Prima donna del cuore: soprano Montserrat Caballé (1933 – 2018) in the title rôle of Francesco Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur at The Metropolitan Opera in 1978
[Photograph by James Heffernan, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

IN MEMORIAM
MONTSERRAT CABALLÉ
12 April 1933 – 6 October 2018

In an era in which ‘alternate facts’ are employed in battles of veracity that render the very notion of truth irrelevant, it is not surprising that Art, itself essentially a sort of alternate fact in too-literal society, is undeniably divisive. After the death of an individual who was almost universally acclaimed as a great artist, it is sadly inevitable that someone with opinions and a forum via which to share them feels compelled to cite all of the reasons why the departed individual was not great. That this has transpired in the wake of the passing of Catalan soprano Montserrat Caballé is indicative of the precarious nature of humanity’s grasp on civility. No one can or should be forced to share the view that Caballé was an important singer, but what harm is there in choosing to remember her at her best?

There is nothing that can be written about Caballé’s life that has not already been extensively documented. Listing her achievements is pointless: those who care are acquainted with them, and those who do not care are unlikely to be converted to appreciation of the singer and her work by reading a litany of her notable performances. Her reputation for withdrawing from performances was wholly earned, but her singing repeatedly affirmed the legitimacy of her artistic significance. Her method of vocal production could be mannered, even lazy, but she made sounds that continue to remind listeners of the visceral appeal of opera. Like Zinka Milanov, she possessed the ability to project pianissimi that hung in the air with remarkable resonance. Like Leyla Gencer, she could hurl dramatic thunderbolts in passages like ‘Giudici! Ad Anna!?’ in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena without wholly disrupting the bel canto line. Such was her breath control that she could accomplish feats like the long-held top B with which she triumphed over the Metropolitan Opera Don Carlo—and the MET’s Don Carlo, Franco Corelli—of 22 April 1972.

I do not recall when or in what context I first heard Caballé. Her final performance at the MET—in the title rôle of Puccini’s Tosca on 10 October 1985—was more than a decade before I first attended a performance there. Less than a year after her departure from the MET, she sang Cleopatra in a Paris concert performance of Händel’s Giulio Cesare that was recorded for broadcast by Radio France. Venturing into repertory in which she had little experience, at a time in her career at which she might have honorably eschewed unfamiliar music, she sang superbly. Delivered with a voice heavier and less agile than in past, it was not a performance destined to please advocates of historically-informed practices, but it was a performance in which Cleopatra sprang to life, at once both crushingly imperious and sweetly vulnerable. This is almost certainly not the first Caballé performance that I heard, but it continues to convince me that she was an inquisitive, engaging artist who occasionally disappointed but frequently surprised.

I had the privilege of hearing Caballé only once, many years after the tremendous successes of her career. The magic was faded, but it still enchanted. Rather than merely singing, she seemed to disappear into the music and find her way back to reality by following the sound of her voice. Perhaps that was not greatness, but it was Montserrat Caballé.

Caballé on the record...

​These are the recordings to which I listen when I want to temporarily escape from my mediocrity by being reminded of Caballé’s greatness; and which I therefore recommend to others who seek the essence of Caballé’s artistry.

    • Bellini’s Norma with Bianca Berini and Pedro Lavirgén; Philadelphia, 18 April 1972 — The 1974 Orange Norma in which Caballé was joined by Josephine Veasey, John Vickers, and the Mistral is rightly celebrated, but, like many singers, she was inspired by singing in Philadelphia. Caballé lacked Callas’s poetic temperament and Sutherland’s formidable accuracy, but she was often a thrilling Norma.

    • Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia with Alain Vanzo, Jane Berbié, and Kostas Paskalis; New York City, 20 April 1965 — It was in this performance, in which she substituted in the title rôle for expectant mother Marilyn Horne, that Caballé made her American début. Like Callas’s 1959 American Opera Society Pirata and concerts in the last year of Elvis Presley’s life, many more people than Carnegie Hall accommodates claim to have been present for this performance. It was an occasion that warrants hyperbole.

    • Massenet’s Manon with John Alexander and Louis Quilico; New Orleans, 13 and 15 April 1967 — It was in another French rôle, Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, that Caballé débuted at the MET on 22 December 1965. That was, in fact, her only MET performance of a French rôle. This New Orleans Manon reveals how persuasive she could be in French repertoire. Like her fellow Catalan Victoria de los Ángeles, Caballé allied incredible timbral beauty with a captivatingly feminine demeanor in a moving portrayal of Massenet’s mercurial heroine. Unlike de los Ángeles, Caballé also sang Puccini’s incarnation of Manon.

    • Puccini’s Tosca with José Carreras, Ingvar Wixell, and Samuel Ramey; Philips studio recording — Dramatically, this Tosca pales in comparison with Callas’s 1953 studio recording and many live performances, including Caballé’s own MET broadcasts. Tosca’s music has never been sung more unflinchingly or alluringly than by Caballé on this recording, however, and, despite the rôle ideally requiring slightly greater vocal amplitude than nature granted him, this Cavaradossi is among Carreras’s finest performances on disc.

    • Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier with Teresa Żylis-Gara, Edith Mathis, and Otto Edelmann; Glyndebourne, 30 May 1965 — Though she sang and recorded Strauss’s Salome to great acclaim and was a radiantly-vocalized Ariadne at the MET in 1976, the Marschallin—the rôle of her Glyndebourne début—is not a part typically associated with Caballé, but she was very touching as the still-young Princess who ponders her mortality and desirability.

    • Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco with Plácido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes; EMI studio recording — This is Caballé in the full glory of youth, singing with astonishing beauty and ease, alongside colleagues in similar vocal estate.

    • Verdi’s Luisa Miller with Richard Tucker, Sherrill Milnes, Giorgio Tozzi, and Ezio Flagello; The Metropolitan Opera, 17 February 1968 — Caballé’s gorgeously-voiced and refreshingly unaffected Luisa is paired with an uncommonly ardent Rodolfo from Richard Tucker.

    • Verdi’s Il trovatore with Ludovic Spiess, Irina Arkhipova, and Peter Glossop; Orange, 23 July 1972 — Several fine performances of Trovatore featuring Caballé’s quintessentially Spanish Leonora are widely available, but this is a rare performance in which she went for—and, after a search, found—the D♭₆ traditionally interpolated in the Act One finale.

    • Vives’s Maruxa with Ana Riera, Vicente Sardinero, and Pedro Lavirgén; Alhambra studio recording — To hear Caballé‘s portrayal of Rosa in this recorded performance of Amadeo Vives’s 1914 zarzuela Maruxa is to experience singing that can only be described as exquisite.

Muchas gracias, La Superba.

Vissi d’arte, vissi d’arte: soprano Montserrat Caballé (1933 – 2018) in the title rôle of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca at The Metropolitan Opera in 1985
[Photograph by James Heffernan, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

Belle of bel canto: internationally-acclaimed mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong, whose critically-lauded interpretation of Adalgisa anchors North Carolina Opera’s concert performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma on 21 October 2018
[Photograph © by Kristin Hoebermann; used with permission]

Her beauty, her voice, and her dramatic genius [have] long been the theme of universal admiration. The successor of Pasta, the rival of Malibran, and the contemporary of Jenny Lind...

It was with these and a plethora of additional words that the editors of The London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, and Society, in an article dated 27 July 1861, reverently bade farewell to the legendary Milanese singer Giulia Grisi, who had announced her retirement from staged opera. Almost three decades earlier, on 26 December 1831, Grisi chiseled her name in the annals of operatic history when she created the rôle of the Druid priestess Adalgisa in the world première of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma. Although it was not as Adalgisa but as Norma that Grisi was heard in London, her British admirers’ parting paean echoed the plaudits that greeted her inaugural Adalgisa, a part in which many of her artistic successors have struggled. A century-and-a-half after Grisi’s death on 29 November 1869, however, those auspicious words of praise for the traits that defined Grisi in the hearts of her devotees—‘her beauty, her voice, and her dramatic genius’—might be used with equal validity to describe one of the few singers who embody Grisi’s legacy in the Twenty-First Century: American mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong.

Virtually every aspect of making a career as an internationally-renowned singer has changed drastically since Grisi left the stage, but a keystone of the native Pennsylvanian DeShong’s artistry that her illustrious predecessor would recognize is an uncompromising commitment to performing every rôle in her repertoire with musical fidelity and dramatic sincerity. ​Her technical acumen was undoubtedly shaped by her early study of the piano and later honed by her tenure at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music, but the innate musicality exhibited by DeShong’s singing cannot be taught by the most gifted mentor. Recipient of Washington National Opera’s 2010 Artist of the Year award, a distinction proved by her portrayal of Ruggiero in the company’s 2017 production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina [reviewed here] to have been wholly justified and a harbinger of triumphs to come, this glamorous lady has delighted audiences with the kind of electrifying singing that is now often feared to be endangered or even extinct. In the decade since her Metropolitan Opera début as Suzy in Giacomo Puccini’s La rondine, DeShong has joined the rosters of many of the world’s iconic opera companies, including the Wiener Staatsoper and London’s Royal Opera House. The Chicago Tribune asserted that ‘her velvety, focused and pliant vocalism supported a credible characterization’ of Adalgisa in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2017 production of Norma. On 21 October 2018, her Adalgisa comes to Raleigh for North Carolina Opera’s concert performance of Norma, offering Triangle-area bel canto aficionados a singular opportunity to hear a significant singer in a rôle that has often been compromised by insignificant singing. Milan had Grisi: felicitously, Raleigh has DeShong.

Far more advanced in experience than in years, DeShong exudes—both in performance and in conversation—comprehensive understanding of her goals, her methods of striving to meet them, and the importance of adapting them to reflect the realities not only of the voice but also of her emotional health. Surveying the path that she has traveled in her career to date, she is mindful of obstacles that she and other singers confront in the formative years of their professional lives. Not least among these challenges is the necessity of determining whether a singer’s career is an vocation or merely an avocation. Thinking of how she would counsel fellow singers questioning the wisdom of pursuing artistic careers, she says, ‘I would ask if they can picture doing anything else with their lives. If the answer is “yes,” I’d say that they should consider the alternate path. If the answer is “no,” my next question is, “Why do you sing?”’ This, she intimates, must be a critical element of an artist’s endeavor to attain self-awareness. She continues, ‘Even when [or] if you are successful in this business, you will have days, weeks, months, even years, when you will question [whether] the sacrifices are too great. This is a truth for me and a truth that I’ve heard from many, if not most, of the singers [whom] I know. We love the music, we are dedicated to our art and sharing it with others, and we see the tremendous advantage that living a global existence can provide to our personal worldview and overall human experience.’

Having garnered myriads of critical praise for her performances of a broad repertory of operatic rôles and concert pieces, DeShong is also uncommonly aware of the rewards that await a thoroughly-rehearsed, insightful artist. ‘There are moments of pure musical and dramatic magic that you will experience on stage, moments so joyful and blissful that the sacrifice of time and comfort will seem well worth it,’ she says. Still, she cautions, ‘the sacrifices are many, and, if you are discouraged at the beginning stages of your career, you may be in for a long and difficult journey.’ Heeding one’s own instincts is paramount, she insists, and fulfillment can only be achieved when one’s decisions are guided by an inviolable consciousness of one’s best interests. ‘Well-trained singers and instrumentalists have a lot to offer in areas other than performance. Your love of music and musical training can be channeled into so many valuable positions in artistic fields. Many of the best managers, directors, stage managers, artistic advisors, costume designers, et cetera come from performance backgrounds. Changing course is not a failure, and it doesn’t mean that your talent is “less-than.”’

Prima donna as primo uomo: mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as Ruggiero in Washington National Opera’s 2017 production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina
[Photograph by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Stylistic versatility is a hallmark of DeShong’s work. There are many historical precedents for singers essaying very different rôles—in DeShong’s case, Händel’s Ruggiero and Suzuki in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, for example—and, like Grisi in Norma, eventually taking on multiple rôles in some operas. A principal consideration in DeShong’s repertory deliberations is whether an engagement is vocally, dramatically, and emotionally appropriate, such contests being decided by a multi-faceted analysis of suitability. ‘“Can I” versus “Should I” is tricky,’ the mezzo-soprano confides. ‘My particular instrument falls a bit outside of the normal framework, and it has afforded me the great luxury of having choices in repertoire and the timing of those choices.’

DeShong concedes that this luxury is not free from pitfalls. ‘I won’t pretend that this is always an easy choice for a singer to make,’ she states. ‘One has to pay the bills, so when the choice is “sing this role or starve,” there is little option. That said, there is also a mindset that can get singers into trouble. Emotions and desires can be tricky for an artist and can lead to decisions that make the heart/ego immediately happy but put vocal health in danger.’ Is there a template that she follows when assessing potential engagements? ‘My process, if you want to call it that, goes something like this: the rôle offer comes in; I head to the piano with the score and sing through the rôle,’ she states. Then, the self-interrogation begins. ‘How did my voice feel after [singing the rôle]? Which rôles am I scheduled to sing before and after this project? What size is the theatre [in which] I am being asked to sing the repertoire? Is the character as appealing as the music? [With whom] will I be singing the music?’

Answering these questions to her own satisfaction enables DeShong to retain a remarkable degree of control over the course of her career, adding new rôles to her operatic repertory according to her level of comfort with the music and the conditions under which she will sing it. That she sings a wide array of rôles compellingly indicates that DeShong’s philosophy is emphatically right for her. ‘Much of the dramatic mezzo and contralto repertoire is comfortable for me now,’ she says. ‘I will sing Amneris, Erda, Azucena, et cetera.’ After pausing for a moment, she elaborates with an air of contemplation. ‘I won’t go as far as to say I wouldn’t sing these rôles now, but the timing and surrounding factors would have to be right. It has always been my intention to sing as young as possible, as long as possible. If the option is there, why not explore as much repertoire as I can, while keeping my voice as healthy as possible?’

Vocal health is a boon that must be continually nurtured and safeguarded, DeShong believes. ‘Singing a lot of Händel, Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini has kept my voice flexible, even, and focused. The Humperdinck, Puccini, Strauss, Berg, Dvořák, Verdi, and other rôles have given me the variety that I crave and opportunities to prove that I am up for a challenge and refuse to be boxed into any one style.’ Many young singers rely upon platitudes as the defining precepts of their artistic personalities, but DeShong rejects generalities, preferring to devise her own specific artistic parameters.

Looking beyond the musical immersion that is a vital component of her method of learning new rôles, DeShong is also attentive to the practical motivations that fuel her drive to diversify her repertory. ‘I’ve touched on why I focus so much energy on variety. The challenge in doing this is, for me, primarily one of time and energy,’ she says. ‘There are moments when I envy singers who have three or so “go-to” leading rôles that they take all over the world. I’ve done my share of Suzukis and Hermias [in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream], and it is always lovely to return to them. Aside from the fact that I love both of those characters dearly, they provide much-needed mental and physical breaks from the demands of the bel canto heroes [who] make up a larger and larger portion of my repertoire. Constantly adding new roles is exciting but exhausting.’

Turning her thoughts to Norma and the opera’s performance history, a history of which she is now so salient a part, DeShong is appreciative of the different qualities that celebrated interpreters have brought to the daunting title rôle. If she could sing Adalgisa alongside any of the great Normas of the past, who would she choose? ‘May I create a hybrid of two singers?’ she asks with characteristic candor. ‘I would take the dramatic intensity and use of text that Callas brought to Norma and infuse it with the poise, clarity, and warmth of sound that Caballé produced. Should we call her “Caballas”...Wait, doesn’t that translate to “mackerels” in Spanish?’ she laughs. Sí, ¡es verdad! ‘Okay, forget that!’

Mira, o Norma: mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as Adalgisa in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2017 production of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma
[Photograph by Cory Weaver, © by Lyric Opera of Chicago]

Its drama propelled by the fallout of two resilient women’s betrayal by the same man, Norma wields uncanny relevance in today’s atmosphere of hyper-charged sexual politics. In some performances of Norma, Adalgisa is little more than a second Norma, lacking depth and individuality. In her studies of the rôle, DeShong has examined Bellini’s score and Felice Romani’s libretto in search of Adalgisa’s true identity, and she expresses her conclusions with obvious affection for the lady she portrays. ‘Adalgisa is a young girl who knows that her person is defined by the strength of her character,’ she suggests. ‘She sees that the greater value is always in what does the most good for the most people, even at her own expense. She knows that her own happiness can never be gained at the expense of another.’

DeShong is astonishingly successful at imparting this sense of Adalgisa’s psyche in staged productions of Norma, but North Carolina Opera’s concert performance facilitates intensified concentration on revealing Adalgisa’s soul via her words and music. ‘For me, good singing can only happen with complete connection to the text,’ DeShong relays. ‘The text informs my vocalism, so that I can paint colors into my vocal line that best convey my character’s intention. Vocally, my Adalgisa in concert will be every bit as focused and dramatically driven as in a staged version. A benefit of concert versions of operas, especially of Norma, is that you can fully utilize your color palette. By avoiding some of the stage action, you are able to devote every bit of your physicality to the sound you are producing, which adds greater varieties of tempi and dynamics that are sustainable.’

As an intelligent, independent, proudly spirited woman, DeShong is sensitive to the chauvinistic implications of many of the operas that she sings, but she maintains that cognizance of the historical contexts of art is the sole means of reconciling the bothersome societal dilemmas of opera with modern notions of gender and personal responsibility. ‘It can be difficult to make peace with some of the toxic masculinity that drives many operas,’ she admits. ‘The stories represent bygone eras and the socially-accepted inequalities that were present at those times. That said, if you look closely at the characters, you can often find more complexities in the characters and plots than are explored in many productions.’ She sees this as one of opera’s most exciting avenues of continued growth. ‘We can find ways to present these stories that don’t lazily fall back on weak stereotypes and gender-biased comedy.’

What does this discerning artist perceive as her part to play in the ongoing evolution of opera as a cultural entity? ‘In a way, my voice type has freed me from portraying “victims,”’ she muses. ‘In fact, looking at the characters I’ve played, I don’t see any of them as being truly at the mercy of their male counterparts. For me, I just try to find the core being of the character I am playing. Gender is often a tertiary consideration. Calbo [in Gioachino Rossini’s Maometto secondo] can easily be played as a feminist. Arsace [in Rossini’s Semiramide] is an extremely sensitive guy. These men can be played as victims of their circumstances, forced to become soldiers in spite of their true desires and natures. It would be easy to simply assume a wide stance, grab a weapon, and create an one-dimensional portrayal. We are only as confined by the stereotypes as we want to be, in many instances.’ Nothing is more apparent in her performances than the fact that neither DeShong’s singing nor her thinking are confined by stereotypes.

Revisiting Adalgisa in preparation for North Carolina Opera’s Norma, in which performance her Adalgisa will be partnered by Leah Crocetto’s Norma and Chad Shelton’s Pollione, DeShong faces one of opera’s preeminent unanswered questions: how does Adalgisa’s story continue after Norma’s ends? ‘I’d like to think that some young composer is writing a feminist tale that shows Adalgisa returning to take Norma’s children and Clotilde away from the tragedy and starting a new life together,’ the mezzo-soprano declares. ‘Perhaps, together, Adalgisa and Clotilde would reinvent the ancient tenants of Druid priestess-hood by eschewing sacrifice by fire, revoking abstinence based [upon] devotion to deities, and reimagining the magic of the forest as a call to conservationism. The children would grow up to be thoughtful and progressive future leaders.’ Moreover, DeShong has a request for the composer who accepts this assignment: ‘Call me. I want to première that piece!’

That Giulia Grisi was an artist of enduring consequence and not merely the first but a definitive Adalgisa must now be taken on faith, but Elizabeth DeShong displays on and off the stage that she is an artist who, like the late Tatiana Troyanos, dedicates herself not to performing but to fully living music. She articulates this with typical humility and honesty. ‘In every performance, it is my goal to give the audience every bit of my being.’ Addressing her audience, she adds, ‘It is my hope that you will be consumed by the story, music, and character so much that you will forget Elizabeth DeShong in the moment. There are many who would probably advise against this goal. You’ll know it is me by my voice, but I hope we go to places none of us recognize, together.’ Every artist’s journey is unique, but, when asked whether there is a message that she would communicate to all young singers striving to find their own places in the operatic community, she responds, ‘Trust that you belong.’ Whether surrendering herself to music by Händel, Bellini, or Puccini, Elizabeth DeShong unequivocally belongs.

Figlio ed amante: mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as Arsace in The Metropolitan Opera’s 2018 production of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide
[Photograph by Ken Howard, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

To learn more about Elizabeth DeShong’s career and upcoming engagements, please visit her official website.

Please click here to access more information or to purchase tickets for North Carolina Opera’s concert performance of Norma in Raleigh’s Meymandi Concert Hall.

Sincerest thanks to Ms. DeShong for her time, frankness, and wit and to Mindi Rayner of Mindi Rayner Public Relations for her invaluable assistance with this interview.

VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835), GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848), and GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): A te, o cara– Stephen Costello sings bel canto — Stephen Costello, tenor; Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra; Constantine Orbelian, conductor [Recorded at Kaunas Philharmonic, Kaunas, Lithuania, 14 – 19 May 2017; DelosDE 3541; 1 CD, 49:57; Available from Delos, Naxos Direct, and major music retailers]

The bitterest complaint uttered by many disenfranchised opera lovers is that the first two decades of the Twenty-First Century have produced no true heirs to the traditions perpetuated by the great singers of the past. It may be true that the continued vitality of opera depends upon the discovery of Flagstads, Bergonzis, and Siepis, but it is particularly regrettable that the cacophony of disapprobation for the present state of singing often distracts aficionados from appreciating the efforts of earnest artists with voices of quality. No less important than singers being properly trained in the art of nurturing, projecting, and maintaining their instruments is audiences being adequately conditioned to listen with respect. At its core, the survival of opera has always depended upon its strongest advocates ignoring what they are told to think and listening with both their ears and their hearts. The sounds that emerge from tenor Stephen Costello’s Delos recording A te, o cara provide bel canto lovers’ ears with copious reasons to rejoice, but it is heart—the hearts of the characters whose music is sung, the heart of the singer bringing them to life, and the reactions of the listener’s heart to these performances—that makes this disc one to be celebrated as an important artist’s homage to the art that uplifts him.

The Philadelphia-born Costello’s talent was acknowledged on a deservedly grand scale with the 2009 Richard Tucker Award, the Nobel Prize of young American singers, and his career has taken him in the subsequent decade to many of opera’s most venerated venues. Having created the rôle of Greenhorn—Melville’s Ishmael—in Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick and appeared alongside a number of today’s preeminent singers, he has enjoyed fruitful collaborations with musicians who complement his sensibilities, among whom conductor Constantine Orbelian and the instrumentalists of Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra must now be included. Conducting broad arrays of voices and repertoire, Orbelian has affirmed his affinity for spotlighting his colleagues’ strengths on critically-lauded recordings.

Orbelian paces the performances on A te, o cara with equal concerns for supporting the singer and preserving the natural contours of the music. None of the arias on the disc is an orchestral showpiece, and Orbelian rightly guides the listener’s attention to the voice. The Kaunas musicians’ playing sometimes lacks the polish heard in performances by major German and Austrian orchestras, but their vigor is preferable to antiseptic precision. Performances of arias out of context can sometimes seem perfunctory, and there are transitions on A te, o cara that seem slightly abrupt, as though Costello and his colleagues were thinking in the complete paragraphs of full scenes rather than the individual sentences of arias. Above all, however, this is a disc that celebrates the joy and catharsis of singing, and the musicians unite their gifts in performances that captivatingly impart those qualities to the listener.

Costello made his rôle début as the naïve Tyrolean Tonio in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment with San Diego Opera in 2013, expanding his bel canto credentials with a gamble that paid richly musical dividends. Possessing a timbre more robust than the sounds wielded by the sort of tenore di grazia often heard in this rôle, Costello here sings with an appealing lightness but is also wholly true to his voice’s natural amplitude. He dispatches the cavatine ‘Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête’ with quicksilver articulation of its rhythms and clear, unaffected diction. Few numbers in opera are more adored by audiences—and frequently sung badly—than the cabaletta ‘Pour mon âme quel destin.’ Costello’s vocalism discloses no difficulties in his ascents to either the eight written top Cs or the traditionally-interpolated ninth repetition of the tone that concludes the piece, but showmanship never supersedes his connection with the sentiments of the text.

