity of his delivery is impressive. The music’s inherent instability, conveyed by churning arpeggios, is meaningfully imparted without being unduly emphasized. The beautifully simple principal subject of the Andante con moto movement is phrased with understated eloquence that persists in Melnikov’s handling of the variations. It is all too easy for pianists to fall into the trap of encumbering this music with saccharine emoting, but the young pianist here circumvents this obstacle by playing straightforwardly and allowing the connection between music and listener to guide his interpretation. Melnikov’s playing of the Allegro ma non troppo – Presto finale is admirably accurate, his grasps on the movement’s rhythmic transitions and the intricacies of the Sonata’s expansive coda unfaltering. Beethoven has long been cited, perhaps apocryphally, as having asserted that playing without passion is far more damaging to music than playing wrong notes. The playing of some very famous pianists has substantiated the sagacity of Beethoven’s alleged observation, but Melnikov’s performance of the Appassionata is one of the finest recorded examples of how strikingly modern the Sonata can sound when performed with both passion and precision.

It is not necessary to attempt to count its appearances on every aural medium in order to discern that Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor (Opus 48, No. 1) has amassed a discography more extensive than that of almost any other piece in two-and-a-half centuries of piano literature. In the company of recordings by virtually every noteworthy pianist of the past hundred years, it is now tremendously difficult for any artist to bring originality to a recorded performance of the Nocturne without also approaching it with idiosyncrasy that is a disservice to both Chopin and the listener. Remarkably, Melnikov plays the Nocturne with an abiding sense of individuality that remains wholly faithful to the score. As in an aria by Bellini, whose work Chopin knew and admired, the melodic line is of paramount importance, and the pianist negotiates the interplay of the primary and secondary subjects, as well as the shift from Lento to Poco più lento, with resourcefulness that intensifies rather than diluting the composer’s distinctive expressivity.

Almost since the piece first appeared in print in 1854, Franz Liszt’s mammoth Piano Sonata in B minor (S.178) has confounded pianists, audiences, and musicologists. Essentially through-composed in the manner of an expansive, half-hour tone poem for solo piano, the Sonata’s construction has ignited debates about Liszt’s intentions, namely whether the piece was conceived as a single movement or should be viewed as a progression of interconnected movements played without pause. With his performance of the Sonata on this disc, Melnikov espouses neither theory, preferring to concentrate on surmounting the score’s many difficulties and allowing the listener to seek clues within the music.

The naturalness of the recorded sound is a great boon to Melnikov’s performance of the Liszt Sonata, enabling the listener to fully appreciate the contrasting delicacy and power of the pianist’s control of the clarion-toned Shigeru Kawai instrument at his disposal. The full emotional effect of the brief Lento assai introduction is realized in Melnikov’s performance, and the piano’s keys gallop beneath his fingers in his playing of the Sonata’s Allegro energico episode. The pomposity in this reading of the Grandioso section is Liszt’s, not Melnikov’s, and the conversational directness of the pianist’s reading of the Recitativo passages initiates a dialogue among the Sonata’s competing thematic fragments.

The pulse of bel canto beats unmistakably in this maneuvering of the Andante sostenuto heart of the Sonata, and the significance of the return to Allegro energico is spotlit by the drive with which it is accomplished. Melnikov observes Liszt’s cantando espressivo marking with sophistication matched by the zeal of his launching of the following Stretta quasi presto. The course from Presto to Prestissimo is traced with dynamism that lends the recurrence of the Andante sostenuto heightened psychological force. From this apex, the path to the Sonata’s resolution is carved through Allegro moderato and Lento assai terrain, and the descent is effectuated in this performance with athletic agility. The clarity of Melnikov’s navigation of Liszt’s contrapuntal writing reveals the composer’s prowess as a steward of long-established musical forms. It is not without justification that the Liszt Sonata is a piece that pianists add to their repertoires only after acute study. Melnikov’s study yields a rousing, revelatory account of the Sonata—rousing in its traversal of Liszt’s craggy musical topography and revelatory in its manifestation of its player’s abilities.

Comparisons of one pianist’s performances with those of other pianists are often as pointless as they are inevitable, but they are sometimes useful in providing a benchmark against which a young artist’s work can be measured. In the context of Melnikov’s playing on this disc, the most apt comparison is with Edith Farnadi, whose interpretations of music by Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt, exemplified by her 1954 Westminster recording of the Liszt Sonata, possessed an analogous balance between mood and momentum. At least since the 1960 release of Johnny Tillotson’s version of the pop song with the title, the notion of ‘poetry in motion’ has been a cliché, but it is an apposite description of Farnadi’s work. As he plays Beethoven’s Appassionata, one of Chopin’s most affecting Nocturnes, and Liszt’s B-minor Sonata on this disc, his commercial recording début, Alexei Melnikov’s artistry also embodies kinetic lyricism. Above all, the performances on this disc beget an enticing question: what comes next for this erudite pianist?

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924) and CARLO CARIGNANI (1857 – 1919): Complete Piano Works and Selected Opera Transcriptions—Sandro Ivo Bartoli, piano [Recorded in Steinway Haus Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 4 – 5 July 2017; Solaire RecordsSOL1007; 1 CD, ; Available from Solaire Records and major music retailers]

I do not deny that I often drown even my noblest intentions in deluges of words. The greatest danger of approaching the analysis of music with a literary mind is allowing the love of writing to overwhelm the necessity of being read. Too frequently, I cannot overcome the compulsion to write an Edward Everett oration when a Gettysburg Address with easily-extracted talking points would be preferred. It is a disease that resists therapy and is perhaps ultimately fatal to the integrity of an earnest crusade to restore to criticism its own kind of artistry.

Sandro Ivo Bartoli’s Solaire Records recital of music for solo piano by Giacomo Puccini, supplemented by Carlo Carignani’s arrangements of themes from Puccini’s operas, is a disc that inspires appreciation that must not be fed to the insatiable beast of verbosity. As in all of his recorded performances with which I am familiar, the technical skill that Bartoli brings to his playing is irreproachable: were there a need for such stunts, he could undoubtedly play the most difficult of Alexander Scriabin’s piano sonatas whilst blindfolded and subjected to all sorts of adverse conditions. Bartoli is not a well-designed automaton, however, and he does not play like one. Rather, his performances breathe. By the motions of his wrists, the music before him inhales and exhales, the notes and chords becoming atoms and molecules in the atmospheres that emanate from composers’ scores. Even if the music that he performs is sparse and atonal, his playing retains a pervasive aura of bel canto.

It became fashionable in the second half of the Twentieth Century and inexplicably remains a badge of honor in some musical circles in the Twenty-First Century to dismiss Puccini’s music as formulaic, undistinguished, and embarrassingly sentimental. Passages from virtually every score that Puccini produced can be cited in validation of these accusations, but it is not an honest operaphile who proclaims that every bar of Le nozze di Figaro, Tristan und Isolde, or Falstaff bears obvious evidence of genius.

In an effort at fairly assessing the merits of Puccini’s music, consider La bohème, a score labeled by some connoisseurs as unendurably saccharine. On stage and in studio, Mimì and Rodolfo are sometimes older than convention suggests that amorous Bohemians ought to be, sometimes fatter, sometimes older and fatter, and, among listeners who surrender their prejudices to the music, has a truly well-sung but zaftig Mimì ever prompted the notion that her death might have been affecting had binoculars been required to see her waistline from the first row of the stalls? There are combinations of emotional qualities in Puccini’s scores that refuse to be suppressed. Bad performances reveal the blemishes, to be sure, but performances like Bartoli offers on this disc celebrate the beauties of Puccini’s music with a blaze of passion that no pseudo-academic disapprobation can wholly extinguish.

Among the pieces included on this disc, only the first six are the work of Puccini in the sense that the composer himself was wholly responsible for their creation—and, in the cases of at least two of the pieces, that attribution is not universally accepted as factual. Possibly a study for the slow movement of an unfinished D-major string quartet that occupied Puccini in 1882, whilst he was studying composition under the tutelage of Antonio Bazzini, the Adagio in A major is a delightful discovery, its graceful melodic lines, eventually adapted to new surroundings in 1883 in both the Capriccio sinfonico and the opera Le Villi, bewitchingly extended by Bartoli’s phrasing. The limited but imaginative thematic development suggests that the music may well trace its genesis to the aborted string quartet, but Bartoli brings it to the piano with panache.

Composed in 1894, the Lento molto Piccolo Valzer eventually metamorphosed into Musetta’s aria ‘Quando m’en vo’ soletta per la via’ in Act Two of La bohème, its opening theme as familiar as the melodies of Verdi’s ‘La donna è mobile’ and Puccini’s later ‘Nessun dorma.’ Bartoli conveys the wistfulness of the tune more touchingly than almost any Musetta: without the subtext of the character’s toying with Alcindoro and Marcello, the melancholic core of the melody resounds. Bartoli plays without a trace of artifice, the sincerity of his performance heightening the piece’s expressivity. Similarly, Bartoli wields compelling—and fitting—energy in his playing of the Marcetta brillante Scossa Elettrica, commissioned in 1899 to celebrate the centenary of Alessandro Volta’s invention of the electric battery.

In Bartoli’s handling, both the ‘moderato’ and the ‘con affetto’ components of Puccini’s instructions for Foglio d’Album are realized with subtlety. This and the Piccolo Tango possess harmonic nuances of near-Impressionistic colorations, almost as though Puccini learned the art of composition for the piano from the young Debussy. The lack of autograph manuscripts has exposed these pieces to doubts about their origins, but Bartoli’s idiomatically persuasive performances of them silence any debat. Verification of their authorship may be difficult, but enjoying the pianist’s playing is easy. A mere sixteen bars in duration, the Calmo e molto lento Pezzo per pianoforte was written in 1916 in tribute to the appalling human toll of World War One, the effects of which reverberated through the Arts until the atrocities of the Second World War dominated cultural consciousness. Lovingly played here by Bartoli, Puccini’s piece is poignantly understated, imparting collective senses of loss and reflection. For sixteen bars, Puccini gave the piano the communicative power of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and Bartoli’s interpretation of Pezzo per pianoforte conveys the full meaning of Owen’s declaration that, when writing of the horrors of war and human cruelty, ‘the Poetry is in the pity.’

An almost exact contemporary of Puccini, as well as a fellow native of Lucca and an accomplished musician in his own right, Carlo Carignani created arrangements for piano of excerpts from Puccini’s operas that divulge abundant musicality. Both of the pieces from Tosca included on this disc, the cantata ‘Sale, ascende l’uman cantico’ and Tosca’s aria ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’ from Act Two, project the moods of the respective scenes in the opera. How much more effective many performances of Tosca would be were their leading ladies capable of sculpting the line as artfully as Bartoli does in his ‘singing’ of the aria! The Preludes to Act One of Le Villi and Act Three of Edgar were reimagined for the piano by Carignani and are delivered by Bartoli with complementary intelligence, the calibre of the former’s craftsmanship honored by the depth of the latter’s concentration.

The central episode in Il trittico, premièred at The Metropolitan Opera in 1918 with Geraldine Farrar as its titular postulant, Suor Angelica falls victim to particularly vehement scorn for its musical construction and its narrative of a woman who receives absolution after ending her own life upon learning of the death of the child from whom she was separated. In Bartoli’s performance of Carignani’s arrangement of the opera’s Intermezzo, one hears the devastated mother’s restlessness as she prepares the potion that will reunite her with her son, anticipating the elation of the meeting between parent and child. Music is often a realm of extremes in which middle ground can be difficult to find and even harder to occupy, and this year’s centennial of Il trittico’s world première is a suitable occasion for reminding listeners of the foolishness of slavishly replicating others’ preconceptions. Puccini unquestionably aimed for the tear ducts in Suor Angelica, but is the idea of feeling empathy for a grieving mother, albeit a fictional one, really so deserving of contempt? Transcending music, Bartoli’s performance of the opera’s Intermezzo is a timely lesson in compassion.

The principal subjects of Cio-Cio San’s aria ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ and the Coro a bocca chiusa (the Humming Chorus) from Act Two of Madama Butterfly are two of Puccini’s most widely-known melodies, and Carignani arranged them for piano with remarkable sensitivity. The ambiance of Puccini’s Nagasaki permeates Carignani’s work, and Bartoli’s finesse brings Cio-Cio San to life with moving immediacy. With his articulation of ‘Un bel dì vedremo,’ Bartoli evokes the simplicity of Margaret Sheridan, the heartbreak of Maria Callas, and the eloquence of Renata Scotto. In his playing of the Humming Chorus, Butterfly’s yearning for Pinkerton’s return surges in the music’s familiar strains. Before hearing this disc, I would never have anticipated one of the foremost interpreters of Cio-Cio San’s tragedy being a pianist.

As he was preparing to depart from New York City after attending performances of Manon Lescaut and Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera, Puccini and his wife bade farewell to their American hosts with gracious remarks that were preserved for posterity by Columbia Phonographic Company. Recorded on 21 February 1907, those few words provide today’s listeners’ sole opportunity to hear Puccini’s voice—until the release of this disc, that is. No words are spoken here, but Puccini speaks as clearly in the performances on this disc as he did in Columbia’s studio more than a century ago. With his playing, Sandro Ivo Bartoli translates Puccini’s discourse into language that all hearers can understand.

NICOLA ANTONIO PORPORA (1686 – 1768): Germanico in Germania—Max Emanuel Cenčić (Germanico), Julia Lezhneva (Ersinda), Mary-Ellen Nesi (Arminio), Juan Sancho (Segeste), Dilyara Idrisova (Rosmonda), Hasnaa Bennani (Cecina); Capella Cracoviensis; Jan Tomasz Adamus, conductor [Recorded at Radio Kraków, Kraków, Poland, 23 July – 3 August 2016; DECCA483 1523; 3 CDs, 217:39; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Anyone who saw Gérard Corbiau’s fanciful 1994 cinematic reimagining of the life of the celebrated castrato Farinelli was introduced to a frazzled, ill-tempered Nicola Antonio Porpora who bullied his illustrious pupil into becoming one of history’s most revered singers. Corbiau’s ogre of a Porpora, impersonated with consummate gruffness by Omero Antonutti, was undeniably entertaining and effective as a component of a narrative that portrayed Farinelli as a hapless victim of fate, but this boorish incarnation of the composer little resembles the Porpora who emerges from his surviving music, too little of which has been made available via good-quality recordings to listeners willing to reassess the man and his work.

Born in Naples in 1686, Porpora was a product of the cosmopolitan musical culture of his native city, dominated during his formative years by Alessandro Scarlatti, whose compositional style strongly influenced the young Porpora’s artistic development. No less significant in the evolution of Porpora’s own style, particularly in writing for the voice, was his encounter with the poet Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, then not yet known as Metastasio: the most renowned librettist of the first half of the Eighteenth Century, he would author the texts for some of Porpora’s most successful operas. Success was not something to which Porpora ever became accustomed, however. Praised and popular at times in his career, his compositions often sprang to life amidst difficult circumstances.

Though his operas gained traction with London audiences during his much-publicized rivalry with Georg Friedrich Händel in the 1730s, the company for which they were written, the Opera of the Nobility, nonetheless failed. Perhaps most cruelly, Porpora suffered the fate of outliving appreciation of his individual musical language. By the time that he returned to Naples in 1759, his artistic journey having taken him to many of Europe’s music-loving metropolises, the emerging stile galante was rapidly supplanting the florid Baroque style of which Porpora was an exponent. Prone to hardship even when he employed as a scantily-paid valet the young Joseph Haydn, who would later acknowledge the obstinate Neapolitan as a teacher of inestimable value to his musical education, Porpora was tormented during the final years of his life by debilitating poverty. At the time of his death in 1768, he lacked the money to pay for his own burial.

It is principally as a composer that Porpora is remembered in the Twenty-First Century, but his legacy as a trainer of voices, glimpsed in Corbiau’s film, endured well into the Nineteenth Century, when castrati last originated rôles in Europe’s opera houses. Like the similarly sensationalized depiction of Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play and Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus, Corbiau’s treatment of Porpora in Farinelli is not entirely without merit: injurious as it is to historical accuracy, there is undeniable benefit in even a brief, unrealistic glance at Porpora’s impact on vocal tutelage. The glimmer of the meticulously-honed pedagogy that, enabling him to write masterfully for the voices known to him, facilitated commissions to compose operas like his 1732 Germanico in Germania increased the public’s curiosity about Porpora’s music. Now, more than three decades after the film’s theatrical release, ​with the availability of singers capable of meeting the grueling demands of Porpora’s vocal writing, reviving the composer’s operas is again feasible. These rebirths of curiosity and feasibility intersect persuasively in this recording of Germanico in Germania.

First performed in Rome’s Teatro Capranica in February 1732, Porpora’s setting of a finely-crafted libretto by Niccolò Coluzzi charges into the conflict between Germanico, the figurehead of Roman authority in the feudal domains that constitute modern Germany, and the fiercely independent Arminio, leader of a realm under Rome’s unwanted dominion. This being Baroque opera, the courses of neither love nor war proceed smoothly, here complicated by the struggles of a Germanic chieftain loyal to Rome, Segeste, whose two daughters’ fealties are divided between embracing and resisting Roman rule. To the credit of composer and librettist, as well as to the performance that transpires on this recording, what amounts to a convoluted story told in a score of long duration is surprisingly easy to follow. The extensive passages of secco recitative move swiftly but logically, aided immeasurably by the clarity and commitment with which they are sung in this performance.

Recorded in the studios of Radio Kraków, ​​this performance plays out in an acoustical space that falls marginally short of DECCA’s long-established high standards of technological excellence. The timbres of the instruments of Capella Cracoviensis are sometimes adversely affected, giving the recording an one-dimensional, studio-bound setting in which musicians, conductor, and singers must work harder to enliven the performance. By adopting generally quick tempi, Jan Tomasz Adamus strives to maintain musical propulsion throughout the performance, but there are passages in which the singers might have benefited from more sympathetic leadership and stricter, more consistent guidance of ornamentation.

Supplementing the conductor’s own efforts at the keyboard, harpsichordist Marcin Świątkiewicz​ plays nimbly—slightly too nimbly in some instances. It is unlikely that anyone listens to Baroque opera solely in order to enjoy secco recitatives, no matter how cleverly they are accompanied. In this performance, the accompaniments are indeed very clever and irreproachably musical but sometimes overwrought. Tiziana Azzone injects the theorbo into the soundscape with expert judgement, however, balancing the continuo and heightening the expressivity of several key scenes. The intrepidity of horn players Anneke Scott, Olivier Picon, and, in Cecina’s Act Two aria ‘Se dopo ria procella,’ Martin Lawrence yields exhilarating if not always attractive realizations of Porpora’s punishing writing for the valveless horns. The recording’s dry acoustic harshens the orchestral sonorities, but the sheen of the players’ collective virtuosity is undimmed. Germanico in Germania is not an opera that can triumph without support from pit and podium, and, overcoming a few problems, Capella Cracoviensis and Adamus offer the singers a setting in which triumph is within reach.

Ever a vivid presence who figuratively transports a recorded performance from studio to stage, tenor Juan Sancho contributes some of his finest singing on disc to date to this traversal of Germanico in Germania. He has in the rôle of Segeste, the Germanic chieftain who has embraced Roman citizenship, an exceptionally congenial part with vocal writing that exploits the strongest of his technical and interpretive skills. As in many of his recorded performances, Sancho sets an example for his colleagues with his alert, responsive singing of recitatives. In Act One, he sings Segeste’s aria ‘Nocchier, che mai non vide l’orror della tempesta’ with blazing tone and fiery demeanor, spotlighting the character’s temperamental kinship with Bajazet in Händel’s Tamerlano. His aria in Act Two, ‘Scoglio alpestre in mezzo all’onde,’ inhabits a vastly different emotional world, and, prefaced by particularly pointed delivery of recitative, the tenor limns the transition with resourcefulness, luring the listener into the quicksand of Segeste’s predicament.

Sancho can reach greater heights of dramatic intensity in a few bars of accompanied recitative than some singers attain in ten-minute arias, as he demonstrates in his zealous delivery of the accompagnato ‘Empi, del vostro scherno’ in Act Three of Germanico in Germania. Segeste’s final aria, ’Saggio è il cultor,’ is sung with strength and subtlety. With the exceptions of the parts in his London operas and oratorios that Händel wrote for John Beard, rôles for tenor in Baroque works rarely achieved the levels of distinction occupied by the notable castrato parts, but Sancho’s portrayal of Segeste takes full advantage of every detail of characterization devised by Porpora and Coluzzi. Vocally, he has few rivals in music of this vintage, his domination of which he increases with this performance.

Since her earliest performances, Julia Lezhneva has reliably displayed extraordinary technical prowess that thrives in the bravura excesses of Baroque music. Nevertheless, the expressive maturity of her depiction of Segeste’s younger, Rome-friendly daughter Ersinda in this performance is as impressive as her confident handling of Porpora’s music. More so than in any of her previous recordings, Lezhneva connects with the character on a profound level, conveying the psychological conflict of a young girl both devoted to her father and his ideology and sensitive to her sister’s staunch support of her husband in defiance of their father. Ersinda’s inherent naïveté does not preclude flashes of ardor, here invigorated by Lezhneva’s agile vocalism. The sole problem with the soprano’s singing of Ersinda’s first aria in Act One, ‘Al sole i lumi pria mancheranno,’ is the over-ambitious embellishment, which causes the intended coloratura feats to seem slightly beyond the singer’s capacity to execute them. This is especially unfortunate as no proof of Lezhneva’s talents other than her unflappable negotiations of the difficulties of Porpora’s vocal lines is required.

Tellingly, Lezhneva subsequently sings the aria ‘Se sposa d’un Romano’ with unerring control and stylishness, the meaning of the text palpably imparted. She further refines her depiction of Ersinda with singing in Act Two in which virtuosity and insightfulness are united in service to the drama. The savage fiorature of ‘Veder vicino il suo contento’ are tamed with astonishing ease, and her effortlessly sparkling trills recall Beverly Sills’s finest singing. The dramatic consequence of the contrast with ‘Sorge dall’onde’ is accentuated without exaggeration, Lezhneva’s clear enunciation of vowels sharpening the focus of her analysis of Ersinda’s actions and motivations. The pinnacle of Lezhneva’s performance is her account of the Act Three aria ‘Se possono i tuoi rai vedermi ognor penar.’ The best of her artistry shines in her singing of this music: the voice is magnificent, of course, but the heart is no less awe-inspiring. ​Along the course of her pursuit of technical excellence, Lezhneva has also deepened her understanding of the emotional aspects of bringing an operatic character to life, and in this performance she expresses Ersinda’s feelings as expertly as she sings her music.

Born in Morocco, soprano Hasnaa Bennani brings to her performance as the Roman captain Cecina in Germanico in Germania a wealth of experience in French Baroque repertoire that has polished her instincts for finding the expressive cores of dizzying fiorature. The results of this aptitude are evident in every moment of Bennani’s singing in this performance. A dynamic participant in recitatives, she brings similar boldness to Cecina’s aria in Act One, ‘Splende per mille amanti un bel sereno volto,’ voicing both words and music with fervor. She is wholly in her element in Cecina’s accompagnato exchange with Arminio in Act Two, unleashing volleys of adroitly-aimed vocal javelins. The brilliance of Bennani’s management of the punishing divisions in the rousing martial aria with obbligato horns ‘Se dopo ria procella’ is matched by the sincerity of her singing of ‘Serbami la tua fede,’ the voice at its most prepossessing when the character reacts to adversity. In Act Three, Bennani makes the aria ‘Serbare amore e fede’ a sonorous statement of Cecina’s principles. Porpora’s music offers the soprano few moments in which to exercise her talent for lyrical singing, but Bennani convincingly projects Cecina’s bravado without coarsening the lovely texture of her natural timbre.

The tremendous promise that soprano Dilyara Idrisova revealed in her performance as Sabina in DECCA’s studio recording of Pergolesi’s Adriano in Siria comes to fruition in the young singer’s portrayal of Arminio’s wife and Segeste’s daughter Rosmonda in Germanico in Germania. At odds with her father owing to her steadfast backing of her husband’s opposition to Rome, the determined lady’s introductory aria, ‘Rivolgi a me le ciglia,’ receives from Idrisova a captivating reading, the voice’s intrinsic delicacy bolstered by adventurous but mostly tasteful ornamentation. The sequence from the accompagnato ‘Sposa infelice, sventurata figlia’ to the cyclonic aria ‘Son qual misero naviglio’ is spanned with imagination and idiomatic musicality, the singer’s restraint in a rôle prone to flamboyance enhancing manifestation of the character’s latent decency.

Idrisova’s superb coloratura singing lends Rosmonda a more distinct profile in Act Two, not least in the aria ‘Il padre mi sgrida,’ in which the singer’s imperturbable assurance is astounding. In both the touching ‘Priva del caro sposo’ and the terzetto with Germanico and Arminio, Idrisova’s Rosmonda refuses to hide in the shadows of male egos. Her interpretation of the aria ‘Dite, che far degg’io?’ in Act Three is molded with punctilious care for maintaining the line without lessening the poignancy of the text. Wife and husband blend their voices handsomely in Rosmonda’s duetto with Arminio, Idrisova phrasing ‘Se viver non poss’io’ with guileless simplicity. The considerable challenges of Porpora’s music for Rosmonda notwithstanding, the touchstone of Idrisova’s performance is dramatic directness. The evenness of her singing is sporadically compromised by thinning of the tone above the stave, but she is a Rosmonda whose few moments of stress are unflinchingly integrated into an honest depiction of a woman whose prevailing loyalty is to love.

Created in Germanico’s Roman première by the celebrated castrato Caffarelli, Farinelli’s rival for the distinction of being remembered as Porpora’s most accomplished pupil, the proud Teutonic chieftain Arminio is inimical to the colonizing Romans despite the danger to himself and the people he loves. Casting rôles written for Caffarelli can be one of the most daunting aspects of modern productions of Eighteenth-Century operas: generally both high and florid, music tailored to the castrato’s abilities is awkward for many countertenors and mezzo-sopranos. In this performance of Germanico in Germania, mezzo-soprano Mary-Ellen Nesi sings Caffarelli’s part with swagger that suggests that the castrato’s boasts that he rather than Farinelli was Porpora’s greatest protégé were not unfounded. From Arminio’s first entrance in Act One, Nesi makes the valiant warrior a dangerous adversary for Rome and Germanico, presenting his defiance with unshakably firm vocalism. There are ungainly moments in her register shifts in the aria ‘Serba costante il core,’ but she commands the tessitura with few of the shortcomings that mar other singers’ performances of similar music.

The communicative power of Nesi’s voicing of ‘A lei, che il mondo adora’ discloses the rewards of her artistic shrewdness, but here and in the riveting accompagnato scene with Cecina in Act Two it is above all the quality of the voice that compels admiration. The fiendish divisions in ‘Empi, se mai disciolgo’ are dispatched with galvanizing precision at a brisk tempo, elevating the tension that erupts in her nuanced, radiantly beautiful account of ‘Parto, ti lascio, o cara.’ In Nesi’s performance, the character’s integrity is always apparent in the emotionally volatile terzetto with Rosmonda and Germanico. The mezzo-soprano wields such histrionic authority in her articulation of ‘Nemica del valor barbara sorte!’ that this scene in Act Three could veritably be an opera in its own right. The tenderness of this Arminio’s discourse with his wife in the duetto with Rosmonda, ‘Se viver non poss’io,’ is endearing, and, in the opera’s final scene, the accompagnato ‘Vindice Dea’ draws from Nesi declamation of poetic potency. Nesi has ever been a noteworthy interpreter of music originally composed for castrati, but her singing on these discs confirms that her work is one of the most cogent vindications of the rejuvenation of this repertoire.

Expanding his enlightening gallery of portraits of forgotten operatic heroes that already includes compelling portrayals of Händel’s Alessandro, Arminio, and Ottone and Hasse’s Siroe, countertenor Max Emanuel Cenčić here assumes command of the Roman forces in Porpora’s and Coluzzi’s Germania as Germanico, a rôle written for the castrato Domenico Annibali, who was also Händel’s first Arminio. Always possessing a timbral richness atypical of countertenors, Cenčić’s singing in Germanico in Germania exhibits an unforced grandeur that ideally suits the imperious but ultimately magnanimous leader and Porpora’s musical profile of him. [Cenčić’s exploration of Porpora’s musical portraiture continues with the release of a DECCA recital of opera arias in March 2018.] The machismo of Germanico’s Act One aria ‘Questo è il valor guerriero d’un’anima romana?’ suits the countertenor’s emphatic style of utterance, and he sustains an aura of sovereignty even when delving into the da capo’s disparate sentiments. The seething fiorature of ‘Qual turbine’ are also familiar territory for Cenčić, and he deftly steers a course through the music that maximizes excitement without devolving into vacuous grandstanding. He sometimes indulges in the invention of elaborate cadenzas that would be more at home in arias by Galuppi or Mysliveček, but his ornamentation of Germanico’s vocal lines is laudably musical.