In San Diego, the Marquise de Berkenfield from whose protective custody Costello’s Tonio sought to retrieve Marie was portrayed by the redoubtable Ewa Podleś, but not even as domineering a guardian as Podleś’s Marquise could disregard this Tonio’s ‘Pour me rapprocher de Marie,’ handsomely sung in California and delivered with extraordinary beauty and passion on A te, o cara. Phrasing with the finesse of a poet extemporaneously finding words to convey what his soul longs to say and eschewing the interpolated top C♯ gracelessly howled in this music by some singers, Costello confirms that Donizetti’s music as written is far more effective than variations on it. Rather than granting him Marie’s hand, many a Marquise might herself fall in love with the singer of such a heartfelt plea!

First performed in Paris in 1838, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal is one of Donizetti’s most innovative but least-familiar scores. Though espoused by a few enterprising singers, conductors, and opera companies, the work’s Italian incarnation, Don Sebastiano, re di Portogallo, has fared little better. A popular number on tenors’ recorded recitals since it was committed to 78-rpm disc by Enrico Caruso on 10 January 1908, Sebastiano’s romanza ‘Deserto in terra, che più m’avanza’ (originally ‘Seul sur la terre, en vain j’espère’) ends the opera’s second act with an outpouring of despair. The defeated king has escaped death only by a loyal lieutenant having assumed his identity and the woman he loves consenting to marry another man, and the character’s emotions galvanize Costello’s singing. He follows Alfredo Kraus’s and Pavarotti’s example by substituting an A♭ for the first of the written top Cs, but the subsequent top Cs and D♭ ring out dazzlingly. Here, too, it is the expressivity of the tenor’s performance that enchants.

The lovesick Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore is one of Costello’s best rôles, one in which the natural plangency of his timbre lends his characterization endearing sincerity. Whereas Pavarotti’s much-loved Nemorino was a charismatic lady’s man who wore his heart on his sleeve, the Nemorino enlivened by Costello is a shy, pensive lad whose awakening to the joys and pains of true love is deeply touching. The wide-eyed awe with which the younger tenor sings the Act One cavatina ‘Quanto è bella, quanto è cara’ is invigorating, the excitement of extolling the virtues of Nemorino’s beloved propelling his navigation of the vocal line. Aided by Orbelian’s well-chosen tempo, Costello then sings the romanza from Act Two, ‘Una furtiva lagrima,’ sublimely. Hearing it sung by voices as unsuited to this music as a featherweight tenorino is to singing Wagner’s Siegfried, it is easy to forget how affectingly lovely the piece can be. Costello’s performance is a welcome reminder of the music’s expressive potential, and the tonal beauty and unexaggerated pathos of his singing recall the similarly-interpreted Nemorino of Cesare Valletti. Depicting another amorous young man, an obvious temperamental relative of Nemorino and another rôle in which Valletti excelled, Costello’s performance of ‘Sogno soave e casto,’ the cantabile from Ernesto’s duet with the title character from Act One of Don Pasquale, radiates the essence of youthful romantic ardor.

A highlight of Costello’s recent engagements was his interpretation of Fernand in Gran Teatre del Liceu’s production of the La favorite, still rarely performed in the original French guise premièred in Paris in 1840. As in the selection from Dom Sébastien, Costello sings Fernand’s scene from Act Four of La favorite in its more widely-used Italian translation. He enunciates the recitative ‘Favorita del re! qual negro abisso’ with anguish befitting a man who has discovered that his betrothed is another man’s mistress, but the distress of Fernand’s predicament never distorts the integrity of Costello’s shaping of the vocal line. His breath control makes his account of ‘Spirto gentil’ competitive with the best on disc, the fervor of his singing bringing Giuseppe di Stefano’s famed 1949 Mexico City performance to mind.

​Costello’s portrayal of Riccardo Percy—history’s Henry Percy, the sixth Earl of Northumberland—in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena has been applauded in Dallas, New York, and Vienna, and his stylish, searing singing of Percy’s Act Two aria ‘Vivi tu, te ne scongiuro’ on this disc reveals how acutely he identifies with the part. On stage, his Percy has exhibited surprising modernity, the plight of the honorable lover ensnared by political maneuvering resonating as powerfully with listeners now as when Anna Bolena was first heard in 1830. The verve of Costello’s reading of the cabaletta ‘Nel veder la tua costanza’ is effortlessly sustained up to his pulse-quickening top Cs and D. In both the aria and the cabaletta, the recorded sound obscures the singer’s handling of chromatic passages like the B♭–B♮–C progressions that preface resolutions of phrases: the commendable accuracy of his intonation elsewhere suggests that minimally-altered microphone placement might have engendered increased clarity.

It was as Arturo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor that Costello made his Metropolitan Opera début on 24 September 2007. A month later, on 25 October, he enthralled the New York audience with his first MET portrayal of Edgardo. In the years between the world première of Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835 and the Twentieth-Century revival of interest in bel canto, performances of the opera often ended with the heroine’s mad scene, denying audiences the pleasure of hearing some of Donizetti’s most exquisitely-written music for the tenor voice. The gravitas of the tragedy that has befallen Edgardo pulls at this tenor’s voice as he utters ‘Tombe degli avi miei,’ but the voice soars above the orchestra. Among so much stirring singing, his performance of ‘Fra poco a me ricovero’ is perhaps Costello’s finest achievement on A te, o cara. Rising to a gleaming, easy top B, Edgardo’s desperation courses through his voice, the character bursting to life in a few minutes of emotive, evocative singing.

The disc’s title is borrowed from the text of the aria with which Arturo makes his entrance in Act One of Bellini’s I puritani, ‘A te, o cara, amor talora.’ This music epitomizes bel canto, and many tenors with voices completely wrong for Arturo—Franco Corelli, for instance—have recorded ‘A te, o cara.’ Costello’s voice is of course nothing like Corelli’s, but the solid, sonorous top C♯ that he deploys in his performance of ‘A te, o cara’ is by no means unworthy of comparison with his predecessor’s much-cherished top notes. Few tenors past or present have offered listeners a performance of this aria that more deserves to be described as bel canto than Costello’s, which exults in Bellini’s distinctive cantilene.

Whilst still a student at his native city’s Academy of Vocal Arts, Costello was an acclaimed Duca di Mantova in Verdi’s Rigoletto, his singing of the rôle in AVA performances in metropolitan Philadelphia identifying him as a Verdian of tremendous promise. As his career has advanced, the Duca has continued to be a cornerstone of his repertoire, serving as his début rôle with Houston Grand Opera and the vehicle for success in the MET’s Las Vegas-set production. He has been forthright in sharing his misgivings about the Duca’s philandering nature, but hearing the immediacy with which he sings ‘Ella mi fu rapita,’ the recitative that opens the scene that launches Rigoletto’s second act, annihilates any doubt about Costello’s fondness for Verdi’s music. In the aria ‘Parmi veder le lagrime,’ a kinder facet of the Duca’s persona is momentarily glimpsed as he sings of his concern for Gilda, and this Duca heightens the significance of this episode of civility by voicing it with unmistakable conviction. The potency of his dramatic accents notwithstanding, the subtitle of this disc is ‘Stephen Costello sings bel canto,’ and his performance of the Duca’s music manifests that designation.

The sole disappointment of A te, o cara is its duration, which at less than fifty minutes is brief even by the standards of the LP era. Perhaps there is an elucidation of the disc’s brevity to be gleaned from the dedication that it bears, which merits being quoted.

The love of a friend can have a powerful impact on one's life. This album is for you, Dima. Without you, none of this would have been possible. You are still as present in the world today as when you walked among us.

HAROLD MELTZER (born 1966): Songs and Structures — Paul Appleby, tenor; Miranda Cuckson, violin; Natalia Katyukova and Blair McMillen, piano; Avalon String Quartet [Recording venue(s) and date(s) not specified; Bridge Records BCD 9513; 1 CD, 60:51; Available from Bridge Records, Naxos Direct, Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

When hearing new music, it is imperative to remember that at some time all music was contemporary. Bach, Brahms, Beatles, or Beyoncé, the evolution of the music of any artist or age can be traced to a finite beginning before which its influences and inspirations were only disparate noises and notions. Physiologically, artistic creation is owed to fortuitous ignitions of synapses within complex cognitive processes, but there is something unknowable and unnameable in the mind that sees a raindrop, a star, or a skyscraper and perceives within and beyond its shape, past the limits of sight, the song that it sings into the void. The ability to hear these songs and to recreate them in sounds that other ears can perceive is eternally new. The sounds become familiar, but it is too often the familiarity of words repeated but not comprehended. In the most basic sense, contemporary music is nearer in temporal proximity to the listener than the music of past masters, but the dissolution of time is one of music’s most potent powers. The music by American composer Harold Meltzer on this Bridge Records release, Songs and Structures, is new not solely owing to its recency but, more significantly, because it makes audible the songs of iconic structures of modern life, physical and psychological. Just as Bach’s Passions are forever contemporary, the works on Songs and Structures are newly ageless.

A quartet of settings of verses by British poet Ted Hughes, Meltzer’s song cycle Bride of the Island was premièred by tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Natalia Katyukova in 2016. Composer and tenor have fostered a professional relationship not unlike the one between Franz Schubert and Johann Michael Vogl, the baritone whose performances of Schubert’s Lieder motivated the composition of some of the finest songs in the canon. In his performances on Songs and Structures, Appleby sings Meltzer’s songs as though both music and words are his own, instinctively fusing his vocalism with Katyukova’s versatile pianism. From the first bar of ‘Reveille,’ tenor and pianist entwine their instruments with shared awareness of aural textures.

Meltzer traced the narrative trajectory of ‘Reveille’ in music of absorbing simplicity, and Appleby deftly manages the ascents to Gs and A♭s above the stave. Katyukova articulates the swirling aquatic figurations that cascade through ‘Sugar Loaf’ with rhythmic exactness that propels but never hurries the performance. ‘The water is wild as alcohol’ is among Hughes’s most evocative lines, and Meltzer seized the opportunity of its musical potential by crafting a vocal line that enhances the words’ histrionic strength. It is the tenor’s lyricism that illuminates the paradoxes of ‘Thistles.’ His direct enunciation of ‘Every one a revengeful burst of resurrection’ reveals the poetic erudition of Meltzer’s treatment of the text. Appleby and Katyukova perform ‘Hay’ with a suggestion of cynicism that reaches its—and the cycle’s—climax in the line ‘Her heart is the weather.’ The disquieting honesty of Appleby’s delivery of the words ‘She loves nobody’ infuses Meltzer’s subtle musical prosody with startling immediacy. The contrast of the passage taking the tenor to top A, sung triumphantly as stipulated by the composer’s instructions, with the song’s ‘ghostly’ resolution ends Bride of the Island with a glimmer of deceptive serenity.

It is not difficult to conclude from a superficial survey of the history of Art Song that American music lacks a complementary literary tradition liked that of German Lieder, shaped by poets of the order of Goethe, Heine, and Schiller. Such a conclusion, however misguided, cannot be wholly rejected, but its validity is substantially reduced by works such as Meltzer’s Beautiful Ohio. The composer found in the poems by James Wright from which Beautiful Ohio’s texts are drawn an economy of words with layers of meaning that, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and the works of William Blake, reveal different truths to each observer. Beautiful Ohio shares with Schubert’s Winterreise an ambivalence about coping with loss, but it is Brahms’s adaptations of biblical texts in his Vier ernste Gesänge that Meltzer’s emotionally-charged treatments of Wright’s words most closely parallels.

Appleby premièred Beautiful Ohio in 2010, and he and Katyukova prove in the performance on Songs and Structures to be as musically and dramatically well-matched in this music as in Bride of the Island. The vivid imagery of the opening song, ‘Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,’ as bizarrely poignant as its title intimates, is communicated assertively but without exaggerated pathos. Appleby and Katyukova approach ‘Little Marble Boy’ reverently, as though performing the song in the hollow, hallowed space conjured in Wright’s poem, their sounds demonstrating the skill with which Meltzer instilled the mood of the text in his music. In ‘Beautiful Ohio,’ the tenor voices ‘I know what we call it / Most of the time’ with particular eloquence, echoing the wariness that haunts the music.

In all of these songs, Katyukova’s playing provides a second voice, not disinterested accompaniment, and her technical mastery of Meltzer’s writing for the piano allows her to focus on nuances of phrasing that reinforce details of her colleague’s interpretation, not least in ‘Caprice.’ Untroubled by the tricky chromatic writing centered in the passaggio, Appleby voices ‘The trouble is / They keep turning faces toward me / That I recognize’ confidently. He and Katyukova boldly stride through the demands of ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,’ unflinchingly confronting the ambiguities of both music and text. Though there is no real stylistic kinship between the works, the emotional currents by which the narrator’s journey in Beautiful Ohio is transported recall the bittersweet integration of thankfulness and sorrow at the core of the music composed by Henry Purcell for the funeral of Queen Mary II in 1695. The philosophical threads that bind words to music in Beautiful Ohio are more tangled than those woven into Purcell’s music, but Meltzer’s songs are no less reliant than any others upon performers’ prowess. Beautiful Ohio and Bride of the Island could be performed differently but surely no better than by Appleby and Katyukova on this disc.

Aqua for string quartet is a musical response to the visual and spatial impact of Aqua Tower, a residential building at 225 N. Columbus Drive in Chicago’s Lakeshore East development that was designed and built under the supervision of a team headed by noted architect Jeanne Gang. Meltzer’s writing in Aqua is as intrinsically ‘vocal’ as in his song cycles, the interactions among instruments here probing the metaphysical implications of an edifice’s marriages of earth and sky, steel and glass, public and private. One of the most intriguing aspects of Meltzer’s artistry is his gift for fabricating gossamer strands of sound that metamorphose into vast vistas. The performance of Aqua by Avalon String Quartet on this disc is a celebration of musical camaraderie, the instruments’ timbres combining to produce an engrossing sonic silhouette of Aqua Tower. The ways in which Meltzer’s part writing exploits traditional tonal relationships are reminiscent of Arvo Pärt’s syntheses of plainsong. The Avalon musicians are clearly as aware of their colleagues’ playing as of their own. They are also unmistakably aware of how Aqua dissolves the boundaries between visible monuments to man’s ambitions and the intangible pursuit of community.

Composed in fulfillment of a commission by the Library of Congress for a work to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of celebrated Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875 – 1962), Meltzer’s Kreisleriana pays homage both to Kreisler and to the music that he espoused. Organized in six movements, the piece might be described as a series of variations on a theme of virtuosity. Kreisler studied with Bruckner, Delibes, and Massenet in the course of an education that exposed him to virtually every trend in composing for the violin and gave him technical assurance sufficient to write his own pieces and successfully masquerade them as works by renowned composers.

Meltzer’s music traverses a broad spectrum of musical influences, but his own voice remains audible, especially in the inimitably innovative development of thematic material. The performance of Kreisleriana by violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blain McMillen is a whirlwind of technical wizardry of which Kreisler would be proud, but there is depth in this music greater than virtuosity alone can infiltrate. Cuckson never attempts to mimic Kreisler’s singular style of playing: rather, she plays Meltzer’s music with her own impassioned phrasing, which McMillen supports with pianism of sensitivity and suavity. Kreisleriana does not attempt to be an Enigma-esque musical portrait of its subject. If Meltzer tasked himself with composing music that reimagines Kreisler’s artistry from a Twenty-First-Century perspective, he succeeded. In this performance, Cuckson and McMillen succeed in playing Meltzer’s music as Kreisler played Beethoven’s.

All music is a tribute to something—a person, a place, an event, an idea. The composer’s imagination is besieged by a realization or a recollection, and music seeps or surges from the creative deluge that results. It is not necessary for the listener to know the circumstances of a piece’s genesis in order to feel the pull of the music’s sentimental gravity. The connections between listener and composer, not esoteric bonds, determine the relevance of music. In order to enjoy the music on Songs and Structures, the listener needs no acquaintance with the literary world of Ted Hughes, the sights of Ohio and Chicago, or the career of Fritz Kreisler. Harold Meltzer’s musical tributes come with no prerequisites: the performances on Songs and Structures need only to be heard to be understood.

VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835): Norma — Leah Crocetto (Norma - rôle début), Elizabeth DeShong (Adalgisa), Chad Shelton (Pollione), Ao Li (Oroveso - rôle début), Wade Henderson (Flavio), Kathleen Felty (Clotilde); North Carolina Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Antony Walker, conductor [Performed in concert by North Carolina Opera in Meymandi Concert Hall, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Sunday, 21 October 2018]

Virtually every niche of operatic repertory has its behemoths that test opera companies’ musical, scenic, and financial resources—Händel’s Rinaldo, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Verdi’s Aida, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Puccini’s Turandot, Heggie’s Moby-Dick... Successfully staging works such as these legitimizes an opera company’s standing in the Arts community: produce an Aida or a Turandot that is memorable for the right reasons, and doubts about an opera company’s viability and artistic merit are largely dispelled. There are many works in the bel canto repertory that, if performed in accordance with their composers’ and librettists’ intentions, make fearsome demands on everyone involved with the performance of opera, but the glorious beast among the beauties is unquestionably Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma.

Premièred at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala on 26 December 1831, with a cast that included Giuditta Pasta as Norma, Giulia Grisi as Adalgisa, Domenico Donzelli as Pollione, and Vincenzo Negrini as Oroveso, Norma is one of a handful of bel canto operas that never wholly disappeared from the repertory in the years between initial successes and the Twentieth-Century revival of interest in music of this era. Norma was first performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on 27 February 1890, in the company’s seventh season, upon which occasion the opera was sung in German by a cast headed by Lilli Lehmann’s Norma. [As of its most recent hearing in December 2017, Norma has been performed 174 times at the MET, whereas Bizet’s Carmen has received 1,010 performances to date, and Puccini’s La bohème has amassed 1,326 MET performances.] In the nine decades since Rosa Ponselle sang her first Norma at the MET in 1927, some of the world’s most acclaimed singers have been heard as Norma, but encountering a performance of Norma beyond operatically-inclined major metropolitan areas remains relatively rare. That North Carolina Opera brought Norma to Raleigh was remarkable enough, but the virtues of the company’s concert performance in Meymandi Concert Hall verified what many attentive opera lovers already know: world-class opera is no longer the exclusive property of famous opera houses.

North Carolina Opera’s Norma benefited from the leadership of Australian conductor Antony Walker, whose mastery of bel canto has been particularly apparent in his many performances with Washington Concert Opera. Bellini’s music has been accused of being boringly simplistic, with a preponderance of common time making his operas dully foursquare, but Walker’s approach proved from the opening bars of the Sinfonia that blandness afflicts interpretations of Norma rather than the music itself. The physicality of Walker’s conducting is reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein, but any suggestion of showmanship in his work is mitigated by his musicality. In Raleigh, he paced Norma effectively but sometimes idiosyncratically. Tempi in Act One were occasionally lugubrious, causing what dramatic momentum could be generated in the concert setting to stall.

The most baffling aspect of the performance was the cuts, which trimmed little time from the opera’s duration but were jarring, especially in the orchestral postlude to Norma’s cabaletta: here, even the musicians sounded lost in the perfunctory conclusion of the scene. Walker’s conducting was more consistent in Act Two, with stimulating but sensible tempi in Norma’s scenes with Adalgisa and Pollione. Nothing in the maestro’s work was arbitrary. Even when unusual, his choices of tempo always seemed justified by clear-sighted interpretive nuances allied with a discernible consciousness of the performance’s overall trajectory. As in his performances with Washington Concert Opera, Walker’s work substantiated the musical advantages of performing bel canto repertory in concert, foremost among which is facilitating appreciation of the score without visual diversions.

Under Walker’s baton, the playing of the North Carolina Opera Orchestra was mostly expert, the musicians executing their parts with energy and enthusiasm. Mistakes were commendably few, but there was an overall roughness to the playing that was perhaps a symptom of the sort of brief rehearsal schedule typical of concert performances. It was difficult to discern whether orchestral balances were compromised or the instruments’ sounds were adversely affected by the concert hall’s dry acoustic. From house left, the harp was inaudible, and wind instruments emerged from the soundscape with distracting prominence. Observation of Walker’s cuing of individual sections of the orchestra hinted at the conductor​’s awareness of sonic challenges, but these were only partially conquered. Nevertheless, North Carolina Opera’s musicians played capably and conscientiously, their finest moments rivaling the work of orchestras with long-established acquaintances with Bellini’s music.

Like their orchestral colleagues, the ladies and gentlemen of the North Carolina Opera Chorus performed spiritedly. Trained by an invaluable asset to North Carolina’s musical life, High Point University professor and acclaimed baritone Scott MacLeod, the choristers launched the opera’s first act with an account of ‘Dell’aura tua profetica’ that exuded the mystery of the Druids’ primordial sylvan world. Their statement of ‘Norma viene’ imparted a genuine sense of anticipation that transformed into exasperation as their quest for rebellion was denied by Norma’s counsel. In Act Two, their singing of ‘Attendiam: un breve inciampo non ci turbi’ radiated laudable engagement with the meaning of the words. The sincerity of the Druids’ exclamations of ‘Guerra, guerra!’ was beyond doubt, and the visceral excitement of their vocalism was electrifying. The best choral singing of the afternoon came in the opera’s final scene. The shock, horror, and sadness of her community’s reactions to Norma’s confession of having broken her vows were palpably conveyed. There were momentary lapses in ensemble and instances of singing that was more accurate dramatically than musically, but this was a chorus of blood-thirsty Druids, not carefree rustic townsfolk. Plotting war against Rome was surely not always perfectly-tuned business.

A stalwart veteran of North Carolina Opera productions and musical events throughout and beyond the Triangle, tenor Wade Henderson imbued his portrayal of the Roman centurion Flavio in North Carolina Opera’s Norma with vocal security that lent this often-overshadowed character a vibrant musical profile. Singing only in a single scene in Act One, Flavio has little to do, but the music with which he is entrusted is often sung poorly by singers who appear as though they would rather be doing something else. This Flavio, however, was a man would sounded like a willing agent of imperial authority. Henderson voiced ‘In quella selva è morte’ with apt gravitas, and his intoning of ‘Odi? I suoi riti a compiere Norma dal tempio move’ conveyed a palpable sense of alarm. Henderson should always be singing leading rôles, but this Norma was enriched by his depiction of Flavio.

Also contributing markedly to the strengths of this Norma was the performance of mezzo-soprano Kathleen Felty, who sang the rôle of Norma’s confidante Clotilde with firm, attractive tone, the impact of which could have been improved by intensification of her focus on forward projection of the voice. In her brief appearance in Act One, Felty sang ‘E qual ti turba strano timor’ pensively, credibly portraying the loyal friend’s sympathy for Norma. Compassionately describing Adalgisa’s anguish to Norma in Act Two, this Clotilde voiced ‘Ella qui presso solitaria si aggira’ with solemnity. The urgency of the character’s utterance of ‘Al nostro tempio insulto fece un romano’ was only partially realized by Felty’s measured enunciation, but, like Henderson, she brought a voice of fine quality to her assignment.

The rôle of Norma’s father Oroveso is often marginalized, both by directors and by indifferent, uninteresting singing. The part is reduced to a comprimario onlooker by merciless excision of his music on a major-label studio recording of Norma, in fact, but as unforgiving a critic of Italian opera as Richard Wagner deemed Oroveso important enough to warrant his composition of an alternate aria for him, intended to be sung by Luigi Lablache in a Paris Norma but seemingly not heard until the Twentieth Century. [Wagner’s aria for Oroveso, ‘Norma il predisse, o druidi,’ is now sporadically included in performances of Norma, including in Boston Opera’s 1971 performances and Florida Grand Opera’s 2016 production.] Singing his first Oroveso, Chinese bass-baritone Ao Li rightly preferred Bellini’s original music, but his performance legitimized Wagner’s confidence in the rôle’s potential. The superb caliber of Li’s instrument was immediately evident upon his entrance in Act One. His assured voicing of ‘Ite sul colle, o druidi’ and ‘Sì: parlerà terribile da queste querce antiche’ established Oroveso as a consequential participant in the drama, and Li was a sonorous, involved presence in the scene prefacing Norma’s ‘Casta diva.’

Oroveso faces a crisis of conscience in Act Two, Norma’s crimes against her sacred calling pitting the character’s paternal instincts against his responsibilities as a defender of his ancient culture. Li declaimed the recitative ‘Guerrieri! a voi venirne credea foriero d’avvenir migliore’ with unstinting brawn. Though undeniably impressive, the raw power of the bass-baritone’s vocalism was intermittently wearying. The character’s shifting emotional predicament calls for more variation in the singer’s delivery than Li offered, but this will likely come with further performances of the rôle. His singing of ‘Ah! del Tebro al giogo indegno fremo io pure’ was marginally uneven in phrasing but uniformly handsome of tone—and concluded with a full-bodied low F. In the subsequent scene with Norma and the final scene, Li lucidly evinced Oroveso’s inner conflict. His command of the subtleties of Bellini’s music was not yet complete, but Li sang Oroveso’s music with striking proficiency.

Tenor Chad Shelton’s Pollione was heard earlier in 2018 opposite Liudmyla Monastyrska’s still-new depiction of the title rôle in Houston Grand Opera’s Norma, and his experience in the part was apparent in the unapologetic bravado of his performance. Shelton made his entrance in Act One with barely-containable machismo, the libidinous proconsul’s passions sweeping through the tenor’s body language. The fervor of his enunciation of ‘Svanir le voci!’ was largely effected through volume, but there were signs of a lighter touch in the cavatina ‘Meco all’altar di Venere era Adalgisa in Roma,’ which in Shelton’s performance shared a latent eroticism with Iago’s duplicitous description of Cassio’s dream in Verdi’s Otello. The swagger of the cabaletta ‘Me protegge, me difende un poter maggio di loro’ suited the singer’s emphatic style better than any other music in the score and was sung with abandon. Though on stentorian form, Shelton avoided the written top C in the aria and the B♭ traditionally interpolated in the cabaletta’s coda.

Shelton’s voice had no shortage of resonance in Pollione’s duet with Adalgisa, but, here and elsewhere, his efforts at subtlety seemed contrived. The tenor voiced ‘Va’, crudele; al dio spietato offri in dote il sangue mio’ lustily, and his ‘Vieni in Roma, ah! vieni, o cara’ was more domineering than persuasive. Shelton hurled out ‘Norma! de’ tuoi rimproveri segno non farmi adesso’ in the tempestuous trio with defiance, and his negotiation of Pollione’s awkwardly disjointed vocal line was predictably rousing. Absent from Act Two until the blazing duet with Norma that precipitates the opera’s ultimate tragedy, Pollione makes a final attempt to thwart his former lover’s desire for vengeance, and Shelton roared ‘Ah! t’appaghi il mio terrore’ with the distress of a man suddenly perceiving the limitations of his fortitude. Never retreating from the chest-beating masculinity of his portrayal, he tried valiantly to draw his Norma into a musical battle of wits. Shelton’s Pollione did not complacently surrender to his fate in the opera’s finale: like Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, he unhesitatingly sought death. Vocally, Shelton’s work was variable, bruising Bellini’s music, but his Pollione had brashness and courage absent from many depictions of the part.

North Carolina Opera had in mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as satisfying an interpreter of Adalgisa as could be heard anywhere in the world today; and one in full communion with the sisterhood of exalted past exponents of the rôle. The delicacy of her first notes in her introductory scene gave her articulation of ‘Sgombra è la sacra selva’ compelling honesty, the dulcet femininity of her singing creating an arrestingly multidimensional portrait of the character. So heartfelt was DeShong’s singing of the beautiful largo ‘Deh! proteggimi, o dio: perduta son io’ that the depth of Adalgisa’s illicit love for Pollione was wrenchingly evident. In the fast-moving duet with Pollione, DeShong voiced ‘E tu pure, ah! tu non sai quanto costi a me dolente!’ impulsively, effortlessly rocketing to the climactic top notes. The elusive art of bel canto shone in her readings of ‘Ciel! così parlar l’ascolto sempre, ovunque, al tempio istesso’ and ‘Sì, fedele a te, a te sarò,’ her top B♭ unforced but forceful. At the start of her scene with Norma, there was unmistakable apprehension in the mezzo-soprano’s statement of ‘Alma, costanza,’ and the finesse of her handling of ‘Dolci qual arpa armonica’ disclosed an abiding understanding of the text. Her top C in ‘Ripeti, o ciel, ripetimi’ was not without strain, but she reached and sustained it resiliently. DeShong dominated the trio: with Norma and Pollione sparring around her, this Adalgisa exerted herself with newfound surety and vocal eloquence indicative of the character’s spiritual purity.

When DeShong’s Adalgisa acquiesced to Norma’s summons in Act Two, Bellini’s request that ‘Me chiami, o Norma’ be sung ‘con timore’ was touchingly honored. DeShong elucidated the genius of Bellini’s writing for Adalgisa in ‘Sì, giurai ma il tuo bene’ by shaping each phrase with concern for its cumulative effect. Here, the written top Cs came easily but were always integrated parts of the melodic line. Adalgisa’s second duet with Norma is one of the most perfect flowerings of Bellini’s meticulously-cultivated bel canto and in DeShong’s performance sounded like it. She phrased ‘Mira, o Norma, a’ tuoi ginocchi questi cari pargoletti’ with incredible breath control, the limpidity of her tones ideal for the music. Walker’s brisk tempo for ‘Sì, fino all’ore estreme’ posed no problems for DeShong, whose technique triumphed over every obstacle. Joining Norma on a bright, secure top C, she finalized her portrayal of Adalgisa with an exclamation point. As a demonstration of impeccably-prepared, unforgettably beautiful, and poignantly expressive bel canto singing, DeShong’s performance was in a class of its own.

The singer who contemplates her rôle début as Norma without trepidation either has both nerves and a throat girded with iron or has not truly learned the music. The historical precedents for failure in the rôle are far more prevalent than those for success, renowned and generally able singers having come to grief in their performances of Bellini’s music, but the accolades that reward efficacious Normas make assaying the rôle a risk that ambitious singers are willing to take. Already a praised Semiramide, Luisa Miller, and Aida, soprano Leah Crocetto added Norma to her repertoire with this performance. Wielding a lirico spinto voice with carefully-honed agility and a band of steel at the upper extremity, Crocetto possesses basic qualifications needed to sing Norma’s music properly. Nonetheless, cogently inhabiting the rôle relies upon far more than vocal endowment, and Crocetto’s inaugural Norma was a work in progress, promising but still notably incomplete.

Inevitable and pardonable nervousness was likely to blame, at least in part, for several missed cues in the soprano’s performance, but it cannot be pretended that, in the context of a concert performance in which scores were employed, this was not worrying. In general, Crocetto was quick to recover from these lapses in timing. In her first scene in Act One, she traversed ‘Sediziose voci’ cautiously, the voice sounding inadequately supported in the lower octave. Interestingly, though, the sublime cavatina ‘Casta diva, che inargenti queste sacre antiche piante,’ a piece known to defeat singers who otherwise thrive in the part, was the most satisfying episode in Crocetto’s performance. The repeated top As and the B♭s on which the filigree-laden lines crest were produced without pushing the voice, but the wisdom of utilizing a variation of the aria’s conclusion devised for Maria Malibran was controverted by a trill that never materialized. ‘Fine al rito’ was dramatically inert but musically potent. She sang the cabaletta ‘Ah! bello a me ritorna del fido amor primiero,’ a repurposed piece found in two of Bellini’s pre-Norma operas, adventurously, unbothered by the written top Cs. Moreover, the explosive top C with which she ended the cabaletta may have caused structural damage to the auditorium.

The first of Norma’s momentous scenes with Adalgisa paired Crocetto with DeShong, whose stylish singing positively affected the soprano’s vocalism. She sang ‘Vanne, e li cela entrambi’ incisively, and there were mesmerizing sounds in her reading of ‘Oh! rimembranza! io fui così rapita al sol mirarlo in volto.’ Crocetto was motivated by DeShong to devote to ‘Ah! sì, fa’ core, e abbracciami’ heightened concentration on the unique accents of Bellini’s musical language. The mounting agitation of the great trio spurred the soprano to elevate the dramatic temperature of her performance. The pair of top Cs in the polacca, ‘Oh, non tremare, o perfido,’ were unerringly placed, and Crocetto handled the fiorature with aplomb. The ire that erupted from her Norma in ‘Oh! di qual sei tu vittima’ and‘ Vanne sì: mi lascia, indegno’ epitomized the rightly-feared fury of a woman scorned. Her top D was a figurative blow to the man who dared to toy with her affections.

Whether staged or performed in concert, the scene that begins Act Two is—or can be—one of the most tense scenes in opera. Unsettled by the revelation of Pollione’s relationship with Adalgisa, Norma contemplates slaying her own children, the innocent reminders of her amorous weakness. Walker initiated the scene with an oppressive aura of foreboding, and Crocetto voiced ‘Dormono entrambi’ with burgeoning tragedy that contrasted with the tenderness flooded her singing of ‘Teneri, teneri figli.’ The​ terror and disgust of ‘Ah! no! son miei figli!’​ were subdued​, but, in Norma’s final exchange with Adalgisa, the soprano sang first ‘Deh! con te, con te, il prendi’ and then ‘Ah! perchè la mia costanza vuoi scemar con molli affetti,’ her rejoinder to Adalgisa’s ‘Mira, o Norma,’ with increased zeal. She ably partnered DeShong in ‘Sì, fino all’ore estreme,’ achieving an agreeable balance between their very different timbres.

Crocetto crowned ‘Ei tornerà’ with a hauntingly beautiful top C, and her imposing bravura—again minus trills—suffused her singing in the duet with Pollione, ‘In mia man alfin tu sei,’ with vitality that her dramatic deportment lacked. Norma’s response of ‘Son io’ when pressed to reveal the identity of the errant priestess is among the opera’s most grueling passages, one in which even Maria Callas famously failed to please an obstreperous La Scala audience, and Crocetto’s pronouncement of the calamitous words was appealing but aloof. The arching vocal lines of the music with which Norma reproaches the vanquished Pollione and embraces her fiery demise provided Crocetto with opportunities to exhibit her legato faculties, and both ‘Qual cor tradisti, qual cor perdesti’ and ‘Deh! non volerli vittime del mio fatale errore’ received her most inward, intimate singing of the afternoon, but her legato was not equal to Bellini’s music. Musically, Crocetto displayed some of the traits needed to succeed as Norma, but the fundamental equipoise of voice and technique was not yet present. Dramatically, her first Norma was too impersonal to be convincing as a priestess willing to renounce her way of life for a forbidden love.

Bel canto connoisseurs wary of hearing inept performances of the operas that they love sometimes advocate shelving Norma until singers comparable to the quartet who sang in the opera’s first, sadly incomplete, Metropolitan Opera broadcast—Rosa Ponselle, Gladys Swarthout, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, and Ezio Pinza—emerge to perform the principal rôles with the requisite dexterity and glamour. Doing this would deprive whole generations of listeners of fully experiencing this magnificent music. Furthermore, singers do not leave conservatories with diplomas that magically render them fit to sing Norma. This is music to which exceptional voices and techniques must acclimate, and that is accomplished solely by studying, rehearsing, and performing the opera. North Carolina Opera’s Norma was not an illustrious afternoon in the opera’s nearly-two-century performance history, but it was a significant event in the annals of opera in Raleigh and, imperfections notwithstanding, a respectable attempt at scaling the heights of one of opera’s most perilous peaks.

Modern muse: world-renowned mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, poised to breathe new life into the title rôle in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Charles Gounod’s seldom-heard Sapho on 18 November 2018
[Photograph by Richard Dumas, © by Alpha Classics]

Opera is an invigorating, inspiriting, infuriating amalgamation of serendipitous circumstances, fortuitous mistakes, unflagging ambitions, and missed opportunities. With cyclical imprecision that mimics all of life’s most rewarding pursuits, operatic trends are as changeable as weather, the musical climate reacting with varying conviction to an enormous array of stimuli. So prominent was Charles Gounod’s Faust in the annals of the first decade of the history of New York’s Metropolitan Opera—it was with a performance of Faust that the MET was inaugurated on 22 October 1883, and Edith Wharton’s 1921 novel The Age of Innocence begins with a bemusedly satirical account of New York society’s fondness for the piece—that the new company’s venue was known as the Faustspielhaus. After being performed by MET forces in Philadelphia and Chicago, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette became the first French opera to be sung in its original language at the Metropolitan. Aside from a short-lived double bill that bizarrely partnered Philémon et Baucis with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, four performances of Mireille in 1919, and accounts of the oratorio Mors et vita and the motet Gallia, Gounod’s popularity with MET audiences has been sustained by Faust and Roméo et Juliette.

It is often folly to extrapolate conclusions about broader tastes from the endeavors of a single entity, but, in the case of global interest in the music of Charles Gounod, the MET’s concentration on two of his operas at the expense of his other scores is generally reflective of the fate suffered by the composer’s music, particularly outside of his native France. Though his lesser-known operas have started to emerge from the shadows, some of them—La nonne sanglante and Le tribut de Zamora, for instance—having been both performed and recorded in recent seasons, the commercial domination of their ubiquitous brethren remains unchallenged. Far from the exalted stage of the MET, both Faust and Roméo et Juliette have been produced by Charlotte’s Opera Carolina, but, regardless of an encouraging venture into unfamiliar repertory with a staging of Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, further exploration of Gounod’s œuvre has not transpired. Whether in Paris, New York, or Charlotte, an opera company’s foremost goal must be to give audiences what they will pay to hear, but the enduring vitality of opera relies upon occasional initiatives by opera companies to lead audiences into new niches of repertoire.

Amongst the most welcome operatic trends of 2018 is the initiative that brings Virginia-born mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey back to Lisner Auditorium to sing the title rôle in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gounod’s rarely-presented first opera, Sapho, on Sunday, 18 November 2018. First performed by the famed Opéra de Paris in Salle Le Peletier on 16 April 1851, Sapho inducted its thirty-two-year-old composer into the contentious community of opera in the French capital, in which environment he would pursue success for the next three decades. Prior to the genesis of Sapho, much of Gounod’s artistic energy was devoted to the study and composition of liturgical music, and, despite having won the prestigious Prix de Rome with his cantata Fernand in 1839, the young composer pondered abandoning music and taking holy orders. The obstacles to its resounding notwithstanding, a musical voice as affecting as Gounod’s cannot be silenced.

Hearing Kate Lindsey sing affirms that hers, too, is a voice of irrepressible eloquence and zeal. Though well established in a busy, widely-acclaimed international career, Lindsey continues to approach performances with wonderment and inquisitiveness, whether she is singing a rôle for the first or the fiftieth time. Stylistic adaptability is widely demanded of younger singers, but Lindsey wields musical versatility with uncommon prowess. Since her 2005 début there as Javotte in Massenet’s Manon, she has been heard at the Metropolitan Opera in parts as diverse as Mozart’s Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Second Lady in Die Zauberflöte, and Annio in La clemenza di Tito, Tebaldo in Verdi’s Don Carlo, Wagner’s Rhinemaiden Wellgunde in both Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung, Nicklausse and the Muse in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, Humperdinck’s Hänsel, and the Kuchtík in Dvořák’s Rusalka. Only weeks ago, she returned to the origins of opera in its modern form as a period-appropriate but dangerously seductive Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at the 2018 Salzburger Festspiele. Not surprisingly, a singer with French diction as impressive as this singer’s has also portrayed Siébel in Faust and Stéphano in Roméo et Juliette, enhancing these scores’ appeal to today’s listeners.

Che soave zeffiretto: mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey as Cherubino (right), with soprano Anja Harteros as Contessa d’Almaviva (left), in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at The Metropolitan Opera in 2007
[Photograph by Ken Howard, © The Metropolitan Opera]

A pinnacle in Washington Concert Opera’s three-decade history is Lindsey’s fiery singing of Romeo in Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi [reviewed here], the musical richness of which she rivaled with her depiction of Léonor in the company’s 2016 performance of Donizetti’s La favorite [reviewed here]. Created in 1840 by Rosine Stoltz, the latter rôle was also sung with great distinction by celebrated mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, whose encouragement after an auspicious meeting in early 1850 induced Gounod to contemplate the composition of an opera. Viardot increased the persuasiveness of her motivation by renegotiating her contract with the Opéra de Paris for the 1850 - 1851 Season to include a stipulation that Gounod must be commissioned to write an opera. The commission was duly issued, a libretto was obtained from eminent man of letters Émile Augier, and the eventual composer of Faust and Roméo et Juliette immersed himself in the legend of history’s earliest female lyric poet. The presence of Viardot and tenor Louis Guéymard, who would go on to create rôles in La nonne sanglante and La reine de Saba for Gounod, in the cast of the opera’s first production was insufficient to capture the public’s attention, but discerning ears noted a talent for writing for voices that merited espousal and nurturing.

Learning the title rôle in Sapho for Washington Concert Opera’s performance, in which she will be joined by tenor Addison Marlor as Phaon, soprano Amina Edris as Glycère, bass-baritone Musa Ngqungwana as Pythéas, and baritone Brian Vu as Alcée, under the baton of WCO’s Artistic Director Antony Walker, Lindsey is conscious of the influence that Pauline Viardot exerted upon the opera’s inspiration and genesis. ‘Viardot was absolutely committed to the dramatic nature of any piece she performed. She worked with Gounod from the ground up on this work,’ Lindsey recently said of Sapho. The individuality of her artistry is apparent in Lindsey’s work, but her renowned predecessor’s legacy in the propagation of Sapho looms large in her study of the part. ‘They wrote to each other constantly, as he lived in her country house, composing, while she was traveling and singing abroad,’ she said of Viardot and Gounod. ‘[Viardot’s] fingerprint is all over the score because she was such an essential element to the opera’s creation. Most specifically, she asked that the final aria [the oft-recorded ‘Ô ma lyre immortelle’] be modeled directly from Gounod’s beautiful “Chanson du pêcheur.” She found his original version of the opera’s conclusion too fragile and feeble for the character of Sapho, so she suggested this change, which Gounod readily embraced. Now, of course, it’s the most known music from this opera, so I suppose her instincts proved correct!’

Instinct is a vital component of Lindsey’s artistic constitution, and she has examined the disparities among Sapho’s plot and Twenty-First-Century perceptions of duty, integrity, and gender rôles with exceptional clarity and insight. Gounod’s and Augier’s tale of a woman who first forgives a man who betrays and curses her without full cognizance of the reasons for her actions and then ends her own life provides plentiful fodder for critics who revile opera’s dated sensibilities. Such censures are not wholly unjustified, Lindsey feels. ‘There probably is a chauvinistic element to all of this because [of] the social and cultural environments around which this opera was conceived and built,’ she admitted, but she went on to fervently articulate her confidence in Sapho’s timeless pertinence. ‘At the conclusion of this piece, I think most people would feel that Sapho is the character with the deepest level of integrity and conscience, which I think makes her incredibly strong. Her decision to sacrifice herself in order to protect the person she loves and to whom she must be loyal represents deep self-awareness and integrity.’ Sapho’s deeds are perhaps not palatable for modern audiences, the mezzo-soprano conceded, but the emotions that drive her are palpably, even painfully, relevant. ‘No, not many people would do that sort of thing today in the name of love, but, in a modern context, it’s not unlike what we ask from the military and many others in their willingness to sacrifice for love of country, cause, or conviction.’

Though Sapho will be performed in concert, a revealing aspect of Lindsey’s preparation for the performance is her erudite scrutiny of Sapho’s dramatic parallels with other rôles in—or soon to be in—her repertory. ‘[One] character I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel. In a year, I’ll be performing the rôle of Orlando in a new opera at the Wiener Staatsoper, so this character is on my mind a lot,’ she shared. She identifies a strong connection between Sapho and Orlando. ‘In the novel, Orlando is a poet in addition to being a character who seems to have eternal life, living on from generation to generation in a constantly-changing world. Not only that, Orlando begins the novel as a boy and then, many years later, he suddenly wakes up one day as a woman. There’s no doubt that Virginia Woolf, in writing this, was exploring layers [in] her own identity, and I’m fascinated to continue to examine and reflect upon this writer and the character of Orlando through whom she spoke.’ Lindsey’s observations suggest that, in a sense, this is a journey that began two-and-a-half millennia before Woolf’s lifetime with the historical Sappho‘s ‘Ode to Aphrodite.’

L’imperatore deviante: mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey as Nerone (rear), with soprano Sonya Yoncheva as Poppea (front), in Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at the 2018 Salzburger Festspiele
[Photograph by Maarten Vanden Abeele, © by Salzburger Festspiele]

It is tempting to presume that débuting a new rôle in concert is more congenial than singing it in a fully-staged performance, but Lindsey is mindful of the formidable challenges of forging a complete characterization without the benefits of scenic support. Daunting as this is, this adventurous singer is excited by the chance to find the character within the score rather than fitting the music to a director’s concept of the rôle. In the context of Washington Concert Opera’s performance, she stated with zest, ‘it’s all about the music. The drama derives entirely through the union of musicians on stage, and as singers we have to rely on our voices to convey the emotional and musical subtleties, which can sometimes be overshadowed in a big, staged production.’ This is not to say that Lindsey is immune to the thrill of the proverbial smell of the greasepaint, of course. ‘I certainly enjoy the big productions, which fill most of my schedule,’ she continued, ‘[but] it’s tremendously refreshing to return to the absolute essence of the music, especially in a new and less-familiar piece.’

In the 167 years since the first performance of Sapho, the opera’s fortunes have improved little. Many singers have included Sapho’s ‘Ô ma lyre immortelle’ in recitals, both on stage and on disc, but few of them have been advocates for Sapho. The score lacks the effortless emotional engagement of Faust and Roméo et Juliette, but its many musical and dramatic virtues can be very rewarding. To what can the neglect to which Sapho has been subjected be attributed? ‘I must say [that] I’m perplexed about this,’ Lindsey opined. ‘The only thing I can surmise is that it’s a rôle that really demands everything from one’s vocal range. For a mezzo, it is “death by high B” from the very start of the piece. For a soprano, perhaps it asks for too many moments of sustained lower-voiced passages.’

Lindsey is not the sort of singer who accepts an offer to perform a rôle simply because the notes that the part requires are in the voice. Offers to sing Sapho are unlikely to ever be plentiful, making Lindsey’s decision to participate in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Sapho an uniquely precious gift to Capital-Region opera lovers, but the rôle has still more attractions for this intrepid singer. ‘Well, Sapho is a woman, for one,’ she laughed. ‘For a singer who mostly plays trouser rôles, this is nice because subconsciously I find that there can be a different way I might approach the execution of a musical line or text based on the nature of the character.’ With Lindsey, though, the essence of any rôle is found in the composer’s music. ‘I enjoy the nobility with which [Sapho] is composed,’ she said. ‘In order to sing this, the voice has to be open, open, open! It’s a good lesson for me in that regard, as I don’t get so many opportunities to sing this sort of bel canto repertoire. It’s a real physical release to let the voice free in the currents of long, flowing, and soaring lines. Musically, it’s incredibly beautiful, impassioned, and poignant, and it contains multitudes of “goose-bump moments”.’

As Washington Concert Opera’s performance aims to prove, Sapho possesses all of these qualities, validating her status as a worthy sister to Faust and Roméo et Juliette. Washington Concert Opera patrons already know that incredible beauty, passion, poignancy, and an abundance of goose-bump moments are trademarks of Kate Lindsey’s artistry.

Passionate poetess: mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, star of Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Charles Gounod’s Sapho on 18 November 2018
[Photograph © by Rosetta Greek]

To learn more about Kate Lindsey’s career and upcoming engagements, please visit her official website.

Please click here to obtain more information or to purchase tickets for Washington Concert Opera’s 18 November concert performance of Sapho in Lisner Auditorium on the campus of The George Washington University.

Sincerest thanks to Ms. Lindsey for her thoughtful and thought-provoking responses to questions for this Spotlight.