Were it not for the hive of buzzing strings into which Porpora plunges the melodic line, Germanico’s Act Two aria ‘Nasce da valle impura vapor che in alto ascende’ might exert the allure of Händel’s most beguiling arias, especially as Cenčić sings it here, but the incessant din of the accompaniment spoils the music beyond any singer’s capacity to rescue it. Still, Cenčić’s performance of the aria is eloquent and charismatic. He joins the seditious Arminio and Rosmonda in their terzetto with an incendiary statement of ‘Temi lo sdegno mio, perfido traditore,’ but, unlike some holders of political sway, this Germanico seems to actually listen to his foes. In Act Three, Cenčić sings ‘Per un momento ancora’ ebulliently, and he accepts the resolution of his clash with opponents of his jurisdiction with affability. Like his previous portrayals for DECCA, extending back to a mellifluous Erster Knabe in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte whilst he was a member of the Wiener Sängerknaben, Cenčić’s Germanico is a winning synthesis of scholarship and showmanship.

When Porpora is last seen in the film Farinelli, he is a disheveled, disenfranchised remnant of a fading era. Sadly, history avows that, to some extent, Corbiau got this right. Porpora’s life was undoubtedly burdened by deprivation, but Germanico in Germania is not the work of an embittered, perennially disagreeable man. His career was impaired by the eternal fickleness of fashion, but the silver lining of that capriciousness is the retribution of rediscovery. With this bar-raising recording of Germanico in Germania, Porpora claims this retribution at last.

VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835): Norma—Maria José Siri (Norma), Sonia Ganassi (Adalgisa), Rubens Pelizzari (Pollione), Nicola Ulivieri (Oroveso), Rosanna Lo Greco (Clotilde), Manuel Pierattelli (Flavio); Coro Lirico Marchigiano “Vincenzo Bellini”; Complesso di palcoscenico Banda “Salvadei”, Fondazione Orchestra Regionale delle Marche; Michele Gamba, conductor [Luigi Di Gangi and Ugo Giacomazzi, Directors; Federica Parolini, Set Designer; Daniela Cernigliaro, Costume Designer; Luigi Biondi, Light Designer; Carlo Morganti, Chorus Master; Recorded ‘live’ during performances in Arena Sferisterio, Macerata Opera Festival, Macerata, Italy, July – August 2016; Dynamic 37768; 1 DVD / Blu-ray, 144:00; Available from Dynamic (DVD / Blu-ray), Naxos Direct (DVD / Blu-ray), and major music retailers]

Amidst the rugged peaks carved in the craggy range of the Italian soprano repertoire by Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, Giordano, and fellow composers remembered and forgotten, there is no altitude more elevated than that reached by Vincenzo Bellini in his Norma. In Felice Romani’s adaptation of Alexandre Soumet’s drama Norma, ou L’infanticide, first performed in Paris only eight months before the operatic Norma reached the stage of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala on 26 December 1831, Bellini had at his disposal one of the finest libretti of the Nineteenth Century, one in which the poet achieved near-perfect equilibrium between action and reflection. With Romani’s words as his impetus, the sensitive Bellini created the defining masterpiece of Italian bel canto and at its center one of the most feared and career-defining rôles composed for the female voice. Since first sung in 1831 by Giuditta Pasta, Norma has revealed her secrets to each subsequent generation of listeners via the voices of members of one of opera’s most exclusive sororities. The lady who ascends unscathed to Norma’s pinnacle, from which the views of opera’s past and future extend from Monteverdi to Mascagni, earns the laurels of a high priestess of bel canto.

The history of recording Norma parallels the well-documented disintegration of bel canto technique in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. A tacit testament to the demands of the title rôle is the fact that, unlike recorded portrayals of many operatic heroines, there is not one Norma heard on a studio recording of the opera who did not sing the rôle on stage. Few sopranos can resist the understandable temptation to sing Norma’s ‘Casta diva’ in concert, but Norma is among the few pieces in the approach to which a modicum of common sense persists. Still, many voices that should not have been singing the rôle have been heard in Norma’s music in recent years. Increasingly, this must be said of all of the opera’s rôles: rare is the performance that can boast of fielding a wholly qualified voice in each part. Like all histories, opera’s continuing evolution is inherently cyclical, but it is now difficult to imagine a return to an era like that in which, in April 1970, the Metropolitan Opera presented Norma with Dame Joan Sutherland in the title rôle, Marilyn Horne as Adalgisa, Carlo Bergonzi as Pollione, and Cesare Siepi as Oroveso.

Staged in the vast space of the Arena Sferisterio in conjunction with the 2016 Macerata Opera Festival, the present Norma was filmed for DVD and Blu-ray release under the direction of Tizio Mancini as a showcase for the accomplishments of a well-integrated team of artists and craftsmen. Visually, this Norma is a fascinating, sometimes frustrating fusion of tradition and innovation. Employing primary-color sets and costumes by Federica Parolini and Daniela Cernigliaro, co-directors Luigi Di Gangi’s and Ugo Giacomazzi’s production occasionally seems to gaze southward, over the Pyrenees, from Bellini’s and Romani’s Gaul to a staging of Bizet’s Carmen. In some moments, there is a sultriness that seems wholly out of place, especially as it disappears when it might prove dramatically viable. Most regrettably, the production does not capitalize on its greatest assets. With one of today’s most experienced interpreters of Adalgisa returning to the rôle, there was no need to resort in this production to stock gestures superficially representative of the naïve priestess’s transition to betrayed, broken woman. Moreover, a youthful, attractive Norma does not need to strike poses in order to earn and engage the viewer’s attention and interest.

Luigi Biondi’s lighting designs are more difficult to assess in the context of a video recording, in which the frame of reference is established by the cinematography, than in the theatre, but they unobtrusively illuminate the tough, primeval world in which this Norma dwells. Violence lurks in every landscape and gesture: in this setting, Norma’s contemplation of slaying her own children is sickeningly credible. This vein of brutality flows in Bellini’s music and Romani’s words but is ultimately tempered by a triumph of humanity that in this productions seems implausible. Perhaps doing so brings the piece closer in mentality to modern audiences, but staging Norma as pseudo-verismo melodrama is a mistake. There is much in this Norma that is beautiful to behold, but the authentic spirit of bel canto is absent. Without it, Norma is just another opera, no matter how well it is performed.

Musically, this Norma is on stronger but far from ideal footing. Conductor Michele Gamba clearly knows and respects the score and has devoted careful study to mastering its many challenges. One of the greatest of those challenges is pacing a performance with tempi that keep the drama moving without distorting Bellini’s exquisite melodic lines or rushing the singers. This Gamba largely manages to do, navigating a course that avoids most of the pitfalls that upset conductors’ earnest efforts at successfully realizing the score’s expressive potential. Whether their efforts emanate from the pit or the stage, the musicians of Fondazione Orchestra Regionale delle Marche and Complesso di palcoscenico Banda “Salvadei” deliver their parts with enthusiasm that makes occasional untidiness of ensemble and intonational uncertainty forgivable, and chorus master Carlo Morganti’s preparation of Coro Lirico Marchigiano “Vincenzo Bellini” produces choral singing that is exciting even when it is not altogether accurate. Though their endeavors also often seem to originate in a musical age that is not Bellini’s, Gamba and his orchestral and choral colleagues restore a measure of the requisite bel canto style missing from the production.

Ably representing Rome in Gaul as Pollione’s comrade in arms Flavio, tenor Manuel Pierattelli brings more voice to his music than many portrayers of the rôle have at their command. In fact, his clear, well-supported tone and forthright diction suggest that Pierattelli might prove to be an equally capable Pollione. Similarly, Bellini’s writing for Norma’s attendant Clotilde is entrusted to soprano Rosanna Lo Greco, who makes a strong impression despite the paucity of opportunities to display her voice’s best qualities. It is too much to ask that a Clotilde sound as though she might sing Norma acceptably, though it must not be forgotten that Joan Sutherland sang Clotilde opposite Maria Callas’s Norma at Covent Garden in 1952, but Lo Greco’s vocalism reveals that hers is a name to remember. Like their colleagues in this production, Pierattelli and Lo Greco are representatives of a new breed of singing actors whose vocal acumen is matched by naturalness before both audiences and cameras.

Hailing from the Alpine town of Arco, south of Brenner Pass in Italy’s Trentino province, bass Nicola Ulivieri honors the historical legacy of his native comune by depicting Oroveso with Italianate fervor and Teutonic discipline. At his entrance in Act One, Ulivieri voices ‘Ite sul colle, o druidi’ virilely, immediately establishing his Oroveso as a younger, stronger-willed figure than the character is in many productions. This is slightly at odds with his vocalism, which is more lyrical than declamatory, particularly in Act One. In Act Two, however, Ulivieri sings with surprising power, intelligently depicting Oroveso’s transition from spiritual leader in his nobly-sung ‘Ah! del Tebro al giogo indegno’ to warmonger in the explosive ‘Guerra, guerra! Le galliche selve quante han querce producon guerrier.’ In the opera’s final scene, the bass makes Oroveso’s realization that he is the grandfather of half-Roman children a moment of true emotion, the horror of his hatred being turned against his own daughter and grandchildren clawing at the unyielding man’s heart. Ulivieri lacks the resonance of Tancredi Pasero, Ezio Pinza, and Cesare Siepi, but he is an effective, musical Oroveso.

The Pollione of tenor Rubens Pelizzari is a brash, rough-hewn soldier whose pursuit of Adalgisa seems more obsessive than affectionate. However passionate their liaison might have been, a woman of Norma’s temperament would surely feel glad to be rid of him. Nevertheless, Pelizzari has good ideas about interpreting Pollione and would likely be more sympathetic in a production that allows him to portray the character as an ordinary man rather than a chauvinistic archetype. Vocally, the tenor also displays a fine command of Pollione’s music. He omits the written top C in his otherwise solid performance of the aria ‘Meco all'altar di Venere,’ and his voicing of the cabaletta ‘Me protegge, me difende’ exudes an apt bravado. Pelizzari’s upper register lacks the squillo brought to the music by Mario del Monaco and Franco Corelli, but he duets forcefully with Adalgisa in ‘Va’, crudele,’ gaining intensity as the vocal line rises above the stave. He holds his own in the magnificent trio that ends Act One, singing first ‘Norma! de’ tuoi rimproveri segno non farmi adesso’ and then ‘Fremi pure, e angoscia eterna pur m’imprecchi il tuo furore!’ with ardor.

Confronted in their Act Two duet with the news that Norma resolved to slaughter their children in retaliation for his infidelity, this Pollione groans ‘Ah! t’appachi il mio terrore’ in appalled apprehension. Pelizzari’s demeanor becomes lachrymose in the opera’s final scene, his statement of ‘Ah! troppo tardi t’ho conosciuta’ imparting self-pity instead of awe inspired by Norma’s sacrifice. Not unlike Ulivieri’s Oroveso, Pelizzari’s Pollione is a professional, not an unforgettable reading of the part, but professionalism in this music is not to be scorned.

Mezzo-soprano Sonia Ganassi has sung Adalgisa in an array of very different productions and opposite Normas of widely varying degrees of proficiency. With acclaimed performances of numerous Rossini rôles to her credit, Ganassi has the wonderful benefit of thorough knowledge of bel canto, and, not surprisingly, she contributes the most idiomatic singing to this Norma. When she begins to sing ‘Sgombra è la sacra selva’ in her Act One scene, there is no doubt that this is a deeply sensitive Adalgisa. Ganassi genuinely performs rather than merely singing the scene, articulating ‘Deh! proteggimi, o dio: perduta io sono’ with crushing emotional weight. She immediately seizes control in the duet with Pollione, phrasing ‘E tu pure, ah! tu non sai quanto costi a me dolente!’ with unmistakable sense of purpose.

Though shamed by her illicit relationship with Pollione, this Adalgisa asserts herself without hesitation in the first of her duets with Norma. Ganassi intones both ‘Sola, furtiva, al tempio io l’aspettai sovente’ and, moving into the trio, ‘Oh! qual traspare orribile dal tuo parlar mistero!’ with complete immersion in the text. Her delivery of ‘Ah! non fia, non fia ch’io costi al tuo core sì rio dolore’ is a lesson in the art of dramatic bel canto: with words and music in perfect balance, no exaggerated characterization is required.

In order for their exchanges in Act Two to be dramatically convincing, Adalgisa and Norma must be musical equals, and Ganassi enriches this performance with involved, intuitive singing. She pronounces ‘Norma! ah! Norma, ancora amata’ with burgeoning anxiety. The traversals of ‘Mira, o Norma, a’ tuoi ginocchi questi cari pargoletti!’ and ‘Sì, fino all'ore estreme compagna tua m’avrai’ that follow are uncommonly cathartic: Adalgisa’s joy and relief at her reconciliation with Norma are touchingly enacted. Intermittent unsteadiness and effort now affect Ganassi’s singing, but she remains a powerhouse Adalgisa for whom no apologies must be made. Bellini and Romani proffered no resolution for Adalgisa, leaving audiences to wonder what becomes of her after the deaths of the man she loved and her dearest friend. Come what may, an Adalgisa such as Ganassi’s surely lands on her feet.

From the first bars of the recitative with which Norma introduces herself, ‘Sediziose voci,’ it is apparent that Uruguayan soprano Maria José Siri brings to her inaugural assumption of the title rôle an important voice in the tradition of Gilda Cruz-Romo and Ljiljana Molnar-Talajić, sopranos with extensive Verdi and Puccini credentials who adapted their spinto voices to Norma’s cantilene and coloratura. In this performance, Siri’s portrayal of Norma recalls the interpretations of several of her celebrated predecessors. The abandon with which she acts the role with the voice resembles the Norma of Gina Cigna, heard in both the earliest complete radio broadcast performance and in the first studio recording of Norma. The emphasis on proper placement of tones brings to mind Zinka Milavov’s 1944 and 1954 Metropolitan Opera Norma broadcasts. Like Radmila Bakočević, she sings Norma without reticence, fully committed to the rôle and holding nothing back.

Intriguingly, Siri’s performance is strongest where many singers’ weaknesses are most apparent, in the much-loved preghiera ‘Casta diva, che inargenti queste sacre antiche piante.’ In the aria’s opening bars, the focus of the soprano’s tone is flawless, utterly untouched by nerves. As the line ascends to the high filigree that troubles many singers of the rôle, slight insecurity intrudes, but Siri’s account of the piece is among the most distinguished on a commercial recording of the opera. She imperiously catapults the recitative ‘Fine al rito; e il sacro bosco sia disgombro dai profani’ into the arena, but the fiorature in the cabaletta ‘Ah! bello a me ritorna del fido amor primiero’ threaten to defeat her. Siri and Ganassi communicate without musical or dramatic barriers in ‘Ah! sì, fa’ core, e abbracciami,’ interweaving their timbres without forcing. In the polacca in the opening sequence of the Act One finale, ‘Oh, non tremare, o perfido,’ the pair of top Cs that punctuate the phrases are produced with ease. Norma’s ire boils in Siri’s voicing of ‘Oh! Di qual sei tu vittima crudo e funesto inganno!’ and, even more scorchingly, ‘Vanne, sì: mi lascia indegno, figli oblia, promesse, onore.’

The scene that begins Act Two is one of the formidable tests of a Norma’s histrionic suitability for the rôle, and Siri emerges victorious, phrasing ‘Dormono entrambi’ with tragic grandeur and exclaiming ‘Ah! no! son figli miei!...miei figli!’ as though she wounded herself with the blade meant for her children. Rejoined by Adalgisa, Siri answers Ganassi’s eloquent singing with a beautiful ‘Deh! con te, con te, li prendi,’ and both ladies suffuse their performances of ‘Sì, fino all'ore estreme compagna tua m’avrai’ with effervescent musicality.

As the opera progresses towards its tragic dénouement, Siri rises to Shakespearean heights of expressivity in ‘Ei tornerà... Sì, mia fidanza è posta in Adalgisa,’ undauntedly braving the punishing tessitura. The low center of vocal gravity in ‘In mia man alfin tu sei’ is more comfortable for Siri than for many Normas, and she spars with Pelizzari’s Pollione in a battle of wills in which the tenor has no hope of prevailing. She then floats ‘Son io,’ Norma’s fatal mea culpa, with particular radiance. The sublime ‘Qual cor tradisti, qual cor perdesti quest’ora orrenda ti manifesti’ and ‘Deh! non volerli vittime del mio fatale errore’ with which Norma takes her leave of the society that condemns her for the crime of following her heart here burn as brightly as the flames meant to consume her. This Norma is no spent woman going gently into that good night of inexorable consequence. Siri will likely build greater assurance in satisfying the musical demands of the rôle with additional opportunities to sing it, but her portrayal of Norma in this production is an auspicious and enjoyable start.

In a time in which singers with the comprehension of bel canto necessary to sing the music as Bellini would have expected it to be sung are in short supply, it is sometimes asked why Norma continues to be performed with regularity. Would it not be preferable, perhaps more respectful to Bellini and Romani, to shelve the score until the emergence of a legitimately important Norma warrants its revival? The dangerous problem with that question is that it ignores the fact that few of history’s significant Normas exhibited their significance in their first attempts at singing the rôle. Her initial reluctance to sing ‘Casta diva’ suggests that not even Giuditta Pasta was a Norma of instantaneous, Athena-like decisiveness. Especially for those who love the opera, a poor Norma is one of opera’s most damnable miseries. This is by no means a poor Norma, but that will not preclude doubts about its value. Its many virtues notwithstanding, this Norma is valuable as a first step along one Norma’s road to potential greatness. With this performance, Maria José Siri is not yet ordained as a high priestess of bel canto, but the altar is within sight.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750): Sonatas for flute and harpsichord, BWV 1020 & 1030 – 1032—Stephen Schultz, Baroque flute; Jory Vinikour, harpsichord [Recorded at Skywalker Sound, Marin County, California, USA, 10 – 13 August 2016; Music & ArtsCD-1295; 1 CD, 55:18; Available from Music & Arts, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

In this second decade of the Twentieth Century, when his music is recorded, promoted, and shared via every conceivable outlet and his prevalence on social media equals the popularity of many living celebrities, it is remarkable to recall that, within a generation of his death in 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach was remembered beyond the minuscule ranks of connoisseurs and fellow composers almost exclusively as an organist. Even his musically-inclined sons, who expanded their familial diaspora across the European continent, were little concerned with preserving their father’s music. By 1750, the musical world as Bach knew it was changing rapidly, its revolutions erupting well in advance of the storming of the Bastille. The advent of the fortepiano was slowly dislodging the harpsichord from its secure place as the preeminent keyboard instrument, and wind instruments with valves were forcing their ‘natural’ cousins into obscurity. Bach was an artist with far-reaching foresight, though, one whose genius for prefiguring the innovations of future generations in his own musical language was rivaled only by Gustav Mahler’s similar propensity. There are many gaps in history’s record of Bach’s day-to-day life and work, but his music tells its own stories. The narrative that emerges from Bach’s music is one of astonishing genius manifested in a body of work that after more than 250 years continues to offer performers and listeners fresh perspectives on music’s ongoing evolution.

Aside from opera, Bach pioneered, propelled, or perfected almost every musical form in use during his lifetime. Though neglected from the time of his death until their rediscovery in the Nineteenth Century by Felix Mendelssohn and other enterprising musicians, Bach’s Passions, Masses, motets, and cantatas are now rightly regarded as cornerstones of Western liturgical music, just as the six concerti assembled as a diversion for the Margrave of Brandenburg are frequently cited as bellwether works in the development of modern orchestration. Bach’s achievements in these genres are indeed groundbreaking, but the quality of his surviving chamber music can be argued to exceed his finest endeavors in other forms. Paralleling his refinement of writing for the organ, Bach extracted from the trio sonatas of Dietrich Buxtehude and musical predecessors of similar abilities the raw materials with which he would assemble his own music for varied small consorts of instruments. Upon this foundation the Sonatas for flute and harpsichord were erected with near-revolutionary faculty for interweaving thematic material between the instruments.

As is true of much of Bach’s music, it is now impossible to ascertain precisely when, where, and with what intentions the Sonatas for flute and harpsichord were devised. Many mysteries complicate understanding of the circumstances that yielded these Sonatas, foremost among which is the question of whether two of them are truly works composed or substantially arranged by Bach. However elusive answers may be, these questions must be asked. Neither the asking nor the difficulty of finding verifiable responses adversely affects enjoyment of the Sonatas, however—especially when they are performed with the period-appropriate musicality and interpretive warmth heard in this expertly-engineered Music & Arts recording. The perceived value of a piece attributed to Bach is unquestionably less than that of music of confirmed authorship, but it is a perception akin to the notion that one of a pair of delectable pastries is less desirable than its partner because the kitchen that produced it cannot be definitively identified. One of the marvels of music is that nothing else seems relevant when well-prepared, well-executed performances resound in one’s ears. Both the preparation and the execution of these performances of the Sonatas for flute and harpsichord persuade the listener that, regardless of its enigmas, this music deserves the attention of the most gifted musicians.

The rewards reaped by this music from the collaboration between accomplished—but not doggedly unyielding—masters of historically-informed music making Stephen Schultz and Jory Vinikour are extraordinary. A virtuoso flautist whose extensive career both in the United States and abroad encompasses solo recitals and concerts, as well as performances with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Musica Angelica, Tafelmusik, and a number of the world’s most renowned period instrument ensembles. A pioneer of combining amplification with flutes of authentic Eighteenth-Century design in order to introduce the singular timbres of these instruments to new audiences, Schultz here plays a German traverse flute created in 2012 after an Italian instrument by Carlo Palanca. His partner in this recording, Vinikour, plays a robust-toned double manual harpsichord built by John Phillips in 2010 after a Gräbner instrument dating from 1722. Like Schultz, Vinikour has been acclaimed throughout the world as soloist, continuo player, chamber musician, accompanist to singers, and conductor. Bach’s music, particularly the Goldberg Variations, justifiably occupies a position of great prominence in Vinikour’s career, making him an ideal companion for Schultz’s explorations of these Sonatas.

Often using the harpsichord’s treble line in the manner of a second melody instrument, contrasted with the straightforward functionality of the bass, Bach’s writing mimics the part writing found in the trio sonatas of his contemporaries, looking to the future and Franz Joseph Haydn’s trios. Schultz and Vinikour each play as though the other’s instrument were an extension of his own, the latter’s incredible affinity for matching the nuances of his colleague’s phrasing despite the harpsichord’s singular mechanism complementing the former’s talent for legato playing that recalls not the efforts of fellow flautists but of Maria Callas. As they are performed by these musicians, Schultz’s flute singing and Vinikour’s harpsichord scintillating, the Sonatas are virtually cantatas for voice and orchestra.

Seemingly metamorphosed by Bach into the form heard in this performance circa 1736, the Sonata in B minor (BWV 1030) began its life in G minor, in which key the melodic line was likely written for violin. The gracefully appealing writing for the flute in the opening Andante movement confirms that Bach’s conversion of the music cannot have been merely a commercially opportunistic exercise. Schultz’s playing heightens the allure of Bach’s ingenious manipulations of the principal subject. The interactions between flute and harpsichord, here realized with a directness that suggests a private conversation between friends rather than a public performance, anticipate the intricacies of Brahms’s chamber music. The Largo e dolce movement that follows is a courtly dance in which shy smiles peek out from the shadows, illuminated by the unhurried lyricism of Schultz’s and Vinikour’s playing. Comparable with similar sections in Bach’s concerti and orchestral suites, this Sonata’s Presto and Gigue are especially demanding, but neither the Presto’s contrapuntal writing nor the Gigue’s passagework in quavers presents challenges that Schultz is not wholly capable of meeting. In this performance, the mathematical precision with which Bach managed thematic development is limned with Cartesian accuracy that never displaces the ebullient spirit of the playing.

Appearing in Bach’s hand only in a now-incomplete transcription of music likely originally scored for recorder, violin, and harpsichord [Alfred Dürr’s practical reconstruction of the missing music for the Neue Bach Ausgabe is utilized in this performance], the Sonata in A major (BWV 1032) exhibits virtues closely related to those of the B-minor Sonata. The acumen with which Bach restructured the instrumentation is apparent, but no seams show in the tight knit of Schultz’s and Vinikour’s performance. The opening Vivace receives from the musicians an outpouring of energy that invigorates every subtlety of the music. Like the second movement of BWV 1030, BWV 1032’s Largo e dolce is an elegant siciliana, here more stylized but no less distinguished. Schultz’s breath control might have been honed from study of this music, and he shapes the melodic line with exceptional eloquence. Spurred by Vinikour’s dexterous playing, there is an improvisatory aura in this reading of the final Allegro that focuses the listener’s attention on every detail of the music, fully displaying the comprehensiveness of Bach’s knowledge of harmony and instrumental timbres.

Recent scholarship suggests that the BWV 1020 and 1031 Sonatas may be either the work of Johann Joaquim Quantz or admiring reworkings thereof by Bach or other composers, including Bach’s sons. The kinship of the Sonata in E♭ major (BWV 1031) with Quantz’s music is obvious, but it is not out of place amidst Bach’s compositions. Still, there is an emphasis on ceremonial ornamentation in the Allegro moderato first movement that is at odds with the interpretive specificity typical of embellishment in Bach’s scores. Nevertheless, Schultz and Vinikour wholly circumvent the pitfall of sacrificing momentum to demonstrations of their own technical prowess. Rather, their dedication is to providing the listener with an unaffected traversal of the music, free from proselytizing in favor of any concept of the Sonata’s origins. The central movement is again a Siciliano, and the defining lilt of the form persists in Schultz’s and Vinikour’s performance even when the music ventures furthest from it. The resolving Allegro is delivered with effervescence, flautist and harpsichordist trading cascades of notes with the wit of actors in an Oscar Wilde play. An occasional resemblance in elements of the Sonata’s construction to operatic arias of the period lends circumstantial credence to a theory that BWV 1020 and 1031 were actually composed by Carl Heinrich Graun. In that vein, Schutlz’s and Vinikour’s playing conjures a good-natured incarnation of the thrilling competitions between singers like Farinelli and Caffarelli.

The home key of the Sonata in G minor (BWV 1020) suffuses the music with a prevailing seriousness that Schultz and Vinikour take care to maintain without exaggeration. The Sonata’s mood is not unlike the dramatic atmosphere shared by Mozart’s two symphonies in the same key, but a brightness permeates the first Allegro that disperses any clouds of gloom that threaten to gather. Approaching the music without interpretive agenda is the core principal of Schultz’s and Vinikour’s performance, and their success is nowhere more absolute than in the G-minor Sonata’s Adagio movement. The simplicity with which the flautist traces the melodic line is deeply satisfying in the fashion of Wolfgang Schneiderhan’s playing of the slow movements of Beethoven’s violin sonatas, supported by the harpsichordist’s sure-fingered navigations of the shifting currents of the ground bass. The gentlemen launch the second Allegro powerfully, tapping the flow of electricity that courses through the music. The sparks that they strike ignite the performance, but the pyrotechnics are always tastefully discharged. Whether the music is the work of Bach, Quantz, Graun, another hand, or community effort, Schultz and Vinikour play it with integrity that would make any composer proud to claim it.

Technology enables today’s listeners to experience the music of composers who only a generation ago remained forgotten. In such an environment, it no longer suffices to state that a composer was a genius and expect that statement to be accepted as fact without substantiation. This is also true of a musician’s reputation. When assessing the merit of a composer’s work or a performer’s artistry, hearing is believing. To hear this recording of four Sonatas for flute and harpsichord is to believe that Johann Sebastian Bach was a musical innovator without peer in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. Perhaps Bach would not recognize all of the music on this disc as his own, but ears as discerning as his could not fail to hear in the playing of Stephen Schultz and Jory Vinikour echoes of his own genius and virtuosity.

NICCOLÒ PAGANINI (1782 – 1840): Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Opus 6, MS.21 and ERMANNO WOLF-FERRARI (1876 – 1948): Violin Concerto in D major—Francesca Dego, violin; City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Daniele Rustioni, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during performances in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, UK, 21 – 22 August 2016 (Paganini) and 8 – 9 March 2017 (Wolf-Ferrari); Deutsche Grammophon481 6381; 1 CD, 72:09; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In a time in which children are gunned down in their schools and nations hurtle towards war over differences of negligible consequence to the daily lives of their citizens, it feels inappropriate even to think of artistic tragedies. The sobering realities of politics and the evolution of culture are now more indivisible than ever before, however, and the struggles of art and artists are often educational on a broader level. Ironically, music as a commodity is accessible to Twenty-First-Century listeners in ways of which previous generations could hardly have dreamed, but music as a common language in which humanity’s troubles can be civilly discussed is understood by ever fewer artists and listeners. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the critical accent now so often missing from serious musical discussions is that of joy. A serendipitous peculiarity of music is that, whether the emotions that it communicates are exuberant or funereal, the most effective performances are those that exude the joy of using music to connect people. When this elation is absent, the most accomplished technique cannot transcend the mundane: rather than hearing music, the listener perceives notes. The musician completes a task like any other commonplace chore, and Saint Cecilia is martyred anew.