JARMILA NOVOTNÁ (1907 – 1994): My Life in Song— Edited by William V. Madison; Foreword by Brian Kellow [The University Press of Kentucky ISBN 978-0-8131-7611-6 (hardbound) / 978-0-8131-7613-0 (PDF) / 978-0-8131-7612-3 (EPub); 296 pages with 60 photographs; Available from The University Press of Kentucky, Amazon (USA), and major literary retailers]

In the years since the tragic events of 11 September 2001, many aspects of society have changed in ways both unmistakable and barely perceivable. The atmosphere of unity that enveloped not only the United States of America but much of the world in the days and weeks following that devastating day, a kind of unity absent from humanity since the end of World War II, has been replaced by a morass of division and desensitized hatred in which decency struggles to maintain a foothold in the global conscience. Almost overnight, the necessity of ensuring the security of people and premises made the dressing rooms and backstage antechambers in which operaphiles of previous generations fêted beloved singers as inaccessible as the subterranean realm haunted by Gaston Leroux’s opera ghost. This opened a chasm between opera and its aficionados that tools like social media can only partially bridge. Opera may never have been miscreants’ target, but an integral component of its foundation was damaged.

In times of disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, opera thrives more than ever on glamour of the kind brought to the Metropolitan Opera between the World Wars by the ‘Tennessee nightingale,’ Grace Moore. Moore’s death at the age of only forty-eight in a January 1947 airplane crash, less than a year after her final performance at the MET, dimmed the glow of the company’s galaxy of stars, but two beautiful singers and fellow Hollywood leading ladies brought fresh infusions of chic to the MET roster: mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens (1913 – 2013; MET début on 22 November 1938, as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier) and soprano Jarmila Novotná. The University Press of Kentucky’s publication of a new edition of Novotná’s memoirs, My Life in Song, reintroduces this luminary of the operatic stage and silver screen, still known for her performance opposite Mario Lanza in MGM’s The Great Caruso, with a compelling sense of the magnetism that she wielded with the skill of a singing sorceress.

Born in Prague on 23 September 1907, Novotná studied with her countrywoman Emmy Destinn (1878 – 1930), now best remembered for creating the rôle of Minnie in Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West but whose career at the MET also included the American premières of D’Albert’s Tiefland, Catalani’s La Wally, Franchetti’s Germania, and Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya dama. Perhaps the most significant intersection in the sopranos’ respective repertoires was the rôle of Mařenka in Bedřich Smetana’s Prodaná nevĕsta (Die verkaufte Braut during Destinn’s 1909 – 1912 tenure in the part; The Bartered Bride in Novotná’s seven MET performances in 1941 and 1942), a spirited but dutiful young girl saved from a loveless arranged marriage by her heart’s chosen mate ultimately being discovered to be another son of the father to whose offspring she was betrothed. Novotná’s charm and charisma undoubtedly shone in her portrayal of Mařenka, but, beyond its musical attractions, the rôle surely had tremendous private significance for her.

Addio, del passato bei sogni ridenti: Czech soprano Jarmila Novotná as Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata at The Metropolitan Opera in 1940
[Photograph by Wide World Studio, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

After establishing herself in Berlin and Vienna, in which cities she partnered Richard Tauber in the world premières of Jaromír Weinberger’s Frühlingsstürme in 1933 and Franz Lehár’s Giuditta in 1934, the darkening political climate in Europe that culminated in the 1938 Anschluss Österreichs pressed Novotná into uprooting her operatic career and seeking safety on the opposite side of the Atlantic. It was as Mimì opposite Jussi Björling’s Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème that Novotná débuted at the MET on 5 January 1940. During the subsequent sixteen years, she was heard in New York as Gluck’s Euridice, Mozart’s Cherubino, Donna Elvira, and Pamina, Verdi’s Violetta, Wagner’s Freia, Antonia—and on a single occasional as Giulietta—in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, Massenet’s Manon, Orlofsky in Johann Strauß’s Die Fledermaus (the rôle in which she sang her last performance at the MET, on 15 January 1956), Richard Strauss’s Octavian, and Debussy’s Mélisande.

In editing Novotná’s memoirs for this publication, eminent television producer, author, and indefatigable advocate for opera and musical theatre William V. Madison preserved the candor that emanates from the singer’s chronicle whilst also producing a book that reads like the plot of a Tinseltown epic reduced to an intimate scale. A decade after Kristallnacht propelled Europe along the path to war, Novotná’s homeland was submerged in the deluge of post-World War II communism. Especially after her retirement from the MET, Novotná dedicated the conscientiousness that begat her reliable musicality to advocating for her countrymen’s freedom. As effective a player on the world stage as in opera houses, she championed the Czech people’s right to self-rule, endearing herself to a nation from which she was involuntarily absent for a half-century. The manifest sadness of Novotná’s longing for democracy in Czechoslovakia is balanced by the joy with which she describes her adventures in Hollywood, the world’s opera houses, and the art of living.

Vitally, it is Novotná’s voice that emerges from the pages of My Life in Song. Though Madison’s editorial adroitness is apparent throughout the book, there is no appreciable effort on his part to manage or manipulate the narrative or the subject’s artistic persona. The foreword by late Opera News editor Brian Kellow, both a meaningful tribute to its author and an affectionate prelude to Novotná’s story, launches the book’s trajectory, a course that Madison follows with the unerring instincts of an accomplished storyteller. This is not a chronology that buries the soul of its subject beneath mounds of valuable but tedious statistics: this is a book in which an artistic soul is reincarnated through her own words.

Both great artists and opportunities to interact with them are now sadly rare, victims of a changing world with changing priorities. For today’s opera lovers, that Jarmila Novotná was a great artist can only be discerned from recordings and accounts of her work, but My Life in Song initiates a deeply personal conversation between the reader and this intriguing lady, a quarter-century after her death. The harmonies in My Life in Song are sometimes discreetly updated, but the melodies remain Novotná’s own, sung as only she could sing them.

Eine schöne Göttin: Czech soprano Jarmila Novotná as Freia in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold at The Metropolitan Opera in 1944
[Photograph uncredited, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): Madama Butterfly— Jill Gardner (Cio-Cio-San), Cody Austin (Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton), David Pershall (Sharpless), Stephanie Foley Davis (Suzuki), Jacob Ryan Wright (Goro), Donald Hartmann (Lo zio Bonzo), Ryan Hill (Il principe Yamadori), Katie Horn-Pershall (Kate Pinkerton), Brian Kilpatrick (Lo zio Yakusidé), Christian J. Blackburn (Il commissario imperiale), Jacob Kato (L’ufficiale del registro), Kayla Brotherton (La madre di Cio-Cio-San), Clarice Weiseman (La zia di Cio-Cio-San), Leanna Crenshaw (La cugina di Cio-Cio-San), Samuel Pershall (Dolore); Greensboro Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Steven Byess, conductor [David Holley, Stage Director; James Bumgardner, Chorus Master; Jeff Neubauer, Lighting Designer and Technical Director; Greensboro Opera, UNCG Auditorium, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 9 November 2018]

There has been much and sometimes rancorous debate in recent years about the scope of the rôle played by the United States of America on the geopolitical stage. Since thirteen very different colonies intertwined their destinies and declared independence as a single, unified nation, the nature of that nation’s mandate to foster the cultivation of its ideals elsewhere in the world has fostered division in America and abroad. History abounds with instances of American intervention in global affairs, regarded by some observers as actions necessary to the preservation and propagation of democracy and by others as gross abuses of America’s influence. A fatal incarnation of the treacherous business of hearing what one wants to hear in pivotal discourse that afflicts modern society is the spark that ignites the tragedy of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Mesmerizingly staged in UNCG Auditorium by Greensboro Opera, the cultural conflict between Cio-Cio-San’s Japan and B. F. Pinkerton’s America hurled Madama Butterfly into the fractured political climate of the Twenty-First Century with heartbreaking frankness.

Unsuccessfully premièred at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in February 1904, subsequently revised, and reintroduced to acclaim in Brescia three months later, Madama Butterfly continued the fascination with women in dire circumstances already evident in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and La bohème. The ambitious Manon is felled by the harsh consequences of her own caprices, and the sweet-natured Mimì is betrayed by her body’s frailty, but, on the surface, Cio-Cio-San seems to retain a measure of control over her destiny. Beneath the ritualized veneer of traditional Japanese honor, her death is as much a result of judgment and disease as those of her Puccinian sisters, however. Abandoning the relative comfort of the life she knew in her first fifteen years, a life with many difficulties, Cio-Cio-San clings to an illusion of her own making. To Pinkerton, she is a plaything; an object of infatuation, without question, but a living trinket to be stored away with souvenirs of more boisterous times. For Cio-Cio-San, Pinkerton is a savior in Navy whites, at once husband, idol, and surrogate father. Blinded by his pursuit of fleeting pleasure, he realizes only after her wings are broken that his butterfly’s spirit is too pure to have recognized his caddishness. Ultimately serving as the instrument of retributive justice for her offenses against her principles, sacrificing herself in order to spare her child the indignity of her disgrace, Cio-Cio-San is more a sister to Bellini’s Norma than to Manon Lescaut and Mimì.

Tu? tu? piccolo Iddio: Samuel Pershall as Dolore in Greensboro Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 9 November 2018
[Photograph by Vanderveen Photography, © by Greensboro Opera]

Under the guidance of the company’s General and Artistic Director David Holley, Greensboro Opera’s production of Madama Butterfly focused on the opera’s timeless simplicities without overlooking its carefully-wrought, sometimes troubling intricacies. Himself an accomplished Pinkerton, Holley brought to his direction of the opera practical knowledge of both score and libretto, animating the characters’ exchanges with deep understanding of conversations in which he has participated. The essential elements of Madama Butterfly’s plot render it a piece that too often falls victim even in thoughtfully-conceived productions to tired clichés and stereotypes. Though a well-meaning product of its time, the broken-English dialogue for Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s source for the plot of Madama Butterfly, John Luther Long’s short story ‘Madame Butterfly,’ is embarrassingly primitive, more Mikado than Meiji. As in all of his work for Greensboro Opera and UNCG Opera Theatre, Holley’s direction of Madama Butterfly elucidated a myriad of details that, like pieces of a puzzle, assembled to produce an exceptionally faithful account of the opera. In Holley’s handling, Puccini’s and his librettists’ dictates were fully honored, proving, as Holley’s productions invariably do, that a venturesome musical imagination is inspired, not inhibited, by adherence to the score.

Designed for Sarasota Opera by David P. Gordon and constructed and painted by Center Line Studios, the sets for Greensboro Opera’s Madama Butterfly were evocatively utilitarian, the transformable house rented by Pinkerton for 999 years as diverting as Goro describes it to be. Jeff Neubauer’s lighting designs and technical direction reliably centered attention on the focal points of the drama, and stage manager Shelby Robertson and assistant stage managers Abigail Hart and Eliva Watson ensured that everything and everyone appeared where and when the production’s blocking prescribed. The costumes by Malabar Limited were tastefully colorful and approximated stylistic authenticity without unduly infringing upon the physical demands of singing. The sandals worn by Cio-Cio-San in Act One were an exception: obviously uncomfortable and impeding the singer’s ease of movement, the shoes were an unnecessary obstacle to the soprano’s performance. Trent Pcenicni’s wigs and makeup designs were also credibly Japanese but manageable. These visual elements of Greensboro Opera’s Madama Butterfly harmonized with Holley’s direction, transporting the audience to a Nagasaki of idealized natural beauty that contrasted portentously with the opera’s raw emotions.

Ancora un passo or via: the cast of Greensboro Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 9 November 2018
[Photograph by Vanderveen Photography, © by Greensboro Opera]

Musically, Madama Butterfly is a far more sophisticated, distinctly modern score than it has sometimes been admitted to be. There are passages of remarkably innovative orchestration not unworthy of comparison with the music of Igor Stravinsky. Much of Puccini’s writing for woodwinds is intoxicatingly sensual, strikingly so in the duet for Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton that ends Act One, heightening the exoticism and eroticism of the music. Conductor Steven Byess paced the performance with intelligently-chosen tempi that maintained momentum and allowed passages of particular significance to exert their dramatic gravity without exaggeration. Strangely, though, the tension that Byess carefully kindled throughout the performance dissipated in the opera’s final scene, causing Cio-Cio-San’s suicide—one of the most harrowing scenes in opera—to seem disappointingly anticlimactic. Balances between stage and pit were also often problematic: many of the singers’ lines disappeared into the orchestral cacophony. The auditorium’s acoustic may account for this, in part, but similar issues were not audible in Greensboro Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen in the same venue.

Under the direction of chorus master James Bumgardner, the choristers sang strongly, not least in the arduous Humming Chorus that bridges the transition between Acts Two and Three, and plausibly portrayed the denizens of Cio-Cio-San’s Nagasaki. Regrettably, it was a rough evening for their colleagues in the pit, instances of ragged ensemble, wiry string tone, and mistakes by the wind players compromising the musical integrity of the performance. There were plentiful passages that were splendidly played, nonetheless, and neither the professionalism nor the preparedness of the orchestra was ever doubted. Their popularity encourages the assumption that Puccini’s operas are not as demanding as other operas in the standard repertory, but this is an opinion with which anyone who has performed Madama Butterfly would surely disagree; and one that the sporadic flaws in Greensboro Opera’s characteristically well-rehearsed performance of Madama Butterfly contradicted.

A most welcome hallmark of Greensboro Opera productions under David Holley’s leadership is the high quality of the ensembles that he assembles, his shows treating Triad audiences to performances featuring artists in supporting rôles who are often better qualified than the singers engaged for leading parts by other companies. The value of this is perhaps easy for the casual spectator to underestimate, but the singers’ involvement is of even greater importance than a production’s scenic elements to the creation of a believable setting for the drama. This is especially true of Madama Butterfly, in a performance of which the impact of the opera’s tragedy relies upon the context established by the supporting players.

The stark reality of the cultural divide that ultimately claims Cio-Cio-San’s life roared into UNCG Auditorium in her uncle’s chilling denunciation of her conversion to Christianity, voiced with startling power by bass-baritone Donald Hartmann. This Zio Bonzo was unmistakably a scion of a way of life in which there is no sin greater than deviation from convention, and Hartmann’s sable-hued voice projected the character’s castigation of Cio-Cio-San with the devastating might of the Unzen volcano. Portrayal of the matriarchal contingency of Cio-Cio-San’s family was entrusted to mezzo-soprano Kayla Brotherton as her mother, soprano Clarice Weiseman as her aunt, and soprano Leanna Crenshaw as her cousin, each of whom enriched the ensemble, as did baritone Brian Kilpatrick’s depiction of Cio-Cio-San’s uncle ​Yakusidé.

Baritone Christian J. Blackburn authoritatively represented the Chrysanthemum Throne as the Imperial Commissioner, singing with vocal assurance and fittingly ceremonial bearing, and Jacob Kato shone in the Registrar​’s brief moment in the spotlight. ​Ryan Hill was an appropriately regal Yamadori, singing the earnest suitor’s music without the unbecoming whining often heard in the part. Looking like a figure who emerged from a Merchant Ivory film, Katie Horn-Pershall lent Pinkerton’s ‘sposa americana’ Kate an unusual sensitivity, diluting the poison of her cruel question to Sharpless about the veracity of Cio-Cio-San’s promise to surrender her child to the Pinkertons’ care. Young Samuel Pershall earned his ovation for his star turn as that child, a feisty lad who in this performance endearingly embodied his father’s—Pinkerton’s, that is—untamable personality.

Che tua madre: (from left to right) mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis as Suzuki, Samuel Pershall as Dolore, soprano Jill Gardner as Cio-Cio-San, and baritone David Pershall as Sharpless in Greensboro Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 9 November 2018
[Photograph by Vanderveen Photography, © by Greensboro Opera]

The marriage broker Goro was in tenor Jacob Ryan Wright’s portrayal more of an opportunistic meddler than a deplorable schemer, the sole motivation of his machinations being the acquisition of American greenbacks. He was clearly thoroughly pleased with his own ingenuity when educating Pinkerton on the tricks of his newly-leased house, and his commentary about Cio-Cio-San’s family history was the chatter of the community gossip rather than the venomous colloquy of a calculating villain. There was no spite in this Goro’s amused reaction to Cio-Cio-San’s naïveté, and the impetus that fueled his enthusiastic endorsement of Yamadori’s wooing was the hope of receiving a substantial financial reward for facilitating an advantageous liaison. There is nothing in either score or libretto to suggest that Goro’s concern for Cio-Cio-San transcends her commercial usefulness to him, but, ably voicing the part without sneering and derision, Wright interpreted Goro as a man whose avaricious maneuvering was not indicative of heartlessness.

This Madama Butterfly was incredibly fortunate to have in mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis as fine a Suzuki as has graced any performance in the opera’s 114-year history, on stage or in a recording studio. Suzukis capable of producing all of the notes required by the part are not uncommon, but Suzukis who produce all of the notes within the rôle’s compass with the ease and tonal beauty that Foley Davis wielded on Friday evening are extraordinarily rare. In Suzuki’s nervous patter in the opera’s first scene, the mezzo-soprano articulated each note clearly, and her diction allowed every word of the part to be understood. The heartfelt directness with which this Suzuki delivered her prayers was profoundly touching: when she asked her gods to end Cio-Cio-San’s weeping, the character’s sorrow cascaded through her voice. Pushing her apprehension aside, she joined Cio-Cio-San in a mellifluously girlish performance of the Flower Duet. Realizing in Act Three that Pinkerton has returned with his American wife in order to take custody of his child, Foley Davis’s Suzuki succinctly imparted her dread and despair in her unaffected statements of ‘povera Butterfly.’ The grief that flooded Foley Davis’s singing and acting of Suzuki’s final interaction with Cio-Cio-San was overwhelming. So absorbing was her performance that Suzuki’s response to Cio-Cio-San’s fate was as wrenching as the heroine’s demise. Foley Davis’s vocalism was nothing short of magnificent in a rôle that often endures mediocrity. Few of even the greatest Cio-Cio-Sans have been partnered by a Suzuki of this caliber.

Vogliateme bene: mezzo-soprano Jill Gardner as Cio-Cio-San (left) and tenor Cody Austin as Pinkerton (right) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 9 November 2018
[Photograph by Vanderveen Photography, © by Greensboro Opera]

A favorite with Greensboro Opera audiences, baritone David Pershall returned to the Gate City to portray the American consul Sharpless in Madama Butterfly. Though his credentials in pieces similar to Madama Butterfly include performances of Schaunard in La bohème at the Metropolitan Opera and a recent rôle début as Silvio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at San Francisco Opera, Sharpless offered Pershall few chances to display the best qualities of his artistry. His handsome voice traversed Puccini’s music with considerable bravado, but there was little in the rôle that elicited the resourceful interpretive scrutiny of which this gifted singer is capable. Sharpless’s exasperation with Pinkerton’s libidinous shortsightedness was palpable in Pershall’s performance, but this was not readily distinguishable from his attitude towards Cio-Cio-San, which communicated annoyance more than empathy. That is not an invalid reading of the part, especially from a perspective critical of American imperialism, but Puccini’s score conveys more compassion than irritation. There was tenderness in the scene in which Cio-Cio-San counters the consul’s tormented confirmation of Pinkerton’s abandonment by revealing her child, and Pershall voiced his part in the ensemble with Suzuki and Pinkerton in Act Three with increased immediacy. As the buffer between Cio-Cio-San’s innocence and Pinkerton’s duplicity, Pershall’s Sharpless was only partially effective, but the baritone’s singing deftly met all of the music’s requirements.

Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton is perhaps a model sailor when at sea, but his behavior as a ‘Yankee vagabondo’ in port dishonors his uniform and his country. He is one of opera’s most loathsome characters, but the most despicable Pinkerton is one who permits the audience to experience the charm that so enchants Cio-Cio-San. Vocally and histrionically, the performance of Greensboro Opera’s Pinkerton, tenor Cody Austin, was engaging but frustrating. The needed vocal and temperamental ranges were present, but the voice was not ideally controlled. Inspecting Goro’s handiwork in the opera’s opening scene, Austin’s Pinkerton was appropriately nonchalant, and the tenor managed the onslaught of top B♭s in his arias ‘Dovunque al mondo lo Yankee vagabondo’ and ‘Amore o grillo, dir non saprei’ without incident. His upper register was generally solid throughout the performance, but the accuracy of his intonation faltered in the lower reaches of the music. In his arias and in the expansive love duet with Cio-Cio-San, Austin’s phrasing was occasionally disjointed. Vocally, he was most confident when declaiming Pinkerton’s vehement repudiation of Cio-Cio-San’s admonishing relations. Austin’s most nuanced singing of the evening was reserved for the ensemble with Suzuki and Sharpless and the Act Three aria ‘Addio, fiorito asil.’ In these numbers, the line soared, and the voice’s metallic patina gleamed. Pinkerton’s impetuosity suited Austin’s emphatic style of singing, but the cumulative efficacy of his portrayal was compromised by vocal instability.

Io sono la fanciulla più lieta del Giappone: soprano Jill Gardner as Cio-Cio-San (center) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 9 November 2018
[Photograph by Vanderveen Photography, © by Greensboro Opera]

A noteworthy Puccinian whose portrayals of Tosca, Suor Angelica, and Minnie in La fanciulla del West have been justly lauded, soprano Jill Gardner renewed her acquaintance with Cio-Cio-San in Greensboro Opera’s Madama Butterfly, and hers was an interpretation of this singularly daunting rôle that was equally thrilling and affecting. From the start of Cio-Cio-San’s entrance music, ‘Ancora un passo or via,’ Gardner’s mastery of Puccini’s musical language was apparent in her phrasing, and she greeted the beginning of a new life with her American husband with a radiant interpolated top D♭. Evincing the guilelessness that the fifteen-year-old Cio-Cio-San should exude is beyond the capabilities of many sopranos, but Gardner believably evoked the girl’s youth without resorting to imprudent antics. The ambivalent doubt and burgeoning passion of the love duet were spiritedly bespoken by the soprano’s expressive singing, and her triumphant scaling of the heights of Puccini’s melodic lines was undermined only by a marginally flat top C at the duet’s conclusion.

In Act Two, hoarseness crept into the lower octave of Gardner’s voice, and she toiled valiantly to focus tones and retain projection. A few phrases strayed in the direction of Sprechstimme, but this is not without precedent: Margaret Sheridan, despite being on excellent form, employed similar effects in the performance recorded by Teatro alla Scala for Voce del padrone in 1929 - ’30, and she is known to have been cited by Puccini as a favorite interpreter of the rôle. Gardner sang ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ stirringly, and she emphasized Cio-Cio-San’s dignity in the interview with Sharpless. Injured by the consul’s words, her voicing of ‘Che tua madre dovrà’ was emotionally crushing. The exhausted joy of her sighting of Pinkerton’s ship in the harbor was followed by a performance of the Flower Duet in which the voice veritably waltzed through the theatre.

Brought by her overnight vigil to the brink of collapse, Gardner’s Cio-Cio-San sensed immediately upon seeing Kate Pinkerton waiting at the garden gate that the sole reason for their shared husband’s return was claiming his son. With that realization, the chill of death overtook her, and Gardner’s vocalism assumed an icy precision until the child’s unexpected appearance unnerved the fiercely protective mother, inciting an incendiary exclamation of ‘Tu? tu? piccolo Iddio.’ In Gardner’s portrayal, Cio-Cio-San’s death was agonizingly direct: hesitant for only an instant, she approached her work as executioner as solemnly as she esteemed her responsibilities as a mother. Gardner’s performance was a tremendous demonstration of a consummate artist’s perseverance. Integrating periodic vocal struggles into her depiction of Cio-Cio-San’s plight, Gardner made the girl’s suffering and sacrifice all the more moving.

Some musicologists continue to delight in ridiculing Puccini’s operas and the devotion they inspire among many opera lovers. Reviewing a 1911 Metropolitan Opera performance of Madama Butterfly in which Emmy Destinn sang the title rôle, a critic whose words have outlived his name wrote that ‘Puccini’s works, now that Madama Butterfly has become one of the most frequently-repeated operas of the season, are certainly maintaining the popularity which many persons have insisted they have deserved.’ Many persons have indeed insisted that Puccini’s operas merit the frequency with which they performed and have reinforced their advocacy with ticket purchases. Listening to the orchestra’s representation of the blade tearing Cio-Cio-San’s life from her body as Pinkerton calls to her cannot be described as pleasure, but Greensboro Opera’s performance of Madama Butterfly afforded the pained pleasure of shedding tears for a Cio-Cio-San who captivated and broke the heart. For all of its complications, the appeal of Madama Butterfly truly is that simple.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750), WILHELM FRIEDEMANN BACH (1710 – 1784), JOHANN LUDWIG KREBS (1710 – 1783), and JOHANN GOTTFRIED MÜTHEL (1728 – 1788): Music for Two Harpsichords — Jory Vinikour and Philippe LeRoy, harpsichords [28 Chairs; Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Asheville, Asheville, North Carolina, USA; Saturday, 20 October 2018]

In her informative but hardly enlightening autobiography, A Prima Donna’s Progress, legendary soprano Dame Joan Sutherland recalled of the experience of recording the title rôle in Georg Friedrich Händel’s oratorio Athalia with the Academy of Ancient Music in 1985 that ‘the old (or reconstructed to ancient specifications) instruments were frankly a bore, wasting enormous amounts of time being tuned and constantly losing pitch again.’ La Stupenda was a pioneering interpreter of Händel’s music whose ornamentation and unapologetically colossal-scaled vocalism, regarded as unorthodox by her contemporaries, now often seem surprisingly tasteful, especially in comparison with other singers’ excesses, but a visionary proponent of period-appropriate performance practices she clearly was not. Were she preparing to sing Alcina, Rodelinda, Cleopatra, or Athalia today, advances in the practical mechanics of historically-informed performances might alter Sutherland’s opinion, but resistance such as hers to the demands and results of playing period instruments is thankfully now unusual.

Not so long ago, playing the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries on modern pianos, for the Eighteenth-Century prototype of which Bach expressed disdain, was commonplace, not only in recitals but also on recordings. Bach’s mastery of form was advanced to a degree that makes adaptation of his music for instruments other than those for which it was composed feasible and often effective, but hearing Bach’s keyboard music played on instruments approximating the timbres and temperaments of the instruments of the composer’s time discloses attributes that the modern piano’s mechanism obscures. A well-attended recital in Asheville, North Carolina, by world-renowned keyboard virtuosi Jory Vinikour and Philippe LeRoy exhibited the bountiful musical pleasures to be had from experiencing the music of Bach and three composers of similar vintage played with an aesthetic approach that would have been familiar to them.

Presented in the lovely, intimate sanctuary of Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Asheville, the recital was organized by 28 Chairs, an enterprising, District of Columbia-based initiative launched and led by indefatigable arts advocate Jessica Honigberg. A feat like bringing a recital featuring two harpsichords to Asheville is typical of what Honigberg and 28 Chairs accomplish—and bringing her goal of hearing music for two harpsichords in her hometown to fruition was truly a feat! On loan from Elaine Funaro, the harpsichords were first transported the 220 miles from Durham to Asheville, a journey paralleling Bach’s famed 200-mile trek on foot from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear the Abendkonzerte organized by the renowned organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude, and then readied for the recital by noted harpsichord builder, restorer, and technician Richard Kingston. Honigberg’s efforts were rewarded with a performance that filled the beautiful space with music making worthy of it.

Repertoire written or successfully adapted for two harpsichords is sparse, but it is hardly surprising that one of the finest pieces in this genre is the work of Bach, whose prowess in writing for the keyboard set new standards for his own and subsequent generations of composers. In Asheville, Vinikour and LeRoy exhibited exceptional mastery of Bach’s intricate, intertwining writing in his Concerto in C major for two harpsichords (BWV 1061a). Navigating the complex rhythmic exchanges of the opening Allegro movement, Vinikour and LeRoy fostered the kind of artistic synergy that transcends the coordinated playing of notes. The antiphonal competition between the two instruments found ideal combatants in these musicians, whose very different styles accentuated the nuances of the composer’s ingenuity. The harpsichordists’ complementary phrasing shimmered in the delicate strains of the Adagio ovvero Largo movement. [Vinikour and LeRoy reprised the Adagio ovvero Largo as their encore, trading instruments for the second playing, and they found entirely new subtleties in the music.]​ Bach was arguably the foremost doyen of counterpoint in the whole history of music, and his handling of thematic development in BWV 1061a’s Fuga combines near-mechanical rhythmic precision with harmonic inventiveness that no algorithms could produce. The energy of Vinikour’s and LeRoy’s playing as subjects flowed between them was electrifying.

Born during his father’s second tenure in Weimar, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was the eldest son of Bach and his first wife, Maria Barbara. His reputation is now overshadowed to some extent by the wider familiarity of the work of his younger brothers Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, but Wilhelm Friedemann possessed musical intelligence of the highest order and inherited his father‘s penchant for seeking his own artistic path. The innovative spirit of his compositional style is apparent in his Sonata in F major for two harpsichords, brilliantly played in Asheville by Vinikour and LeRoy. Their delivery of the passagework in the sonata‘s Allegretto e moderato movement was the musical equivalent of an extended volley between two tennis dynamos, and here, as in their performance of the elder Bach’s concerto, the clarity with which these artists communicate was unmistakable. The rhapsodic nature of LeRoy‘s playing was particularly suited to the lyricism of the central Andante movement, his beautifully-phrased answers to Vinikour’s statements like the echoes of lovers’ sighs. The Presto‘s rapid-fire figurations could find no better exponents than this pair: wholly untouched by artifice, their performance of this exhilarating music radiated the pure delight of fastidiously-cultivated artistic camaraderie.

For the recital’s second half, Vinikour and LeRoy looked beyond the Bach family without leaving Johann Sebastian’s circle of acquaintance. Johann Ludwig Krebs studied the organ under Bach’s tutelage in Leipzig, and his Concerto in A minor for two harpsichords, though slightly more Classical in construction than the bulk of Bach‘s music in similar form, bears the hallmarks of the teacher’s influence. Vinikour’s and LeRoy’s playing of the Allegro movement that launches Krebs’s Concerto also displayed the symbiotic attention to detail that characterized their performance of Bach’s music. As is often true of these artists’ work, their imaginative articulation of even the most intricate writing yielded surprising expressivity, disclosing seldom-explored emotional gradations in the music. In this performance, the central Affettuoso movement was reminiscent in its hypnotic interaction between the instruments, if not in basic structure or thematic material, of the duet for Andonico and Aspasia in Händel’s Tamerlano, ‘Vivo in te, mio caro bene.’ The Concerto’s final Allegro movement received from Vinikour and LeRoy a reading of indefatigable effervescence, the unexpected hairpin turns in the music’s harmonic progression executed with suspenseful spontaneity.

Like Krebs, Johann Gottfried Müthel also studied with Bach, arriving in Leipzig only months before Bach’s death on 28 July 1750. His direct exposure to Bach’s erudition was brief, but Müthel undoubtedly learned much from that fleeting experience and from the legacy of Bach’s stint as cantor of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche. Müthel’s Duetto in E♭ major for two keyboards, published in 1771 with the designation of ‘für 2 Claviere, 2 Flügel, oder 2 Fortepiano,’ was the most galant in style of the music heard in this recital, the writing in the Allegro moderato, e cantabile movement prefiguring Muzio Clementi’s music for pianoforte. Vinikour and LeRoy reveled in the conversational reciprocity of the music. Müthel’s musical language being better-suited to instruments of later design than to the harpsichords in Asheville, the Adagio mesto e sostenuto, con affetto movement was sensibly omitted, but the concluding Allegretto was played with vitality that made use of every capability of the instruments at Vinikour’s and LeRoy’s disposal.

Despite conscientious endeavors by champions of historically-accurate performance practices, including Jory Vinikour and Philippe LeRoy, whose founding of Great Lakes Baroque brought appropriately-performed music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries to metropolitan Milwaukee, period instruments and performances of music written for them remain relatively scarce in many parts of the United States. Performances like this 28 Chairs recital in Asheville are the most effective campaigners for a bolder presence for period instruments in America, but, in reality, playing like Vinikour’s and LeRoy’s will never be bountiful in Asheville, Amsterdam, or Abu Dhabi. Musicianship such as theirs is so rare that it is itself virtually a period instrument.

Baroque in the Blue Ridge: the harpsichords played by Jory Vinikour and Philippe LeRoy in recital in Asheville, North Carolina, on 20 October 2018
[Photograph by the author, © 2018 by Joseph Newsome / Voix des Arts]

VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835), GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848), and GASPARE SPONTINI (1774 – 1851): Spirito— Marina Rebeka (soprano); Irene Savignano (soprano), Marco Ciaponi (tenor), Francesco Paolo Vultaggio (baritone), Gianluca Margheri (bass-baritone); Coro ed Orchestra del Teatro Massimo di Palermo; Jader Bignamini, conductor [Recorded at Teatro Massimo, Palermo, Sicily, Italy, in July 2018; Prima Classic PRIMA001; 1 CD, 77:57; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

When hearing recent performances of operas by Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, and their contemporaries, it has been all too easy to forget that, freely translated, bel canto means ‘beautiful singing.’ Discussion of whether the singing of the artist widely celebrated as the Twentieth Century’s foremost exponent of this repertory, Maria Callas, truly epitomized the beauty of vocal emission that is so fundamental a component of bel canto continues more than a half-century after her last performances of bel canto rôles, but few operaphiles, even those whose experiences of Callas’s artistry are confined to recordings, would dispute the assertion that Callas’s gallery of bel canto heroines indelibly altered perceptions of this music and notions of how and by whom it is sung.

In the four decades since Callas’s death, assessments of her career have engendered debate about whether any bona fide successors to her legacy as guardian of bel canto have emerged. There have been fine voices and earnest, thoughtful interpreters of an ever-expanding array of bel canto rôles, to be sure, but has their work sustained and advanced Callas’s revitalization of bel canto repertory? The paradox of Callas’s artistry is that, for all the emotional complexity of her characterizations, her method of bringing rôles to life was remarkably simple: the foundation of every performance was fidelity to the score, allied with an intuitive musicality that approached every music difficulty as an extension of a character’s dramatic situation. In this unteachable amalgamation of musical integrity and dramatic sincerity, Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka has proved in the last decade to be an uniquely-qualified champion of her own variation on the Callas mystique. Her homage is not the flattery of mimicry but the advancement of Callas’s sublimely uncomplicated concept of bel canto.

In the first half of the Twentieth Century, a soprano’s path to operatic stardom deviated from the course traveled in previous generations by Giuditta Pasta, Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, and Dame Nellie Melba. With larger theatres came instrumental ensembles and operatic dramas on scales calibrated to fill them, and voices were required to adapt by projecting greater volume over greater distances. By the middle of the Twentieth Century, the vehicles of career-defining triumphs on the world’s operatic stages were more likely to be operas by Verdi, Wagner, or Puccini than the bel canto scores in which prime donne of the Nineteenth Century made their reputations.

The persistent implications of this paradigm shift notwithstanding, the essential tenets of bel canto technique, foremost among which is an inviolable concentration on maintaining purity of line, remained unchanged. Though sung in Italian translation rather than the composer’s German, a 1962 RAI Torino broadcast performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg affirms with an ensemble of voices that seem better-suited to L’elisir d’amore or Don Pasquale than to Wagner repertory—Giuseppe Taddei as Hans Sachs, Bruna Rizzoli as Eva, Luigi Infantino as Walther von Stolzing, and Renato Capecchi as Beckmesser—that there are natural habitats for bel canto even in artistic territory with musical topography very different from that found in the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. Rebeka’s Mimì in Wiener Staatsoper’s November 2018 revival of Puccini’s La bohème perpetuated this employment of bel canto technique in performance of other repertory. In the work of some singers, this sort of stylistic synthesis might be construed as evidence of laziness or incomplete training, but, like Callas, Rebeka exhibits uncommon awareness of the intrinsic bel canto in every piece that she sings.

Expanding a discography that already includes beautifully-sung recordings of operatic arias and scenes by Mozart and Rossini and performances of Vitellia in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito and Verdi’s Luisa Miller, Rebeka débuts on new label Prima Classic with Spirito, an insightfully-curated, lovingly-presented, and superbly-recorded programme of scenes from Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma and Il pirata, Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda and Anna Bolena, and Gaspare Spontini’s too-little-performed La vestale. Aided by Latvian National Opera’s music librarian Marija Beate Straujupe in an exploration of autograph materials that revealed that, after two centuries of scrutiny by performers and scholars, many discrepancies separate composers’ original intentions from modern performance traditions, Rebeka imbued Spirito with an aura of indefatigable advocacy for this music before singing a note.

The magnitude of her dedication to restoring glamour to this repertory is complemented by the idiomatic performances of the Teatro Massimo di Palermo chorus and orchestra and the elegant, elastic conducting of Jader Bignamini. Spirito is markedly enriched by the participation of a team of artists whose work displays focus on an unified aesthetic goal: with musicianship of this caliber supporting her singing, the listener is freed to contemplate the beauties of Rebeka’s vocal tableaux without fearing that their foundation will crumble beneath her.

Rebeka’s career to date at the Metropolitan Opera, where she débuted in 2011, includes much-lauded outings as Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Mathilde in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, and Musetta in Puccini’s La bohème. In October 2017, she sang two performances of the title rôle of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, a part added to her repertory in Trieste in 2016, and she opens Spirito with an assured, affectionately-sung account of the scene in which Bellini’s heroine is introduced to the listener.

Giuditta Pasta, Bellini’s first Norma, uninhibitedly expressed her reservations about the musical and dramatic viability of her entrance aria, the rightly-feared ‘Casta diva.’ To her credit, her apologies were equally uninhibited when the composer’s faith in the music’s power to move audiences was rewarded with an euphoric reception for the piece. No other music in opera surpasses the elongated cantilene of ‘Casta diva’ as a paragon of the purest bel canto, and Rebeka’s singing of the aria exudes profound respect for Bellini’s melodic inspiration. She navigates the ascending phrases with the formidable breath control that the writing demands but so seldom receives, and her clear, unaffected diction elucidates the emotional depth of the composer’s treatment of the text. Here and in all of the scenes on Spirito, she is equally successful in communicating the dramatic trajectories of passages of recitative. Rebeka delivers the cabaletta ‘Ah! bello a me ritorna’ with technical brilliance, managing the music’s tessitura and intricate fiorature with an exuberance that diversifies her depiction of Norma’s temperament. Among the courageous ladies who sing Norma, many sopranos excel in either the aria or the cabaletta: few are the singers who, as Rebeka does on Spirito, fully master all of the music in this daunting scene.

Four years prior to the première of Norma, Bellini enjoyed a resounding success with the introduction of his Il pirata at La Scala, advancing the reputation for melodic fecundity instigated by his earlier work. The rôle of Imogene in the first production of Il pirata was entrusted to Henriette Méric-Lalande, whose connection with Bellini began a year earlier in Naples with the première of Bianca e Gernando and who went on to be the first Adelaide in Bellini’s La straniera in 1829 and the creator of the title rôle in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in 1833. In the Twentieth Century, Imogene’s music was dominated first by Maria Callas, whose staged performances at La Scala and 1959 Carnegie Hall concert performance with American Opera Society are still discussed with reverence, and then by Montserrat Caballé, whose espousal produced the first studio recording of Il pirata.

Rebeka’s selection of the opera’s final scene for inclusion on Spirito broadens a continuing revival of interest in Il pirata. The melancholic prelude to the opera’s final scene receives from Bignamini and the Palermo musicians a performance of haunting beauty, the exquisite writing for cor anglais and flute delivered with expressive finesse. The soprano makes ‘Oh! s’io potessi’ a very personal utterance, the maelstrom of the character’s feelings churning in the vocalism. Rebeka intones ‘Col sorriso d’innocenza’ with subtlety that heightens the emotional impact of Bellini’s delicately-crafted vocal line. As in the scene from Norma, she utilizes the music linking Imogene’s aria and cabaletta as a portal into the character’s constitution, finding within the composer’s setting of words like ‘Qual suono ferale’ the essence of the psychological trials that Imogene faces in the course of Il pirata. The grim resignation of ‘Oh! Sole! Ti vela di tenebre oscure’ is powerfully realized in Rebeka’s performance, her timbre brightening as waves of anguish and defiance flood the music. Bignamini’s sensible tempo for the cabaletta enables the singer to give every note its due, and she capitalizes on this opportunity to provide a traversal of this music that is notable for both its accuracy and its emotive efficacy.

The title rôle in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda was created in the opera’s 1835 première by another of the Nineteenth Century’s most renowned singers, the Spanish-born Maria Malibran. Daughter of the tenor and pedagogue Manuel García, Rossini’s first Conte Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Malibran was heiress to a vocal tradition that was a cornerstone of bel canto. Joined in the performance of the finale ultima of Maria Stuarda on this disc by tenor Marco Ciaponi as Roberto, the Earl of Leicester, baritone Francesco Paolo Vultaggio as Lord Guglielmo Cecil, soprano Irene Savignano as Anna Kennedy, and bass-baritone Gianluca Margheri as Giorgio Talbot, each of whom sings with discernible involvement, Rebeka established herself in a 2016 Riga concert performance of the opera as an interpreter of La Stuarda with the potential to rival Leyla Gencer’s, Caballé’s, and Beverly Sills’s unforgettable portrayals of the doomed Queen of Scots. She furthers this impression with her graceful but gutsy singing on Spirito.

The controlled conflagration of Rebeka’s singing of Bellini’s music also flickers in her performance of Donizetti’s work. Vitally, the passions that she evinces are always those present in the music. The indignation of a wronged woman enlivens the soprano’s declamation of ‘Io vi rivedo alfin!’ The nobility of her voicing of ‘Deh! Tu di un’umile preghiera’ intimating the character’s aristocratic bearing, this Stuarda is a queen to the marrow of her bones even when facing execution. Again following the emotional courses of the music, Rebeka wrenchingly conveys the gravitas of the sentiments that torment the condemned woman in her final moments. There is nonetheless a serenity in her singing of ‘Ah! Se un giorno da queste ritorte’ that touchingly asserts the heroine’s unwavering belief in the righteousness of her actions. No less unfaltering is Rebeka’s technical acumen. She unflinchingly articulates the passagework and ascends above the stave without grandstanding. There is an undeniable vein of showmanship in this music, but, as Rebeka sings it here, it is as much the character as the singer who displays the marvels of her voice.

The operatic incarnation of the second wife of Henry VIII in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, premièred at Milan’s Teatro Carcano a year to the day before Bellini’s Norma reached the stage of La Scala, was, like Norma, also a Pasta rôle. Callas’s interpretation of the title rôle in La Scala’s groundbreaking 1957 production of Anna Bolena instituted a benchmark to which other singers’ efforts are compared, almost universally unfavorably. Rebeka made her rôle début as Anna Bolena at Opéra National de Bordeaux on 5 November 2018, and like her Maria Stuarda, her inaugural depiction of Anna was already a distinguished portrayal.

The voices of Percy and Smeton in this recorded performance of Anna Bolena’s closing scene are provided by Ciaponi and Savignano, who again sing attractively and characterfully. Rebeka interacts with them and the gruesome reality of Anna’s fate as though on stage, voicing ‘Piangete voi?’ with moving desperation and umbrage. The innate dignity of the soprano’s reading of ‘Al dolce guidami,’ the centerpiece of what is typically described as a mad scene but is in Rebeka’s handling a study of a woman in complete command of her faculties grappling with the consequences of circumstances beyond her control, is enhanced by the unflappable musicality of her phrasing. The ugliness of the character’s impending demise never imperils the tonal beauty with which ‘Che mai sento’ is sung. The interpolated E♭ in alt with which Rebeka resolves her forceful, imaginatively-ornamented account of the cabaletta ‘Coppia iniqua’ sounds slightly strained, but it ably imparts the exasperation of a fiercely proud woman meeting an unjust end, and it excitingly concludes an inspired, intrepid performance of this music.

There is perhaps a parable about opera’s incessant struggle for acceptance beyond the ranks of its devotees to be gleaned from the fact that Saint-Domingue-born soprano Alexandrine-Caroline Branchu is now most remembered by history not for her creation of the rôle of Julie in the 1807 Paris première of Gaspare Spontini’s La vestale but for her brief stint as Napoléon Bonaparte‘s paramour. In terms of frequency of performance, La vestale may be the least-familiar of the operas sampled on Spirito, but Julie is a rôle embraced by acclaimed bel canto divas including Callas, Gencer, Renata Scotto, and Caballé, albeit in Italian translation rather than Spontini’s authentic French.

For this recorded survey of Julie’s scene from Act One of La vestale, Rebeka prefers the original French, and it is apparent from the first words of ‘Ô des infortunés’ that her mastery of French vowels comes within a diphthong’s distance of equaling the quality of her Italian diction. The attention devoted to textual nuances in the Bellini and Donizetti selections is similarly valuable in the soprano’s singing of Spontini’s music. The poise with which she enunciates ‘Toi, que j’implore avec effroi’ befits a priestess of Vesta, but there is no lack of the ardor expected of a young woman in love with a Roman general. Rebeka envelops the vocal line with singing of silken sensuality, her zeal potently limning the conflict between duty and desire that vexes Julie. The meaning of the words and Spontini’s musical response thereto propel this performance of ‘Sur cet autel sacré’ to a lofty summit of expression. The kinship between Julie’s ‘Impitoyables Dieux’ and Elettra’s incendiary ‘D’Oreste, d’ajace’ in Mozart’s Idomeneo, re di Creta is unmistakable, and Rebeka immerses herself in the music’s volatile deluge with Callas-like intensity. Comparisons with Callas and other eminent mistresses of bel canto are inevitable, but one of Rebeka’s most commendable accomplishments on Spirito is honoring the traditions of both the original and later interpreters of the music whilst cultivating her own mesmerizing individuality.

Too often, analyses of bel canto singing are hijacked by obsessions with fanciful coloratura and interpolated high notes. These of course can be enjoyable aspects of bel canto performances, but it is unlikely that Bellini, Donizetti, or Spontini would have cited a singer’s agility or prowess above the stave as the most important trait that a Norma, Imogene, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, or Julie should possess. As the creators of this music would appreciate, her bravura technique and gleaming upper register are but two of the joys of Rebeka’s singing on Spirito. It is the sensitivity of her musical recreations of the plights of five fascinating ladies that is the disc’s heart. Many singers perform and record this repertory, but this recording asserts Marina Rebeka’s manifestation of the true spirito of bel canto.

[1] KARL FRIEDRICH ABEL (1723 – 1787), THOMAS AUGUSTINE ARNE (1710 – 1778), SAMUEL ARNOLD (1740 – 1802), JOHANN CHRISTIAN BACH (1735 – 1782), WILLIAM BATES (died 1778), EGIDIO DUNI (1708 – 1775), WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791), DAVIDE PEREZ (1711 – 1778), GIOVANNI BATTISTA PESCETTI (circa 1704 – 1766), and GEORGE RUSH (circa 1730 – circa 1780): Mozart in London— Rebecca Bottone, Eleanor Dennis, Anna Devin, Martene Grimson, Ana Maria Labin (sopranos); Helen Sherman (mezzo-soprano); Ben Johnson, Robert Murray (tenors); Steven Devine (harpsichord); The Mozartists; Ian Page, conductor [Recorded during live performances at Milton Court, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, UK, 20 – 22 February 2015; Signum ClassicsSIGCD534; 2 CDs, 144:50; Available from Signum Records, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Grabmusik, K. 42/35a (original 1767 version) and Bastien und Bastienne, K. 50 (original 1768 version)— Anna Lucia Richter (Der Engel, Bastienne), Jacques Imbrailo (Die Seele), Alessandro Fisher (Bastien), Darren Jeffery (Colas); The Mozartists; Ian Page, conductor [Recorded at Blackheath Concert Halls, Blackheath, London, UK, 7 – 9 January 2018; Signum ClassicsSIGCD547; 1 CD, 66:24; Available from Signum Records, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Unlike most of the Twenty-First Century’s population centers, London was by the turn of the Nineteenth Century a teeming metropolis. It is estimated that, by the time of the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, London’s streets were congested by the traffic of 100,000 residents, and nearly 1.1 million Londoners were counted when the first modern census was conducted in 1801. Eight hundred miles away, there were likely 15,000 inhabitants of the Austrian city of Salzburg, then an independent archiepiscopal seat, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born there on 27 January 1756. Neither a small town as suggested by the fictional incarnation of Antonio Salieri who appears in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus nor the cultural Hinterland depicted in early biographies of Mozart, Salzburg was nevertheless dwarfed by London, which the composer’s youthful eyes first beheld on 23 April 1764, when he arrived from the Continent with his father and sister, poised to beguile the music-loving denizens of Georgian society.