In her previous recordings of solo and chamber works, the playing of violinist Francesca Dego has exhibited the pure delight in making music that uplifts an artist’s work and audiences’ reactions to it. Born in Lecco in Italy’s Lombardia region, Dego’s prodigious talent was apparent from an early age, her concert début at the age of seven having revealed a fledgling interpretive acuity that she continues to refine. A student of prestigious violinists and institutions, she perpetuates traditions encompassing fellow artists as diverse as the composer and violinist George Enescu and Ferdinand David, to whom Felix Mendelssohn dedicated his Violin Concerto. That she is a committed, thoroughly-prepared musician and an alert, insightful artist is consistently apparent, but the quality that makes these recorded performances of concerti by Niccolò Paganini and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari equally enjoyable and valuable is the unmistakable sense of felicity that her playing of even the most contemplative passages in these works imparts. There are many violinists capable of playing these concerti and, among them, a certain number capable of playing them with true brilliance. Dego is the peer of the finest technicians past and present, but another of today’s artistic tragedies is that extraordinary technique and imagination no longer guarantee a successful career. Some careers are built upon illusions of individuality, but this disc confirms that Dego’s artistic development is shaped by the kind of magic brandished only by genuine originality.

A vital influence on the adventurous course of Dego’s musical journey is surely the presence of conductor Daniele Rustioni as a like-minded companion in art and life. Any suggestions of a spouse’s tendency to indulge his partner’s idiosyncrasies are silenced by the uncompromising integrity of Rustioni’s conducting of the performances on the disc. Acclaimed for his work in the world’s opera houses, Rustioni is an ideal compeer for Dego’s musical style. In her traversals of both concerti, Dego’s playing ‘sings,’ evoking Rossinian bel canto in Paganini’s music and the Indian-Summer Romanticism of the composer’s own operas in Wolf-Ferrari’s concerto.

Under Rustioni’s direction, the musicians of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra perform this music with professionalism that upholds the orchestra’s nearly-century-long legacy of excellence. It is again not the distinguished caliber of the music making that lends their performances uncommon merit: it is the zeal audible in the work of every section of the orchestra that captures the listener’s attention. Unfailingly right for the music, Rustioni’s tempi are not followed by the orchestra but felt, their coordination with Dego’s playing disclosing easily-overlooked but crucial details of the composers’ part writing. In these performances, Paganini and Wolf-Ferrari receive the fully-engaged handling often reserved for ostensibly ‘greater’ composers, a result of the palpable musical camaraderie among soloist, conductor, and orchestra. With these performances, the CBSO instrumentalists prove themselves to be persuasive exponents of Italian music, and Dego and Rustioni are christened as honorary Brummies.

Somewhat like Franz Liszt, Paganini has too often been dismissed as an unrivaled virtuoso whose compositions are well-written but ultimately unimportant pieces that exploit feats of their creator’s legendary virtuosity. More so in Paganini’s case than in Liszt’s, this assessment is not wholly without justification, and, in comparison with his Hungarian-born counterpart, the Italian composer left fewer works, in fewer genres, that can now be examined in pursuit of increased understanding of his artistry. Nevertheless, Paganini’s music almost always amounts to more than the sum of its parts, and those parts in the concerto played by Dego on this disc constitute a veritable litany of the skills for which Paganini was renowned.

The first of Paganini’s five canonical concerti for violin and orchestra [though first published after the composer’s death, Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 6 (M.S.75) is an early work that poses editorial questions: a previous Deutsche Grammophon release featured violinist Salvatore Accardo’s performance of Federico Mompello’s orchestration of the concerto] was likely drafted in 1817 and 1818, by which time his gifts as both performer and composer had reached their zenith. Epitomized by the twenty-four Capricci composed during a fifteen-year span and published by Casa Ricordi in 1820 (and previously recorded for DGG by Dego—catalogue number 481 0025), the contents of the arsenal of technical weapons manifested in Paganini’s music are restricted solely by the physical limitations of the violin. In Dego’s hands, the 1697 Cremonese instrument by Francesco Ruggeri with which she plays these concerti seems to acknowledge no limitations. Paganini originally composed his first Concerto in E♭ major, with the orchestral parts scored in that base key and the solo part notated in D major, enabling him to scordatura to tune his violin a half-tone higher via scordatura—a practice familiar from Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s fascinating Rosenkranz-Sonaten—but still take advantage of the resonance of the instrument’s open D string. The Concerto is now generally performed in transposition to D major, permitting today’s violinists to recreate the sonorities that Paganini intended without resorting to creative tuning.

A principal goal for Paganini’s manipulation of keys in the Concerto was lofting the violin’s tones above the orchestral sound, and the diaphanous but full-bodied playing fostered by Rustioni and the CBSO facilitates Dego’s dauntless fulfillment of that aim. In the Concerto’s opening Allegro maestoso movement, the young violinist’s mastery of the wrist-numbingly difficult writing is marvelous, but she actively seeks to enhance the listener’s appreciation of Paganini’s compositional expertise by executing the most demanding passages not as sequences of tricks but as organic extensions of the melodic lines. As in the works of Édouard Lalo and Pablo de Sarasate, there are moments undeniably meant to elicit gasps of awe from the listener, and Dego never lets Paganini down, inspiring as much wonder with her dexterous delivery as the composer himself must have done. Employing a cadenza devised by Émile Sauret and improved by Accardo, she resolves the Allegro maestoso with an exhilarating musical exclamation point.

The central Adagio espressivo movement is the aria that follows the first movement’s fiery recitative, and here it is Dego’s phrasing that enthralls, Rustioni accompanying her with the finesse with which he would support a Norma’s singing of ‘Casta diva.’ The Allegro spirituoso Rondo finale is the cabaletta in this quasi-operatic Concerto, and this performance of it has the clear-sighted intensity of Maria Callas’s and Renata Scotto’s portrayals of dramatic bel canto heroines. Accurate double stops, pizzicati, and harmonics and flawless intonation in chromatics are all present in Dego’s playing, but they are not used as distractions that shift the listener’s focus from the music to the musician. This performance provides abundant thrills, but, more importantly, Dego’s playing highlights the charm that shyly hides beyond the dizzying whirlwinds of notes.

A native Venetian of German and Italian parentage, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari embraced a career in music only after having abandoned his desired course of following his father into the visual arts. It is for his operas that Wolf-Ferrari is now most remembered, and in scores like Il segretto di Susanna, I gioielli della Madonna, and Sly there are perhaps glimpses of how Wolf-Ferrari’s views of musical landscapes were influenced by a painter’s sensitivity to color, light, and shadow. The cultural cross-pollination that produced the unique blossoms of his mature style parallels the similar circumstances that nurtured the work of Maurice Ravel, but, like Paganini, Wolf-Ferrari’s surviving music provides fewer pieces than Ravel’s with which to analyze his cosmopolitan synthesis of very different national idioms.

One of a handful of the composer’s non-operatic works to have received even occasional attention during the seven decades since his death, Wolf-Ferrari’s Opus 26 Violin Concerto was written for American violinist Guila Bustabo, a controversial figure whose career was disrupted first by her associations with Nazi-affiliated musicians and institutions and later by the effects of bipolar disorder. Premièred in Munich in January 1944, at the height of the Second World War, the Concerto fuses lyricism with exhibitionism, the music’s soundscapes almost wholly free of the oppressive clouds of war.

Dego’s performance of the Concerto’s opening Fantasia conjures an aura of wonder that is precisely right for the music—and is sustained with unexaggerated expressivity by Rustioni and the CBSO musicians. Neither Wolf-Ferrari’s music nor Dego’s playing of it is insubstantial, but the violinist approaches the Concerto with a spellbinding lightness of touch that heightens the work’s contrasts between simplicity and showmanship. The Romanza receives from Dego a reading of exquisite poise. Hers is not solely the confidence of certain technical proficiency: the assurance with which she plays this music, not least in the subsequent Improvviso, affirms that, rather than conventionally learning the music, she has absorbed it, stylistically and emotionally. As much in Wolf-Ferrari’s Concerto as in Paganini’s, the virtuosic episodes are therefore natural components of the player’s interpretation of the music.

Unlike scores by many of his contemporaries, the pages of Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto are not littered with tempo markings and other directions. Thus, when Wolf-Ferrari stipulated that a passage in the final Rondo’s coda should be played ‘un poco più presto,’ it was undoubtedly with the expectation of his instructions being followed. He could find no more dutiful an exponent of his music than Dego, whose subtle observance of the composer’s wishes makes their significance all the more apparent to the listener. In a recording career that promises much, Dego will undoubtedly get round to the cornerstone concerti of her instrument’s repertory, but she could have selected no better work for her first recorded collaboration with an orchestra than Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto. The work’s wartime provenance notwithstanding, Dego claims this music as her own as persuasively as Jacqueline du Pré seized the Elgar Cello Concerto.

Were the performances on this disc merely good, it would nevertheless be a fantastic recording, for in its seventy-two minutes the listener is invited into a dialogue in which soloist, orchestra, and conductor translate for the benefit of modern listeners the dissimilar musical dialects of composers whose works rarely enjoy thoughtful treatment. These performances are spectacular, however, validating and expanding the credentials of one of the new millennium’s most gifted violinists. One cannot survive as a soloist in Classical Music today without ego, but this disc never sounds like an exercise in building its soloist’s reputation. Rather, it sounds like Francesca Dego’s declaration of affection for an instrument and the music composed for it—and for the opportunity to share that affection with a world that desperately needs it.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918 – 1990): Mass– A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers—Kevin Vortmann (Celebrant); Sarah Uriarte Berry, Julia Burrows, Morgan James (sopranos); Hilary Ginther, Bryonha Marie Parham, Lyn Philistine, Pearl Sun (mezzo-sopranos); E. Clayton Cornelious, Devin Illaw, Benjamin Krumreig, J.D. Webster (tenors); Timothy McDevitt, Kent Overshown, Nathaniel Stampley (baritones); Zachary James (bass); Douglas Butler, Daniel Voigt (boy sopranos); Westminster Symphonic Choir, Temple University Concert Choir, The American Boychoir; The Rock School for Dance Education; Temple University Diamond Marching Band; Student Musicians from the School District of Philadelphia; The Philadelphia Orchestra; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in performance in Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 30 April – 3 May 2015; Deutsche Grammophon483 5009; 2 CDs, 107:45; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In his Mémoires, passages in which make Mein Kampf seem like a paragon of humility by comparison, Hector Berlioz wrote that he ‘came into the world quite naturally, unheralded by any of the signs which, in poetic ages, preceded the advent of remarkable personages.’ Perhaps Jennie and Samuel Bernstein were similarly unaware of the artistic significance of the event when they welcomed their son Louis to the world on 25 August 1918. Like Berlioz’s 1803 début, though, the birth of the boy who would become Leonard Bernstein was an auspicious occasion in the history of music. In this year of celebration of the centennial of Bernstein’s birth, the prominent rôle played in the evolution of American music in the Twentieth Century by this son of Ukrainian immigrants is rightly being reassessed from new and perspectives, balancing appreciation of the sometimes flamboyant fervor of his conducting with fresh analyses of the contemplative brilliance of his work as a composer. From his still-potent Broadway scores to symphonic pieces that, like the music of fellow baton-wielding composers such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Paul Kletzki, largely have not entered the international repertory, Bernstein bequeathed to contemporary Classical Music a body of work in which virtually every facet of his musical personality is reflected.

Not even Bernstein’s least-heralded works are unknown, but, aside from West Side Story, not even his best-known and best-crafted works—the fantastic Candide, for instance—are as widely heralded as they deserve to be. This is especially true of his Mass, a pièce d’occasion of quality that should have triumphantly outlived its occasion but has received greater appreciation in print than in performance. Recorded during performances in Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts with emotional immediacy that is all but impossible to achieve in recording studios [recording this atmospheric work under studio conditions would surely have yielded sonics of markedly improved balance and clarity, which might have increased the performance’s potency for repeated hearings], this Deutsche Grammophon Mass honors the score’s creator with an interpretation that shirks none of the piece’s difficulties and controversies. A product of the social and artistic contexts of a tumultuous period in America’s history, Mass was when new and can still sound radical when performed without complacency. Responses to every stimulus not found in Bernstein’s score ignored, this is a Mass that throbs with the true spirit of its composer.

Commissioned by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and first performed on 8 September 1971, in conjunction with the inauguration of the Center for the Performing Arts built in Washington, DC, to honor her slain husband’s cultural legacy, Bernstein’s Mass is a work that is as complex and multi-layered as the composer himself. Like Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Bernstein’s Mass is an indictment of the inherent hypocrisy of the modern era. Manifested in Mahagonny in the substitution of a hedonistic cult of consumption for conventional morality, the duplicity is portrayed in Bernstein’s Mass as a spiritual crisis via which the national conscience is dissected and found to be fallible but resilient.

Bernstein devised Mass as a ‘theater piece’ rather than a straightforward musical treatment of the Ordinarium of the Mass, and the work’s theatricality is especially apparent in the performance preserved on these discs. Bernstein scored the piece for an exceptional ensemble of diverse musical forces, and a particular joy of this recording is hearing the young musicians of the Temple University Concert Choir and Diamond Marching Band and students from the School District of Philadelphia performing with abundant energy, musicality, and enthusiasm. The composer’s writing for voices and instruments not typically employed in formulaic Mass settings, an integral element of his concept, met with critical skepticism when the work was premièred, but the brilliance with which these parts are executed in this performance validates the sagacity of Bernstein’s vision.

The easy virtuosity brought to the music by The Philadelphia Orchestra, Westminster Symphonic Choir, and the young men of The American Boychoir, whose training academy is among the most lamentable victims of the new millennium’s financial calamities, reveals the extraordinary vitality of the composer’s ingenuity. The Philadelphia musicians, professional and amateur, manage the transitions among idioms—operatic in the manner of Candide and the flawed but engaging A Quiet Place [a new recording of which, featuring an excellent cast and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under the direction of Kent Nagano, is scheduled for release by DECCA in June 2018], symphonic in the mode of his homages to Beethoven and Mahler, and Broadway-esque, reminiscent of West Side Story—with keen awareness of both the individual implications of each stylistic component and how each part fits into the whole. A performance of Mass cannot survive haphazard musicianship: this performance thrives on its participants’ consistent, consistently incisive musicality. Every woman, boy, and man involved with this recording audibly approaches the music with unique points of view, but a particular success of this performance is that it is emphatically Bernstein’s Mass and no one else’s.

With vocal lines inhabiting many of the stylistic worlds explored by Bernstein during his career, the solo singers in Mass face unenviable challenges of range, diction, and versatility. The effectiveness of a performance of this music cannot be assessed solely using the criteria of accurate pitches and rhythms, not least because an aura of improvisational spontaneity is crucial to the realization of Bernstein’s musical and expressive intentions. The singers assembled for this performance of Mass constitute an ensemble of great variety and vitality, and their work engenders a reading of the score in which the equilibrium between words and music, meticulously cultivated by Bernstein, is maintained with unfaltering scrutiny of the dramatic significance of each phrase.

The mostly well-matched singers—boy sopranos Douglas Butler and Daniel Voigt; sopranos Sarah Uriarte Berry, Julia Burrows, Morgan James, and Meredith Lustig; mezzo-sopranos Hilary Ginther, Bryonha Marie Parham, Lyn Philistine, and Pearl Sun; tenors E. Clayton Cornelius, Devin Ilaw, Benjamin Krumreig, and J. D. Webster; baritones Timothy McDevitt, Kent Overshown, and Nathaniel Stampley; and bass Zachary James—are wholly credible as participants in a spiritual probe driven by a musical explication of traditional liturgy. The integration of disparate idioms is accomplished with laudable fluency, lending the traversal of the score the continuity and fluidity that it needs to truly lure the listener into the soul of the music—and, through the music, into the soul of America. That this is difficult music is obvious, but the vocalism provided by these talented, dedicated artists enables the listener to joyfully and truthfully echo the words of Walt Whitman: in their performance, one hears America singing.

The performance of Seattle-based tenor Kevin Vortmann as Mass’s celebrant is nothing short of a tour de force. With only a few notes at the lower end of the compass disclosing weakness, the singer exhibits vocal qualifications diligently adapted to the music—music that requires a blend of a good opera singer’s security throughout the range, an accomplished Lieder singer’s communicative acuity, and the charisma of a leading man of the Great White Way. Vortmann brings to the Celebrant’s music a timbre reminiscent of that of John Aler and a vibrancy that recalls the best performances of Mandy Patinkin. His approach to the part is wholly his own, however, mimicking neither the inimitable creator of the rôle, Alan Titus, nor any subsequent Celebrant. Vortmann elucidates textual subtleties not by exaggerating his diction but by remaining sensitive to the ways in which Bernstein employed words to propel vocal lines.

The depth of Vortmann’s comprehension of the composer’s musical architecture is evident in every phrase of his performance, beginning with an account of ‘A Simple Song’ that is both exciting and moving and continuing with a forceful Epiphany. In the Fraction sequence launched by ‘Things Get Broken,’ Vortmann intones ‘Pacem! Pacem!’ with the angst of a soul torn by violence and injustice, and the Allegro furioso statement of ‘Why are you waiting?’ explodes with doubt and sudden rage. Vortmann makes ‘God...said...’ and ‘Oh, I suddenly feel ev’ry step I’ve ever taken’ wrenchingly personal, delving into the sinister dimensions of dogmatism with terrifying honesty. In an instant, the listener also feels every step of the Celebrant’s voyage, Vortmann’s delivery imparting the catharsis of self-awareness. The Celebrant’s metamorphosis from instrument of ritual to self-sufficient Everyman is wrought with unerring histrionic instincts: the liberation of a symbolic scion of modern society from the drudgery of self-delusion is palpable. An amalgamation of the Evangelists in Bach’s Passions, the Simpleton in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Britten’s Albert Herring, and Bernstein’s own Candide, the Celebrant receives from Vortmann a mesmerizingly complex, cogent characterization.

Having recently conducted performances of Wagner’s Parsifal and Richard Strauss’s Elektra at The Metropolitan Opera, that company’s Music Director designate Yannick Nézet-Séguin has vast experience with music sometimes cited as troublesome by fellow musicians and listeners. Performances and recordings have revealed him to be a masterful conductor of a broad repertoire including music by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler, and the too-little-appreciated Florent Schmitt, manifesting a far-reaching but not pedantic intelligence. His handling of Bernstein’s music in this performance of Mass, ebulliently youthful and galvanized by the impatience with the musical establishment that erupts from every page of the score, illuminates a close artistic kinship between composer and conductor. Executing the instructions provided in the music is something of which any competent conductor should be capable, but Nézet-Séguin shapes this performance of Mass with the sort of comprehensive mastery that Britten disclosed in his conducting of Schumann’s unwieldy Szenen aus Goethes Faust. Under Nézet-Séguin’s baton, the idiosyncrasies of the music that perplexed and displeased critics in 1971 sound inherently right: rather than missteps to be corrected, they are innovations to be celebrated.

Mass’s peculiar but engrossingly episodic structure, not wholly unlike Act Two of Parsifal, becomes an impactful linear narrative in this performance, the momentum of the Celebrant’s storytelling energized by Nézet-Séguin’s urgent but unhurried pacing. The conductor’s comfort with music from many eras is particularly advantageous in Mass’s pair of Meditations, here impressive as finely-crafted pieces with their own merits rather than forgettable as affectionate but decorative pastiches. In a work like Mass, it can be argued that, to transplant Thomas Jefferson’s observation from the halls of civic power to the concert hall, the conductor is best who conducts least—or, more to the point, least imposes his conducting upon the music. In the context of these DGG discs, it could almost be believed that, this group of musicians having assembled in Verizon Hall, a performance of Mass extemporaneously occurred like the proverbial hockey game that arises from an impromptu brawl at the ice rink. Its copious virtues notwithstanding, this is not music that scores hat tricks without adept coaching. Conducting with an exemplary fusion of zeal and perceptiveness, Nézet-Séguin unobtrusively coaches this team to unequivocal victory.

Perfection in Art is an imperfect thing. One pair of eyes gazes upon Pablo Picasso’s Guernica with the belief that the carnage would be more real to the viewer if striking colors gushed from the tableau. Other eyes study a kaleidoscopic work by Marc Chagall and wonder whether its message would be more forcefully conveyed by hues of grey. It is now fashionable to dismiss some of Bernstein’s works as dated, and there are indeed passages in Mass that are very much of the time of their creation. As the music is performed on these discs, Mass can no more be dismissed as a relic of the past than Guernica can be described as merely a well-known image. Still rousing after more than four decades, Bernstein’s own recording introduced Mass to the public beyond Kennedy Center’s walls. Overcoming technical limitations that mitigate its efficacy, this recording introduces Mass to a new generation of listeners with a performance that recreates the magic of the composer’s account on its own terms.

JESSICA KRASH: Past Made Present: Music of Jessica Krash—Emily Noël, soprano; Ian Swensen, violin; Robert DiLutis, clarinet; Tanya Anisimova, cello; Laura Kaufman, flute; Jessica Krash, piano; Members of the Washington Master Chorale; Thomas Colohan, conductor [Albany RecordsTROY1716; 1 CD, 73:31; Available from Albany Records, Amazon (USA), iTunes, and major music retailers]

As important to the continued viability of Classical Music as memorable performances by accomplished performers is the emergence of original, compelling compositional voices that communicate the modern world’s complex emotional conundrums in musical language that challenges, comforts, and uplifts. The legacies of previous generations of composers, bolstered by works of timeless, universal relevance, are sufficient to preserve the prestige of genre’s illustrious history, but its future cannot be secured solely by memories. In the words of the English composer Sir Malcolm Arnold, ‘music is the social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is,’ and the world in this second decade of the Twenty-First Century direly needs gestures of friendship. There is no surer path to friendship than mutual understanding, understanding of the kind that can be found in—and learned from—Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, and, above all, it is a quest for compassionate awareness that permeates the music of American composer Jessica Krash. With Past Made Present, Albany Records’ commitment to providing this superbly unique composer with an avenue into the public conscience is furthered with recordings of music that both manifests and encourages accord achieved through self-examination.

The pieces on Past Made Present speak with a creative voice that is at once wonderfully original and gratifyingly familiar. All of the music on this disc reveals an extraordinary gift for part writing on an intimate scale that rivals the work of masters of the Tudor courts of Henry VIII and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, allied with an innate ability to craft melodic lines that grasp and retain the listener’s attention. Like the music of Brahms, Krash’s works disclose a command of form that enables inventiveness. Also like Brahms’s best works, especially his chamber music, and Anton Bruckner’s remarkable F-major String Quartet, the music on Past Made Present is shaped by a bipartite, almost ambiguous sensibility that juxtaposes an abiding aura of disquiet with haunting purity of vision. The profound and the profane coexist, agreeing to disagree, struggling for domination but held in an uneasy—and truthfully human—equilibrium by musical discourse that refuses to take sides. This is music that advocates no ‘right’ point of view: rather, the sophisticated but appealing harmonic language invites the listener into exchanges that nurture contemplation. Here, there are no prerequisites. Krash’s music asks the listener to focus not only on how it resounds in the ears but also on how it reverberates in the heart.

Expertly sung on this disc by the twelve voices of Washington Master Chorale under the direction of Thomas Colohan, Young Vilna is Krash’s harrowing, healing, and heartfelt act of grappling via music with the legacy of the Holocaust among the Jewish communities of her grandfather’s native Lithuania. With a text drawn from youngsters’ questions addressed to Ellen Cassedy, author of the seminal cultural study We Are Here, during her own time of study and self-enrichment in Lithuania, Young Vilna unites words of timely poignance with music that often seems to pursue thoughts beyond words’ abilities to fully embody emotions. Tenor soloist Eric Lewis emerges from instead of seeking to sing over the chorus, and the delicate fervor of his and his colleagues’ singing is equaled by the ideally-balanced playing of violinist Ian Swensen, clarinetist Robert DiLutis, and cellist Tanya Anisimova.

The insightfulness of the composer’s use of text emphasizes the ambivalence of the line ‘Today’s young people live in the present,’ suggesting undertones of denial, accusation, and self-doubt beyond the façade of disengagement. The emotional weight of ‘Maybe I would have been a killer. Would I have been different?’ is intensified by the lightness of Krash’s setting: this is a sentiment to be whispered, the possible responses too momentous for public discussion. The repetition of ‘Are Jews genetically geniuses?’ imparts a subtle crisis of identity, heightened in this performance by the unpretentious immediacy of the choristers’ singing. The ambivalence of Krash’s treatment of the question ‘Do you feel at home?’ recalls the final moments of Britten’s Death in Venice, its protagonist suspended between life and death and wholly at peace in neither state. Reconciliation, resignation, and recrimination echo in Krash’s music, pulsing in the subdued passion of this performance.

Krash found both inspiration and texts for the song cycle Sulpicia’s Songs in Mary Maxwell’s wonderfully singable translations of verses written by Sulpicia, a too-little-studied Roman poet and scholar believed to have been active during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Chauvinistic elements in academia persist in questioning the authorship of the handful of poems attributed to Sulpicia, alleging that the complexities of their language and themes place them beyond the capabilities of even the best-educated women of First-Century Rome. As is true of the collection of sonnets written by someone who may or may not have been christened with the name William Shakespeare, questions about the true identity of the author of Sulpicia’s poems in no way lessen their literary and historical value. What cannot be doubted is that an indelible aspect of an artist’s rôle in society is to see, sense, and surmise beyond the limitations of her time and place. That debate continues about whether, as a Roman woman of the First Century, Sulpicia could have written these poems is indicative of insecurities and prejudices that have nothing to do with art.

Accompanied by the composer, soprano Emily Noël gives new life to Sulpicia’s words, catapulted into the Twenty-First Century in settings via which Krash spotlights the often uncanny modernity of the poet’s conceits. In the opening song, ‘At last it’s come,’ Noël’s voice gleams with the enthusiasm of new discovery, and she contrasts this tellingly with the muted feeling with which she delivers the cunningly-crafted melodic lines of ‘The hated birthday approaches.’ The vocal writing in ‘Did you hear?’ is challenging in unexpected ways, demanding concentration that the soprano employs to perform the song with complementary control and cogency. Noël’s voice, a versatile and splendidly-trained instrument, is always diverting but is exquisitely beautiful in ‘I’m grateful,’ her flawless placement of tones throughout the range supported by enviable diction, and she subsequently sings ‘Fever’ with appropriate fervor and an infusion of vocal warmth. The spartan expressivity of ‘No longer care for me’ is forcefully imparted by Krash’s mercurial pianism and seconded by the singer’s forthright enunciations of notes and words. ‘For pleasure likes a little infamy; discretion is nothing but a tedious pose’ is one of the most delightful lines ever set to music by any composer, and Noël and Krash articulate these and all of the lines of ‘Let it be known!’ with impish humor and playful but polished musicality.

An enchanting pas de deux for flute and piano, Turns of Phrase here proves to be a perfect scene-changing interlude between Krash’s song cycles. Flautist Laura Kaufman joins the composer in a performance of the piece that sonorously explores all of the music’s eponymous turns of phrase. The music’s textures are fabricated from artful uses of the interplay between the instruments, hearkening back to Bach’s writing for flute in his BWV 1030 - 1032 Sonatas. As in all of the music on Past Made Present, though, Krash’s idiom is entirely distinctive, learning lessons from the past but applying that knowledge to the development of her own musical vocabulary. At the keyboard in this performance of Turns of Phrase, she and Kaufman intertwine thematic material with the skill of dexterous weavers. So eloquent are Kaufman’s tones that, in this traversal, Turns of Phrase is virtually another song cycle.

More than a millennium closer than Sulpicia in temporal proximity to today’s listeners, the minstrel Martin Codax benefits little in increased familiarity from those centuries. Almost every assertion about his work is punctuated by parenthetical question marks. Indeed, dating Codax’s life and work to the middle of the Thirteenth Century stems from the chronology of the contributions to the cantigas d’amigo in the Pergaminho Vindel commonly attributed to him, verses that uniformly adhere to the strictest form of these refined ballads. Utilizing Daniel Newman’s translations from the original medieval Galician, Krash rekindles the perspicacity of her Sulpicia settings with The Cantigas de amigo of Martin Codax, again navigating the courses of the texts’ physical and psychological landscapes with a seemingly inexhaustible flow of apt musical imagery.