It is hardly surprising that London should have exerted a strong effect upon the young Salzburger, his native city’s hilltop Schloss so different from the English capital’s elegant palaces. For the modern traveler visiting London for the first time, the enormity of the place can be daunting, but it is difficult to fathom how a boy with only eight years to his credit must have reacted to the city’s splendors. With the cataclysmic fire of 1666 less than a century in past at the time of the Mozarts’ arrival, many of Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpieces were then still new by London standards. Still recent, too, was the absence from the London musical scene of Georg Friedrich Händel, who died on 14 April 1759. History has extolled Paris and Vienna as the centers of musical innovation in the Eighteenth Century, but the musical legacy of Georgian Britain rivals that of the period’s much-lauded literature.

That Leopold Mozart elected to remain in Britain for fifteen months, departing on the homeward journey on 24 July 1765, demonstrates that the discerning father valued the educational benefit of Wolfgang’s and his sister Nannerl’s extended exposure to England’s music and musicians. Subsequent generations have judged Vater Mozart harshly, deeming him to have been an unapologetic opportunist whose concern for his children’s well-being was outweighed by his cognizance of their earnings potential, but the nurturing of their natural talents that their work ultimately revealed at least provisionally rehabilitates Leopold’s parental reputation.

Unfortunately, none of Nannerl’s compositions are known to have survived, but her younger brother’s works on The Mozartists’ and Ian Page’s Signum Classics release Mozart in London, as well as his 1767 Grabmusik (K. 42/35a) and 1768 Singspiel Bastien und Bastienne (K. 50), the featured pieces on a subsequent Mozartists recording, vindicate the wisdom of Leopold’s judgment. In his correspondence, Mozart often discussed the influence of fellow composers whose music he admired, but the misconception that the creator of Così fan tuttle and Die Zauberflöte was the product solely of his own genius regrettably persists. Exploring music likely to have captivated his inquisitive young ears in 1764 and 1765, Mozart in London melodiously provides Mozart’s musical growth with historically-appropriate context.

Had encounters with The Mozartists and Ian Page transpired during the Mozarts’ 457 days in England, the family might well have remained in London indefinitely. A lingering problem in performances of music dating from the first two decades of Mozart’s life is the tendency to approach the music from the perspective of the works of his final fifteen years, unnecessarily and in many cases detrimentally imposing an inflated grandiosity on the music. No one now questions the legitimacy of Mozart’s genius: performing the works of his youth as though were written with the same inventiveness that shaped later pieces enlarges the distance between Mozart and the listener. This is a mistake never made by The Mozartists, whose goal to recreate the sound world in which Mozart was immersed in London in the 1760s is achieved with that most vital of historically-informed virtues—common sense.

In terms of aural balances, clarity, and avoidance of distracting noises off, these discs, recorded during concerts in London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, offer the listener an ideal sonic environment in which to appraise the novelties of this music. This is of course inconsequential if the quality of the performances is inferior to that of the recorded sound. Page ensures that the musicianship on Mozart in London is pristine, conducting with his customary stylistic flexibility and unflagging concentration. The musical dialects spoken by these pieces range from late Baroque to fledgling Romantic, and Page communicates effectively in each of them. The Mozartists play with indefatigable elegance that never stands in the way of evincing the music’s inherent passions. The instrumentalists play with an incontestable sense of responsibility for the successes of both Mozart in London and their performances of Grabmusik and Bastien und Bastienne. Their endeavors engender discs for which any musician would be proud to claim responsibility.

The composer’s shade hopefully will not be too incensed by the assertion that the selections from Mozart’s own early compositions are the least-interesting pieces included on Mozart in London, though only because they are not new to recordings. Performances of these works are not even a fraction as frequent as are those of his later music, but they are far from unknown. Rarely are they played as idiomatically as in these performances, however. Composed in Chelsea during August or September 1764, whilst his father convalesced from a minor malady, the Symphony No. 1 in E♭ major (K. 16) is a piece with ebullience that is little encumbered by musical reflections of characteristic English clouds and fogs. Page insightfully manages the tempo transitions among the Molto allegro, Andante, and Presto movements, his pacing brisk but by no means rushed.

The Allegro, Andante, and Presto chapters in the narrative of Symphony No. 4 in D major (K. 19) also receive nuanced but persuasively straightforward readings. The composer’s manuscript misplaced and feared lost for two centuries, the Symphony in F major (K. 19a) was Mozart’s inaugural venture in symphonic form, and it is here played with an apt air of discovery. Page and The Mozartists energetically limn the youthful zest of the Allegro assai and Presto movements, and the delicacy with which they articulate the melodic lines of the Andante exhibits what an ear for beauty that Mozart already possessed at the age of eight.

A setting of words from Pietro Metastasio’s much-used libretto Ezio, ‘Va, dal furor portata’ (K. 21) was Mozart’s first concert aria and was likely never performed during the composer’s lifetime. The performance by tenor Ben Johnson on Mozart in London is enjoyable despite fleeting insecurity in passagework. From the inception of his composition of vocal music, Mozart wielded a rare affinity for identifying the innate musicality of words, whether in German, Italian, or Latin. Johnson’s clear diction enables the listener to fully appreciate the cleverness of Mozart’s reaction to Metastasio’s text, and his burnished but light-textured voice perfectly suits the music.

Karl Friedrich Abel was among the German-speaking composers who followed the Hannoverian dynasty to London, led by Händel’s example. Rediscovery of his music has disclosed that he was a pioneering symphonist who deserves to be recognized in the company of the innovative Haydn brothers. In this performance by Page and The Mozartists, Abel’s Symphony in E♭ major (Op. 7, No. 6) is proved to be worthy of inclusion not just in this programme but also in the standard orchestral repertoire. The vivacity of the opening Allegro movement crackles in the strings, and the genteel part writing with which the composer wove the Andante is delivered with focus on the music’s aural tapestry. As in the concluding movements of Mozart’s symphonies, Page sets a tempo for Abel’s Presto that is utterly right for the music.

Square deal: a view of London’s Grosvenor Square, circa 1750, in an engraving by T. Bowles
[Image © by Mayson Beaton Collection]

Now principally remembered for the rousing ‘Rule, Britannia’ from his Masque of Alfred, Thomas Arne was one of Eighteenth-Century Britain’s most gifted native sons. A master of many of the musical forms in vogue during his career, he garnered considerable praise with his penchant for writing stirring works for the stage with texts in English—an aspect of his artistry that, surveyed by an ensemble of expert musicians, enlivens this visit to London as Mozart knew it. Sampling Arne’s oratorio Judith, soprano Ana Maria Labin sings a pair of arias that confirm their composer’s work to have merited Mozart’s admiration. First, she phrases the enchanting ‘Sleep, gentle Cherub! Sleep descend,’ a piece that would not sound out of place in Händel’s Orlando, with superb breath control, heightening the emotional impact of the words and the auditory luster of her evenly-produced tones. The wrenching ‘O torment great, too great to bear’ renders Arne’s Israelite woman a cousin of Händel’s Theodora, and Labin reanimates this finely-crafted music with stylish but ingratiatingly full-bodied vocalism.

During his time in England, Mozart studied singing under the tutelage of the noted castrato Giusto Fernando Tenducci, who created the rôle of Arbaces in Artaxerxes, the only one of Arne’s operas to have seized a foothold in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, aided in no small part by the initiative of Classical Opera, Ian Page, and Signum Classics. For Mozart in London, mezzo-soprano Helen Sherman stands in for Tenducci as Arbaces, singing two of the character’s arias with technical assurance and emotional honesty that teach the listener about what Mozart likely learned in London two-and-a-half centuries ago. Sherman’s account of ‘Amid a thousand racking woes’ exhilarates, the singer’s command of the requisite musical idiom allied with perceptive use of the words. No less rousing is her singing of the very different but equally engrossing ‘O too lovely, too unkind.’ In both arias, her voice gleams. Composers and fellow singers could learn much from Sherman’s singing of this music.

As performed by soprano Rebecca Bottone and tenor Robert Murray, the most delightful of Arne’s pieces on Mozart in London is the duet ‘O Dolly, I part’ from The Guardian Outwitted. As they disclose in their individual assignments, they are exemplary exponents of this repertoire: combining their voices and their histrionic skills, they bring Dolly and her swain to life and make the centuries that divide today’s listeners from them disappear. Bottone’s upper register strikes like lightning, electrifying her exchange with Murray. She goes on to sing ‘Hist, hist! I hear my mother call,’ one of the numbers that Samuel Arnold composed himself for his pastiche The Maid of the Mill, with disarming simplicity. Arnold also included a number from Italian composer Egidio ​Duni​’s 1758 opera La fille mal gardée in The Maid of the Mill, given in English as ​​‘To speak my mind of womankind,’ and Murray’s brilliantly mercurial singing accentuates the music’s tremendous charm. Displaying the well-honed versatility of her own artistry, Bottone tenders a mellifluous tribute to the craftsmanship of the forgotten William Bates with an evocatively unaffected performance of ‘In this I fear my latest breath’ from Pharnaces.

The names of Giovanni Battista Pescetti and George Rush are now little more than footnotes in the chronicles of music in the Eighteenth Century, but their work was sufficiently regarded in the 1760s for it to be likely that Mozart heard some of their music during his time in Britain. Voicing ‘Caro mio bene, addio,’ an aria by Pescetti included by the production’s primo uomo in a pastiche version of Metastasio’s Ezio staged at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket in November 1764, with appealing tone and earnest feeling, soprano Martene Grimson stimulates curiosity about what other gems are hidden among this composer’s scores. The success of the 1764 Drury Lane première of George Rush’s The Capricious Lovers did not prevent its librettist, Robert Lloyd, from ending his own life less than a month after the opera’s opening, but the three-part Overture, an example of the type of operatic Sinfonia that evolved into the Classical symphony that receives from The Mozartists a reading of aptly-scaled buoyancy, understandably enjoyed popularity as a concert piece that outlived the titular lovers’ presence on the stage. Had artists active in the years that separate Rush’s lifetime from the Twenty-First Century sung ‘Thus laugh’d at, jilted and betray’d’ as Robert Murray sings it on Mozart in London, The Capricious Lovers might never have ceded its grasp on the public’s attention.

Born in Naples but most known for his tenure at the Lisbon court of José I, Davide Perez brought Metastasio’s libretti to the Portuguese capital. Metastasio’s protégé Giovanni Ambrogio Migliavacca was the author of the libretto of Perez’s Solimano, a text that, like many of Metastasio’s libretti, was utilized by a number of composers, including Pescetti, following its initial use by Johann Adolf Hasse in 1753. Perez’s adaptation of the text was first staged in Lisbon in 1758. It was for a patchwork presentation of Solimano that Perez’s aria ‘Se non ti moro a lato’ was pressed into service in London in 1765, but the text of this aria was derived from Metastasio’s Adriano in Siria rather than Solimano. Sir Walter Scott might have perceived in this muddle a proverbial ‘tangled weave,’ but Martene Grimson unravels the enticement of Perez’s music with an eloquent, touching traversal of the aria.

Among the composers with whose work Mozart became acquainted whilst visiting London, none made a stronger or longer-lasting impression than Johann Christian Bach. Often called the London Bach, this youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach enjoyed royal patronage and popularity with the public during his time in England. During his family’s travels and his time in Vienna, Mozart either met many of the age’s foremost composers or knew their music, and the significance of his profound respect for Johann Christian Bach’s music is indicative of the caliber of his work. The Mozartists’ keyboardist Steven Devine finds much to stimulate but nothing to overextend his abilities in Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D major (Op. 1, No. 6). He dispatches Bach’s spirited writing in the outer Allegro assai and Allegro moderato movements with abundant virtuosity, but it is his playing of the central Andante that dazzles, the nobility of his phrasing reminding the listener of the expressivity of which the harpsichord is capable when handled by a true master of its sounds.

Unlike his father, the London Bach was a successful composer of music for the stage, and it is likely that the young Mozart knew a number of his older colleague’s operatic scores. Though recent years have witnessed increased interest in the stile galante typified by Bach’s music, his extant operas have received comparatively little attention. The three works sampled on Mozart in London intimate that, like Händel’s and Mozart’s, Bach’s mastery of the art of using music to convey emotion was superior to that of many of his contemporaries. The lyricism of ‘Non so d’onde viene,’ an aria from Bach’s Alessandro nell’Indie that was sung in the London pastiche Ezio, finds a natural exponent in Ben Johnson, the lovely patina of the tenor’s voice accentuating the gracefulness of the music.

Performed in London in a 1765 pastiche based upon the same libretto by Antonio Salvi set by Händel in 1737 as Berenice, regina d’Egitto, the aria ‘Confusa, smarrita’ was extracted from Bach’s Catone in Utica. Soprano Anna Devin intrepidly conquers the aria’s formidable tessitura whilst also projecting the sentiments of the text. The famously critical Charles Burney recorded that the 1765 première of Bach’s Adriano in Siria was at least partially a failure despite the presence of a beyond-capacity audience. Emirena’s accompagnato ‘Ah, come mi balza il cor’ and aria ‘Deh lascia, o ciel pietoso’ in Adriano in Siria were written for the same singer who portrayed the title rôle in Berenice, the Torino-born soprano Teresa Scotti. Scotti perhaps did not meet Burney’s expectations, but, singing the scene magnificently on Mozart in London, Devin exceeds the high standard set by Margaret Marshall in a 1988 Vienna concert performance of Adriano in Siria conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. The rôle of Farnaspe was sung in Adriano’s first performance by castrato Giovanni Manzuoli, who would collaborate with Mozart in creating the name part in Ascanio in Alba in Milan in 1771. For this recording, Farnaspe’s aria ‘Cara, la dolce fiamma’ is interpreted by soprano Eleanor Dennis, and hers is some of the finest singing heard on Mozart in London, her comfort with Bach’s style facilitating a fantastic performance of this ​meticulously-crafted music.

Mozart in London is unquestionably an educational release, but it melds its pedagogy with extraordinary musicality. Visiting London in 1764 and 1765 must have been much the same for Mozart. There was something to be learned at virtually every turn, but how much easier lessons are when they are tunefully taught!

Wunderkind about town: portrait of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni (1721 – 1782), circa 1763
[Image © by Mozarteum Foundation]

Having absorbed the lessons of London and other destinations along his family’s musical tour, Mozart returned to his native city with increased awareness of both his own abilities and the stylistic developments promulgated by his contemporaries. In 1767, the eleven-year-old Mozart was challenged by the penultimate Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Sigismund von Schrattenbach, to rapidly produce a score that silenced skepticism about the preternatural cleverness attributed to the boy. It is surmised that Mozart composed his Grabmusik (K. 42/35a), a Passion-themed cantata that likely received its first performance at Salzburger Dom during 1767’s Holy Week, in response to his patron’s test. Little is known of the work’s reception, but it is not difficult to suppose that Graf von Schrattenbach, who was considerably more cordial to Mozart than his archiepiscopal successor, Hieronymus von Colloredo, would prove to be, was pleased by the result of his young subject’s toil.

Illustrative of a Teutonic liturgical tradition that predated Mozart by several centuries, Grabmusik’s dialogue of a soul and an angel before the tomb of Christ, sung in this performance by baritone Jacques Imbrailo and soprano Anna Lucia Richter, is a direct descendent of the sort of philosophical discourse found in Händel’s Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, a mode of theological explication that in other parts of Europe was already outdated in 1767—and one to which Mozart did not return in the remaining twenty-four years of his life. Belying the age of its composer, the maturity of the musical language reflects the depth of Mozart’s remarkably erudite understanding of the discourse.

From the first notes of Die Seele’s recitative ‘Wo bin ich? bittrer Schmerz,’ Imbrailo delivers the soul’s utterances with secure, sonorous tones. Guided by Page’s tempi, pensive but never ponderous, the baritone lends his voicing of the aria ‘Felsen, spaltet eurer Rachen’ an aura of wonderment. Richter answers with declamations of Der Engel’s ‘Geliebte Seel’, was redest du?’ and ‘Betracht dies Herz und frage mich’ that spotlight Mozart’s youthful but surprisingly advanced sensitivity to layers of meaning in the text. The spontaneity of Imbrailo’s pronouncement of ‘O Himmel! was ein traurig Licht’ heightens the sense of fulfilled faith that permeates the music. The concluding duet, ‘Jesu, was hab’ ich getan,’ is an obvious step along the path that leads from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions to Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. Ending a heartfelt performance of the duet by both soprano and baritone, Richter’s statement of the Angel’s announcement of absolution, ‘Es verzeihet deinem Schmerz,’ is a genuinely cathartic resolution, musically and emotionally.

In the year after his Grabmusik was composed, Mozart continued the experimentation with composing for the operatic stage begun with Apollo et Hyacinthus with a small-scaled work for voices intended to parody Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1752 intermède Le devin du village, one of the most successful operatic pieces of its decade. One of Mozart’s earliest biographers, his widow’s second husband, speculated but could not substantiate that Bastien und Bastienne (K. 50/46b) was first performed by forces funded by the renowned German doctor Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer at his palatial residence in Vienna and may also have been commissioned by him. [Regardless of the discord that it inspired, later lampooned by Mozart in Così fan tutte, Mesmer’s concept of animal magnetism was clearly a profitable postulation.] Corroborating assertions concerning events conjectured to have transpired a quarter-millennium ago is difficult under the best of circumstances, but reconstructing the chronology of Bastien’s genesis was aided by the Twentieth-Century rediscovery of the autograph score, which affirmed details of the work’s initial composition and later revision. However Mesmer was involved with its creation, The Mozartists​ definitively show Bastien und Bastienne to be an endearingly hypnotic example of the young Mozart​’s ingenuity.

Though uniformly well-intentioned and thoroughly musical, previous recorded performances have tended to treat Bastien und Bastienne as a museum piece rather than a viable work for the stage. After all, how theatrically savvy could a twelve-year-old boy possibly have been? As in all of his Mozart recordings to date, Page focuses solely on performing the music as the score dictates and leaves answering questions about the piece’s dramatic effectiveness to the listener. The first performance of Bastien und Bastienne that can be conclusively verified took place in Berlin in 1890, but so revelatory is The Mozartists’ animated account of the score that it might be the world-première performance.

The sincerity exuded by Anna Lucia Richter’s singing as Der Engel in Grabmusik gives her portrayal of Bastienne a palpable charisma, evident in every note of her performance but particularly in ‘Er war mir sonst treu und ergeben.’ Tenor Alessandro Fisher’s ardent, euphoniously-sung Bastien is a worthy partner, the character’s fickleness notwithstanding. Fisher wholly avoids the temptation to approach Bastien as a Tamino in training, instead singing the rôle on its own terms. His voicing of ‘Meiner Liebsten schöne Wangen’ is a perfect expression of hormonally-charged young love, and he joins with Richter in a feisty ‘Geh! geh! geh, Herz von Flandem!’ that in their performance is precisely the kind of lovers’ quarrel and reconciliation that would now be conducted via text message. Colas, the mediating force in Bastien und Bastienne, is brought to life with astute theatrical instincts and resonant vocalism by bass-baritone Darren Jeffery. Incisive in speech and song, the latter supplemented by the inclusion of Mozart’s 1769 revision of Colas’s second aria, Jeffery finds in Colas an older brother of Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail with his own unique musical personality. His work exemplifies the prevailing virtue of The Mozartists’ performance of Bastien und Bastienne: the makings of Mozart’s eventual operatic flair are always audible, but this Bastien und Bastienne is a fully-formed organism, not a glorified embryo.

Paradoxically, it is easy to undermine estimation of Mozart’s enduring significance to Western music by overstating the scope of his originality. The cinematic representation of Mozart as an irreverent, even ridiculous conduit for divine inspiration is undeniably intriguing, but it distorts modern observers’ view of the composer and the musical community that fostered his artistic upbringing. The Mozartists and Ian Page encourage the listener to abandon the idea that one must respect Mozart simply because he is acknowledged as one of music’s greatest geniuses. Rather, these musicians urge today’s listeners to ask why Mozart deserves continued attention and affection. Who was the man who made this music, and from whence came the tools needed to build such a legacy? With Mozart in London, Grabmusik, and Bastien und Bastienne, The Mozartists further their commitment to offering fastidiously-researched, joyously-performed answers to these questions.

MARK ABEL (born 1948): Time and Distance— Janelle DeStefano, mezzo-soprano; Hila Plitmann, soprano; Carol Rosenberger and Tali Tadmor, piano; Mark Abel, organ; Bruce Carver, percussion [Recorded at The Bridge, Glendale, California, USA, June – November 2017; DelosDE 3550; 1 CD, 57:03; Available from Delos Music, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Poets, philosophers, and similarly-inclined personages have long proposed that music is an universal language, one in which sentiments impervious to the communicative capacities of words alone can be satisfactorily and comprehensibly articulated. Music can be argued to be a sort of communal mother tongue in which differences of accent, syntax, and vocabulary do not impede understanding. Its dialects are as numerous as combinations of melody and harmony, but it is not ‘speaking’ its language but hearing its discourses that wields the true connective energy of music. The sounds of Zydeco are meaningful to the listener whose first language is that of Zelenka or Zandonai because they stimulate the heart as boldly as they provoke the brain. Minds perceive as they are trained to do, but hearts are governed by a consistent mechanism. One man’s tunes are different from another’s, but, like the hearts to which they appeal, they are propelled by beats that any man can discern.

Music can peer clear-sightedly into corners of the psyche in which the eyes perceive only darkness, but time and distance are confoundingly convoluted concepts for musical explication. Spatially, they are remarkably analogous entities: tangible in their physical manifestations but intrinsically intangible, their shared power is that of separation. The mind assesses the ravages of time and the displacements of distance, yet the solemn duty of gauging the emotional tolls of the effects of time and distance falls to the heart. In the works of American composer Mark Abel featured on Delos’s masterfully-recorded release Time and Distance, the intricacies of the relationships that inexorably link humanity with the divisive repercussions of the physical and emotional separations wrought by time and distance are examined in songs of grace and gravity. The music on this disc does not inhabit the shadows made by abstractions. Too plentiful to enumerate are the passages in this music that are so wrenchingly private that they may compel the listener to ask, ‘How can this man whom I have never met know so much about my life?’ This intuition, uncanny and unifying, is the foundation of Abel’s unique musical language and the quality that makes Time and Distance a disc that severs new veins of raw emotion each time that it is heard.

With an unsettlingly personal text by the composer, ‘The Invocation’ is an apt preamble to the metaphysical exploration of Time and Distance. Performed by mezzo-soprano Janelle DeStefano and pianist Carol Rosenberger with a suggestion of futile inquisitiveness, questioning having failed to penetrate the closely-guarded justification of the status quo, the song emerges as its own kind of inquisition. To what or to whom is the eponymous invocation addressed? For what response can flawed beings truly hope? Abel advances this searching pragmatism with music in which the writing for voice and piano echoes the ambivalent coexistence of optimism and cynicism that permeates the text. Rosenberger plays with an ideal equilibrium of dramatic impetus and aloofness, enabling DeStefano to emphatically evince the stark irony of words such as ‘We are tempted, we succumb, sometimes dangle from the bottom rung / And still we ask: Why must happiness be earned?’ without disrupting the organic progression of the music. This is not a performance that seeks to hide unpleasant realities behind façades of artificial loveliness: neither singer nor pianist rejects stringency when it is required, and the openness of their collaboration yields candid interpretive beauty.

In ‘Those Who Loved Medusa,’ Abel utilizes a provocative text by a fellow Californian, poet Kate Gale, as a catapult for some of his most theatrical music. Materializing in an atmosphere that undulates with the jangling of pseudo-ancient crotales, conjured by the work of percussionist Bruce Carver, the voice of soprano Hila Plitmann shimmers against the backdrop of Rosenberger’s pianism like a mirage of a lone Joshua tree in the Mohave, ephemeral but identifiable. Plitman’s moonlight timbre contrasts markedly with the bleak imagery of the words, heightening the discomfort inflicted by the poet’s stinging irony. The soprano delivers the line ‘Fear the woman with her own snakes’ with restrained vehemence that discloses a deeply intellectual grasp of the text’s inherent contradictions, Medusa becoming Eve, Pandora, and every woman who has tasted the bittersweet elixir of destruction. Rosenberger plays hypnotically, charming the music’s writhing serpents, but the spell is easily broken. The vocal line strikes at the heels of tonality, Plitman’s accuracy of pitch and verbal clarity claiming for battered womanhood a sonorously venomous victory.

The composer again looked to his own words for In the Rear View Mirror, Now, creating a triptych of songs with both strongly individual temperaments and an abiding cohesiveness. Plitmann is here accompanied by pianist Tali Tadmor and Abel as organist, and the structure of the music is paralleled by the cooperation of this musical trinity. A composer’s performance of his own music cannot be accepted as definitive without scrutiny, but Abel’s skill at the keyboard rivals Rachmaninoff’s playing of his works for piano, preserved on recordings and piano rolls. Tadmor’s work is no less successful, lyricism tempering bursts of bravura. The first song, ‘The Long Goodbye,’ is sung with a consistency of purpose embodied by Plitman’s fervent singing of the words ‘Blame is ugly,’ her voice lending allure to the most disquieting nuances of the text. Reaction to the cultural disintegration instigated by gentrification of the San Francisco Bay Area shapes ‘The World Clock.’ Plitman infuses the momentous lines ‘Technology changes / But people? Never / A simple principle, ages old’ with potent urgency, intensified by the sensitive accompaniment. There is an unmistakable kinship between the prevailing mood of Abel’s ‘The Nature of Friendship’ and the emotional claustrophobia of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. ‘Platonic love’s a most welcome narcotic’ and ‘They’d have kicked you off the Titanic’s lifeboat if it came to that’ are lines that the reclusive genius of Amherst might have written, and Abel’s musical settings amplify the essence of his words. Plitman sings this music with concentrated directness. Her performance of In the Rear View Mirror, Now brings to mind the statement inscribed on vehicles’ side mirror: ‘objects in mirror are closer than they appear.’ ​Moving forward may increase the measurable distance between past and present, Abel intimates, but sentimental proximity is affected by no rules of logic or physics.

Herself an accomplished singer, Joanne Regenhardt published in a collection entitled Soundings a series of poems that radiate musicality, the sonic implications of her words rendering even an uninflected recitation of her verse a tuneful experience. Abel’s handling of her texts in The Ocean of Forgiveness bears the hallmarks of complementary sensibilities, the composer’s poetic insight leading him to the fathomless levels of meaning within the words. This artistic symbiosis also permeates DeStefano’s and Tadmor’s performance of the songs, initiated with an account of ‘Desert Wind’ that invites the listener to participate viscerally, transforming hearing into a conduit for feeling. In her forthright, almost frighteningly sincere voicing of ‘Sally’s Suicide,’ DeStefano enunciates the line ‘Existence like a sea anemone had become a fastened thing’ with unforgettable eloquence, seeming to find in those words an outlet for an exclamation from her own soul. The focus of the singer’s and pianist’s performance of ‘In Love with the Sky’ is also internalized, their partnership elucidating details of Abel’s shifting musical tableaux that less-attentive artists might overlook. The subtleties of textual cadences and thematic development that provide the momentum for the transition from ‘Reunion’ to ‘Patience’ are realized by DeStefano and Tadmor with uncommon cognizance of the words’ function as the blueprint for the music’s architecture. The Ocean of Forgiveness is a musical edifice as complex as the ideas that dwell within its depths: galvanized by the confident performance that they receive on this disc, these songs impart a genuinely moving awareness of the fear of drowning that prevents many people from surrendering to the tide of absolution.

Having begun with ‘The Invocation,’ concluding Time and Distance with ‘The Benediction’ bestows an element of finality upon the disc’s final moments—journey’s end, destination achieved. Composed in 2012, ‘The Benediction’ returns to Abel’s own poetry, enlivened in this performance by Plitmann’s verbal acuity. She and Tadmor find in the song’s surging plangency aspects of all of the songs heard on Time in Distance, revisiting the disparate tributaries of the disc’s primary expressive flow with an air of resolution reminiscent of that of the music that follows Brünnhilde’s immolation in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Abel’s is not a musical language of full stops, however: this is music of commas and semicolons, phrases completed but anticipating the arrival of new ideas.

Much contemporary vocal music is marred by a disconcerting disparity between the spirit of the words and the aural persona of the music, so pronounced in some pieces that one questions composers’ literacy. The peculiar sorcery of words’ transfiguration by music that gave birth to song is too often sacrificed to ego, creators seeking accolades at the expense of artistry. Franz Schubert earned praise by composing Lieder in which melody uplifted poetry. Johannes Brahms earned praise by writing songs in which the hidden secrets of the heart were exposed more graphically than in an autopsy. With the songs on Time and Distance, Mark Abel earns praise for musical innovation. Moreover, he garners affection by recapturing the enchantment of song. Man may never conquer the challenges of time and distance, but he comes nearest to triumph in music.

DOMENICO SCARLATTI (1685 – 1757), JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833 – 1897), CÉSAR FRANCK (1822 – 1890), ERNEST CHAUSSON (1855 – 1899), EMMANUEL CHABRIER (1841 – 1894), JACK M. JARRETT (born 1938), and JOHN WESLEY WORK III (1901 – 1967): Recital by Donald Hartmann, bass-baritone, and Ināra Zandmane, piano [University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Music Recital Hall, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; 20 January 2019]

Song is a wondrous thing, at once stupefyingly simple and complicatedly contrived. Children can master it artlessly, but it can elude the most revered artists. To sing is to simultaneously inhabit two planes, traversing the parallel poetry of melody and tonality of words. In mathematics, it is posited that a line at infinity completes an affine plane, providing a point at which parallel lines, never uniting in tangible reality, ultimately intersect. Infinity is the realm of song, its improbable intersections of music and words facilitating innumerable variations of psychological interaction. It is in these tuneful collisions of sounds and syllables that the true artist finds the most perfect meaning of song, the art of revealing the sublime that lurks within the obvious.

Even amongst the most ardent music aficionados, connoisseurs of song are unique creatures. Memories of cherished performances are honored like battle scars. Storied Lieder singers and accompanists are their Pattons and Eisenhowers. For the lover of Art Song, a recital in which singer and accompanist earn recognition as collaborative artists is an occasion of significance commensurate with its rarity. To perform Lieder is not difficult, but to descend in four or five minutes’ duration into the depths of a song demands resources of communal concentration and musicality that exceed the capacities of some artists. Cognizance of the limitations of their abilities and challenging themselves to surpass them are vital aspects of earnest musicians’ artistry, and these qualities are the foundation upon which bass-baritone Donald Hartmann and pianist Ināra Zandmane built a recital that was a palpable, unmistakably personal musical journey from beginning to end. Presenting faculty recitals is often a contractual obligation, a fact that in some instances is all too apparent, but this was a recital focused on exploring and expanding artists’ faculties.

Celebrating four decades on the operatic stage not by boasting of enviable statistics and critical acclaim but by continuing to meticulously and lovingly hone his craft [whilst preparing for this recital, he was also rehearsing the rôle of Zuniga in North Carolina Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen], Hartmann offered the Greensboro audience a cohesive, intelligently-ordered programme distinguished by singing with emotional introspection that contrasted markedly with his exhilaratingly uninhibited comedic operatic characterizations. It is tempting to question whether the buffa or the seria more accurately reflects the essence of this artist, but is not the foremost lesson taught by Shakespeare’s and Verdi’s Falstaffs that laughter and tears are triggered by different combinations of the same stimuli? Hartmann’s portrayals of Rossini’s Bartolo and Don Magnifico are particularly satisfying because their hilarity is complemented by virility and vulnerability. In comedy, he reminds audiences that foppishness and foolishness are not identical, interchangeable concepts. In this recital, he asked the listener to recognize that the shadows in which men hide in their darkest hours cannot exist without the light from which they flee.

Hartmann’s voice is an instrument that can be both cavernous and caressing, and the aural potency of his Stygian timbre was heightened by the finesse of Zandmane’s playing, not least in the Baroque piece with which they boldly launched the recital. Likely adapted from an earlier composition for soprano, Domenico Scarlatti’s cantata da camera for bass and basso continuo ‘Amenissimi prati, fiorite piagge’ did not appear in print in an academically-credible critical edition until 1971, after which time the piece was recorded by Early Musical specialist Max von Egmond and occasionally sung in recital by José van Dam. His lauded command of Rossinian bravura writing notwithstanding, Hartmann is not the sort of singer expected to excel in Baroque music, but he shares Samuel Ramey’s aptitude for adapting his technique to the requirements of music like Scarlatti’s.

Hartmann declaimed the cantata’s opening recitative, ‘Amenissimi prati, fiorite piagge,’ with complete avoidance of affectation, delivering the words with directness rare in performances of music of this vintage. Sustaining the vocal line with fluidity that evoked the Arcadian atmosphere of the text, he compellingly limned the longing for freedom from the torments of amorous attachment that permeates the aria ‘Amar non voglio per non penare.’ The sense of hope inspired by the promise of a new day exuded by the recitative ‘Quando sui primi albori del matutino’ shone from the music, singer and pianist transforming the recital hall into a tranquil ‘stanza del piacere e del contento.’ The effectiveness of Hartmann’s and Zandmane’s association was especially apparent in the aria ‘Il fior coll’aura, l’aura coll’onda scherzar vedrò,’ which received from them a reading of guileless charm. Moreover, the singer’s navigation of fiorature was admirable despite the intermittent obtrusion of aspirates. In the final aria, ‘Donne belle, se tutti gl’amanti,’ the cantata’s narrator advocates nature’s delights as an alternative to love’s inconstant pleasures. [The recitative ‘Così, libero e sciolto dall’empia schiavitù del dio bendato’ is not included in the edition of the cantata employed in this performance.] Asserted with sensitivity of the caliber demonstrated by Hartmann and Zandmane, allied with the quality of Scarlatti’s music, it was a persuasive argument.

Never hidden from the public, the Lieder of Johannes Brahms have enjoyed increased exposure in recent years, in part courtesy of performances and recordings by singers whose mother tongues are not German. Most renowned in his native Greensboro for performances of Italian music, Hartmann has displayed comparable affinity for insightfully interpreting works auf Deutsch, a skill that was abundantly evident in his singing of five of Brahms’s songs in this recital. [A recording of his performance of Schubert’s ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ in a previous UNCG recital should be heard by all who value Lieder.] Beginning with a touchingly sincere reading of ‘Mein Mädel hat einen Rosenmund,’ the twenty-fifth song in the composer’s 1894 collection of Deutsche Volkslieder (WoO. 33), the bass-baritone elucidated the subtleties of the music with immediacy exemplified by his enunciation of ‘du lässt mir keinen Ruh’.’ The sentimental trajectory of his voicing of the sixth of the WoO. 33 Volkslieder, ‘Da unten im Thale,’ reached its zenith in the line ‘Für die Zeit wo du g’liebt mi hast, dank i dir schön,’ sung with restrained intensity. Zandmane’s intuitively text-driven playing established a sonic canvas in ‘In stiller Nacht’ (WoO. 33, No. 42) upon which Hartmann rendered the imagery of words like ‘die Blümelein, mit Tränen rein hab’ ich sie all’ begossen’ with somber hues. In secure, sonorous voice throughout the recital, his performances of these songs were unerringly faithful to the music’s innate straightforwardness.

The second of Brahms’s Opus 6 Lieder, ‘Feldeinsamkeit,’ uses a text by Hermann Allmers, and Zandmane’s musicianship again fostered an ambiance that enabled Hartmann to follow rather than force the words. His articulation of ‘Mir ist als ob ich längst gestorben bin’ was one of the recital’s most mesmerizing moments. The words of ‘Wenn ich mit Menschen’ from Vier ernste Gesänge (Opus 121), first performed five months before Brahms’s death, are taken from St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and the spirit of the text resolves the melancholic trek of the ‘serious songs’ with an effusion of optimism. Hartmann made an honorable effort at the difficult diminuendo at the song’s conclusion, but it was the conviction of his singing that engendered the performance’s immense emotional impact.

The trio of French songs chosen by Hartmann provided the recital with a beguiling interlude of sorts, the relationships among the pieces’ different musical idioms confirmed by both the singer’s lyrical approach and Zandmane’s stylistically kaleidoscopic pianism to transcend a shared language. In their performance of César Franck’s mélodie ‘La procession,‘ the repetitions of ‘Dieu s’avance à travers les champs’ in the forgotten Charles Brizeux’s text assumed a crucial rôle in the song’s narrative. Perhaps the most familiar of the seven of Ernest Chausson’s Opus 2 mélodies, ‘Les Papillons’ (No. 3) is a setting of a text by Théophile Gautier, and the poet’s words fluttered from Hartmann’s throat as hypnotically as the composer’s notes danced from Zandmane’s fingers. The comedic tension that grew with each utterance of ‘comme de bons campagnards’ in Emmanuel Chabrier’s strophic ‘Villanelle des petits canards’ was delightfully alleviated by a wily interpolated ‘quack’ at the song’s end. Though he professed that this repertory did not captivate him when he first encountered it, continued acquaintance clearly inspired genuine fondness. Zandmane’s playing was at its most ebullient in these songs, marvelously so in Chabrier’s music. The effervescent Veuve Clicquot of her work blended deliciously with the smooth Courvoisier of Hartmann’s vocalism.

Asheville-born composer Jack M. Jarrett’s operatic setting of his own translation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 drama Cyrano de Bergerac premièred at UNCG on 27 April 1972, with baritone Charles A. Lynam (1930 – 2013), with whom Hartmann studied, in the title rôle. Like all of the selections in this recital, the bass-baritone’s inclusion of music from the balcony scene from Act Two of Jarrett’s Cyrano de Bergerac was an homage to a meaningful link with his musical education. The swirling, sensual Romanticism of the composer’s music brings to mind ‘Zweite Brautnacht,’ the heroine’s rapturous paean to wedded bliss in Act Two of Richard Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena, the voice soaring above a dense deluge of sound. Zandmane played so passionately, expertly discharging the erotic electricity of a climactic trill, that details of Jarrett’s orchestration came to life with astonishing clarity.

Hartmann phrased ‘Let us take advantage of this occasion to speak in the shadows of night’ with the hesitant excitement of a shy lover. There was an amiable but wrenching pathos in his statement of ‘I rise to pluck a star from the heavens, but yet I falter, and stoop in shame, to pick a flower’ that would have suited Don Quixote as organically as it embodied Cyrano—or, to invoke another Strauss leading lady, Der Rosenkavalier’s Marschallin, whose facilitation of her beloved’s love for another is not unlike Cyrano’s wooing of Roxane on Christian’s behalf. The tessitura of this music, intended for a higher, lighter voice, tested Hartmann, precipitating a few pinched tones above the stave, but the prevailing impression made by his singing was one of bittersweet confession of feelings too tender to endure daylight’s cruel disclosure.

For his encore, Hartmann gave a movingly heartfelt performance of John Wesley Work II’s arrangement of Harry Dixon Loes’s ‘This Little Light of Mine’ that radiated what Quakers extol as ‘the gift to be simple.’ Hartmann is an artist for whom tonal beauty is always a welcome result but never the sole aim of his industry. Rarely is his singing pretty merely for the sake of being pretty, for in his artistic journey beauty is a mode of transportation, not a destination. There were occasional missed entrances, textual mistakes, and negligible intonational lapses in this recital, but the unpardonable transgressions of sloppiness, unpreparedness, and disinterest were wholly absent. Beauty of expression was the cornerstone of this recital, one in which two parallel talents intersected in the exquisite infinity of song.

ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK (1854 – 1921): Hänsel und Gretel (sung in an English translation by Carol Palca Kelly) — Stephanie Foley Davis (Hänsel), Joann Martinson Davis (Gretel), Scott MacLeod (Peter), Lyndsey Swann (Gertrud), Gretchen Krupp (Die Knusperhexe), Jordan Winslow (Sandmännchen), Amber Rose Romero (Taumännchen); Members of Greensboro Youth Chorus; Greensboro Opera Orchestra; Garrett Saake, conductor [David Holley, Producer and Stage Director; Jeff Neubauer, Technical Director and Lighting Designer; Brad Lambert, Scenic Projections Designer; Greensboro Opera, Pauline Theater, Hayworth Fine Arts Center, High Point University, High Point, North Carolina, USA; Saturday, 2 March 2019]

Would any true operaphile question the judgement of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf? In the 126 years since its world première in 1893, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel has often been dismissed as a confection best suited to the tastes of children and unsophisticated audiences. A setting of the composer’s sister Adelheid Wette’s adaptation of one of the Brüder Grimm’s most popular tales, Hänsel und Gretel aspired to a première in Munich but was ultimately first staged in Weimar’s Hoftheater, where it was conducted with admiration by Richard Strauss. When the opera reached Hamburg a year later, Gustav Mahler wielded the baton with similar approbation. The opera’s first performance at the Wiener Hofoper—today’s Wiener Staatsoper—in 1894 was attended by Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf, both of whom reportedly expressed appreciation for the music. Not one of these illustrious artists who experienced Hänsel und Gretel in its first decade of life was a child, and few observers would belittle their musical sophistication. What did Strauss, Mahler, Brahms, and Wolf hear in Hänsel und Gretel that has eluded subsequent listeners’ ears?

As is true of virtually all operatic queries, the best answers to questions about the evolution of perceptions of Hänsel und Gretel’s musical merits are found in the music. That Humperdinck was an ardent disciple of Richard Wagner is widely known, his work with the older composer including painstakingly copying the autograph score of Parsifal in preparation for that opera’s 1882 première. A dozen years after seeing Hänsel and Gretel come to life in Weimar, Humperdinck visited New York in order to attend the Metropolitan Opera première of the opera on 25 November 1905. That performance was conducted by Alfred Hertz, whose expansive command of Wagner repertory at the MET encompassed the American première of Parsifal. The influence of Wagner on Humperdinck’s musical constitution is abundantly apparent in Hänsel und Gretel, in which there are moments that vividly recall Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Der Ring des Nibelungen. Many are the pages in Humperdinck’s score that look to the future, however. Strauss’s Salome and Die Frau ohne Schatten, Mahler’s symphonies, and Arnold Schönberg’s Gurre-Lieder are all indebted to Hänsel und Gretel, engendering a legacy that is at odds with modern trends of regarding the opera as a treacly trifle served as holiday fare and otherwise ignored.

Hänsel und Gretel was indeed conceived primarily as a Christmastide entertainment for children, but are its family-friendly narrative and relative brevity the sole motivations for both London’s Royal Opera House and the MET selecting the opera for their inaugural radio broadcasts of full-length performances in 1923 and 1931? The fusion of ambitious Wagnerian aesthetics with more accessible Germanic folklore and simple tunes that captivated audiences in the final two decades of the Nineteenth Century enabled listeners in the war-ravaged Twentieth Century to figuratively revisit a time before foxholes and takes, a time when predictable dangers lurked in finite settings in which they could be confronted and conquered. Sensitive to the interplay of innocence and menace that permeates Humperdinck’s score, perhaps what Strauss, Mahler, Brahms, and Wolf recognized in the context of Hänsel und Gretel was that being intended to be performed for children does not inevitably beget childishness.

Into the woods: (from left to right) soprano Joann Martinson Davis as Gretel, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis as Hänsel, and soprano Jordan Winslow as Der Sandmännchen in Greensboro Opera’s March 2019 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel
[Photograph © by VanderVeen Photographers]

Staged in the elegant Pauline Theater in High Point University’s Hayworth Fine Arts Center, Greensboro Opera’s production of Hänsel und Gretel is a celebration of cooperation amongst Arts institutions in and beyond the Triad. Sung in an English translation by Carol Palca Kelly that was first employed by Minnesota Opera, the performance was the culmination of an initiative to not only expand the reach of Greensboro Opera’s endeavors but also to foster broader community involvement. High Point University faculty member Brad Lambert designed projections that playfully but credibly—credible except when Mutter despaired of shattering the family’s only jug whilst a lovely, seemingly intact pitcher was clearly visible on the mantle behind her—conjured the atmosphere of each scene. His image of dawn breaking in the forest with a burst of pastel colors was particularly striking. Technical director Jeff Neubauer’s lighting designs occasionally muddled the production’s focus, compromising the virtues of its simplicity by complicating the audience’s task of following the opera’s action.

Originally devised for Utah Opera and Symphony, Susan Memmott Allred’s costume designs were both whimsical and practical, emphasizing that Hänsel, Gretel, and their parents are troubled but not defeated by privation. Christian Blackburn’s stage management and Greensboro Opera General and Artistic Director David Holley’s direction were unmistakably influenced by their own work as singers: when the production’s antics were at their busiest, the principals’ vocalism was never impeded. There is more darkness in Hänsel und Gretel than Holley’s staging explored, but the delighted reactions by the many youngsters in the near-capacity audience confirmed the production’s effectiveness.

In loco parentis: soprano Lyndsey Swann as Gertrud (left) and baritone Scott MacLeod as Peter (right) in Greensboro Opera’s March 2019 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel
[Photograph © by VanderVeen Photographers]

The theater’s orchestra pit could not accommodate the number of musicians that Humperdinck’s orchestrations require, necessitating a reduction in musical forces. The ensemble assembled for this production—pianist Emily Russ, flautist Janet Phillips, oboist Thomas Turanchik, clarinetist Darkson Magrinelli, trumpeter Johammee Romero, and percussionist Erik Schmidt—approached the difficult score with commendable concentration. Their playing of the opera’s Vorspiel was enjoyable despite fleeting problems with intonation and ensemble, and the Hexenritt, enjoyment of which was marred by the audience taking advantage of the scene change to catch up on their conversations, was aptly exhilarating. The cuckoo in the wood sang out beguilingly.

The climactic statement of the Abendsegen theme in the Traumpantomime should rattle the rafters in the manner of Wagner’s orchestral showpieces in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung and ‘Walk to the Paradise Garden’ in Frederick Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet and of course could not do that in this performance, but the music’s impact was enhanced by Michael Job’s choreography of the balletic representation of the fourteen angels’ vigil, which was gracefully performed. The quality of the dancers’ work was complemented by the fine singing of the High Point University students and members of Greensboro Youth Chorus who touchingly and euphoniously portrayed the Kuchenkinder.

Conductor Garrett Saake’s pacing of the performance was characterized by an impressive amalgamation of respect for the score and complete cognizance of the abilities and needs of the personnel at hand. Some conductors either rush through Humperdinck’s score, reducing the piece to a pretentious operetta, or over-accentuate the opera’s Wagnerian passages. Saake avoided both extremes, maintaining dramatic momentum but also allowing the music and the singers to exert their magic without battling illogical tempi. The performance was acculturated to the dimensions of the orchestra and venue but, owing to the conductor’s intelligent leadership, never seemed ‘small.’ It was not as powerful or vibrant as in larger-scaled performances, but Humperdinck’s voice sang uninhibitedly via Saake’s clear-sighted guidance of this Hänsel und Gretel.

At the end of his tether: (from left to right) soprano Joann Martinson Davis as Gretel, mezzo-soprano Gretchen Krupp as Die Knusperhexe, and mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis as Hänsel in Greensboro Opera’s March 2019 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel
[Photograph © by VanderVeen Photographers]

The courage of this production’s Hänsel and Gretel was tested by a Sandmännchen whose appearance was strangely nightmarish. Her visage disguised by a ghoulish mask, soprano Jordan Winslow’s voice emerged with serene security, floating the music on a stream of silvery tones. Dressed to the nines in a glistening gown and sparkling diadem, the Taumännchen resembled a glamorous storybook princess more than an industrious sprite, but this suited the effervescent singing of soprano Amber Rose Romero. Dispersing her dew in the form of bubbles, a clever device that enchanted the youngest members of the audience, Romero projected her voice with similar iridescence except at the lower end of the compass, where the music moved out of her vocal comfort zone.