From her first notes in ‘Ondas do mar de Vigo,’ it is apparent that Noël is as authoritative an interpreter of Krash’s Codax songs as of Sulpicia’s Songs, and she and the composer collaborate on a reading of the song that is as much a performance of chamber music as an interaction between singer and accompanist. The lulling motion of the sea cascades from Krash’s fingers, buoying Noël’s shimmering singing. The singer portrays the transition from ‘Mandad’ei comigo’ to the related but very different ‘Mia irmana fremosa’ as a significant change of mood, enhancing the shift in perspective with a broad spectrum of vocal colors. Noël’s and Krash’s phrasing seizes the meandering momentum of ‘Ai Deus, se sab’ora meu’ and ‘Quantas sabedes amare amigo,’ creating in each song an individual microcosm that is also an episode within the cycle’s narrative. Like the dénouement and deus ex machina of Greek drama, ‘Eno sagrado en Vigo’ and ‘Ai ondas que en vin veere’ escalate and resolve the music’s internal struggles, employing the words as catalysts for the music’s ultimate evolution. The energy of Noël’s singing and Krash’s playing electrifies the music, their camaraderie emitting a charge that crackles across the songs’ difficult vocal and sentimental intervals. Melodic distinction, niceties of harmony, verbal clarity, and ingenuity are important gauges of a composer’s proficiency as a creator of Art Songs, but the foremost test of songs’ merit is in how they respond not to study but to singing. In Noël’s performances, Krash’s songs are confirmed to be works of wit and innovation—and, most endearingly, exceptionally good music.

It is fitting that the final piece on Past Made Present should be Delphi — What the Oracle Said, an affectionate reminiscence for solo cello of an adolescent visit to Greece. Like a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela for modern Catholics, a visit to Delphi was for denizens of ancient Hellenistic societies both an end, the culmination of an arduous journey, and a beginning, the start of a spiritual voyage guided by the oracle’s wisdom—a dichotomy shared by Krash’s music. In Anisimova’s hands, the timbre of the cello is the voice of a primordial force that has not yet conquered worded speech, a siren call that needs no verbalization to be understood. Anisimova’s virtuosity encompasses not only the technical wherewithal to play Krash’s music with confidence but also the artistry to deliver this musical monologue with an actor’s theatricality. With this music, the oracle speaks of the continuity resilience and renewal, qualities that define the cellist’s playing.

Prominent among music’s marvels is the power to access regions of the psyche that hide their secrets from ordinary modes of communication. Music can reclaim memories from oblivion and reignite dormant feelings, but it, too, must be reclaimed and reignited in order to survive the indifference of societies too frenetically-paced to stop and listen. Classical Music can never tame the din of modern life, so it must harness it and make of the noises of living a symphony of survival. In the pieces on Past Made Present, Jessica Krash transforms the bittersweet sounds of looking back and forging ahead into music that makes sincerity audible.

[1] Great Australian Voices – Nance Grant, soprano [Désirée Records GAV 001; 3 CDs; Available from Fish Fine Music]

[2] Great Australian Voices – Robert Allman, baritone [Désirée Records GAV 002; 3 CDs; Available from Fish Fine Music]

[3] Great Australian Voices – June Bronhill, soprano [Désirée Records GAV 003; 3 CDs; Available from Fish Fine Music]

[4] Great Australian Voices – Dame Joan Sutherland, soprano [Performances recorded in Melbourne and Sydney during the Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Season, July – October 1965; Désirée Records GAV 004; 4 CDs; Available from Fish Fine Music]

[5] Great Australian Voices – The Australia House Recital 1959—Dame Joan Sutherland, soprano; Richard Bonynge, piano [Recorded in performance at Australia House, London, UK, 18 June 1959; Désirée Records GAV 005; 1 CD; Available from Fish Fine Music]

If one establishes as the objective of one’s artistic endeavors a summarization of the ethos of a time, a place, or a people, how does one pursue the fulfillment of that goal? In which medium can the collective ideals of a culture be best expressed? Walt Whitman made a persuasive argument for poetry with Leaves of Grass, in which he created one of the most complete and compelling portraits of Nineteenth-Century America available to modern observers. The Zeitgeist of Victorian England haunts the novels of Charles Dickens, and every cry for equality and plea for peace of the 1960s resounds in the songs of Bob Dylan. These are the works of artists whose creative impulses and intellects were shaped by the eras that they immortalized, and in this distinction is the crux of what makes Désirée Records both unique and invaluable. Dedicated to the preservation and celebration of the legacies of Australia’s foremost vocal artists, many of whom were never adequately appreciated or are now too little-remembered beyond Oceania, Désirée Records and the label’s founder, conductor and voice connoisseur Brian Castles-Onion, are affectionately restoring to these singers the reputations they earned with performances that deserve worldwide adulation.

Though hardly the first Classically-trained singer of Australian birth to win fame in her native land, Dame Nellie Melba was the first Australian opera singer to enjoy widespread recognition throughout the world. That Melba studied in Melbourne with a teacher who was herself a pupil of the celebrated pedagogue Manuel García, the brother of Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot and son of the tenor who was Rossini’s first Norfolk in Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra and Conte Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia, reveals a tradition of vocal training in Australia that places the emergence of the great Australian voices of the Twentieth Century in a well-established tradition that many Eurocentric histories of singing have overlooked. Like many American singers of her time, Melba conquered opera in Europe, and details of the crucial context of her formative experiences in her homeland were outnumbered in musical annals by tales of her European successes, as well as by memories of her rapturously-received appearances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. In addition to support of Australian art and artists, Melba bequeathed to her countrymen an example of translating appreciation in Australia into global stardom with a fluency that perhaps only Dame Joan Sutherland (1926 – 2010) can truthfully be said to have matched in subsequent generations.

Melba was unquestionably a phenomenon, but she was not an operatic Uluṟu, a musical monolith rising out of an uncultured desert. Still, mimicking modern expressions of time, opera in Australia can be categorized into AM and PM periods: ante-Melba and post-Melba. With the indefatigable concertizing in support of Australia’s armed forces in World War One that secured her appointment as a Dame Commander of the British Empire and the seemingly interminable cycles of farewell appearances that ushered her into a jocund colloquialism, Melba honed the persona of the quintessentially Australian prima donna, as temperamental as that distinction implies but singularly practical and hard-working. Her legacy continued on the world’s stages first by Florence Austal and later by Marjorie Lawrence, Melba imparted to aspiring Australian singers both the drive to succeed and the necessity of developing an ironclad technique akin to the mastery of bel canto that she learned from Mathilde Marchesi.

Melba’s extant recordings are mostly sonically paleolithic, but they furnish dim glimpses of the magic that the voice could wield. Owing to their various provenances, there are selections on Désirée Records discs that suffer from poor sound. Unlike some ill-advised attempts at remastering Melba’s recordings, however, Castles-Onion’s work is focused on faithfully recreating voices’ individual timbres, avoiding the distortion and false overtones that can result from aggressive processing of archival recordings. In the context of material of the vintage heard on these Désirée Records releases, some of which was recorded non-professionally and under less-than-ideal conditions, only varying sound quality is wholly faithful to the source recordings. These discs are the aural equivalents of the weathered family Bibles so beloved by many Americans: the pages are crinkled, discolored, and torn, but the potency of the message is not lessened by the dilapidated state of the vessel.

Among these discs, the recording of Sutherland’s 1959 Australia House recital is the most challenging for the listener in terms of its soundscape, but the ears that cannot adjust to the difficult sound for the sake of hearing the youthful, exuberant, dauntlessly virtuosic singing that Sutherland shared with the London audience—and it can be heard to thrilling effect—are listening for the wrong reasons. Four months after the Covent Garden performances of Lucia di Lammermoor that catapulted her to international recognition, Sutherland remained on pristine form, offering a programme that at least temporarily quashes contentions that she was an unimaginative singer. Alongside selections typical of her recital repertoire in the first decade of her career—arias from Händel’s Alcina and Rodelinda, Elvira’s mad scene from Bellini’s I puritani, and music for another Elvira, the heroine of Verdi’s Ernani—Sutherland sang numbers from Dalayrac’s Nina, Paisiello’s La molinara, Arne’s Love in a Village, Lehár’s Merry Widow, and Shield’s Rosina, all of them voiced with astonishing freedom and immediacy. The surprises come in her performances of songs by Arditi, Arne, Dvořák, Grieg, Leoncavallo, and Rachmaninoff. Seldom admired for her handling of text even before the much-discussed sinus surgery that she underwent in the same year as the first Covent Garden Lucia and this Australia House recital, La Stupenda is unlikely to be proclaimed a peer of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the merit of these song performances, but this is not the Sutherland of the mid-career studio recordings, in the contexts of which diction can be problematic. The words in this recital were surprisingly crisp and genuinely felt. Detrimental though it is to the overall experience of this disc, the imperfect sound focuses the attention on listening closely to every note and syllable that Sutherland produces. It is a visceral journey that every Twenty-First-Century listener who wonders why Sutherland was adored by many operaphiles should make.

Like Melba before her, Sutherland was a phenomenon whose work was applauded in almost every locale in which she appeared, and Désirée Records’ release devoted to Melbourne and Sydney performances from the 1965 Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Season allows today’s listeners to hear her singing as it sounded to the audiences who applauded her. Even amidst a plethora of widely-circulated in-house, broadcast, and studio recordings, connoisseurs and her countrymen know that, whether at the outset or in the twilight of her career, Sutherland was never on better form than when singing before an Australian audience. Her DECCA account of Puccini’s music for the heroine of Suor Angelica is beautifully sung, but, when performing the rôle on stage in Sydney opposite the draconian Zia Principessa of Rosina Raisbeck, she sang the character, not merely the music. Likewise, time’s effects on the voice, an immense instrument that challenged recording technology, were often magnified by studio microphones but seemed less apparent and sometimes inconsequential in Australian performances. When Sutherland returned to Australia after triumphs in London, Milan, New York, and Chicago to revitalize the touring company inaugurated decades earlier by American-born J. C. Williamson, whose entrepreneurial ambition contributed indelibly to Melba’s popularity in Australia, her performances combined the vigor and vocal health of youth with the discipline and experience of a seasoned artist.

In excerpts from the 1965 Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Season Melbourne staging of Lucia di Lammermoor, Sutherland is joined by John Alexander as Edgardo, Cornelis Opthof as Enrico, Dorothy Cole as Alisa, Clifford Grant as Raimondo and Sergei Baigildin as Arturo, the last two of whom reprised their parts with Opera Australia when Sutherland sang Lucia in Sydney in 1986. In addition to having sung Pollione in the first of Sutherland’s studio recordings of Norma and partnering her in MET performances in New York and on tour, including in Lucia di Lammermoor, Alexander respectively portrayed Pollione and Gennaro in Sutherland’s début performances in Vancouver of the title rôles in Norma and Lucrezia Borgia. Edgardo was a part to which he was well suited, and he was in strong voice in Melbourne, giving Edgardo’s music beauty and brawn. Still, the spotlight is naturally on Sutherland, and she does not disappoint. The significance of any loss of verbal clarity suffered since the 1959 Covent Garden outing is lessened by the increased confidence of the singing: an affecting Lucia in 1959, she was an engrossing one in 1965.

Also sampled are Sydney performances of Lucia di Lammermoor from later in the same year, represented by Elizabeth Harwood’s traversal of Lucia’s ‘Ardon gl’incensi,’ more fragile than the madness of Sutherland’s Lucia but no less spellbinding, and an unexpected but stirring account of Edgardo’s ‘Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali’ by Alberto Remedios, whose lauded Siegfried for Sadler’s Wells and superb Melbourne Tristan, both opposite Rita Hunter, would eventually overshadow the tenor’s strong showings in Italian repertory.

In addition to Lucia di Lammermoor, Donizetti appeared in the 1965 season via performances of L’elisir d’amore with Harwood as Adina, Luciano Pavarotti as Nemorino, Spiro Malas as Dulcamara, Robert Allman as Belcore, and Doris Yanick as Giannetta. No opera company in the world could engage a cast of this quality for L’elisir d’amore in 2018. Pavarotti brought unforced charm to Nemorino, not least in this production, staged when he inhabited the part with physicality that matched his vocal suitability for the music. Malas and Allman are sonorously effective in their parts, but Harwood’s Adina is a pure delight. The voice glistens throughout the range, and the character springs to life with humor and good-natured feminine cunning. What a pity that Harwood never had an opportunity to record Adina under studio conditions!

The 1965 Melbourne production of Gounod’s Faust united Sutherland’s Marguerite with the native Mississippian Alexander’s Faust, a portrayal also heard at the Metropolitan Opera, including on the auspicious occasion of the joint house débuts of Montserrat Caballé and Sherrill Milnes, later in 1965; Richard Cross’s saturnine Méphistophélès; Opthof’s Valentin; the underrated Margreta Elkins’s Siébel; and Raymond Collier’s Wagner. Alexander lacked the easy resonance in the upper register that Corelli had in spades in Sutherland’s studio recording of Faust but otherwise sang with greater stylistic fluency and vocal pliancy than his Italian counterpart. The technical demands of Marguerite’s music—trills, long phrasing, and security on high—were easy going for Sutherland, and she here soars in passages in which some sopranos sink. In these selections, Sutherland’s characterization of Marguerite is generic, but the music is sung with supreme assurance.

The essence of La Stupenda: soprano Dame Joan Sutherland in a 2001 portrait by Richard Stone
[Image © by Richard Stone; used with permission]

The Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Season’s 1965 Sydney production of Bellini’s La sonnambula was the setting for one of Sutherland’s early collaborations with Luciano Pavarotti, then not yet thirty years old. Discovered by Sutherland and her husband and frequent conductor Richard Bonynge two years earlier, the young tenor from Modena was the rare colleague who could match Sutherland in height, stage presence, and tonal opulence. His Elvino complemented an awe-inducing cast that also included Harwood as Lisa, Lauris Elms as Teresa, Malas as Rodolfo, and Tom McDonnell as Alessio. That singers of Harwood’s and Elms’s caliber assayed rôles like Lisa and Teresa is indicative of the prestige of the company assembled for the 1965 season. As heard on this disc, Malas is a grumbling, uncomplicated Count, Pavarotti’s Elvino a golden-voiced swain with a quick temper. Sutherland’s Amina is a sweet-souled, abidingly rustic creature. The marvel of Maria Callas’s depiction of Amina was the sophistication that she found in the part, allying coloratura display with emotional complexity. There is little depth beyond basic sincerity to Sutherland’s Amina, but the music is sung with unrivaled brilliance.

Pavarotti and Opthof also appeared as Germonts fils and père opposite Sutherland’s Violetta in the 1965 Melbourne La traviata, with a supporting cast that included Malas, Clifford Grant, Morag Beaton, Joseph Ward, Monica Sinclair, and Ronald Maconaghie. Like Amina and Elvino in La sonnambula, Violetta and Alfredo in La traviata are rôles that Sutherland and Pavarotti recorded together in studio, but the excerpts from this Melbourne production preserve their partnership at its freshest, their voices produced with almost giddy effortlessness. Sutherland was subjected to much negative criticism of her diction, but Pavarotti rarely received the praise that he deserved for his crystalline enunciation. In his singing on this disc, Alfredo’s love for Violetta is potently conveyed by both words and music, handled with equal aplomb. Sharing the stage with an artistic equal galvanizes Sutherland: audiences could rely upon her Violetta being impeccably sung, but Melburnians were treated to a characterization as satisfying dramatically as vocally.

Still staged infrequently at the time of the Melbourne performances memorialized by this Désirée release, Rossini’s Semiramide is perhaps the opera that benefited most from Sutherland’s espousal. The daunting music for the eponymous queen, composed to emphasize the still-strong elements of the deteriorating voice of Isabella Colbran, who married Rossini less than a year before Semiramide’s première, held few terrors for La Stupenda, who returned to the score in Sydney as late as 1983. Sutherland sang the title rôle in all of the Melbourne performances in 1965, backed by Joseph Rouleau’s Assur, Maconaghie’s Oroe, and Grant’s Ombra di Nino. Sinclair and Elms alternated as Arsace, and André Montal and Joseph Ward shared duties as Idreno. [Elms and Grant also reprised their Melbourne rôles in the 1983 Australian Opera production.] The age of Rossini tenors of the ilk of Juan Diego Flórez, Lawrence Brownlee, and Michele Angelini had not yet dawned, but it seems as though there were no embarrassments in Melbourne. Rouleau’s Assur is familiar from Sutherland’s studio recording of Semiramide and a recording of a Boston performance, and the vocal solidity heard in those performances was also at his command in Melbourne. Marilyn Horne may always be many listeners’ paragon for the performance of Arsace’s music, but Elms was an artist of comparable gifts and a worthy partner for Sutherland’s regal Semiramide. Whereas recent performances of Semiramide have inspired barrages of squabbling about the quality of the singing, it is difficult to imagine the singing in these selections provoking any reaction but universal acclamation.

The Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Season also gave audiences down under then-rare opportunities to hear Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin, staged with Allman as Onegin, Joy Mammen as Tatyana, Alexander as Lensky, and Elms as Olga—a cast comparable to the best ensembles heard at the Bolshoi, Covent Garden, or the MET. In addition to singing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, the Melbourne-born Mammen alternated with Sutherland and Harwood as Violetta and Adina. Her portrayal of Tatyana exhibits the technical stability that she continues to share with today’s singers. Heard both at Lincoln Center and in a MET tour performance in Boston, Alexander’s Lensky was an aptly poetic depiction, delivered in Australia with boyish vitality. Any Tchaikovsky aficionado might dream of hearing a singer of Elms’s calibre as Olga, and the same can be said of Allman, who brandished a voice that recalled Giuseppe Taddei’s instrument. In the character’s music on this disc, Allman’s Onegin is a virile but diffident man, evinced with powerful vocalism.

A beloved component of Dame Nellie Melba’s carefully-cultivated farewell performances was her singing of ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ the song by composer Sir Henry Bishop and librettist John Howard Payne that Donizetti famously—criminally, according to Bishop—used in the Anna Bolena mad scene. Sutherland often paid tribute to her predecessor by singing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ in her own recitals and concerts. A Melbourne performance of the song, recorded on 14 August 1965, makes a fitting finale to Désirée’s memento of the Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Season of 1965. In a sense, it is a memorial to a bygone era, as much an exercise in nostalgia as an example of the singer’s artistry. Perhaps there will always be operas and singers who perform them, but Dame Joan Sutherland was a gift to the art form that can never be replicated.

Bringing Bayreuth to Melbourne: soprano Nance Grant as Ortrud in Victoria State Opera’s 1985 production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin
[Photograph © by Victoria State Opera]

Anyone who has not heard the 1981 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert performance of Die Walküre in which Nance Grant’s Sieglinde was rescued first from Donald Shanks’s Hunding by Robert Gard’s Siegmund and then from the political wrangling of Raymond Myers’s Wotan and Lauris Elms’s Fricka by Rita Hunter’s Brünnhilde is sadly ignorant of a performance that could teach many fellow Wagnerians much about the elusive art of singing Wagner’s music beautifully and characterfully. An exceptionally versatile singer whose repertoire extended from Elettra in Mozart’s Idomeneo, rè di Creta to rôles in contemporary works, Grant possessed a voice worthy of being heard in the world’s most exalted opera houses and concert halls. Rightly lauded in the land of her birth, Grant inexplicably does not share Sutherland’s familiarity abroad. Castles-Onion’s meticulous curation of Désirée’s wide-ranging survey of this marvelous soprano’s career is therefore particularly valuable.

At first glance, the most striking facet of Grant’s bejeweled artistry as this release celebrates it is the incredibly broad array of musical styles that populated her repertoire. From the Eighteenth Century, there are pieces from Gluck’s La corona and Orfeo ed Euridice and Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte, all capably if not always authoritatively sung. Moving into the Nineteenth Century, Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio is a rôle in which Grant excelled: the tempestuous ‘Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin?’ might have been composed to suit her abilities, and the nobility of the character was ably served by the singer’s balance of gusto and grace. Finding music from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor among these treasures of Grant’s career is surprising, but the determination with which the soprano sings is customary.

A sample of Grant’s Marguerite in Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust returns to more predictable repertory. In the Verdi canon, excursions into the dramatic worlds of Simon Boccanegra and Aida disclose Grant’s affinity for interpreting the Italian composer’s heroines, but the excerpt from La traviata is revelatory. Similarly enlightening are numbers from Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s I quattro rusteghi, vastly different pieces that Grant sings with unwavering commitment to stylistic verisimilitude. Similarly unique is the selection from Rossini’s devout but overtly operatic Stabat Mater, sung with utter conviction and gleaming tone. Assessed in the context of these performances, Grant clearly was an artist for whom partial efforts were unacceptable. When she approached new music, her commitment was absolute, the results of which are audible in every selection on these discs.

Grant had a natural affinity for the operas of Richard Wagner, in which she encountered characters with whom she sympathized, musically and temperamentally. This Désirée release introduces the listener to her resigned but resilient Senta in Der fliegende Holländer, her radiant Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, and her resolute, resplendently maternal Sieglinde in Die Walküre, music from all three rôles voiced with assurance and spot-on dramatic instincts. Her portrayal of Ortrud in Lohengrin was one of the greatest successes of her career, and hearing her ethereally intone Elsa’s name suggests how entrancing she must have been in the rôle in the theatre. The Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier could hardly be more different, but Grant lends her pathos without ever being pathetic, achieving precisely the balance between heartbreak and self-awareness that enables the listener to feel the struggle between the character’s dignity and desperation.

Alongside such cerebral scenes, the once-popular number ‘My Hero’ from Oscar Straus’s Chocolate Soldier is unusual fare for this musical feast, but Grant’s singing makes it a delectable interlude. Desirable, too, is the music from Debussy’s L’enfant prodigue, sung with impressive comprehension of the composer’s singular musical language. The three minutes in which Grant is heard as Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites constitute a captivating character portrait in miniature. The unexaggerated expressivity of her operatic portrayals is convincingly adapted to the smaller dimensions of the Art Songs included here. The singer’s intelligence and interpretive insightfulness are ever apparent, but it is the voice that ultimately prompts contemplation of how knowledge of the work of such an artist can for so long have been confined to privileged connoisseurs. With this release, Grant débuts anew on the international stage, and how fantastic she sounds!

The complexities of malice: baritone Robert Allman as Iago in The Australian Opera’s 1984 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello
[Photograph © by Opera Australia]

The paucity of voices endowed by nature with the qualities necessary for success in singing Verdi repertory has been one of the most lamentable realities in opera in the first eighteen years of the Twenty-First Century. It has become clichéd to state that this or that singer of a previous generation, perhaps under-appreciated during his career or largely forgotten since his retirement, would be widely celebrated were he singing now, alongside today’s lackluster colleagues, but earnest Verdians long to hear baritones like Cesare Bardelli, Franco Bordoni, and Lorenzo Saccomani, singers whose fine performances of Verdi rôles were overshadowed by the work of better-known singers. The Désirée Records released devoted to the singing of Melbourne-born baritone Robert Allman (1927 – 2013) documents the enviable career of a true gentleman who was arguably Australia’s foremost Twentieth-Century Verdi baritone.

Allman sang the small rôle of Monsieur Javelinot in the 1958 British première of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, opposite fellow Australians Sutherland and Sylvia Fisher. By that time, his Covent Garden credentials included performances as Donner in Das Rheingold with Sutherland and Rosina Raisbeck, Monterone in Rigoletto with Tito Gobbi as the jester, the herald in Verdi’s Otello, and Escamillo in Carmen. Another of Allman’s London rôles was the Greek captain in Berlioz’s Les Troyens. More than a quarter-century later, he returned to Les Troyens in Melbourne, singing Chorèbe to the Cassandre of Margreta Elkins. Though sung in English, the excerpt from Allman’s performance included by Désirée imparts the distinctive Gallic ethos of the music. Further evincing the baritone’s incredible stylistic flexibility, very early recordings of music from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, complemented by endearing mementos from Allman’s 1997 farewell gala and disarmingly sincere performances of Katie Moss’s ‘The Floral Dance’ and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s ‘The Lost Chord,’ deepen awareness of the subtleties of the singer’s artistry.

Selections from Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal divulge that Allman was no less enthralling in Wagner rôles than in Verdi parts. His Holländer and Amfortas are tormented by weariness of body and psyche, his Gunther exudes the uncertainty of a powerful man whose control of his empire is crumbling, and his enigmatic Telramund and reverent Wolfram reaffirm that, when sung with uncompromising musicality and proper technique, there is considerably more beauty in Wagner’s music than many performances suggest. Allman’s preeminence in German repertory also encompassed Richard Strauss’s Salome and Elektra, and, as heard in the excerpts tendered by Désirée, his Jochanaan and Orest would be boons to any production of these operas, in any language. In all of the music on these discs, Allman phrases with a poet’s attention to the sounds and meanings of words. Nothing is over-accentuated, but nothing is ignored.

Schaunard in Puccini’s La bohème was another rôle for which Allman was applauded at Covent Garden, where his Musetta was fellow Victorian Marie Collier. Via this release, his interpretations of Scarpia in Tosca, Michele in Il tabarro, and Gianni Schicchi can be appraised. The menace that a successful Scarpia must exert is unmistakable in Allman’s depiction, but there are also indications of a gnawing vulnerability: this is a Scarpia whose cruelty emerges from an unfillable void. Similarly, a vein of humanity enriches the blood of Allman’s Michele, who proves that the most dangerous hatred is born only of the most intense love. Allman was perhaps not the most natural comedian, and his is an uncaricatured Gianni Schicchi—and is all the better for it. Prospective interpreters of the part could learn from Allman’s example that comedy and stupidity are neither identical nor interchangeable commodities. A related lesson can be gleaned from the baritone’s singing in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. His Tonio commits monstrosities but is not the snarling, grunting monster portrayed by many singers. His villainy is no less triggered by unrequited love than is Canio’s violence. Not even legendary recordings by Carlo Galeffi, Gino Bechi, and Giuseppe Taddei are superior to Allman’s account of ‘Nemico della patria’ from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, for which his emulsion of passion, patrician sensibilities, and resonant, beautiful tone was ideal.

As an exponent of Verdi’s baritone rôles, Allman’s only Australian rivals were Raymond Myers and John Shaw, both gifted singers who shared their countryman’s suitability for this repertory. Myers and Shaw often portrayed these characters as tough, irascible scions of their social strata, but Allman projected greater individuality, emphasizing personal rather than universal emotions. The drama that he brings to the excerpt from I masnadieri is siphoned from the score, the structure of the music used as a template for creating vocal imagery. There is venom in Allman’s Macbeth, but his fangs, sharpened by his wife’s deadly ambition, are bared with reluctance. His Rigoletto is akin to Giuseppe de Luca’s admired portrayal, defined as much by finesse as by raw force: the man’s shame, boundless love, and fury burst from only a few minutes of music. The decorum of both the Conte di Luna in Il trovatore and Giorgio Germont in La traviata is communicated in singing of consummate musicality and dramatic integrity. In Allman’s performances, the fathers in Simon Boccanegra and Aida, the former conciliatory and the latter vengeful, share a core of bronzed vocalism that makes Simone’s probity profoundly moving and Amonasro’s rage chilling. Allman’s Iago in Otello is grippingly mercurial: his nefarious plans come to fruition with the added peril of being handsomely sung.

As deserving of praise as the breadth of Allman’s repertory is the fact that the consistency of his singing throughout the four decades explored by this Désirée release is inviolable. The voice aged, of course, and the technique metamorphosed accordingly, but the essence of his artistry was unchanging. Perhaps Allman’s most important legacy to subsequent generations of singers is his embodiment, of which this Désirée release is a testament, of the premise that the health of a voice is maintained by singing only what and how it is meant to sing.

Queen of the stage: soprano June Bronhill (center) in the title rôle of Victoria State Opera’s 1976 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by Victoria State Opera]

To the company of a trio of Joans—Hammond, Sutherland, and Carden—in the ranks of Australia’s foremost interpreters of bel canto repertory must be added a single June: the charismatic soprano June Bronhill (1929 – 2005). Now remembered by many music lovers principally for her sparkling portrayals of operetta heroines, not least in productions and recordings by London’s Sadler’s Wells, her deft characterizations of leading ladies of serious opera, epitomized by her singing of the title rôle in Victoria State Opera’s 1976 production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, in which she was antagonized by Nance Grant’s Elizabeth I, are not recalled with the respect that they deserve. For this sin of omission, Désirée’s release endeavors to make amends by spotlighting performances of music important to Bronhill’s artistic development but overlooked in most remembrances of her work.

Like many Australian artists of her generation, some of Bronhill’s earliest experiences in the often harrowingly combative world of professional Classical Music—and some of listeners’ earliest experiences of her singing—resulted from her participation in Mobil Quest, one of the world’s first widely-disseminated competitions for Classical singers. Bronhill was a finalist in the 1951 edition of Mobil Quest, in which the top prize was won by another coloratura soprano, Margaret Nisbett. This and other competition successes put her on the path to stardom in and beyond Australia, facilitating her studies and early appearances in the UK.

The variety of music chosen by Castles-Onion to retrace the progress of her career is mesmerizing. From early Mobil Quest appearances to comic parts and triumphs in rôles from the standard repertory, the musical odyssey on these discs leads to destinations as relatively remote as Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, for the heroine in which Bronhill’s voice might have been specially tailored. Considering her comfort with Eighteenth-Century vocal writing, it is regrettable that, subject to the availability of archival recordings, Mozart figures in this study of Bronhill solely in music from Die Entführung aus dem Serail, in which she notably sang Blonde to Joan Carden’s Konstanze in 1977. Almost any of the pre-da Ponte operas might have been revived for her, and she could have been a near-perfect Ilia when Sutherland sang Elettra in Idomeneo in Sydney in 1979. [Further evidence of her Mozartean credentials is the warm reception her singing in Le nozze di Figaro at Sadler’s Wells garnered from the British press.]

Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale was another part for which Bronhill’s gifts qualified her, and the music presented by Désirée is sung with the timing of a conscientious comic actress. Her timbre and vocal amplitude reminiscent of Mercedes Capsir, Bronhill is a light, bright-toned Lucia di Lammermoor, a rare exemplar of the girlish guilelessness that Miss Lucy should manifest. The Melbourne Maria Stuarda was a pinnacle in Bronhill’s singing of serious rôles, and the excerpts on this release permit the listener to make the acquaintance of the soprano’s delicate but spirited Mary Stuart, little like contemporaneous portrayals by Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé but a riveting realization of Donizetti’s—and, in its verbal boldness, Schiller’s—heroine.

Though very different musically and dramatically, Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, Lady Harriet in Flotow’s Martha, and Massenet’s Manon were parts in which Bronhill’s vocal splendor shone, and the music from these scores that she sings on this release opens a portal into a niche in her repertory that few of her admirers outside of England and Australia witnessed. The luminosity of the soprano’s singing of pieces for Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Verdi’s Gilda, Violetta, and Oscar in Un ballo in maschera is expected, but the adroitness with which she made music from Puccini’s La bohème and La rondine work on her own terms dazzles. Equally astounding are her performances of selections from Menotti’s The Telephone and The Saint of Bleecker Street: here, too, she stakes her own unique claim to the music. Poaching ‘Bess, you is my woman now’ from Porgy and Bess is a trick that she brought off with aplomb, sounding wholly in her element in Gershwin’s jazz-influenced idiom. Another musical theatre piece, Ron Grainer’s and Ronald Millar’s Robert and Elizabeth, occupied a prominent place in Bronhill’s repertory, and gratitude is owed to Désirée Records for championing music from Robert and Elizabeth and numbers from Romberg’s The New Moon and Ivor Novello’s King’s Rhapsody, all sung with unflappable glamour.

Eurydice and Gabrielle in Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers and La vie parisienne were rôles in which Bronhill was particularly admired, and her performances of music from these scores are the foundation of Désirée Records’ audit of her career. There is abundant humor in her singing of Offenbach’s frothy melodies, but what lingers in the memory is the generosity of spirit that permeates her characterizations. This is also true of her traversals of music from the Gilbert and Sullivan gems Iolanthe, HMS Pinafore, and The Mikado. Few singers of any nationality have brought greater enchantment to Iolanthe’s Phyllis than Bronhill conjures on this disc. Likewise, her singing of pieces from Lehár’s Merry Widow and Das Land des Lächelns is bewitching, proving that these scores are as divertingly picturesque when staged by the Georges and the Thames as when played along the banks of the Danube. This serves as a germane metaphor for the careers of all of the Australian artists heard on Désirée Records’ releases, subsequent titles having given more singers the attention they deserve: products of one of earth’s most dynamic nations, the allure of these voices is universal.

Widely known on other continents only in the contexts of a handful of world-famous exports, the musical heritage of Australia is as rich and varied as the country’s geography. Also like the continent’s sparsely-populated interior, where hidden wonders await adventurous visitors like the mammoth crocodiles that lurk in the nation’s waterways, Australia’s musical history contains many delicacies perhaps tasted but never fully savored by international audiences. Désirée Records’ ongoing dedication to fondly and analytically honoring and sharing these extraordinary singers’ lives and careers indeed advances Australia fair.

[1] GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Handel Arias—Franco Fagioli, countertenor; Il pomo d’oro; Zefira Valova, concertmaster and director [Recorded in Sala Rossa, Villa San Fermo, Lonigo, Italy, in March 2017; Deutsche Grammophon479 7541; 1 CD, 79:52; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] NICOLA ANTONIO PORPORA (1686 – 1768): Opera Arias—Max Emanuel Cenčić, countertenor; Armonia Atenea; George Petrou, conductor [Recorded in the Megaron, The Athens Concert Hall, Athens, Greece, 6 – 9 March and 4 – 12 September 2017; DECCA 483 3235; 1 CD, 75:59; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

The Russian actor and pedagogue Konstantin Stanislavski famously quipped that ‘there are no small parts, only small actors.’ Virtually every actor engaged to portray Chorus Girl Number Seven in a blockbuster Broadway revue or Silent Roman Centurion in a cinematic epic clings to an optimistic interpretation of Stanislavski’s assertion, trusting that true talent is as apparent in ten seconds of screen time as in ten pages of dialogue. In opera, this could be equated with a singer making as great an impact in undemanding recitative as a colleague manages to create in an intricate aria—a feat achieved on stage and in studio by some of opera’s foremost singing actors. Still, it cannot be denied by even the most unbiased aficionado that there are niches in opera’s four-century repertory that, though in no way of ‘small’ quality, require the advocacy of specially-qualified artists. Anyone who has heard poorly-sung performances of Baroque music can be pardoned for questioning whether the long-ignored operas of the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries truly merit rediscovery. In order to reclaim the impact that they exercised on audiences in the Eighteenth Century, the arias of composers like Georg Friedrich Händel and Nicola Porpora need singing of the distinction of Claudia Muzio’s and Rosa Ponselle’s performances of music by Verdi and Puccini. Such singing is ever in short supply, but some of Händel’s and Porpora’s finest opera arias receive on new discs from Deutsche Grammophon and DECCA performances by countertenors Franco Fagioli and Max Emanuel Cenčić that embody the system of bringing characters to life advocated by Stanislavski: feeling the emotions of the individuals they portray, even in the context of studio-recorded recitals of individual arias, Fagioli and Cenčić confirm that they are ingenious artists, here playing large parts in facilitating the modern reassessment of Eighteenth-Century vocal music.

Unlikely as it may seem to Twenty-First-Century observers, there was little difference in the eminence of Händel’s and Porpora’s reputations among their contemporaries. When a rival company was formed with the aim of undermining Händel’s dominance of Italian opera in London, Porpora was imported to serve as its presiding genius, both as composer and organizer of a troupe of singers to compete with Händel’s regular ensemble of foreign and domestic virtuosi. Renowned throughout Europe as a pedagogical paragon of the Neapolitan school of singing that produced the celebrated castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli, Porpora was sufficiently appreciated to have been invited to fill Antonio Vivaldi’s former post at the helm of the lucrative musical activities at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà.

Paralleling the similar perceptions of Händel’s and Porpora’s artistic merits in the Eighteenth Century, there is little to choose between Il pomo d’oro’s playing in Fagioli’s recital of Händel arias and Armonia Atenea’s backing of Cenčić’s accounts of Porpora arias. Led in this performance by Zefira Valova, the Pomo d’oro musicians transform their instruments into participants in the dramas that play out in arias that Fagioli sings. Armonia Atenea’s artistic director George Petrou leads his colleagues in accompanying Porpora’s arias with dauntless technical and interpretive dexterity. The performances of both ensembles are insightfully molded to complement the styles of the composers and singers, Il pomo d’oro’s emotionally-charged sonorities suiting Händel and Fagioli and the bold colors of Armonia Atenea’s soundscapes mirroring Porpora’s and Cenčić’s sensibilities. Moreover, these performances reflect the tremendous progress in producing ear-pleasing sounds made by period instrument ensembles since the inception of the historically-informed performance practice movement. Perhaps accompaniment of this caliber does not truly enhance the distinction of the singing, but it indisputably increases the listener’s enjoyment of it.

Recorded in celebration of his victory in the 2003 Bertelsmann Neue Stimmen competition, Fagioli’s first commercial recording featured arias by Händel and Mozart, handsomely if slightly anonymously sung. In the subsequent fifteen years, Fagioli has fastidiously honed his artistry, both on stage and in studio. To this release, his first solo recital disc dedicatedly wholly to the music of Händel, he brings an abiding musicality that is only occasionally compromised by over-emphatic delivery. In the performances on this disc, Fagioli is on excellent form, but there are fleeting moments in which he seems to be pushing the voice uncomfortably. His voice is an extraordinary instrument that impresses without manipulation, and his technique largely enables him to meet the demands of the most difficult music without forcing. In his singing of the Händel arias on this disc, he is at his best when he surrenders himself to the music. He needs only to follow where Händel leads in order to find greatness.

Still undeservedly among Händel’s least-known works for the stage, the 1734 pasticcio Oreste (HWV A11) was tailored to the abilities of a fine cast that included the castrato Giovanni Carestini, often cited as Farinelli’s foremost rival for recognition as the greatest singer of the first half of the Eighteenth Century, as the title character. Fagioli here performs Oreste’s aria ‘Agitato da fiere tempeste’ with dazzling agility that sounds frantic only at the top of the range.

The title rôle in Serse (HWV 40), created in the opera’s 1738 première by Caffarelli, is a near-perfect fit for Fagioli, who also recorded the part complete in conjunction with a concert performance at Opéra Royal de Versailles in 2017 and will return to it in an European tour with Il pomo d’oro in October and November 2018. The brief ‘Frondi tenere e belle’ is perhaps the most famous recitative in any of Händel’s operas, and Fagioli mostly evades the trap of over-singing, exercising restraint and resolving cadences without distorting the flow of the text. The recitative is followed by one of Händel’s most familiar arias, albeit one that has suffered in the guise of ‘Händel’s Largo’ almost every conceivable bowdlerization in the 280 years since it was first sung. Thankfully, ‘Ombra mai fu’ is now allowed to cast its spell with more authentic tempi, and Fagioli sings it captivatingly. He voices ‘Crude furie degl’orridi abissi’ with gravitas, evincing the sentiments of the text by exploring Händel’s vivid musical imagery.

Composed in 1711, Rinaldo (HWV 7) was the score with which Händel secured both his own and Italian opera’s fortunes in London. The name part was created by the castrato Nicolini, for whom Händel wrote music of tremendous musical and dramatic variety. The exquisite ‘Cara sposa, amante cara’ is one of its composer’s most affecting contemplative arias, and Fagioli sings it with palpable, nuanced emotion, magnifying the pathos of the words without imposing anachronistic Freudian subtexts. The bravura brilliance of his performance of the electrifying ‘Venti, turbini, prestate’ is arresting but almost too aggressive. The voice rockets through the tessitura thrillingly, but the undeniable impact of the highest notes comes at the expense of lessened focus and beauty in the middle of the voice.

After an uncharacteristically long gestation, Imeneo (HWV 41) reached the stage in 1740, with Giovanni Battista Andreoni, who also created the rôle of Ulisse in Händel’s Deidamia the following year, taking the rôle of Tirinto. The castrato must have been delighted by the opportunity for exhibiting his histrionic abilities afforded by the aria ‘Se potessero i sospir miei,’ and Fagioli honors his memory with a performance of edge-of-the-seat immediacy. Nearly three decades earlier, the part of Mirtillo was created in the 1712 première of Il pastor fido (HWV 8) by Valeriano Pellegrini, who had sung Nerone in the Venetian première of Händel’s Agrippina in 1709. Fagioli brings to Mirtillo’s ‘Sento brillar nel sen’ the easy command of the fiorature that the music demands, but he also traces the vocal line with imaginative phrasing. Singing the aria competently is a feat, but Fagioli convincingly recreates Mirtillo’s predicament with sounds that stoke the listener’s empathy.

Perhaps none of Händel’s operas merits the attention that it has received in recent years as completely as his 1725 masterpiece Rodelinda, regina de’ Longobardi (HWV 19), a musical tangle of amorous intrigue and presumed death of the type frequently encountered in Baroque opera. Senesino’s rôle was Bertarido, the rightful ruler of Lombardy who is believed to have been slain, and his Twenty-First-Century counterpart fully expresses the horror, shock, and anger of a man confronting the sight of his own tomb in ‘Pompe vane di morte.’ The aria that follows, ‘Dove sei, amato bene,’ is one of those miraculous passages in which the affectation of opera is stripped away, enabling a deluge of genuine, timeless emotions to flow from the music. Producing a commendably well-integrated stream of tones and tastefully ornamenting the da capo repeat, Fagioli exercises welcome restraint, imparting Bertarido’s inherent dignity as meaningfully as his desperation.

First performed in 1724, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (HWV 17) was the score by which Händel’s standing as a composer of opera was maintained for generations, and it remains his most widely-known—and likely still his most frequently-performed—opera. The title rôle is perhaps the most overtly heroic of the parts that Händel wrote for Senesino, but the aria ‘Se in fiorito, ameno prato’ reveal’s the hero’s latent romanticism. Historical accounts of his stage presence suggest that Senesino was not altogether convincing as a lover. In this realm, Fagioli has a decided advantage, his virile voicing possessing a core of magnetic attractiveness that he puts to good use in his voicing of ‘Se in fiorito, ameno prato.’ There is no doubt that this is a Cesare with tyrannical inclinations, but sensuality is one of his most potent weapons.

The first of two operas that Händel composed for the Covent Garden Theatre in 1735, Ariodante (HWV 33) has proved to be one of the composer’s most enduring scores, its name part, created by Carestini, having been sung in recent seasons by renowned and diverse singers including Cecilia Bartoli, Dame Sarah Connolly, and Joyce DiDonato. Fagioli joins their company with performances of Ariodante’s two most familiar arias. To the animated ‘Scherza, infida, in grembo al drudo’ he devotes an exhibition of bravura singing of the highest order. Still, it is his intense but tranquil singing of the serenely beautiful ‘Dopo notte atra e funesta’ that impresses most. Baroque vocal music is equated by some listeners with the difficult passagework that consigned it to generations of neglect, but there are moments, a number of which are found in Händel’s operas, in which Baroque music rivals the emotional sophistication of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner. Fagioli’s singing of ‘Dopo notte atra e funesta’ on this disc assumes a place among Elisabeth Grümmer’s, Maria Callas’s, and Kirsten Flagstad’s unforgettable performances of Pamina’s ‘Ach, ich fühl’s,’ Violetta’s ‘Addio, del passato bei sogni ridenti,’ and Isolde’s Liebestod.

In the 1730 Season that included the first production of Partenope (HWV 27), the Bolognese castrato Antonio Bernacchi replaced Senesino as Händel’s primo uomo, interpreting the rôle of Arsace in Partenope. To the extent that the music that he wrote for Arsace can be assessed as a benchmark, Händel seems to have harbored great esteem for Bernacchi’s abilities. Could they hear his performance of ‘Ch’io parta?’ on this disc, both Händel and Bernacchi would undoubtedly regard Fagioli with the respect due to an exemplary interpreter and an equal. From the first casts to Dame Janet Baker, Helen Watts, and Marilyn Horne, Händel’s operatic rôles in mezzo-soprano range have been sung by an array of engaging artists, each of whom brought unique qualities to the music. Foremost among Fagioli’s Händelian virtues is the absolute confidence in the importance of this music that is audible in every bar that he sings on this disc. This is a disc that should be heard by those listeners who continue to doubt the effectiveness of Händel’s music for today’s singers, theatres, and audiences.

Nicola Antonio Porpora (left) and Georg Friedrich Händel (right)
[Source: Eighteenth-Century engravings in the public domain]

The espousal of Porpora’s music that engendered a fantastic DECCA studio recording of the composer’s opera Germanico in Germania [reviewed here] led the ever-inquisitive Cenčić to seek in the composer’s still-under-appreciated body of work arias awaiting rediscovery via which his passion for Porpora’s singular idiom could be translated into performances of stylistic authority. As an artistic laboratory in which experiments utilizing elements of past, present, and future trends were conducted in musical form, Porpora’s career was not unlike Mahler’s, in whose music the past of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms met the future of Bax, Britten, and Berio. Porpora was perhaps more of a synthesizer than an innovator, but the adroitness with which he absorbed, modified, and individualized aspects of his contemporaries’ compositions is evidence of the depth of his inventiveness. Throughout his career, Cenčić has been a musical catalyst, not only reviving forgotten Baroque repertory but also broadening the reach of the countertenor voice with projects including his creation of the rôle of the Herold in Aribert Reimann’s Medea. Critical to the success of Cenčić’s initiatives is his understanding of the fact that even the most exalted aspirations are betrayed by haphazard musicianship. When he commits to a project, it is with undeviating focus and diligence. This has rarely been more discernible than in his performances of the arias on this disc. By lending his percipient artistry to reintroducing these pieces, Cenčić expands his significance as a pivotal, persuasive champion of Porpora’s music.

The cast of the 1728 Venetian première of Porpora’s Ezio was graced by a pair of acclaimed castrati: Domenico Gizzi, who portrayed Valentiniano, and the famed Nicolino, who sang Ezio. Familiar to modern listeners owing to their appearances in operas by Händel and Gluck, Valentiniano and Ezio are two of Eighteenth-Century opera’s most widely-traveled characters. In his performance on this disc, Cenčić matches the virtuosity of the blazing trumpets in Valentiniano’s aria ‘Se tu la reggi al volo’ with remarkably assured handling of the cyclonic coloratura. His singing of Ezio’s ‘Lieto sarò di questa vita’ is equally exciting, his vocal colorations mirroring the subtle, shifting hues of the text. Cenčić’s naturalness on stage tellingly permeates these performances. Whereas Fagioli looked inward in his singing of Händel arias, seeking the motivations within the characters’ hearts, Cenčić projects the emotions of Porpora’s characters across the unseen footlights, acting even when before studio microphones.

The structure of Ericlea’s aria ‘Torbido intorno al core’ from Meride e Selinante, written for the 1727 Venetian Carnevale season, reveals kinship with the tuneful slow movements of Vivaldi concerti. Cenčić crowns his nobly-phrased account of the aria with a truly superb final trill. Porpora’s most celebrated pupil Farinelli was the first Agamennone in Ifigenia in Aulide, premièred in 1735 in London, and the volleys of fiorature with which Porpora shaped the aria ‘Tu, spietato, non farai’ are reminiscent of similar music by Johann Adolf Hasse. Cenčić despatches the divisions with indefatigable technical acumen, but, as must have been true of Farinelli, it is the perceptiveness with which Cenčić integrates the coloratura into his portrayal of the aria’s drama that mesmerizes.

Porpora’s Filandro was first heard in 1747 in Dresden, a center for operatic progress in which cultural cross-pollination yielded strikingly original musical blossoms. The Arcadian finesse of ‘Ove l’erbetta tenera, e molle’ is sustained by delicate writing for recorders that comment on a dulcet vocal line, gracefully delivered by Cenčić. The countertenor’s vocalism in ‘D’esser già parmi quell’arboscello’ is a model of Italianate bel canto technique appropriately returned to the repertory from which the fundamentals of bel canto emerged. Providing another vehicle for Farinelli, Poro was first performed during Torino’s 1731 Carnevale. Bolstered by raucous horns and timpani, the great castrato surely made a dashing impression with the martial aria ‘Destrier, che all’armi usato.’ Cenčić here sings the number with electrifying bravado, the contrast between his upper and lower registers heightening the effect of his take-no-prisoners machismo.

Premièred in 1734, Enea nel Lazio was one of the operas that Porpora wrote for London during his tenure as composer-in-residence for the opera company founded by aristocrats organized by the Prince of Wales as a rival to Händel’s second Royal Academy, which enjoyed the patronage of the prince’s parents, King George II and Queen Caroline. Italian opera’s prominence in London was then already being supplanted by entertainments in the vernacular, including Händel’s own oratorios, but Porpora’s music for the English capital, typified by the aria ‘Chi vuol salva la patria e l’onore,’ enjoyed popularity among the cognoscenti. The listener need not be a scholar or a nobleman in order to appreciate Cenčić’s singing of ‘Chi vuol salva la patria e l’onore,’ his voice ably limning the gallantry of the text. Having abandoned Händel and joined Porpora and the Opera of the Nobility, Senesino remained loyal to the Italian composer, ultimately making his farewell to staged opera as Turno in the 1740 Naples production of Porpora’s Il trionfo di Camilla. The arias ‘Va per le vene il sangue’ and ‘Torcere il corso all’onde’ indicate that Senesino remained a very capable singer until the end of his career—or else that Porpora expected him to be. Cenčić voices ‘Va’ per le vene il sangue’ with intensity that builds to a stirring climax. His traversal of ‘Torcere il corso all’onde’ is among his most memorable recorded performances: in the agility, accuracy, and artfulness of these four minutes of his singing beats the heart of Cenčić’s artistry.

Three of Lottario’s arias from Porpora’s opera Carlo il Calvo, premièred in Rome in 1738, are here heard for the first time on disc. ‘Se rea ti vuole il cielo’ receives from Cenčić a performance of particular urgency, the voice surging with enhanced pointing of the words’ meaning. The lyricism of ‘Quando s’oscura il cielo’ draws from the singer vocalism of mellifluous expressivity. The full panoply of his faculties is deployed in ‘So che tiranno io sono,’ the voice flickering with the character’s remorse and self-recrimination.

Seven years before his retirement from the stage, Senesino sang the rôle of the mythological hero Teseo in the 1733 première of Porpora’s Arianna in Nasso, and the musical and dramatic requirements of the aria ‘Nume che reggi ’l mare’ were unquestionably customized to the castrato’s gifts, which were documented by Eighteenth-Century Londoners to have included the declamatory power of a musical orator. Today’s listeners can only conjecture about how Senesino sounded in his performances of Porpora’s music, but, if he sang ‘Nume che reggi ’l mare’ as eloquently as Cenčić sings it on this disc, his place in musical history is justified by this alone.

Whether the repertory is Baroque, bel canto, or verismo, the viability of opera largely depends, now as much as when Senesino first sang in London in 1720, upon the continual presence on the world’s stages of singers for whom opera is not artifice but a way of life—singers, as these discs reaffirm, like Franco Fagioli and Max Emanuel Cenčić. In recent months, both Fagioli and Cenčić have added fully-staged interpretations of Rossini rôles to their repertoires, the former singing Arsace in Semiramide and the latter portraying Malcolm in La donna del lago in a new production that he also directed. The horizons of countertenor singing now rightly extend well beyond the boundaries of repertoire written for castrati. With singers of Fagioli’s and Cenčić’s stature leading the way, the continued viability of both countertenor singing and opera in general is guaranteed.

BENJAMIN C.S. BOYLE (born 1979), JAKE HEGGIE (born 1961), JENNIFER HIGDON (born 1962), LORI LAITMAN (born 1955), and GLEN ROVEN (born 1962): Remember—Tobias Greenhalgh, Steven LaBrie, & Jarrett Ott, baritones; Michael Brofman, Adam Nielsen, Glen Roven, & Danny Zelibor, piano [Roven Records RR051218; 1 CD, 54:00; Available from Roven Records, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

Once upon a time, there was a land in which remarkable baritone voices like those of Richard Bonelli, John Charles Thomas, Lawrence Tibbett, Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, Cornell MacNeil, and Sherrill Milnes seemed to emerge from her ponds, prairies, and peaks like inexhaustible natural resources. That land remains, extending from Atlantic to Pacific in the embrace of Canada and Mexico, but the skepticism of the listener whose experiences belie the richness of that baritonal endowment is a predictable consequence of acquaintance with the recent state of baritone singing in America’s great opera houses and concert halls. Declaring the Great American Baritone an endangered species slipping ever closer to extinction is understandable, but, no matter how convincing the evidence to the contrary may be, Mark Twain’s quip about the rumor of his demise having been greatly exaggerated might also be applied to baritone singing in the United States.

The international standards of baritone singing, particularly in Verdi repertory, have arguably been continually spiraling downward since Leonard Warren’s untimely death during a 1960 Metropolitan Opera performance of Verdi’s La forza del destino, but the totemic American baritone is not a chimera. Physiologically, it is true that the baritone range is the most common territory inhabited by male voices, but voices such as those of young American baritones Tobias Greenhalgh, Steven LaBrie, and Jarrett Ott are anything but common. With Remember, this compelling disc on his own label, lauded composer, conductor, pianist, poet, and producer Glen Roven provides a platform via which these three gifted singers connect with listeners via intelligently-sung, affectionately-accompanied performances of Art Songs by some of America’s most renowned contemporary composers. Intelligence is commendable, not least owing to it being in sadly short supply, but the brightest mind achieves little in the service of mediocre vocal cords. Mediocrity finds no home on this disc.

Possessing a voice of genuine beauty allied with interpretive instincts that have garnered acclaim from savvy critics and audiences in locales including Aix-en-Provence, New York, and Vienna, Tobias Greenhalgh is at the forefront of today’s ranks of memorable baritones. The comfort and vocal elasticity with which he transitions among musical styles recalls the singing of another American baritone, the under-appreciated Brent Ellis. Like Ellis, Greenhalgh can thunder as convincingly as he whispers, his timbre’s attractiveness never compromised. Accompanied with finesse and flexibility by Michael Brofman, Greenhalgh here performs Roven’s Four Surreal Songs—a title aptly reminiscent of that of Brahms’s Opus 121 Vier ernste Gesänge—with a broad range of vocal hues that embolden the subtleties of Paul Éluard’s words. As set by Roven and sung by Greenhalgh, these texts reveal seldom-seen facets of Éluard’s creative personality that are uncannily appropriate for the first husband of the notorious provocateuse who would eventually enter history on the arm of her second husband, Salvador Dalí.

Motivated by Brofman’s firm but fluid rhythm foundation, Greenhalgh delivers ‘Arc of Your Eyes’ with unapologetic sentimentality, the golden patina of the voice suiting the shimmering colors of the text. The unforced immediacy of his singing of ‘Ecstasy’ establishes a core of serenity amidst the song’s surging emotions. To borrow Hemingway’s conceit, baritone and pianist make ‘The Bull’s Ear’ a moveable feast that lures the listener to the table with a tantalizing array of musical flavors. Roven’s compositional idiom is at its most entrancingly efficacious in ‘End of Monster,’ in which the composer’s responses to Éluard’s words create their own unique sonic poetry. Brofman’s playing fashions a foundation upon which Greenhalgh crafts a reading shaped by a precise balance between music and drama. The song’s metaphysical subtleties are manifested with poignant directness, but this is a performance of a song, not a poetry recitation, and the baritone never ignores the composer’s ingenuity. The listener cannot ignore the unaffected beauty of Greenhalgh’s singing.

Utilizing texts by Paul Valéry [a fittingly operatic surname!], composer Benjamin C. S. Boyle created in his Le passage des rêves a song cycle that rivals the finest efforts in similar form by Erik Satie, Henri Sauget, and Francis Poulenc. Boyle’s musical language is often ambiguous, harmonies conveying as much emotional complexity as his exquisitely-crafted melodies, but the poet’s words are not obscured by the composer’s musical imagery. The duality of words and music that is the nucleus of Boyle’s songs is embodied by the interpretive interdependency of Steven LaBrie and Adam Nielsen, their work on this disc bringing to Boyle’s music the spirit of Benjamin Britten’s and Peter Pears’s still-potent recordings of Schubert Lieder.

LaBrie’s gifts of tonal opulence, strength throughout his range, and expressive sincerity qualify him as a markedly effective exponent of recent repertory: how wonderful he could be as the libidinous Steward in Jonathan Dove’s Flight and is sure to be as Charlie Mitchell in San Diego Opera’s March 2019 production of Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers. His bold, burnished singing of Boyle’s songs is ideally partnered by Nielsen’s eloquently electric pianism. From the first bars of their evocative, resoundingly musical traversal of ‘La dormouse,’ the ethos of this performance is evident: identifying and analyzing the intellectual core of each song, LaBrie and Nielsen inspire one another to make emotional transitions audible. Their singing—and Nielsen’s playing sings as palpably as his colleague’s vocalism—of ‘Les pas’ further refines the principals of musical communication that their collaboration epitomizes, the interaction between voice and piano treated as a candid dialogue. Similarly, the pair’s account of ‘Le sylphe’ pulses with poetic intensity, the layers of meaning inherent in both words and music insightfully elucidated. Even amidst the bounty of wonderful music making on Remember, LaBrie’s and Nielsen’s performance of ‘À l’aurore’ is special: there are palpable feelings of personal vindication and addressing a new day with hope that validates the necessity of darkness. The surety of Nielsen’s touch contrasts with the improvisatory malleability of LaBrie’s phrasing, energizing music, text, and emotion with unerring equilibrium.

The interpretive symbiosis with which LaBrie and Nielsen ignite Boyle’s songs proves to be no less incendiary in their performance of Lori Laitman’s The Joy of Uncreating. Not unlike the textual integrity of her operatic setting of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the composer’s uses of Joan Joffe Hall’s words in the songs on this disc are strikingly perceptive, her music dissecting the heart of the words with a tonal scalpel that pares away artifice. LaBrie and Nielsen cut into the flesh of ‘Illumination’ with unhesitant strokes, piercing the song’s torso with a gleaming blade sharpened on the backs of the words. Here and in ‘The Joy of Uncreating,’ they navigate the music’s paths through the texts with magnetic expressive dexterity.

Like Greenhalgh and LaBrie, Jarrett Ott is an artist whose performances are events in the best and truest senses of the term. With a voice that is at once sinewy and sonorous, Ott has the ability to disguise biting ferocity with slyly-employed finesse. There is a kind of irresistible danger in his singing; the song of a siren whose hypnotic vocal snares cannot be escaped. Singing as he does on this disc, with a pianist of Danny Zelibor’s caliber supporting his work, resistance is unimaginable. Both in his performances on Remember and in his work in general, Ott cogently bridges the distances that separate listeners from composers and poets, facilitating empathy that transcends the mechanics of singing.

Few American composers of any generation have dedicated their efforts to exploring the expressive capacities of the human voice as consistently or as persuasively as Jake Heggie has done, and his settings of verses by Vachel Lindsay in Of Laughter and Farewell exemplify the wit and discernment that are the hallmarks of his Art Songs. Ott and Zelibor approach ‘Under the Blessing of your Psyche Wings’ with the combination of concentration and spontaneity that the music demands, presenting the song as a delicate but forceful episode. Likewise, baritone and pianist immerse themselves in Heggie’s musical evocation of riparian reverie in ‘By the Spring, at Sunset,’ the interplay of music and words handled with sophistication.

Complementing the literary sensibility of Heggie’s songs, Jennifer Higdon’s treatment of Walt Whitman’s ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d’ blossoms with the shifting moods of the poetry, despair and anger melding with quiet resilience and an inextinguishable but almost reluctant optimism. Ott’s singing infuses warmth into Whitman’s elegiac strains, capitalizing on Zelibor’s propulsive realization of Higdon’s writing for the piano. Like their Remember colleagues, Ott and Zelibor foster a musical discourse into which the listener is invited, not as an observer but as a participant.

Greenhalgh, LaBrie, and Ott join their voices above the composer’s sensitive accompaniment to close Remember with a thrilling, touching performance of Roven’s song of that name. As in their individual assignments, the three baritones enunciate the text, in this case a lovely selection by Christina Rossetti, with clarity and comprehension. Roven’s music is a logical destination for the journey traveled in the songs on the disc. With these performances of songs by five of today’s most eminent American acolytes of the muse of Art Song, three masterful singers inaugurate a renaissance of the iconic American baritone. For that alone, this is disc worth remembering, but its most memorable virtue is uniformly, flawlessly superb singing.

FRANK BRIDGE (1879 – 1941), BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913 – 1976), REBECCA CLARKE (1886 – 1979), THOMAS FREDERICK DUNHILL (1877 – 1946), CECIL ARMSTRONG GIBBS (1889 – 1960), IVOR GURNEY (1890 – 1937), MURIEL HERBERT (1897 – 1984), GUSTAV HOLST (1874 – 1934), HERBERT HOWELLS (1892 – 1983), JOHN IRELAND (1879 – 1962), ERNEST JOHN MOERAN (1894 – 1950), SIR CHARLES HUBERT HASTINGS PARRY (1848 – 1918), SIR ARTHUR SOMERVELL (1863 – 1937), SIR CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD (1852 – 1924), SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT (1905 – 1998), and MARK-ANTHONY TURANGE (born 1960): Come to Me in My Dreams – 120 Years of Song from the Royal College of Music—Dame Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano; Joseph Middleton, piano [Recorded in Potton Hall, Dunwich, Suffolk, UK, on 22, 23, and 25 September 2017, and 7 April 2018; ChandosCHAN 10944; 1 CD, 77:18; Available from Chandos, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Eulogizing his brother Robert in 1968, Senator Edward Kennedy spoke of the slain man’s penchant for first perceiving his world’s wrongs and then toiling to right them. A century before an assassin’s bullet ended the life of Robert Kennedy, another man of vision perceived a need and sought to fill it. In many ways a stranger in his adopted country and never allowed to forget it, Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha nonetheless observed aspects of British society with rare perceptiveness and clarity. A Continental man exposed in his youth to Europe’s great cultural consortia, he recognized in music-loving Britain a lamentable lack of rigorous, state-supported tuition for aspiring professional musicians. In the months prior to his untimely death in 1861, the Prince Consort advocated the establishment of a national academy dedicated to the training of musicians, an initiative that came to fruition, albeit ineffectually, more than a decade later. Under the guidance of Sir George Grove and the patronage of Albert’s son, the eventual King Edward VII, the school that arose from Albert’s endeavors evolved into the Royal College of Music, which in 1883 admitted its first ninety-two scholars.

The first fourteen decades of RCM’s history have been guided by the leadership of ten directors, amongst whose ranks are esteemed musicians including Grove, Sir Hubert Parry, Sir George Dyson, Sir David Willcocks, and the present director, Colin Lawson. Even more awe-inspiring than surveying the accomplishments of this decury of directors is contemplating the voices that have echoed in RCM’s South Kensington corridors, both literally and figuratively. Reverberating in that storied space, the formative sounds of some of Britain’s greatest compositional talents forever qualify RCM as a shrine to the Art of Song. It is this legacy of nurturing the continuing vitality of English Song that this Chandos release celebrates by presenting works by some of the institution’s most distinguished alumni and faculty.

Spanning 120 years of repertory yielded by RCM’s commitment to educating and encouraging composers, Come to Me in My Dreams partners two of Britain’s most gifted interpreters of Art Songs, mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton, in performances that are as emotionally engaging as they are stylistically varied. From the lush late Romanticism of the College’s early years to the stark sounds of more recent decades, the music on this disc tunefully appraises RCM’s influence on more than a century of Britain’s musical life. Here singing with exemplary but unpretentious diction and impeccable musicality, Connolly could frankly make a musical history of pickling in the home counties compelling. Performing a programme of Art Songs that might have been composed specially for her, she honors RCM with a recital that rivals the finest Lieder recordings in the discography.

Whether lamenting man’s inconstancy as Purcell’s Dido or communicating the grim forebodings of Wagner’s Brangäne and Fricka, Connolly’s voice is a richly-textured instrument in which subtlety and sublimity meld organically with splendor and majesty. Aspects of her performances evoke memories of the work of some of her most venerable fellow interpreters of repertory in English: Helen Watts’s straightforwardness, Dame Janet Baker’s stylistic versatility, Rosina Raisbeck’s innate theatricality, and Jan DeGaetani’s verbal flair, for example. In the context of the selections on Come to Me in My Dreams, however, Connolly’s singing brings to mind the performances of none of her operatically-inclined colleagues as vividly as it recalls the vocalism of Lancashire-born popular singer Cilla Black. Like Black at her best, Connolly wields a sensitive but stern femininity that is used as neither an excuse nor a weapon. Reinforced by the probing lucidity of Middleton’s pianism, the mezzo-soprano’s singing on this disc is wonderfully robust, prissing and purring altogether banned from her musical demeanor. In Connolly’s and Middleton’s handling, the merits of the music on Come to Me in My Dreams are revealed to be gratifyingly consistent: commendably little disparity in quality separates the most familiar songs from their least-known comrades.

The musical odyssey of Come to Me in My Dreams begins with Muriel Herbert’s ‘The Lost Nightingale,’ here performed by both voice and piano with none of the artifice that can ruin even well-sung performances of this expertly-crafted piece. Interpreted by Connolly and Middleton with disarming simplicity, John Ireland’s ‘Earth’s Call’ is legitimately a ‘sylvan rhapsody,’ the singer’s delivery of the vocal line emerging from the accompaniment with the brilliance of rays of sunlight penetrating a forest canopy. Ireland’s ‘The Three Ravens’ is also given a reading of poetic savvy. ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ from Thomas Frederick Dunhill’s The Wind among the Reeds should be in the repertory of every singer capable of performing it with the sentimental sincerity and glamorous tone with which Connolly limns its eloquent melody. All of Herbert Howells’s music also deserves to be performed more frequently, but Connolly and Middleton make an especially strong case for greater exposure for ‘Goddess of Night.’ The hauntingly perceptive use of text that Howells cultivated in his English-language Requiem, Hymnus Paradisi and the motet Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing is evident throughout the two minutes of ‘Goddess of Night,’ heightened in this performance by the singer’s nuanced but natural enunciation of the vowels that drive the music.

Frank Bridge’s studies at RCM bestrode the turn of the Twentieth Century, and his music linked the past of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky with the future of Rubbra, Britten, and Tippett. Like many of his confederates in what Howells described as the ‘cosy family’ of RCM, song often provided Bridge with respites from the horrors of the Great War and professional frustrations. Bridge’s ‘Where she lies asleep’ and ‘Come to me in my dreams’ offer the listener solace, too, the atmosphere of each song awakened in the hearer’s imagination by Connolly’s and Middleton’s vivid musical colloquy. The composer’s setting of Humbert Wolfe’s ‘Journey’s End’ is a harrowing acceptance of finality made piercingly personal by the effortless candor of the performance on this disc. Gustav Holst’s rendering of ‘Journey’s End,’ the ninth of the twelve songs that constitute his Opus 48 (H 174), is marginally lighter in mood but no less moving than Bridge’s song. Middleton plays Holst’s music adroitly, and Connolly’s phrasing highlights the psychological depth of Holst’s reaction to the text.

Among the composers whose music is performed on Come to Me in My Dreams, Benjamin Britten’s name and songs are likely the most familiar to listeners beyond Britain’s borders. Dating from 1947, Britten’s Opus 41 A Charm of Lullabies is hardly the best-known of his song collections, however, and it is heartening to observe that, nearly forty-two years after the composer’s death, there are still worthwhile products of his creativity awaiting widespread discovery. Virtually all of Britten’s songs are tonally ambiguous, some of them deceptively so, but they share a near-obsessive commitment to textual integrity. The words of ‘A Cradle Song’ are articulated as crisply in Britten’s music as in Connolly’s singing. This composer’s writing for the piano seldom follows predictable harmonic paths, but Middleton’s playing, whilst reveling in the music’s ingenuity, divulges the inner logic that is the foundation of each of these songs. He and Connolly perform ‘The Highland Balou’ and ‘Sephestia’s Lullaby’ with the thoughtfully-conceived interaction of chamber musicians, and their traversal of ‘A Charm’ winningly imparts the wry humor of the brusque text. There is a disconcerting ambivalence that defies easy explanation at the heart of ‘The Nurse’s Song,’ not overtly threatening as in ‘A Charm’ but vaguely disquieting, but vocalist and accompanist avoid imposing an interpretive agenda on the song. Here recorded for the first time, Britten’s ‘A Sweet Lullaby’ and ‘Somnus, the humble god,’ both contemporaneous with A Charm of Lullabies, are beguilingly sung, Connolly’s claret-hued timbre bathing the songs in the crepuscular glow that the music invokes.

Its pervasive melancholy transformed into genuine pathos by the emotional honesty of Connolly’s and Middleton’s performance, Sir Arthur Somervell’s ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ from his 1904 adaptation of verses from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad is unexpectedly one of the most affecting songs in this recital. Likewise, listeners for whom Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s name summons notions of stodginess may find this performance of ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains,’ one of the six songs in his fourth set of English Lyrics, revelatory. Voice and piano are deployed with keen comprehension of the relationship between words and music. ‘A soft day’ from Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster (Opus 140) is also sung with assurance, Connolly voicing the line ‘The hills wear a shroud of silver cloud’ with particular radiance.

Cecil Armstrong Gibbs’s 1934 ‘Sailing Homeward’ is another song in which Connolly’s and Middleton’s cooperation produces an ambience of contemplative resignation that lends an aural dimension to this defining niche of the English psyche. The warmth of the mezzo-soprano’s tone as it caresses the strains of E.J. Moeran’s ‘Twilight’ is stimulating, lifting the words off of the page enchantingly. Like many of the pieces on this disc, the songs of Ivor Gurney are too-little-known gems of the repertory, and the three of his songs offered on Come to Me in My Dreams sparkle dazzlingly in these performances. Superlatives are divisively subjective, but how could opposition to the assertion that Gurney’s ‘Thou didst delight my eyes’ is one of the finest songs in the English language be justified? That anyone who has heard Connolly’s voicing of the song could deny the expressive impact of the music or the artist is unthinkable. She and Middleton are no less effective in disclosing the virtues of ‘The fields are full’ and ‘All night under the moon,’ prominent among which is a directness of feeling reminiscent of the Zwei Gesänge of Brahms’s Opus 91.

Rebecca Clarke dedicated her setting of ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ to Gervase Elwes, the tenor who was also the dedicatee and first performer of Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge. Differences of Fach notwithstanding, Elwes would undoubtedly delight in recognizing Connolly as an artistic legatee, and her singing of Clarke’s music qualifies her as an heiress of the most exalted traditions of Lieder singing of any country and generation. Composed for a 1962 Old Vic production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sir Michael Tippett’s Songs for Ariel make use of some of the play’s best-known lines. Connolly’s and Middleton’s approach to ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ is appropriately spritely but unflappably focused. In her singing of the doleful ‘Full fathom five,’ a deluge of heartbreak surges in the line ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes,’ uttered with complete control of rhythm and dynamics. Wings flutter convincingly in Middleton’s playing of the accompaniment to ‘Where the bee sucks,’ and there is an enigmatic whiff of diffidence in Connolly’s voicing of the closing statement of ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’—the work of a great actress who also happens to sing splendidly.

Composed for Connolly in 2016, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s ‘Farewell’ constitutes an apt resolution for Come to Me in My Dreams, both as a representative of current trends in British songwriting and as a summation of the musical development that has transpired in the years since the first RCM class occupied their desks. As in all of the selections on this disc, Connolly’s ascents to the top of the stave are projected with a dramatic soprano’s surety, but the inviolable solidity of her tone and the accuracy of her intonation throughout the range are the true hallmarks of her work on this recording. Britain and her music are rarely cited as bastions of spirited expression, but they possess profusions of passion unlike but as earnest and poignant as those of their Continental counterparts. It is perhaps gilding the lily to suggest that Come to Me in My Dreams has been 135 years in the making, but it is no exaggeration to avow that Dame Sarah Connolly’s and Joseph Middleton’s performances of these songs were wholly worth the wait.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918 – 1990): A Quiet Place [Edition by Garth Edwin Sunderland]—Claudia Boyle (Dede), Joseph Kaiser (François), Gordon Bintner (Junior), Lucas Meachem (Sam), Rupert Charlesworth (Funeral Director), Daniel Belcher (Bill), Annie Rosen (Susie), Steven Humes (Doc), Maija Skille (Mrs. Doc), and John Tessier (Analyst); Chœur et Orchestre symphonique de Montréal; Kent Nagano, conductor [Recorded in Maison symphonique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 17 – 19 May 2017; DECCA 483 3895; 2 CDs, 93:05; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers; WORLD PREMIÈRE RECORDING OF SUNDERLAND’S EDITION]

The roads leading to the world’s important opera houses are strewn with the carcasses of musical vehicles scuttled before they reached their destinations, parts tried and discarded in the process of revising scores, and the abandoned ambitions of works that never realized their potential. Even among pieces that found success, there are plethoras of questions with no definitive answers. Should a mezzo-soprano or a tenor Idamante be preferred in Mozart’s Idomeneo? Should Bizet’s Carmen be performed with spoken dialogue or sung recitatives? Should Verdi’s Don Carlos be sung in four or five acts; and in French or Italian? Is Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess more at home in a Broadway theatre or an opera house? Now, nearly two decades after his death, how is Leonard Bernstein’s legacy as an operatic innovator fairly assessed?

Since its inception, qualms about the work’s theatrical viability have largely banished Leonard Bernstein’s opera A Quiet Place to the pages of academic studies of the composer’s œuvre, the few productions that the score has received in the thirty-five years since the première of its original form having mostly failed to meet the opera’s goals of further examining and refining the themes addressed in Bernstein’s 1952 opera Trouble in Tahiti. In the earlier work, audiences met Dinah and Sam, a couple bound in a complicated marriage that produced a son who was more a possession to be inventoried than a tangible manifestation of love. Integrating Trouble in Tahiti into its second act as a series of reminiscences, the three-act version of A Quiet Place that Bernstein conducted at the Wiener Staatsoper in 1986, pacing performances that were recorded by Deutsche Grammophon, opens with the aftermath of Dinah’s death in a car accident. The tyke in Trouble in Tahiti, Junior, was joined in the time between the operas by a sister, Dede, whose husband François was previously Junior’s lover. Each member of the family loves and is loved but has never learned to express feelings more intimate than frustration. Perhaps this is the crux of the opera’s difficulties: how can a composer who made lines as seemingly banal as ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ not only integral to a piece’s dramatic continuity but also an indelible episode in American musical history effectively convey the sometime futility of words?

That he returned after an absence of thirty years to the dysfunctional family at the core of Trouble in Tahiti indicates that these people and their mostly self-inflicted struggles clearly captivated Bernstein. First devised by the composer and his chosen librettist, Stephen Wadsworth, in a single, two-hour act, A Quiet Place was a departure from the charm and romance of West Side Story and Candide. Considerably more convoluted than the straightforward love against the odds of West Side Story’s María and Tony, the relationships at the heart of A Quiet Place triggered profound responses from both composer and librettist, described in detail in Wadsworth’s insightful liner notes for the Deutsche Grammophon recording.

...we discovered a coincidence of need - to write about loss, grief, family mourning, and coming through tragedy together. Lenny had lost his wife, Felicia, only two years before, to cancer. I had lost my sister Nina only one year before, in a car crash. These things weighed heavily on our souls.

Recorded with exceptional sonic clarity in Maison symphonique de Montréal, this DECCA recording of A Quiet Place utilizes an arrangement of the score prepared by The Leonard Bernstein Office Vice President for Creative Projects Garth Edwin Sunderland, first performed in Konzerthaus Berlin in 2013 under the direction of Kent Nagano, whose conducting is a vital component of the success of this performance. Engendered by career-long acquaintance with the composer’s work, as well as his mastery of a related piece like Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, with which A Quiet Place shares an emphasis on the Existential implications of interpersonal relationships, Nagano’s informed handling of Bernstein’s music lends Sunderland’s arrangement of A Quiet Place an aura of authority. Bernstein possessed one of the Twentieth Century’s best-trained ears for reimagining orchestral colors and textures, and Nagano’s management of the intricately-constructed tonal strands, spellbindingly executed by Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, unearths and enlivens the wealths of musical ingenuity and emotional power that the score wielded from the start of Bernstein’s and Wadsworth’s operatic alliance.

Reduced from the 150 minutes heard in Vienna in 1986 to ninety-three minutes, principally by excising flashbacks of Trouble in Tahiti from Act Two, the opera here moves at a fast pace that suits the episodic nature of the drama. Paralleling the work of their orchestral counterparts, the expert singing of Chœur symphonique de Montréal combines close adherence to the score’s pitches and rhythms with convincing conversational immediacy. The communicative effectiveness of Bernstein’s writing for groups of voices is enhanced by Sunderland’s treatment of the intersections among instruments and voices, and Nagano’s conducting spotlights subtleties always present in the opera but less evident in previous performances.

In the orchestral Postlude that ends Act One of A Quiet Place, Bernstein unleashed a torrent of the destructive but liberating familial angst that permeates Mozart’s Idomeneo, Verdi’s Rigoletto, and Wagner’s Die Walküre, and Nagano fully capitalizes on the music’s innate poignancy. Lyrical passages emerge from the manic pages of the score like lulls in storms of grief, given space in which to develop organically. A Quiet Place was unquestionably a masterful work at its 1983 première, and Sunderland’s intelligent restructuring of its words and music make it more accessible. With this performance, Nagano confirms that A Quiet Place is one of the most beautiful, unique, and moving operas of the Twentieth Century.

During his career, Bernstein was fortunate—far more fortunate than many of his contemporaries in musical theatre and opera—to enjoy collaborations with artists who understood, respected, and shared his ideals. Supporting rôles in this performance of A Quiet Place are brought to life by singers who exhibit qualities similar to those that defined the work of vocalists with whom Bernstein worked closely. Tenor John Tessier’s bel canto credentials might seem an over-qualification for the Analyst’s music in A Quiet Place, but his proper placement of vowels, rhythmic precision, and intonational accuracy are as welcome in Bernstein’s vocal lines as in Bellini’s. Similarly, the techniques of bass Steven Humes and mezzo-soprano Maija Skille are deployed with style and sensitivity in their portrayals of Doc and Mrs. Doc. The vocal acting of intrepid mezzo-soprano Annie Rosen amplifies the importance of Susie’s every word and note, lending the character added substance. Baritone Daniel Belcher’s Bill is also a fully-characterized depiction, sung with burnished tone and verbal lucidity. The Funeral Director receives from tenor Rupert Charlesworth a performance that gives the character unexpected dimensions of credibility and empathy. Each of these singers devotes to Bernstein’s music the vocal charisma and emotional honesty that it deserves.

The voice of tenor Joseph Kaiser is an instrument of finer quality than any listener might ever have hoped to hear in Bernstein’s music for François, the unknown variable of sorts in A Quiet Place’s family equation. First Junior’s lover and then Dede’s husband, François is the outsider who, despite his close involvement in their affairs, is able to discern the family’s shortcomings. Casting Kaiser in the rôle astutely intensifies the contrasts among François and both Junior and Sam, his higher, leaner timbre sounding almost fragile in comparison with the voices of his in-laws. In his every utterance in Act One, Kaiser is anything but feeble, however, his agile, attractive voice dominating the angular writing with ease except at the extreme top of the range, where effort is audible. Those hints of effort are put to apt dramatic use: like the family into which he inserted himself, François falls victim to his own insecurities, portrayed by Kaiser with touching verisimilitude. This is implicitly evoked in François’s Act Two aria ‘I’ve been afraid,’ passionately sung by Kaiser as a genuinely self-searching expression of endearment.

The tenderness that often glows in Kaiser’s vocalism calms the tempestuous egos that explode in the opera’s charged atmosphere. There is an alluring Mozartian fluidity in his account of the Act Three aria ‘Dear Loved Ones,’ the reading of Dinah’s suicide note that was originally assigned to Junior and is here the song of a Twentieth-Century Idamante brokering a delicate peace. Fulfilling his destiny as the catalyst for reconciliation and healing, Kaiser’s François launches his aria ‘Stop! You will not take another step!’ with the conviction of exasperation, but the sense that he is at last being heard softens the steel of his delivery. As the shared lover of troubled siblings, François is a character who can seem calculating and opportunistic, but, singing with gleaming tone and sincerity, Kaiser infuses François with nobility that figuratively provides the quiet place in which the drama achieves resolution.

It is not difficult to imagine Kaiser’s thoughtful François having been infatuated with the Junior of bass-baritone Gordon Bintner. Even when careening towards psychiatric cataclysm, this Junior is mesmerizing and, more consequentially, obviously redeemable. There is no denying that the Junior who bursts into Act One with the vehemence of a rabid animal exhibits few signs of reclaimable sanity, but Bintner evokes sympathy for the errant son by voicing his lines with a pervasive suggestion of inevitability, demonstrating that Junior’s rants are symptoms of illness, not true depravity. In the disturbing scene in which Junior disrupts his mother’s funeral with a shocking strip tease, Bintner adopts a garish but pitiable manner that suits the frenzied music and further exposes the fractures in the man’s mental state. By casting a singer with a strong, sinuous voice as Junior, his kinship with Sam is rendered both more believable and more meaningful.

The pathetic state of Junior’s mental health becomes sickeningly apparent in the vaudevillian scene in Act Two in which he invents a harrowing tale of an incestuous youthful relationship with Dede, mercilessly taunting François and goading his family to conflict. Bintner traverses this jazz-tinged music with flamboyance, purring his untoward accusations with something of Chet Baker’s sangfroid. None of the vocal effects that Bintner employs for dramatic variety distorts the singer’s pitch, but his characterization is immeasurably enriched: like Kaiser’s François, Bintner’s Junior, engrossingly sung, is an atypically plausible persona. Spanning the psychological metamorphoses of Act Three with acuity that culminates in a commanding performance of the aria ‘You see, Daddy, that death does bring some relief,’ Bintner persuasively evinces Junior’s ultimate transformation from bitter man mired in childhood inhibitions to better man on the path to recovery.

Building upon her colleagues’ erudite embodiments of their parts, soprano Claudia Boyle uplifts this performance of A Quiet Place with a portrayal of Dede that is capably sung—no small feat—and refreshingly free of cliché. The wide intervals and placement of tones without facile approach demanded by Dede’s music, much of which prefigures very different but equally difficult rôles like Ariel in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest and Pip in Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, are unflappably supplied by Boyle. Her voice soars above the stave, but she also negotiates tricky passages in the lower octave with aplomb. Boyle voices Dede’s Act One arietta ‘Fantastic, great!’ with a piercing irony that is unmistakably limned by the slightly acidic edge with which she projects her tones. Dede plays the rôle of the more stable of Sam’s children (and François’s partners), but she is not without idiosyncrasies and indiscretions. Still, Boyle never allows the young woman’s flaws to obscure her basic humanity, her vocalism as reassuringly lovely when the text is thorny as when her words are comforting.

The trio with Junior and François and the scene in Act Two in which Dede at least momentarily connects with her father whilst donning one of Dinah’s dresses are pinnacles in Boyle’s performance, her voice arrayed in primary colors for the confrontational sparring and in pastel hues for intermittent tranquility. Occasional shrillness, dramatically appropriate, illustrates Dede’s awkwardness, especially in exchanges with François. The ambivalence of Sam’s and Dinah’s marriage is echoed in Dede’s relationship with François, and Boyle affectingly articulates her character’s indecision. The soprano sings the Act Three aria ‘Morning’ incisively, the text garnering as much attention as the music. Dede can be portrayed as a petulant shrew, but Boyle tames her, seizing each of the score’s inherent opportunities to chart the progress of her emotional evolution.

The husband and father at the center of the opera’s drama is portrayed in this performance with a myriad of temperamental contradictions by granite-voiced baritone Lucas Meachem. The first impression made by his Sam is one of unstinting strength, the core of iron in his singing introducing an element of stereotypical machismo into his depiction of the stern father. Meachem quickly divulges that Sam’s bravado is a coping mechanism that masks a vulnerability that is exacerbated by the father’s damaged relationships with his children. The character’s gruff exterior crumbles when platitudes are not adequate to express his feelings, and the baritone’s singing is most memorable when Sam’s hopelessness is most exposed. Throughout Act One, Meachem alternates boldly handsome singing with vocalism of unnerving sweetness, his account of the aria ‘You’re late’ a manifestation of Sam’s inability to grant his children access to his innermost emotions.

Grappling with the anger, denial, and uncomfortable truths forced to the surface by Dinah’s death, Sam begins Act Two with the aria ‘I wish I could sleep,’ delivered by Meachem with a wide spectrum of vocal colors ranging from darkest despair to glowing embers of self-recrimination. Here and elsewhere in this performance, the world-weariness of Meachem’s singing unveils a link between the small-scaled situations of A Quiet Place and the macrocosms of Wagner’s Ring. Singing with galvanizing resolve, Meachem reveals in Sam a suburban Wotan, his Fricka gone but still omnipresent and his children, not unlike Sieglinde and Siegmund, embroiled in futile combat against fate. In Meachem’s performance, Sam’s aria in Act Three, ‘Oh, François, please,’ is an outcry of desperation. Freud would likely theorize that, as an amorous partner for Dede and Junior, François is a stand-in for Sam, a father figure with whom they share a long-desired affection. In the wake of François’s rebuke and cathartic destruction of Dinah’s letter, the humility with which Meachem’s Sam welcomes François to the family proposes that he accepts and embraces his son-in-law as an equal. Though not every man can aspire to sing as Meachem does, his Sam is an Everyman, complicated in his simplicity and finally strongest when admitting his weaknesses.

Opera is an art that thrives on second chances. Many are the works that overcame unpromising and in some instances utterly disastrous premières to claim eventual success. Nonetheless, how many neglected honorable failures are there for every Carmen, and how many of those honorable failures might prove to be stage-worthy under the right circumstances? In terms of the consistent quality of Leonard Bernstein’s music, the very busy conducting schedule that undoubtedly deprived the public of works that never came to fruition was perhaps advantageous. It can be truthfully if not charitably said of some composers that their least-inspired music is good and their best work not markedly better, but Bernstein had little time for mediocrity. Artistically, A Quiet Place was never a failure, but, as the opera’s protagonists discover, redemption often requires compromise and cooperation. In this performance of A Quiet Place, all of the circumstances are right, and Bernstein’s final work for the operatic stage makes its second chance a triumph.

AGOSTINO STEFFANI (1654 – 1728): O barbaro Amore– Duetti da camera—Andréanne Brisson Paquin (soprano), Céline Ricci (mezzo-soprano), José Lemos (countertenor), Steven Soph (tenor), and Mischa Bouvier (baritone); Jennifer Morsches (cello), Deborah Fox (theorbo and guitar), and Jory Vinikour (harpsichord and direction) [Recorded in Sono Luminus Studios, Boyce, Virginia, USA, 14 – 18 February 2017; Musica Omnia mo0711; 1 CD, 66:07; Available from Musica Omnia, Naxos Direct, Amazon (UK), Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

There is an uncannily timely lesson about cultural cooperation and coexistence to be learned from the fact that much of Twenty-First-Century observers’ acquaintance with the music of Italian composer Agostino Steffani is owed to the advocacy of a German-speaking aristocrat who became King of England. When the Elector of Hannover ascended to the English throne as George I in 1714, included in the souvenirs of his native land that accompanied him to London were Steffani scores that would otherwise now almost certainly be lost. Royal prerogative has indisputably sometimes been abused, but Sir Winston Churchill might reasonably have said of the fledgling Hannoverian dynasty’s preservation of Steffani’s work that there are few instances in musical history in which so much is owed to so few.

Born in 1654 in the Veneto region of Italy, near both Treviso and Venice, Steffani embarked upon his circuitous musical education at Venice’s Basilica di San Marco, where he served as a chorister. Noble patronage subsequently transported the young composer first to Munich, then to Rome, and ultimately back to the Bavarian capital, in which cities his natural abilities flourished under capable, nurturing tutelage. The path that led him to the court of the eventual George I also brought him into contact with a fellow composer who, unlike Steffani, would follow his employer to Britain: Georg Friedrich Händel. The extent to which Steffani may have influenced his Halle-born junior cannot be definitively discerned, but Händel undoubtedly benefited from the older man’s encouragement. Later appointments found Steffani in Brussels, Düsseldorf, and again in Hannover, where, like the esteemed castrato Farinelli, he was entrusted with diplomatic missions. It was whilst fulfilling political duties that the composer died in Frankfurt in 1728. Neglecting the work of an artist who was sufficiently esteemed by his superiors to be tasked with the handling of affairs of state seems anything but reasonable, but the whims of artistic fashion adhere to no conventional logic.

Recent years have ushered in a resurgence in Steffani’s reputation, propelled by the espousal of his music by renowned artists, perhaps the most committed amongst whom is mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli. Productions of Steffani’s 1688 opera Niobe, regina di Tebe by London’s Royal Opera House and Boston Early Music Festival were recorded and released commercially to great acclaim, broadening awareness of his proficiency for writing for the stage. Appreciation of the keen understanding and innovative use of the prevalent music forms of his time that was likely the basis of his contemporaries’ respect for Steffani has been somewhat slower in expanding into the Twenty-First Century. Recorded with extraordinary acoustical clarity and immediacy by the industry-leading production team of Peter Watchorn (Executive Producer), Dan Merceruio (Producer), Daniel Shores (Engineer, Mixing, and Mastering), and Allison Noah (Recording Technician), O barbaro Amore, Musica Omnia’s recital of ten of Steffani’s sublime, stirring duetti da camera, offers a wonderful opportunity to examine the fluency of the composer’s musical language in the setting of inward discourses among voices and continuo instruments. Distant but undeniable relations of Monteverdi’s madrigals, the duets are here imaginatively ordered to form a continuous psychological arc that rivals the linear storytelling of Schubert’s Winterreise and Schumann’s Dichterliebe.

Amidst the bursts of enthusiastic rediscovery that have introduced Steffani and his work to modern audiences, his music has been revitalized by no artists more gifted than Deborah Fox, Jennifer Morsches, and Jory Vinikour. Directing these performances from the harpsichord, Vinikour paces each piece with masterful command of its musical and poetic nuances, both emphasizing the unique qualities of each duet and persuasively creating context within the cumulative narrative of the ten duets in succession. As a harpsichordist, Vinikour’s work has rarely been more refined, the restraint exhibited by his playing here affirming his faith in the expressive potential of the music. Avoiding the trap of excessive ornamentation, he fosters lean, lithe textures that support the vocalists rather than competing with them. Likewise, Fox plays theorbo and Baroque guitar with interpretive nimbleness that rivals her manual dexterity. Via her participation in performances of Baroque operas, she has honed an unerring instinct for aiding singers in maintaining conversational naturalness even in music of tremendous technical difficulty. Cadences are her punctuation, and Fox resolves phrases with unforced momentum. Morsches complements her colleagues’ efforts with alert, adaptive playing, accenting her tones in response to the words that they accompany. Fox’s theorbo and Morsches’s cello are an aural embodiment of Ovid’s Pyramus, and Vinikour’s harpsichord is the porous wall through which they converse with the singers’ Thisbe.

It seems unlikely that music of the quality heard on O barbaro Amore was written without the voices of specific singers resounding in Steffani’s mind, but the circumstances of the composition and first performances of these duets are largely unknown. Unanswered questions about their inception give the duets an alluring aura of mystery, but the performances on this disc establish beyond any uncertainty that soprano Andréanne Brisson Paquin, mezzo-soprano Céline Ricci, countertenor José Lemos, tenor Steven Soph, and baritone Mischa Bouvier are a quintet to whose talents any composer past, present, or future would delight in tailoring new music. The variety of Steffani’s deployment of different vocal registers in the duets is evidence both of the composer’s expertise in writing for voices and of the quality of the voices by which he anticipated his music being sung. Individually and in ensemble, the voices selected for this recording heighten the expressive impact of the duets with singing in which virtuosity, always present and wielded with confidence, seems an afterthought. Beauty of tone, purity of line, and honesty of emotional engagement are the characteristics that shape the artistic experience of O barbaro Amore. The raw sentiments of the words are felt before the difficulty of the music is perceived. How many performances of repertory of this vintage can truly be said to achieve this?

Brisson Paquin and Bouvier take the first steps on this journey with a traversal of ‘È spento l’ardore’ that establishes a charged atmosphere in which the relationships between text and music—and the alternating collaborations and confrontations between voices—conjure bitingly realistic tableaux of lovers’ rows and reconciliations. The brightly-polished patina of the soprano’s timbre soars above the darker hues of the baritone’s voice, but their sounds meld with surprisingly mellifluous homogeny. Brisson Paquin also shares an euphonious bond with Ricci, who joins her in an account of ‘Saldi marmi’ that closes the distance from Steffani’s music to duets for Rossini’s Semiramide and Arsace and Bellini’s Norma and Adalgisa. The adventurous harmonies of Diana’s exchanges with Endimione in Cavalli’s La Calisto also echo in Steffani’s music, rising to the surface in ‘Saldi marmi’ owing to the singers’ judicious management of the intervals that separate their vocal lines. Soph proves a wholly-qualified partner for Brisson Paquin, as well, delivering his part in their account of ‘Io voglio provar’ with dulcet but sonorous vocalism. In each of the first three duets, the soprano finds within her voice a range of colors that reflect the moods of the text, and each of her colleagues proves to be wonderfully skilled at revealing the unexpected modernity of Steffani’s word settings.

In the evocative strains of ‘Non so chi mi piagò,’ Brisson Paquin and Lemos fuse their voices into a stream of molten sound that illuminates the subtleties of the composer’s exploitation of the polarities of the upper and lower lines. The soprano’s vocalism is particularly effective here, her opalescent tones at the top of the stave cascading like lovers’ sighs. In the first of Ricci’s contests with Lemos, ‘Placidissime catene,’ the music seems to pour not solely from their lungs but from every cell of their bodies and every recess of their psyches. They unleash the latent verismo in Steffani’s music without one note of their performance straying from the appropriate style of elocution. This is historically-informed singing that refuses to be pedantic. Soprano and mezzo-soprano reunite for an affectingly spirited account of ‘Lontananza crudel’ in which their navigation of the intersections of their serpentine vocal lines compellingly limns lovers’ loathing of the distances that separate them.

The poignant potency of Ricci’s alliance with Brisson Paquin also courses through her performance of ‘Il mio seno è un mar di pene’ with Soph. The tenor voices his music with dramatic immediacy and silver-clad tone that gleams most brightly in his enunciation of vowels. The essence of the music is articulated in the lines ‘in sperar tropp’anelante solo si muor per essere costante,’ and the despair of these words permeates this reading of the duet. As in their first encounter on O barbaro Amore, there is an unique electricity that sizzles in Ricci’s and Lemos’s singing of ‘Quando ti stringo, o cara.’ Though similar in basic compass, their voices are very different instruments. The churning depths of the mezzo-soprano’s timbre collide with the lava that flows from the countertenor’s vocal cords, generating a scorching geyser of histrionic steam that lends their musical sparring an element of spontaneous but perceptively-wrought catharsis. The metamorphosis in Ricci’s demeanor in ‘Labri belli, dite un po’ is indicative of her submersion in the text, and she reacts alluringly to Bouvier’s vigorous but sensitive voicing of his music. Mezzo-soprano and baritone make of this duet a vibrantly hypnotic dance, approaching words and music with caressing sensuality.

The last chapter in this tale of love’s pains and pleasures, ‘Occhi, perché piangete,’ pairs Brisson Paquin with Lemos in a demonstration of artistry that epitomizes both the consistency of Steffani’s inspiration and the caliber of the music making that produced O barbaro Amore. These singers and the musicians who accompany them follow the music wherever it leads, swathing even the most uncomfortable niches of humanity in beauty. Above all, the performances on this disc raise a vital query: how can such music have been ignored for so many years?

Pat Benatar and the Four Aces got it right: love is truly both a battlefield and a many-splendored thing. History preserves few intimate details of Agostino Steffani’s life before his rise to prominence on Europe’s musical, political, and ecclesiastical stages, but his music provides glimpses of the man time has largely concealed. With the ten duetti da camera on this disc, Steffani transformed a remarkable aesthetic cognizance of the complexities of love into music of timeless cogency. In performing these duets, the artists whose work created O barbaro Amore unequivocally got it right, too.

HAROLD MELTZER (born 1966): Variations on a Summer Day and Piano Quartet—Abigail Fischer, soprano; Tara Helen O’Connor and Barry Crawford, flute; Alan Kay and Vicente Alexim, clarinet; Margaret Kampmeier, piano; Cyrus Beroukhim, Miranda Cuckson, and Andrea Schultz, violin; Daniel Panner, viola; Greg Hesselink, cello; Jayce Ogren, conductor; Boston Chamber Music Society [Recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, USA, on 25 March 2017 (Piano Quartet) and 28 – 30 March 2017 (Variations on a Summer Day); Open G Records888295672382; 1 CD, 40:51; Available from Bandcamp.com]

Originality for its own sake is scarcely better than unimaginative adherence to traditions. Popularity is not universally indicative of quality, but traditions are rarely devoid of some degree of celebration of the exceptional. Newly-minted words with nothing to say merely clutter languages that are already ludicrously verbose, widening the chasm between thought and expression in ways that further complicate the critical act of communication. As a physical manifestation of the most honest aspects of humanity, Art must communicate necessary truths too uncomfortable for everyday discourse and must do so in ways that demand attention and action. For music, it is not enough to spin a beguiling melody or beat out a distracting rhythm. Whether old or new, the sounds must forge connections among people—connections that engender harmonious resolutions for life’s chaotic cacophonies.

There are no formulæ that reliably concoct success for a composer of what is now identified as ‘serious’ music. Few composers in the recent history of Classical Music are likely to have been spared enduring the well-meaning dictate that artistic fulfillment depends upon originality, but originality in music is a misleading notion. All that has been achieved by musicians since the inception of composing in written form notwithstanding, the available tonal spectra are finite. Whether music makes use of quarter tones, tone rows, counterpoint, scordatura, or any of the thousands of effects that fill musicological glossaries, the basic structural tenets are unchanging. Success as a composer begins with recognizing that originality does not demand abandonment of the time-tested fundaments of music.

That Johannes Brahms was one of the most powerful instigators of musical evolution is indisputable, but which bold innovation in music does one attribute solely to Brahms’s invention? Brahms’s genius was not in discarding established methods and fabricating new ones: he altered the course of music’s cyclical metamorphoses by perfecting the forms he inherited from past masters and reshaping them to realize his own designs. As a reformer looking to both the past and the future, Brooklyn-born composer Harold Meltzer is among Brahms’s most gifted Twenty-First-Century heirs. The pieces on this expertly-produced Open G Records disc ask the listener not only to absorb the complexities of the sonic layers but also to consider their meaning. Why did Meltzer choose these forms, these instruments, these words? This is not arbitrarily-conceived music. Like Brahms, Meltzer has crafted an individual style not by rejecting the work of his artistic ancestors but by respecting, learning from, and continuing it. His is originality with purpose.

Written in 2016 in memory of composer Steven Stucky (1949 – 2016), Meltzer’s Piano Quartet is a thought-provoking but never coldly academic piece in which novelty and nostalgia interact in a mesmerizingly intricate ballet. The spirit of Meltzer’s memorial to a fellow artist is anything but funereal: this music is a paean to living, remembering, carrying on, and moving forward. The adjectives combined by the composer with metronome markers in lieu of conventional verbal instructions of tempo and temperament—effervescent, ardent, ecstatic, eager, poignant, ebullient, contented, sparkling—are observed so meticulously by the Boston Chamber Music Society musicians—violinist Harumi Rhodes, violist Dimitri Murrath, cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, and pianist Max Levinson—that an attentive listener might use precisely these words to describe the impact of this performance of the piece. The through-composed structure of his quartet differs from the architecture of these earlier works, but Meltzer’s part writing fleetingly recalls both Brahms’s three piano quartets and Antonín Dvořák’s superb Opus 87 Piano Quartet. Notable for inspired use of pizzicato, the emotional epicenter of the American composer’s quartet is the ‘Dreamwaltz for Steve,’ an episode further distinguished by kaleidoscopic intermingling of instrumental textures and timbres that amplify a faint echo of Beethoven. The instrumentalists are alert to the music’s subtleties, navigating the work’s expressive transformations with playing of unwavering technical mastery. This is a sophisticated performance of significant, splendidly-scored music.

A setting of verses by American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), Meltzer’s Variations on a Summer Day discloses a rare affinity for perceiving the inherent song in words and fashioning music that manifests that song for performers and listeners. Stevens’s text is a stream-of-conscious meditation that is not unlike the mature work of writers as seemingly dissimilar as T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, the thoughts within his lines seeming to exist externally, free-standing concepts that are not reasoned but encountered like landmarks along a path. The poet blurred the distinctions between physical and metaphysical, and Meltzer embraces this ambiguity in writing that is at once earthly and ephemeral. Though their musical idioms are very different, there is a familial relationship between the narrator of Variations on a Summer Day and the nameless protagonist of Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine. Like Poulenc’s incarnation of Jean Cocteau’s surrealistic drama, Variations on a Summer Day is an engrossing exchange with an unheard conversant. Mimicking nature’s cycles, the music imparts a sense of inevitability: rather than beginning and ending with contrived formality, the music rises to the surface for the duration of Variations on a Summer Day and then retreats into silence, waiting to be heard again.

Under the direction of conductor Jayce Ogren, the musicians to whom performing Variations on a Summer Day for this recording was entrusted play Meltzer’s music with an abiding interpretive spontaneity, vividly limning the score’s tonal unpredictability. Flautists Tara O’Connor and Barry Crawford, clarinetists Alan Kay and Vicente Alexim, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Andrea Schultz, violist Daniel Panner, cellist Greg Hesselink, and pianist Margaret Kampmeier approach this music with obvious preparation, but their playing is appealingly free from artifice. [In the passages beginning with ‘Round and round goes the bell of the water’ and ‘Low tide, flat water, sultry sun,’ violinist Cyrus Beroukhim deputizes for Cuckson. That the substitution is indiscernible is a testament to both musicians’ artistic integrity.] Cleanness of execution of the music’s rhythmic transitions is critical to the effectiveness of Variations on a Summer Day, but clinical exactitude would deprive the piece of its improvisational fervor. Guided by the apparent thoroughness of Ogren’s acquaintance with the score’s challenges, this performance is precise without ever being perfunctory.

It is often as an implicit euphemism for a less-flattering characterization that a singer is said to possess an unique voice, but soprano Abigail Fischer proves to be a peer of Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian, and Jan DeGaetani as a singer with a wholly unique voice in the very best sense. A bright, forward placement of vowels and a flickering vibrato contribute to the fluidity of the soprano’s singing of both Meltzer’s music and Stevens’s words. Moreover, Fischer’s diction is little affected by notorious ‘opera singer English,’ her enunciation refreshingly natural. The exhilaration generated by her voicing of ‘Say of the gulls’ is tempered by the uneasy serenity of her declamation of ‘A music more than a breath.’ Fischer commands the irregular emotional tides of the sequence encompassing ‘The rocks of the cliffs,’ ‘Star over Monhegan,’ and ‘The leaves of the sea’ like a sorceress, wielding the magic of Meltzer’s music with able, assured vocalism.

A restless energy reminiscent of that found in Dylan Thomas’s poetry courses through ‘It is cold to be forever young,’ its sparks igniting Meltzer’s ingenuity. The music here grows more intense, and Fischer and Ogren sharpen their focus on the composer’s aural imagery. Singer and musicians lend ‘One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls’ a measure of lightness, and the accents of ‘An exercise in viewing the world’ and ‘This cloudy world’ are judiciously matched with the cadences of the words. Meltzer provides music of uncompromising directness for both ‘To change nature’ and ‘Now, the timothy at Pemaquid,’ and these performers give his lines readings of equal earnestness. Fischer sings ‘Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers’ with particular eloquence, joining Meltzer in evincing the ambivalence of the text with touching simplicity. Emotional honesty is also the heart of Fischer’s account of ‘Cover the sea with the sand rose,’ the vocal lines of which she sculpts with perfectly-balanced tenderness and toughness.

‘Words add to the senses’ is an apposite artistic credo for both Meltzer and Wallace Stevens—and for this performance of Variations on a Summer Day. Too often, words seem to stand in the way of today’s composers’ efforts at creating memorable music, but Meltzer seizes the opportunities for sketching familiar but previously unseen vistas offered by Stevens’s words. A near-Baroque sensibility permeates ‘The last island’ and ‘Round and round goes the bell of the water,’ the composer identifying distant vestiges of John Donne in the text, and Fischer sings the music with appropriately ringing tone that would serve her as stylishly in music by Bach or Telemann. Meltzer’s final variations emphasize the parallels between Stevens’s words and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Afforded a chance to demonstrate her dramatic instincts, Fischer sings ‘Pass through the door’ with unaffected sincerity. Her vocalism is impressive throughout the performance, but she saves her best singing for the final three segments, launching the work’s quest for renewal with a searching traversal of ‘Low tide, flat water, sultry sun.’ The strangely disquieting ‘One boy swims under a tub’ and ‘You could almost see the brass on her gleaming’ highlight the perpetuality of Variations on a Summer Day. Instead of proposing a resolution, they suggest an inexorable continuation of the voyage. Fischer, Ogren, and their colleagues eschew ostentatious gestures in Variations’ final pages: their sounds cease, but the music does not end.

In grasping at success that is increasingly difficult to define, today’s composers sometimes forget the ideal that should always be the objective of creativity. Scholars can debate whether originality is characterized by saying something entirely new or saying something that has been said before but differently, but the truest gauge of music’s success is its appeal to the listener. Sonic treatises on new ways of composing and performing music are valuable, but how often does one genuinely want to hear them? Harold Meltzer’s Piano Quartet and Variations on a Summer Day break new ground without subjecting the listener to gruesome noises of demolition. No idols of previous generations were smashed in the name of originality in the making of this music. Rather, this composer has molded contemporary music that is as pleasing as it is progressive. How original!

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): La clemenza di Tito, K. 621—Rolando Villazón (Tito Vespasiano), Joyce DiDonato (Sesto), Marina Rebeka (Vitellia), Regula Mühlemann (Servilia), Tara Erraught (Annio), Adam Plachetka (Publio); RIAS Kammerchor, Chamber Orchestra of Europe; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor [Recorded during concert performances in Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, Germany, in July 2017; Deutsche Grammophon 483 5210; 2 CDs, 140:36; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

1791 was a remarkable year for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. After celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday in January, he produced three of his most enduring and influential compositions: the E♭-major String Quintet (K. 614), the Clarinet Concert (K. 622), and his opera Die Zauberflöte. In July, he and his wife welcomed the second of their children who would eventually reach adulthood, their son Franz Xaver Wolfgang. Sadly, the infant would need to survive only a few months in order to outlive his father. When Mozart died on 5 December 1791, the works dating from his final year, including the unfinished Requiem and the motet ‘Ave verum corpus,’ essentially became characters in a drama that grew ever more fantastical until the Mozart known to the musical denizens of Enlightenment Vienna was little more than a shadow in his own spectacle.

Until the second half of the Twentieth Century, a little-read chapter in the story of the last months of Mozart’s life recounted the genesis of La clemenza di Tito, an opera seria of the type that was a relic of earlier generations, though still a respected and in some circles, like that of which Mozart’s supporter Gottfried van Swieten was the center, beloved one. The death of the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II in February 1790 closed Vienna’s theatres whilst Mozart was at the zenith of his faculties, but the ascension of Joseph’s brother Leopold II to the throne made amends with an opportunity to write an opera to celebrate the new monarch’s coronation as King of Bohemia. The contract for arranging the composition and performance of the opera was granted to Prague impresario Domenico Guardasoni, whose invitation to participate in the project was declined by Antonio Salieri. The tremendous success of the inaugural production of Don Giovanni, staged in Prague in October 1787, made Mozart a viable candidate to substitute for Salieri, and, despite being immersed in the preparation of Die Zauberflöte, the younger composer accepted the offer and started his work—and how he worked! Less than two months separated Guardasoni’s receipt of the contract on 8 July and the world première of La clemenza di Tito in Prague’s Stavovské divadlo on 6 September.

Unlike many composers of his time, Mozart prized novelty in his writing for the stage, preferring to work with libretti prepared specially for him rather than perpetuating the tradition of using widely-traveled texts already employed by other composers. In this regard, La clemenza di Tito is an anomaly among Mozart’s mature operas, its libretto, an adaptation by Caterino Mazzolà of the work of the Eighteenth Century’s busiest librettist, Pietro Metastasio, having been previously set by nearly forty other composers including Antonio Caldara (1734), Christoph Willibald Gluck (1752). and Baldassare Galuppi (1759). For Prague, Mazzolà substantially streamlined and restructured the drama, reducing Metastasio’s three acts to two and eliminating many arias, only a few of which were replaced with new texts. In truth, the original goal of the commission was to serenade Leopold II with a wholly-new piece, but the writing of a fresh libretto would have left even less time for composition of the music. Nevertheless, the recycled tale of amorous intrigue, political upheaval, and royal magnanimity clearly inspired Mozart, who had fallen ill by the time that the opera reached the stage. His burden was lightened by the task of writing secco recitative being placed in other hands, but it is doubtful that, facing the pressure of such a deadline, the industrious Rossini or Donizetti could have crafted a score of the quality and significance of La clemenza di Tito under similar circumstances.

Expanding the cycle populated to date by recordings of Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Mozart’s three operas with libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte and to be joined in due course by a souvenir of this month’s Festspielhaus Baden-Baden concert performances of Die Zauberflöte, this Clemenza di Tito deepens Québécois conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s experience with the music of a composer in whose musical language he has demonstrated a notable fluency. It is hardly surprising that this young conductor, still only in his early forties, excels at leading performances of scores shaped by white-hot passions, but his fervent handling of the ‘formal’ style of La clemenza di Tito is tempered by commendable and period-appropriate restraint. The contrasts among fast and slow sections of arias are sometimes slightly exaggerated, but the opera’s emotional transitions benefit tremendously from the heightened sense of impending calamity that this engenders. On the whole, Nézet-Séguin’s tempi are both prudent and sensitive: the quickest passages are controlled, and slower music rarely languishes.

The conductor’s concerted efforts to keep the drama moving at a sensible, sustainable pace are supported by Jory Vinikour’s fortepiano continuo, played with technical and intellectual nimbleness, and expertly seconded in secco recitative by cellist William Conway. Likewise, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe musicians deliver performances that spur renewed admiration of Mozart’s skill as an orchestrator, not least in the brilliant—and, in this performance, brilliantly-played—Overture and the delightfully martial Maestoso Marcia in Act One. Some performances of La clemenza di Tito create the illusion that in this score Mozart’s creative genius took a step back from his achievements in the da Ponte operas and Die Zauberflöte, first performed in Vienna three weeks after Tito’s Prague première, but the performance incited by Nézet-Séguin corroborates the assertion that La clemenza di Tito is a by no means unworthy sibling of Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte.

Mozart’s operatic choral writing reached its apotheosis in La clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflöte. In these works, the choristers genuinely participate in the drama rather than merely commenting on it. As the populace of Tito’s Rome, patricians and plebeians, the expert RIAS Kammerchor singers perform Mozart’s music with a balance of zeal and precision that complements Nézet-Séguin’s approach to the score. In Act One, they deliver ‘Serbate, o Dei custodi della Romana sorte’ with credible avidity, their plea for divine protection propelled heavenward on a torrent of accurately-pitched, perfectly-blended tone. The tumultuous music of the Act One finale could hardly be more different, and the mettle of their singing makes the fear and panic of the scene palpable. ‘Ah, grazie si rendano al sommo fattor’ in Act Two returns to a reverential manner, and the ensemble’s performance adapts accordingly. They preface the opera’s finale with a heartfelt account of ‘Che del ciel, che degli Dei tu il pensier,’ and their singing intensifies the catharsis of the final scene. Like Nézet-Séguin’s conducting, RIAS Kammerchor’s singing further spotlights the ingenuity that Mozart expended in the composition of La clemenza di Tito.

It is unusual to hear a singer of Czech bass-baritone Adam Plachetka’s abilities as Publio, the commander of Tito’s Praetorian guards, but the power of his singing gives the character a stronger presence than he typically commands. In the first of his trios, the ensemble with Vitellia and Annio in Act One, Plachetka is a rare Publio who is always noticeable. This is also true in the quintet, in which the bass-baritone voices Publio’s lines sonorously and energetically. Trios in Act Two unite him first with Vitellia and Sesto and then with Sesto and Tito: Plachetka makes a robust impression in both settings. Between these trios comes Publio’s aria, ‘Tardi s’avvede d’un tradimento,’ sung here with secure tone and solid technique. Plachetka’s voice remains audible and attractive in the opera’s closing ensemble, and his Publio sets a high standard both for his colleagues and for the performance of this rôle.

Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught characterizes the young Annio with keenly-honed histrionic instincts and vocal technique that maintains the requisite style without sacrificing the emotive spontaneity of her singing. In the beautiful Andante duet with Sesto in Act One, ‘Deh, prendi un dolce amplesso,’ Erraught voices Annio’s words with obvious understanding of their meaning, and, here and in the subsequent duet with Servilia, ‘Ah, perdona al primo affetto,’ the mezzo-soprano imbues the rôle with significantly greater dramatic involvement than he wields in many performances. Like Plachetka’s Publio, Erraught’s Annio is engagingly conspicuous in both their trio with Vitellia and the momentous quintet that ends Act One.

The first of Annio’s arias in Act Two, the Allegretto ‘Torna di Tito a lato,’ is affectionately sung, but it is in the Andante aria ‘Tu fosti tradito’ that Erraught claims for herself a place alongside Brigitte Fassbaender and Frederica von Stade among the finest recorded interpreters of Annio. The appeal of her vocalism is consistent throughout the performance, but the parlous position in which Annio finds himself in ‘Tu fosti tradito,’ acknowledging that his friend Sesto’s deeds warrant a death sentence but entreating Tito to allow his deliberations to be guided by the mandates of his heart rather than the rule of law, inspirit Erraught’s depiction. In the opera’s finale, her Annio evinces the jubilation of having facilitated Sesto’s deliverance from an inglorious fate, and the magnetism of Erraught’s singing compels the listener to rejoice, as well.

In recent seasons, Swiss soprano Regula Mühlemann has rapidly established herself as one of her generation’s preeminent Mozart singers. Heard as Barbarina in Nézet-Séguin’s recording of Le nozze di Figaro and donning Papagena’s musical plumage in his Die Zauberflöte, she portrays Servilia in this performance of La clemenza di Tito with unforced charm and secure, often radiant singing. She does not over-accentuate the top As in the Act One duet with Annio, ‘Ah, perdona al primo affetto,’ instead emphasizing continuity of the musical line. She, too, utters her lines in the quintet with urgency and impeccable musicality. Mühlemann phrases Servilia’s Act Two aria in minuet time, ‘S’altro che lacrime per lui non tenti,’ liltingly, rising to a dulcet top A. Her tones gleam in the final scene, in which she resolves Servilia’s part in the drama with noteworthy comprehension of the intricacies of Mozart’s part writing.

That Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka’s repertoire has expanded in the past two years to include the title rôles in Bellini’s Norma, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, and Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco and Luisa Miller is indicative of this artist’s musical intrepidity. It is also evidence of her technical fortitude. With Vitellia in La clemenza di Tito, Mozart created a full-blooded sister for Elettra in Idomeneo, re di Creta and Die Königin der Nacht in Die Zauberflöte—and, though he did not know it, a fantastic part for Marina Rebeka. Vitellia’s duet with Sesto in Act One, ‘Come ti piace, imponi,’ offers the soprano an opportunity to exhibit her talents, and she seizes it with alacrity, bringing mellifluous sounds to the Andante and projecting resonant top notes in the Allegro section. She quarries the rich lode of expressivity in the shift from Larghetto to Allegro in the aria ‘Deh, se piacer mi vuoi,’ executing the fiorature unflinchingly. Rebeka takes control of the trio with Annio and Publio with the authority of an emperor’s daughter, hurling out ‘Vengo! aspettate!’ with vehemence echoed by her effortless top B and thrilling launch to the infamous D₆. As Vitellia’s plans spiral out of control in the final pages of Act One, Rebeka’s voice simmers with the heat of the flames that engulf the Campidoglio.

The Act Two trio with Sesto and Publio discloses a different dimension of Vitellia’s personality, and Rebeka voices her music with assurance. Words and notes erupt with the cataclysmic kinesis of Vesuvio in the accompagnato ‘Ecco il punto, o Vitellia,’ declaimed in this performance with Shakespearean perceptiveness. The plummets below the stave in the rondò aria ‘Non più di fiori vaghe catene’ are not easy going for Rebeka, but she shirks nothing, bravely traversing the two-octave interval to top A♭. As her quest for vengeance unravels and she confesses her treachery to the emperor, Vitellia leaves the world of Elettra and Die Königin der Nacht and enters the realm of Pamina, made worthy of mercy by tasting the bitter elixir of tragedy. The beauty of Rebeka’s singing makes this transformation especially apparent. Musically and dramatically, few singers manage to embody a character as completely as Rebeka animates Vitellia on this recording. Neither victim nor vixen, this Vitellia is merely, movingly human.

Among the many sparkling facets of Joyce DiDonato’s artistry, her singing of Mozart repertoire perhaps does not receive the attention that her performances of Baroque, bel canto, and contemporary music justifiably garner. This is an inexplicable injustice, as her depiction of Sesto in this recording of La clemenza di Tito is a performance of the sort of psychological depth and technical confidence that only a truly great singer can muster. In the past few seasons, the mezzo-soprano has sometimes discernibly worked harder to conjure the musical magic for which she is renowned, but her Sesto is a reminder of the wisdom of singers like Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson, mistresses of other repertoire who insisted that periodically singing Mozart rôles is a soothing balm for the voice. Sesto’s music is daunting, but Mozart was too shrewd to write vocal lines that could not be sung.

After hearing DiDonato’s singing in the Act One Andante duet with Vitellia, ‘Come ti piace, imponi,’ doubting the veracity of Flagstad’s and Nilsson’s suggestion is unfathomable. Here and in the duet with Annio, ‘Deh, prendi un dolce amplesso,’ DiDonato’s vocalism is youthful, poised, and sincere: what artifice there is exists in the music. Weaving her voice into the colorful tapestry fabricated by Romain Guyot’s wonderful playing of the aria’s clarinet obbligato [his performance of the basset-horn obbligato in Vitellia’s rondò is equally superb], she delivers an astounding account of ‘Parto, parto, ma tu, ben mio,’ the crispness of her trills matched by the fluidity of her articulation of the triplet fiorature cresting on top B♭s in the fast-paced Allegro assai. Then, as Sesto wrests with his promise to slay Tito, she summons the potency of Greek tragedy in the accompagnato ‘O Dei! che smania è questa, che tumulto ho nel cor!’ The passage beginning with ‘Deh, conservate, o Dei, a Roma il suo splendor’ in the quintet is voiced with acute understanding of Sesto’s motivations and the conflicting loyalties that torment him.

Responding to Rebeka’s and Plachetka’s vocal sparks, DiDonato sings ‘Se al volto mai ti senti lieve aura che s’aggiri’ in the Act Two trio with Vitellia and Publio with imaginative nuance, followed by a subtle but steadfast reading of ‘Quello di Tito è il volto!’ in the subsequent trio with Tito and Publio. DiDonato’s performance of the Adagio rondò ‘Deh, per questo istante solo ti ricorda il primo amor’ affirms that this piece is in no way inferior to Sesto’s more famous aria in Act One. Interpreted by this singer, Sesto’s shame and self-loathing are uncommonly believable, not least when he declares ‘Tu, è ver, m’assolvi, Augusto, ma non m’assolve il core.’ There have been excellent recorded performances of Sesto’s music, foremost among which are Teresa Berganza’s portrayals for István Kertész and Karl Böhm, but DiDonato initiates a class of her own. So apt are her discreet embellishments that Mozart might have been whispering them in her ear. Her Donna Elvira in Nézet-Séguin’s Don Giovanni was a tremendous accomplishment, but this Sesto surpasses even her own best work.

In the first legs of Nézet-Séguin’s DGG Mozart journey, Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón surprised many listeners who questioned the wisdom of his Mozartian forays with vibrant, mostly stylish performances as Belmonte in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Curzio in Le nozze di Figaro, Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, and Ferrando in Così fan tutte. [Villazón’s rôle in the forthcoming Die Zauberflöte is Papageno.] Here mounting the imperial throne as the troubled but ultimately level-headed Tito Vespasiano, he does not fully rise to the level of those previous impersonations, but this is music in which many valiant efforts have fallen short of success. A cinematic stereotype of Roman emperors—either exasperatingly haughty or vulgarly libidinous and unfailingly speaking with a pompous British accent—persists in today’s cultural consciousness, and Villazón turns this paradigm on its head. His is a Tito more likely to be found among his subjects, devouring the marvels of Rome, than cloistered behind palace walls. He sculpts the lines of the Andante con moto aria ‘Del più sublime soglio l’unico frutto è questo’ with the steady hand of a master craftsman, little bothered by the frequent treks to G at the top of the stave. The reliability of the tenor’s G₄ is further tested in Tito’s Allegro aria ‘Ah, se fosse intorno al trono,’ and Villazón again passes without cheating, laudably confronting every difficulty with determination.

There is an aura of a celebrant’s interactions with his congregation in Villazón’s singing of Tito’s Act Two scene with the chorus, his pronouncement of ‘Ah no, sventurato non sono cotanto’ ringingly regal in tone. His smoky timbre enables a probing explication of the emperor’s predicament in the accompagnato ‘Che orror! che tradimento!’ Villazón’s bold but calm demeanor is touchingly effective in this music and in the trio with Sesto and Publio. The aria ‘Se all’impero, amici Dei!’ is a veritable obstacle course, the tranquil contemplation of its Andantino section disrupted by a return to the galloping Allegro. When a singer as stylistically deft as Nicolai Gedda was unable to negotiate the aria’s dizzying fiorature cleanly under studio conditions, Villazón earns leniency, but no apology needs to be made for his performance. The pitches are there, and the top B♭s present no problems. The accompagnato ‘Ma che giorno è mai questo?’ is ideal territory for him, and he enlivens music in which leaner voices can sound feeble. Villazón’s voicing of ‘Il vero pentimento di cui tu sei capace’ in the finale scene proclaims that this Tito’s mild manner is a manifestation of courage, not weakness. Musically, this is not a flawless performance, but it is as thoughtful and enjoyable a portrayal of Tito as has been recorded.

Mozart’s correspondence divulges a fascinating profundity of self-awareness, but it is impossible to know whether the composer was cognizant as he left Prague after the première of La clemenza di Tito to return to Vienna and resume work on Die Zauberflöte that he had said his farewell to Italian opera. As is the case with Pergolesi, Schubert, Bellini, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and other composers who died young, later generations of musicians, listeners, and scholars ponder what these artists might have achieved had they lived longer. Many long-lived composers would undoubtedly savor a final effort in any genre as inventive as La clemenza di Tito and a performance of it as superlative as this one via which to be remembered.

September Songster: Baritone Brian Mulligan, who joins pianist Timothy Long in Vocal Arts DC’s world-première performance of Gregory Spears’s Walden, paired with Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, in Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Sunday, 16 September 2018
[Photograph © by Dario Acosta]

‘Music, once admitted to the soul,’ the Victorian author and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote, ‘becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.’ In the realm of Art Song, ‘the Soul selects her own Society,’ as Emily Dickinson opined, each listener’s individual experiences, personality, and preferences dictating the constitution of that musical soul. Whether a listener’s foremost loves are German Lieder, French chansons, Italian canzonette, or Art Songs in English, there is an universal sense of euphoria sparked by hearing great music for the first time—the euphoria that transforms sounds into the eternal spirit of which Bulwer-Lytton wrote. On Sunday, 16 September 2018, dynamic baritone Brian Mulligan joins pianist Timothy Long in a Vocal Arts DC recital in Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater that both introduces new music and enables listeners in the nation’s capital to revisit a lauded work of America’s recent musical past. Thankfully, Art Song recitals remain plentiful, even beyond America’s metropolises, but opportunities to witness the début of new music by artists of uncompromising integrity are infrequent events. With this Kennedy Center recital, Vocal Arts DC patrons have the chance to join the ranks of musical pioneers like those who first heard Schubert’s Winterreise, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, and Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder.

A native of New York’s Triple Cities region, Mulligan possesses a voice that flows with the power and beauty of the Susquehanna. An alumnus of both Yale University and the Juilliard School, the baritone has established himself as a master of an extraordinarily broad repertoire, his engagements at the Metropolitan Opera including rôles in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gounod’s Faust, Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, and Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. In this Vocal Arts DC recital, he further expands his acquaintance with contemporary music with the world-première performance of Gregory Spears’s Walden, a setting of texts by Henry David Thoreau. In a recent conversation, Mulligan disclosed that a telling sense of responsibility guides his preparations for the first performance of Walden. ‘Being a part of a world première helps remind me that all of my artistic interpretations can be unique and meaningful, even if the music I usually perform is over 100 years old,’ he confided. ‘The greatest reward of singing a world première is the feeling of being a true creator. As a singer, it’s sometimes a challenge to remember that you are a creator, not just an instrument.’

First published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods is a pillar of the American literary canon, its endorsement of quintessential Yankee virtues and the basic tenets of Emersonian transcendental philosophy lending Thoreau’s words an aura of prophecy that seems ever more visionary in the modern era. More reactionary than truly radical, the writer’s ideas are presented without artifice, yet, unlike the symbolism-laden novels of Ernest Hemingway, Walden cannot honestly be said to be a ‘good read’ on a superficial level. The irregular meters and syntactical idiosyncrasies of Thoreau’s writing do not facilitate musical adaptation, but the humanistic message imparted by the author’s words finds an expert conduit in Spears, whose critically-acclaimed opera Fellow Travelers, premièred by Cincinnati Opera in June 2016, similarly asks audiences to confront uncomfortable political, societal, and spiritual prejudices. Mulligan’s reflections on his involvement in furthering Walden’s genesis divulges the organic proficiency of Spears’s handling of Thoreau’s words. ‘The greatest challenge in any world première is handling the revisions that inevitably come up in rehearsals,’ the baritone states. ‘It’s part of the process of creating a new piece of music, but it can get very confusing for a singer to remember all of the revisions!’ In this music, however, writer, composer, and interpreter have achieved symbiosis with minimal alternations. ‘Happily,’ Mulligan says, ‘there were very few changes made to Walden—thank you, Greg!’

Walden is partnered in its first performance with music by American composer Dominick Argento. When circumstances delegated the inaugural performance of music commissioned for a 1975 recital sponsored by Minneapolis’s Schubert Club first to one American soprano, then to a very different American soprano, and finally to widely-acclaimed British mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker, the changes in personnel led Argento on a search for material suited to each successive recitalist’s particular gifts. With the aim of engaging Baker’s interpretive savvy, the composer ultimately chose as his texts selections from A Writer’s Diary, a 1953 compendium of excerpts from the diaries of Virginia Woolf. The song cycle created for and premièred by Baker in Minneapolis on 5 January 1975, From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, garnered the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Argento, rightly rewarding the psychological depth and emotional immediacy of his settings of Woolf’s candid words.

Manifested in a wonderful 2016 Naxos recording, Mulligan’s advocacy of From the Diary of Virginia Woolf has offered fresh interpretations of this vibrant music to Twenty-First-Century audiences. Now, he brings to Kennedy Center a singular perspective on the parallels and intersections among Thoreau, Woolf, Spears, and Argento. Contemplating the similarities between the pieces that he will sing in Washington, Mulligan identifies a common nationalism in the cores of both From the Diary of Virginia Woolf and Walden. ‘Dominick and Greg both compose music that, to me, sounds uniquely, proudly, beautifully American,’ he suggests. ‘The texts of these two cycles are both deeply emotional introspections, but they are each expressed very differently. Woolf’s diary is devastating, sometimes manic, and Argento wrote music that is a visceral expression of her text.’ This, he explains, establishes an emotive contrast between the works. ‘Thoreau’s words in Walden are calm and collected, and Spears’s music is a quiet, cerebral expression of his text—to me, anyway!’ Committed to safeguarding listeners’ right to form their own conclusions, he quickly adds, ‘That’s just how I experience this music, but [they] may experience it differently. I do think the two cycles complement each other, musically and thematically. They are both gorgeous contemplations.’

The abiding difference between Walden and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf might be best characterized as one of basic attitudes towards the tribulations of human existence. Mulligan is keenly sensitive to this polarity. ‘While Thoreau’s Walden is full of hope and wonder, Woolf’s diary is mostly wrought with an inescapable despair,’ he contends. ‘Thoreau once wrote that he had “a real genius for staying at home,” and I think Woolf shared that clever sentiment. Woolf was born twenty years after Thoreau’s death, and she was a great admirer of him and his work. In July 1917, The Times Literary Supplement published Woolf’s essay “Thoreau,” and it is a beautiful tribute to him. [Click here to read an edited version of Woolf’s ‘Thoreau’ on the TLS website.] They were very different people, but I think they both relied on solitude in order to clearly observe both society and themselves.’

More than a century and a half after Thoreau’s death and nearly eighty years after Woolf ended her life, Mulligan recognizes the paradox of withdrawing from society in order to better understand it that they exemplified as a vital component of the analytical acuity wielded by Thoreau and Woolf. ‘One of the things I like best about Thoreau and Woolf is that they were both so brilliantly introspective,’ he asserts. ‘They were both so conscious and present, always aware of what was going on around them. The way that they processed their life experiences into their art is incredibly inspiring to me—and something I strive to do in all of my performances.’ Retreating inward in order to sharpen one’s outward perspicacity is an action that is very familiar to the singer. ‘That solitude, or aloneness, helped to unburden their minds and distill their thoughts,’ he says of Thoreau and Woolf. ‘It’s a practice I regularly turn to as an artist when I’m learning new music or creating a complex character.’

When asked to which aspects of Spears’s and Argento’s music he would entreat the Kennedy Center audience to be especially attentive, Mulligan exclaims, ‘I don’t believe in asking audiences to prepare to be entertained! At the recital, sit back, experience the performance, listen to the words, hear the music, and allow yourself to feel something. After the performance, if you want to learn more, go to my website. Listen to the music again, reexamine these texts, and discover more about the creators who brought this all together. [Among] Argento, Spears, Thoreau, and Woolf, there’s just so much art and history to enjoy.

Listeners are certain to feel something when hearing Brian Mulligan sing. The energy of his singing is felt by the body, and the sincerity of his emoting is felt by the soul. He does not demand that audiences agree with his artistic choices, but he makes them with the expectation of being heard with the same openness and concentration with which he performs. In this, his work recalls the crafts of both Henry David Thoreau and Virginia Woolf. In her final novel, Between the Acts, Woolf wrote, ‘Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken.’ Giving first life to Gregory Spears’s Walden and new life to Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, Mulligan’s Vocal Arts DC recital promises to awaken, reveal, and restore.

EVENT INFORMATION AT A GLANCE:
Vocal Arts DC presents Brian Mulligan, baritone, with Timothy Long, piano
Sunday, 16 September 2018, 2:00 PM
Terrace Theater
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Please click here for more information or to purchase tickets for this performance.
Click here to learn more about Vocal Arts DC’s exciting 2018 – 2019 Season.

Brian Mulligan’s and Timothy Long’s Naxos recording of Dominick Argento’s The Andrée Expedition and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf
Naxos 8.559828
Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon, and major music retailers

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759) and PHILIP GLASS (born 1937): ARC — Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor; Les Violons du Roy; Jonathan Cohen, conductor [Recorded in Salle Raoul Jobin, Palais Montcalm, Québec City, Québec, Canada; Decca Gold 481 7190; 1 CD, 61:49; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Much as musically-inclined people lament current standards of interpretation and performance and long for distant eras populated by artists whose names instigate arguments among observers who never experienced their work, it cannot be claimed with any degree of veracity that any one moment in human history has been more richly blessed with the presence of truly great artists than another. There are in any era many accomplished, admirable personages whose efforts distinguish them from their earnest but uninspired contemporaries, but the genius of a Michelangelo, Molière, or Mozart is exceptional in any age. Arguably, the surest foundation of genius is universality: beauty in almost any work of art can be discerned by senses conditioned to identify it, but recognition of the expressions of humanity in Michelangelo’s Pietà, Molière’s Tartuffe, and Mozart’s Così fan tutte requires no special conditioning. There is perhaps some irony in the fact that a touchstone of artistic genius is that the observer need not be a genius in order to appreciate it. Important art does not demand to be noticed: it conveys its message, and even those who do not wholly understand it are aware of having experienced something remarkable.

That American countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is an extraordinary artist and ARC, his début recital disc for Decca Gold, a work of once-in-a-generation significance is apparent from one glimpse of the disc. Gazing at the listener from a kaleidoscopic, mosaic-like painting by George Condo, Roth Costanzo opens a portal into a private world in which images, words, and tones collide in bursts of artistic fusion. Venturing into the singer’s introductory essay, the reader meets a man of disarming honesty and wit, assured but never arrogant, confident in the integrity of his artistic choices but willing to concede that some listeners may be skeptical about the wisdom of a recital in which music by Georg Friedrich Händel is partnered with pieces by Philip Glass. Above all, he is grateful for the listener’s company on an expedition that, like a trek on Europe’s Camino de Santiago, exposes unfamiliar vistas along the path to heightened understanding of the intersections of traditions past and present. Roth Costanzo addresses the listener not as an anonymous entity but as a fellow pilgrim, a seeker of renewed equilibrium amidst uncertainty, and an equal whose responses to the performances on this disc are genuinely valued.

Vocally, the performances on ARC are characterized by an evocative synthesis of suavity and virility, qualities exuded by Roth Costanzo’s artistry in any repertoire that he sings. Not one moment of his work on ARC is in any way didactic, but his is singing from which much can be learned. ARC is a disc that unmistakably affirms that tonal beauty and expressive sincerity are valid traits in performances of music of any vintage. Moreover, Roth Costanzo resurrects the spirit of individuality that was formerly such a vital aspect of artistic personalities but is now conspicuously absent from the work of too many of today’s singers. Though ARC abounds with alluring tones, it is apparent that the production of beautiful sounds is neither the sole nor the foremost objective of Roth Costanzo’s singing. Rather, communicating the words and their meanings is the ultimate destination of his artistic journey. Particularly in the context of ARC, what makes Roth Costanzo a compelling artist is trust: he trusts the probity of poets’ words and composers’ music, he trusts the support provided by his colleagues, and he trusts his own intelligence and vocal acumen to establish connections among poets, composers, musicians, and listeners.

Under the leadership of the ensemble’s incoming Music Director, British cellist and conductor Jonathan Cohen, the musicians of Les Violons du Roy play with involvement that renders them participants in, not just accompanists of, the performances on ARC. The vigor and virtuosity of the ensemble’s historically-appropriate playing of Händel’s arias are not surprising, but the finesse and panache of their handling of Glass’s music, much of it arranged for these performances by Michael Riesman, are two of ARC’s greatest strengths. The timbre of each instrument resounds with clarity, but the textures woven by the ensemble en masse are astonishingly intricate, not least in the repetitive figurations of Glass’s music. Paced by Cohen with an unerring sense of balances between emotion and momentum, the orchestra’s music making echoes the sensibilities of both the composers’ word settings and the singer’s realizations of them. In the Glass selections, it is the modernity of the sounds produced by the instrumentalists that is most striking. Cohen shares Roth Costanzo’s affinity for seeking the essence of a piece within the music instead of in perceptions of it. With their performances on this disc, Cohen and the Les Violons du Roy musicians eradicate any suggestion that the playing of period instruments is period-specific.

First performed in 1715, Amadigi di Gaula (HWV 11) is not among Händel’s best-known operas, but it contains in Dardano’s sarabande ‘Pena tiranna’ one of the composer’s most exquisite arias. Composed not for the star castrato Nicolini, who created the title rôle, but for Venetian contralto Diana Vico, a singer whose gifts were sufficient to garner primo uomo parts even in casts that included Farinelli, the aria’s vocal line intertwines with languid writing for oboe and bassoon, here gorgeously played by the Violons du Roy musicians. The gnawing ache of Dardano’s unrequited love courses through Roth Costanzo’s urgent, long-breathed phrasing, and his plangent tones credibly enliven the character’s despair. The name part in Flavio, re de’ Longobardi (HWV 16) was composed for alto castrato Gaetano Berenstadt, who was also the first Tolomeo in Giulio Cesare and Adelberto in Ottone, re di Germania, and he inspired another of Händel’s most memorable arias, ‘Rompo i lacci,’ sung by Roth Costanzo with ease that belies the music’s difficulty. The countertenor’s invaluable ability to spotlight the dramatic impetus of bravura passages is wonderfully apparent in this piece, each accurately-pitched, fully-articulated note fitted into its proper place within the aria’s musical and psychological structures.

Though it was first sung in the opera’s 1711 première by soprano Isabella Girardeau, Almirena’s aria ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Act Two of Rinaldo (HWV 7) has since the release of Gérard Corbiau’s 1994 film Farinelli been a sort of countertenor anthem. In truth, the aria’s tessitura is awkward for many countertenors, a reality tacitly acknowledged by the sometimes clumsy technological amalgamation of the voices of a countertenor and a soprano employed to produce Farinelli’s singing voice for the cinema. No trickery is involved in Roth Costanzo’s singing of ‘Lascia ch’io pianga,’ however: the magic that he creates is authentically mesmerizing. His singing offers a lesson in the hypnotic power of purity of line and interpretive simplicity, the words caressed without ever being crooned. The contrast with the bravado with which he detonates the explosive fiorature of Bertarido’s ‘Vivi, tiranno’ from Rodelinda, regina de’ Longobardi (HWV 19) is therefore all the more effective. His Bertarido is convincing as a deposed monarch sparing the life of the usurper of his throne, but the heart of a loving husband cruelly separated from his wife also beats palpably in Roth Costanzo’s vocalism.

Crafted to exploit the histrionic prowess of one of Händel’s most frequent collaborators, the renowned castrato Senesino, the powerful scene for the long-suffering titular king from Act Three of Tolomeo, re d’Egitto (HWV 25) benefited from the complete engagement of its composer’s theatrical flair. In this performance, the disc’s title is confirmed to represent more than its leading man’s initials. Traversing the emotional shifts of ‘Inumano fratel,’ Roth Costanzo fashions an arc of ardor that reaches its apex in the arioso ‘Stille amare,’ voiced with yearning and directness via which the fates of kings and kingdoms become movingly personal. In this singer’s performance, the title character’s much-abused ‘Ombra mai fu’ from Serse (HWV 40), one of its composer’s most innovative scores, is neither saccharine nor exaggeratedly sultry. A king’s ode to his favorite tree, it is evocative enough on its own terms, without a singer imposing a post-Freudian subtext upon the music. Here, too, Roth Costanzo achieves an uncommon degree of intimacy by approaching both words and music with manifest honesty. A countertenor’s proficiency in singing Händel repertory is not unexpected, but the excellence of this countertenor’s singing of the Händel arias included on ARC exceeds all expectations.

It may seem nonsensical to propose that Philip Glass is to some extent the most Baroque of contemporary American composers, but, like the term Baroque, Glass’s singular musical language defies easy definition and classification. As practiced by Händel, the animus of the Baroque aesthetic was the carefully-wrought amalgamation of ancient and contemporary styles, and Glass’s work can be said to adapt a similar philosophy of anticipating the future by building upon the past. It is no coincidence that Glass has often been inspired by mythological and historical figures, his musical depictions of them and their modern incarnations shaped by contemplation not only of his own reactions to them but also of which musical accents suit them. Thus, the prescient plainspokenness of Mahatma Gandhi permeates Satyagraha, and the pragmatism of its subject pulses in the music of Galileo Galilei. Glass’s musical portraits sound nothing like Händel’s, but they often feel much alike. Scrutinized with tremendous insight, these feelings form the nucleus of ARC.

Thoughtful phrasing is no less crucial to the efficacy of performances of Glass’s music than to those of Händel arias, especially in the wordless effusions of ‘The Encounter’ from 1000 Airplanes on the Roof. Many singers’ enunciations of verbose texts impart less emotion than Roth Costanzo’s intoning of the ‘ah’ that is the lone verbalization of ‘The Encounter.’ In his singing of this syllable are streams of recognition, interaction, and affection, propelled by the voice’s tonal fluidity. The voice also flows hauntingly through David Byrne’s text in ‘Liquid Days.’ Artifice would destroy the impact of lines asserting that ‘Love watches Television / Love needs a bath / Love could use a shave,’ but the guilelessness of Roth Costanzo’s performance heightens the poignant relationship between Glass’s effortlessly eloquent music and the touchingly ordinary imagery of the words.

Its text drawn from the writings of Thirteenth-Century Persian poet and scholar Rumi, ‘In the Arc of Your Mallet’ from Monsters of Grace epitomizes the perspicacity of capitalizing on the innate of musicality of words found in Glass’s best work. In a piece like this, he seems almost to have composed nothing at all, having merely listened with ears and heart and transcribed the sounds of the poetry. This is a hallmark of Glass’s ingenuity, and Roth Costanzo is an ideal conduit for the composer’s expressive energy, here singing ‘In the Arc of Your Mallet’ with a spectrum of colors rarely wielded by a countertenor voice. Still, it is his performance of ‘How all Living Things Breathe’ from The Fall of the House of Usher that is the sentimental climax of ARC. The straightforward pathos of his plea ‘Don’t go anywhere without me’ is unforgettably affecting, and the quiet intensity with which he sings ‘You’re the road and the knower of roads, more than maps, more than love’ is arresting. Controverting the Dante’s frequently-quoted observation about the pain of recalling past happiness in times of misery, Roth Costanzo’s voice is most enchanting when expressing anguish, his vocalism injuring and healing at once. To hear him is to suffer the wounds of life and also receive the balm to soothe them.

No fewer than three of Händel’s operas—Tolomeo, the frequently-performed Giulio Cesare, and Berenice—are swayed by Egyptian characters, the strife within their own land and conflicts with other cultures in which they are embroiled having captivated the composer’s imagination. Glass, too, has looked to Egypt for creative stimulus and most notably channeled his inventiveness into bringing episodes from the Eighteenth-Dynasty reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten to the stage. The title rôle in Akhnaten, Glass’s cautionary tale of the dangers of ambition and religious fervor and the culmination of his biographical trilogy launched with Einstein on the Beach and continued with Satyagraha, was originated in the opera’s 1984 première in Stuttgart by British countertenor Paul Esswood, to whom Roth Costanzo has proved in productions in London and Los Angeles to be today’s best-qualified successor. He furthers that impression with a performance of the controversial ruler’s ‘Hymn to the Sun,’ the pivotal scene that ends Act Two of Akhnaten, that is a fitting finale to ARC and, more momentously, a definitive account of the piece. Subtly emphasizing the gravitas of the transitions from major to minor modes, Roth Costanzo portrays a man of prodigious charisma, his voice radiating the security of a visionary. As in every piece that he sings on ARC, his intonation and rhythm are flawless. Singing of this caliber is worthwhile for its own sake, but, allied with the kind of expressivity that Roth Costanzo brings to this music, it is inestimably precious.

Nonsensical though the notion may seem, individuality can be an obstacle in today’s musicians’ endeavors to balance artistic fulfillment with solvent careers. It is alarming to consider when assessing the legacies of artists of past generations how their careers might be different in the Twenty-First Century. The quality of their vocal capital notwithstanding, would Beniamino Gigli and Jussi Björling now be sent to gyms before being welcomed into opera houses? Would Lily Pons be told that the highest reaches of stardom are beyond the grasp of a lady of very petite stature? Would Cristina Deutekom be counseled that success depends upon sounding more like some other, more conventional singer? The concept of the fascinating multimedia project effectuated in conjunction with the planning and release of ARC would likely have bewildered Gigli, Björling, Pons, and Deutekom, but they would hear in Anthony Roth Costanzo’s singing the same level of musical mastery that contributed to their own artistic triumphs. By the standards of any era, ARC is a triumph of individuality, musicality, and artistic inquisitiveness. Blazing one’s own artistic path is not always the safest, most profitable choice, but Anthony Roth Costanzo chooses the road less traveled by, and, in the case of ARC, that has indeed made all the difference.