It was evident from her introductory utterance that the titular tykes’ mother Gertrud was a woman to be obeyed. Too frequently portrayed as a raving shrew, an interpretation with no real basis in the score or the libretto, this conflicted woman faces the crippling guilt of feeling that she has failed her children. The performance of the rôle by soprano Lyndsey Swann, a heart-wrenching Madame Lidoine in UNCG Opera Theatre’s bold 2016 production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, was a reminder of why mammoth-voiced singers like Rita Hunter and Dame Gwyneth Jones were attracted to the part. Gertrud is the opera’s most overtly Wagnerian character, and Swann supplied the evening’s most heroic singing. Her interactions with Hänsel and Gretel limned the overwhelmed but loving mother’s frustration, expressed in music spanning wide intervals that the soprano navigated intrepidly. Her diction was a casualty of the effort, particularly in the aftermath of breaking the pitcher, but a few obscured words were a small price to pay for the gleaming top B with which Swann heightened her realization of the mother’s desperation and despair. There are echoes of Brünnhilde’s defiance and maturity through suffering in Gertrud’s music, and Swann sang the rôle with sincerity rather than hysterics.

Honey, I’m home: baritone Scott MacLeod as Peter (left) and soprano Lyndsey Swann as Gertrud (right) in Greensboro Opera’s March 2019 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel
[Photograph © by VanderVeen Photographers]

His first offstage ‘Tra la la la’ established that the defining trait of baritone Scott MacLeod’s Peter was irrepressible optimism. His carefree, confident demeanor notwithstanding, the rôle’s frequent ascents to top E♭s, Es, Fs, and F♯s challenged the singer. The necessity of repeatedly placing notes above the stave undermined his support of the voice’s lower octave. Many productions of Hänsel und Gretel compound the problem of adult singers’ depictions of children by casting singers too old to be believable as the parents of pre-adolescent children, but MacLeod was an appropriately youthful, virile father; perhaps too virile in his description of the potential horrors to which his wife subjected their children by ordering them into the haunted wood in search of strawberries. Peter’s paean to providential retribution for evildoers and the sustaining capacity of faith in the opera’s final scene can be uncomfortably didactic, but this Peter imparted relief rather than evangelism, a wise course for a man more likely to be found in a Biergarten than at Mass. MacLeod’s Peter was heartier of spirit than of voice, but his animated stage presence lent the performance a wonderful propulsive energy.

The rôle of the Knusperhexe, née Rosina Ledkermaul, was created in the opera’s Weimar première by mezzo-soprano Hermine Finck, the third of composer Eugen d’Albert’s six wives, and was sung in the 1894 Vienna production by Marie Lehmann, sister of the famed soprano Lili Lehmann and herself a noted Wagnerian who sang Wellgunde and Waltraute in the first complete Bayreuther Festspiele Ring in 1876. The part was taken in Greensboro Opera’s production by mezzo-soprano Gretchen Krupp, an alumna of UNCG who was a Grand Finalist in the 2018 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and seems destined to follow the Lehmann sisters into Wagner repertory. Like Hänsel’s and Gretel’s parents, the sorceress who antagonizes them has often been sung by singers more likely to be seen riding motorized scooters than broomsticks. Fair Rosina’s hearing and vision are impaired, intensifying her crone tendencies, but Humperdinck’s music for her calls for anything but a lady with failing faculties. It is fortunate, then, that Krupp’s faculties were on blazing form. This witch needed no spells in order to dominate Hänsel and Gretel: the raw might of her voice exploded like grenades fired into the auditorium. The trills with which Humperdinck seasoned the music are not in a voice as substantial as Krupp’s, but she made laudable efforts at them and gleefully took every high option suggested by the composer. Her top B♭ was literally—and legitimately—show-stopping. It is not easy to evoke sympathy for a woman who converts unsuspecting children into snacks, but Krupp brought a hint of vulnerability to her performance. There was no corresponding weakness in her singing.

Ready, aim, fire: (from left to right) mezzo-soprano Gretchen Krupp as Die Knusperhexe, soprano Joann Martinson Davis as Gretel, and mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis as Hänsel in Greensboro Opera’s March 2019 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel
[Photograph © by VanderVeen Photographers]

Many operas are like automobiles. They can be very pretty, valuable, and comfortable, but, without engines, they go nowhere. Not surprisingly, much of the responsibility for the efficacy of a performance of Hänsel und Gretel rests upon the shoulders of its dual engines, the singers who portray the title siblings. Greensboro Opera’s performance had in mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis and soprano Joann Martinson Davis a pair of artists who jump-started the performance with their exuberant singing in the opera’s opening scene and sustained that ebullience to the final bar of their music. Unlike productions that are undermined by the lugubrious work of singers who struggle vocally and dramatically to plausibly portray children, this Hänsel und Gretel was enlivened by depictions of the title characters that exuded unaffected jocularity. Not the sort of chirping soubrette often heard in the rôle, Martinson Davis was a gratifyingly full-voiced Gretel who encountered no problems with the girl’s top notes and trills.

Foley Davis was equally successful as Hänsel. Male singers have depicted boys and young men less persuasively than Foley Davis embodied Hänsel's pluckiness and impetuosity. Her diction was superb throughout the range, and the freedom with which she traversed the part’s two octaves was extraordinary. In the first two acts, she and Martinson Davis charmingly illustrated the siblings’ coltish relationship, and the mezzo-soprano made Hänsel’s sheltering of his sister in the wood unusually moving. Their account of the beloved Abendsegen was sublime. Martinson Davis’s Gretel joyously greeted the morning after a harrowing night in the forest with a sensational top D. The youths’ vigorous gorging on morsels of the Knusperhäuschen contrasted tellingly with their confrontation with the witch. Their cunning prevailing, they rejoiced with stunning unison top B♭s. Many of the world’s opera companies regularly stage Hänsel und Gretel, but few of them offer their audiences Hänsels and Gretels as captivating as Greensboro’s.

It is oversimplification to state that opera is cinema with singing, but, like films, opera productions rely upon savvy direction and dedicated performances by their casts to compellingly tell their stories. The tale of Hänsel and Gretel is too familiar to need complex directorial explication, but it is as true in opera as in any other field that familiarity breeds contempt. Greensboro Opera’s production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel satisfied because it invited the audience to forget the world’s worries for two hours and surrender to the pleasures of fairy-tale spectacle. Calamities persisted beyond the theater’s walls, but, within those walls, beautiful singing transported listeners to a realm in which love overcomes wickedness.

Additional performances of Hänsel und Gretel are scheduled for 8, 9, and 10 March at the Theatre at Well•Spring. Hänsel, Gretel, and Peter will be sung in the 10 March performance by Emily Wolber, Lilla Keith, and Jacob Kato. Please visit Greensboro Opera’s website for more information or click here to purchase tickets.

Brother behind bars: (from left to right) mezzo-soprano Gretchen Krupp as Die Knusperhexe, soprano Joann Martinson Davis, and mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis as Hänsel in Greensboro Opera’s March 2019 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel
[Photograph © by VanderVeen Photographers]

HAROLD ARLEN (1905 – 1986), SAMMY FAIN (1902 – 1989), GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898 – 1937), GREGORY PEEBLES (born 1977), FRANCIS POULENC (1899 – 1963), OTTORINO RESPIGHI (1879 – 1936), and RICHARD RODGERS (1902 – 1979): Soprano Leah Crocetto in recital with pianist Mark Markham [North Carolina Opera, Fletcher Opera Theater, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Sunday, 3 March 2019]

Discussions of which qualities contribute to the evaluation of a singer’s significance rightly begin and end with the voice, but there is another integral component that answers to many names. Call it charisma, stage presence, or artistic vision: without it, even singing of the most astounding beauty can fail to make a lasting impression on listeners. Casting semantics aside, this thing that can be cultivated, refined, and reinvented but cannot be borrowed, duplicated, or taught is the essence of a singer’s artistry.

Stage presence is not always a guest at Art Song recitals, but soprano Leah Crocetto owned the stage of Fletcher Opera Theater in her North Carolina Opera recital with pianist Mark Markham as though Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts deeded it to her. Returning to Raleigh, where she has previously sung Leonora in Verdi’s Il trovatore and her rôle début as Bellini’s Norma, with an adventurous programme that provided as complete a survey of her artistic temperament as two hours of music could ever hope to do, this dauntless artist sang with the kind of candor that frightens some singers. Without the orchestra, costumes, and action of staged opera in which to bury insecurities, recitals furnish nowhere for a singer’s vulnerabilities to hide, sometimes prompting singers to choose the safety of music that challenges neither performers nor listeners. Crocetto might have garnered the admiration of her Raleigh audience with songs far less demanding than those by Respighi, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff, and Peebles that she selected as the cornerstones of this recital, but her objective was not to seek applause with vocal display. The voice was spectacularly displayed, but it was Crocetto’s daring, disarmingly intimate baring of her soul that made this recital unforgettable.

Now lauded more for his frequently-played tone poems and orchestral pieces than for his operas and other vocal works, Ottorino Respighi possessed a gift for melody that qualified him as a worthy exponent of the too-little-appreciated Italian song tradition furthered by Verdi, Puccini, and Toscanini. Markham’s passionate realizations of Respighi’s writing for the piano in the songs presented in this recital accentuated the Italianate slancio of the music and divulged that the composer’s vivid orchestral language translated easily into the piano’s dialect. The vocal control that Crocetto exhibited in her singing of ‘Stornellatrice,’ embodied by her perfectly-placed top A♭s, was a testament to her unflappable preparedness.

In ‘Nebbie,’ the singer’s lucid articulation of Ada Negri’s text culminated in a declamation of the lines ‘E mi ripete: Vieni, è buia la vallata’ that echoed the deep feeling exuded by her fortissimo G♯s. Dating from 1896, ‘Notturno’ is one of Respighi’s loveliest inventions in song form, comparable in quality to the finest of Richard Strauss’s Lieder of the same period. Markham’s playing yielded a broodingly dark soundscape in which Crocetto’s voice shimmered, her intonation formidably certain. The emotional intensity of ‘Mattinata’ unleashed subtle reminiscences of the soprano’s Aida. As confident in adversity as in triumph, the poet’s and composer’s voices took flight in Crocetto’s singing.

In reality, this recital introduced the Raleigh audience to several magnificent voices. The imposing but unaffected Tebaldi-esque Italian diva who voiced the Respighi songs was succeeded in the Poulenc selections that followed by a chanteuse after the fashion of Eartha Kitt. A singer of Crocetto’s abilities is expected to excel in performances of music as sumptuously written for the voice as Poulenc’s, but, supported by pianism that resounded with the hypnotic tumult of Paris, she sang these pieces with an ideal combination of sultriness and sophistication. The first three of the Poulenc songs chosen by Crocetto are settings of texts by Louise de Vilmorin, two of which were drawn from the composer’s 1939 work Fiançailles pour rire. Soprano and pianist phrased ‘Violon’ with a nonchalant elegance of which Catherine Deneuve would have been proud. Their performance of ‘Fleurs’ should have been chased with a glass of cognac, so chic was their handling of Poulenc’s sensual melodic writing.

Crocetto brought the communicative immediacy of her singing of Elisabetta’s ‘Tu che la vanità’ in Verdi’s Don Carlo to her account of ‘Aux officiers de la garde blanche,’ finding in the song a close kinship with Poulenc’s and Cocteau’s Voix humaine. The words of ‘Les chemins de l’amour’ were penned by Jean Anouilh, one of France’s greatest Twentieth-Century writers, and if composer and playwright could have heard this performance of the song they would have immediately initiated a collaboration on an operatic adaptation of Anouilh’s Antigone as a vehicle for Crocetto. It is not without justification that Denise Duval’s interpretations remain the benchmarks to which performances of Poulenc’s vocal music are compared, and Crocetto earned a place alongside Catherine Dubosc and Mireille Delunsch as one of the few singers who share Duval’s thorough comprehension of Poulenc’s singular style.

Resplendent Raleigh recitalist: soprano Leah Crocetto (left) as the titular heroine in San Francisco Opera’s 2015 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Luisa Miller, with tenor Michael Fabiano as Rodolfo
[Photograph by Cory Weaver, © by San Francisco Opera]

Despite the increased focus on linguistic diversity that has broadened singers’ and opera companies’ repertoires in recent years, it remains unusual for non-Slavic artists to include Russian songs sung in their original language in recital programmes. Still more uncommon are performances by singers whose mother tongue is not Russian who enunciate the language as idiomatically as Crocetto did in her singing of four pieces by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Her singing of this music recalled the sensitivity of Elisabeth Söderström, the sincerity of Galina Vishnevskaya, and the vocal power of Elena Obraztsova.

In the first of her Rachmaninoff excursions, ‘Не пой, красавица’ (Opus 4, No. 4), Crocetto immersed herself in the recesses of the uniquely Russian mood of the music, its brooding and fiercely Romantic strains climaxing on a fiery fortissimo top A. The yearning, slightly enigmatic atmosphere of ‘Отрывок из А. Мюссе’ (Opus 21, No. 6) was heightened by the almost preternatural tranquility of Markham’s management of the song’s rhythmic figurations. Here and in ‘Здесь хорошо’ (Opus 21, No. 7), in which Crocetto rose fearlessly to the pianissimo top B, voice and piano disclosed an uncommon synchronicity between words and music, the pianist conveying the shifting colors of the text as meaningfully as the singing echoed the cadences of the accompaniment. The virtuosity of Rachmaninoff’s writing for the piano, particularly in ‘Какое счастье’ (Opus 34, No. 2), is predictably demanding, but Markham executed the most ferocious passages with imperturbable assurance. It was in this music that it was most noticeable and bothersome that the piano’s lowest octave sounded marginally out of tune. Crocetto’s top B♭ was on point, however, emerging like a thunderbolt from the surging vocal line.

Gregory Peebles is the rare contemporary composer who has experienced song as both a creator and a performer. His tenure with Chanticleer exposed him to music of virtually all eras, and that experience is audible in every bar of his 2013 song cycle Eternal Recurrence, given its first performance in North Carolina by Crocetto and Markham. More of a stream-of-consciousness meditation in several movements than a song cycle in the tradition of Schubert and Schumann, Eternal Recurrence employs texts from an array of sources including Gaius Petronius’s Satyricon. Beginning and ending with episodes entitled ‘The Void,’ comprised of an isolated note on the piano, Peebles’s music progresses into a contrapuntal labyrinth that briefly pays homage to Johann Sebastian Bach.

With Crocetto’s entrance in the ‘Vivace, Naïve’ section, the music’s psychological potency began to take shape with gripping profundity. The probity with which the soprano sang ‘The curvature of light beckons toward ancient horizon’ prepared the listener for the riveting honesty of her delivery of ‘The one I’m not, I’d rather be doing’ in ‘By Chance.’ Peebles’s penchant for taking the voice to extremes found an expert champion in Crocetto, whose vocal solidity encompassed all of the music’s complexities. The sonorous proclamation of Pyrrhic victory of ‘I reconquered my mattress continent and found its sheet-fields lonely’ in ‘Hollow’ was answered by the wrenching resignation of ‘Call me what you will.’ Singer and pianist made the composer’s instructions in ‘Liquide, molto rubato’ palpable, siphoning the listener into the cascading swell of the music.

Peebles’s directions in ‘Largo, proud’ were also followed with great fidelity, with Crocetto’s statement of ‘If my heart had a flag, its noble crest would be a passport the color of new jeans’ suggesting a Kafka-like juxtaposition of the everyday and the metaphysical. The Latin and Greek words of the text attributed to Petronius lend the ‘Verklärt’ movement an element of archaic authority, inspiring Crocetto to intone them in this performance with the prophetic mystery of an oracle. The ‘Playful, leggiero’ designation of the final vocal sequence is at odds with the sentiment of ‘Every language is the hardest,’ sparking a debate between music and words that was resolved by the unity of purpose that allied Crocetto’s singing with Markham’s playing. The finest music responds to the stimuli of different artists with new dimensions of emotional connectivity, but it is difficult to imagine a more viscerally moving performance of Eternal Recurrence than it received from Crocetto and Markham in Raleigh.

The singer introduced the American standards with which she closed the recital as favorite souvenirs from a time before the ‘Leah Crocetto, soprano’ phase of her career. There was no doubt that these songs were old friends, but these performances were not remembrances of things past: these were spontaneous experiences of genuine, raw feeling that eliminated any spiritual distance between performers and audience. Written for the 1924 revue Lady, Be Good, George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’ was sung by Crocetto with a directness that metamorphosed the euphoric ache of love into a tangible thing that could be felt with each note that caressed the ear. Harold Arlen’s and Ira Gershwin’s ‘The Man That Got Away’ started its life in the 1954 film A Star Is Born, and this star singer shone in her quietly wrenching performance of it.

The collaboration between Crocetto and Markham achieved its apex in their exquisitely personal account of ‘Falling in Love with Love’ from Richard Rodgers’s and Lorenz Hart’s musical The Boys from Syracuse. The trust between them was manifested in musical expressivity that seemed to stop time, everything else in the world swept aside by these few minutes of bittersweet regret. Crocetto opined that Sammy Fain’s and Irving Kahal’s 1938 song ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ needed no introduction. This is also true of singing of the quality with which she gifted the piece to the audience. Singing such as this cannot be found in all the old familiar places, but the fortunate listeners in Raleigh will surely always remember this singer that way.

For their encore, Crocetto and Markham gave a performance of ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ from Jerome Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Showboat in which every smile and sigh in Edna Ferber’s novel suffused the song. As in all of the music included in this recital, they forged their own path to the heart of the piece, finding sass, humor, refreshingly original wit, and incredible insight in its refrain.

There is no instrument that is more versatile than the human voice. With a finite range of tones, it can rage, revel, comfort, and cajole. With the simplest of tunes, it can change minds and win hearts. The best vocal recitals are those in which the listener feels that music was not merely performed but lived. Leah Crocetto’s and Mark Markham’s North Carolina Opera recital was an event in which music was a medium, not an outcome. It was The Judds who sang that ‘love can build a bridge,’ but Leah Crocetto and Mark Markham encircled Fletcher Opera Theater with musical orange barrels and launched a construction project of their own.

Poet of the piano: pianist Mark Markham, fellow traveler in soprano Leah Crocetto’s recital journey with North Carolina Opera, 3 March 2019
[Photograph by Jean-Luc Fievet, © by Mark Markham]

Hometown bel canto hero: tenor David Blalock, Nemorino in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Pavel Antonov]

The short-lived novelist Thomas Wolfe, born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900, wrote words to which almost any artist can relate, eventually published posthumously in the aptly-titled work You Can’t Go Home Again.

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame.

Though his richly-hued voice has been heard in many venues within relative proximity of his hometown, including in acclaimed performances with North Carolina Opera and Virginia Opera, Chapel Hill-born tenor David Blalock’s portrayal of Nemorino in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore is a much-anticipated homecoming for this intelligent, insightful artist. An alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Maryland Opera Studio who resided in his youth in Alamance County, he has emerged as one of America’s most promising lyric tenors, garnering critical praise and audience appreciation for performances of music in a broad array of styles ranging from Georg Friedrich Händel’s Messiah to Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Stylistic versatility is now more than ever before an indispensable component of a successful young singer’s artistry, but few singers of any age rival the consistent imagination and vocal velvet with which this young artist brings music of any era to life.

Despite the vast differences between their musical languages, Blalock’s depictions of Don Ottavio in North Carolina Opera’s 2015 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni [reviewed here] and the Steuermann in Virginia Opera’s 2016 production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer [reviewed here] shared a common accent, that of the singer’s carefully-honed bel canto technique. Too often misinterpreted as a focus on complex fiorature and high notes, the core of true bel canto technique is emphasis on proper use of the breath to place and project tones, facilitating clarity and evenness throughout the range. As Blalock’s singing reveals, this is especially apparent in a tenor’s passaggio, the bridge between registers to which many singers fail to devote the sturdiness needed to sustain a long career. Blalock is aided by possessing raw materials of exceptional quality, but the technique that he has forged is a model of the sort of bel canto foundation that enabled Carlo Bergonzi and Alfredo Kraus to sing beautifully for decades. In this as meaningfully as in the theater’s nearness to his childhood home, Blalock’s rôle début as Nemorino is a return to his roots.

There is perhaps no bel canto aria for the tenor voice that is more iconic—and more of a measure of a singer’s mastery of bel canto technique—than Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima.’ Positioned at a pivotal moment in Act Two of L’elisir d’amore in which, as in many of Händel’s operas, the boisterous action stalls to allow an outpouring raw emotion that alters the course of the drama, the melancholic plangency of the vocal line has endeared the piece to generations of opera lovers. It is a moment that Blalock identifies as a time of special importance in the character’s narrative. ‘“Una furtiva lagrima” stands out because of how big of a contrast it is to the rest of the rôle,’ he recently reflected. ‘It is the first and only moment in the opera [in which] Nemorino is on stage all alone, thus making that moment even more intimate.’

‘Una furtiva lagrima’ constitutes only a few minutes of a rôle in which an extraordinary progression of singers have conveyed virtually every conceivable emotion, however, and Blalock is equally attentive to the cumulative impact of a performance of L’elisir d’amore. ‘Honestly, there is so much beautiful music that I can’t pick a particular passage that stands out above the rest in my mind,’ he confided. ‘There are definitely moments where the action stops and time sort of “stands still” during a few of the big ensembles and finales. The big chorus scenes when everyone is on stage at once tend to be my favorite moments of the opera [because] I enjoy playing and reacting with lots of people on stage. There are so many ups and downs with this character: I just love the whole thing!’ It is the interaction among characters that makes L’elisir d’amore a captivating experience, he suggested. ‘I think, ideally, that if we [singers] are doing our jobs of telling this story well, the audience will be so wrapped up in the drama that they sometimes won’t even notice the music.’

Man on course: tenor David Blalock, Nemorino in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, as Der Steuermann in Virginia Opera’s 2016 production of Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer
[Photograph by Lucid Frame Productions, © by Virginia Opera]

The naturalness and assuredness of his stage presence notwithstanding, Blalock’s singing of Nemorino’s music is unlikely to go unnoticed, and he concedes that the opera’s popularity affects his approach to it. ‘I think [that] the greatest challenge of singing Nemorino is the fact that many opera lovers have heard this music sung many times by the world’s greatest singers,’ he shared. ‘Even before they hear me sing, many people have an idea of how “Una furtiva lagrima” should sound because of the way Pavarotti or Domingo sang it.’ Still, he is no stranger to the reality of audience preconceptions. ‘As an opera fan myself, I can understand those ideas,’ he continued. ‘I fell in love with this opera partly because of these great singers.’

Blalock has achieved a level of knowledge of performers and performing traditions of the past that is uncommon amongst singers of his generation. This shapes his understanding of operas’ historical contexts, but, for him, imitation emphatically is not the highest form of flattery. ‘I just try to sing like David Blalock, not to imitate anyone else,’ the tenor insisted. Furthermore, he sees a clear parallel between his own artistic individuality and Nemorino’s struggle to attract and retain Adina’s attention and affection. ‘I have definitely been in that situation before,’ he admitted, thinking of Nemorino’s yearning to feel that his love is reciprocated. In this kind of situation, he again cites self-reliance as the surest means of accomplishing one’s goals. ‘Ultimately, the best thing one can do is be oneself,’ Blalock advised.

Whether of the operatic variety or in one’s life beyond the stage, the cultivation and preservation of love depend upon absolute honesty, this sagacious artist asserts. ‘If you end up together [with the object of one’s affection], then you don’t have to keep pretending to be something you are not,’ he mused. ‘If the person continues to be indifferent, then you have still stayed true to yourself and will ultimately be better off with someone else.’ After pausing to contemplate the confounding complexity of affairs of the heart, he added, ‘It is definitely easier said than done, but I truly believe [that] people end up happier if they stay true to themselves and try not to please others.’

Endeavoring to please others is an unavoidable necessity of a singer’s career, and Blalock is preparing to portray Nemorino for the first time by making a comprehensive study of the part. ‘The greatest challenge of playing the rôle in general is how physically demanding it is,’ he said. ‘Nemorino doesn’t leave the stage for one second in Act One, and most of that time is spent singing!’ Moreover, Blalock indicated, his work does not end with the stamina required by the rôle. ‘Not only is it a lot of singing, but the character requires a special kind of energy: he is young, maybe a little antsy, sometimes a little drunk, excited, lovable, earnest, and many other things—all at the same time. It can be exhausting, but when I am living in the story, I don’t feel the exhaustion until the curtain has come down.’

He has already conquered a number of the world’s eminent stages, but the curtain continues to rise on David Blalock’s career. Blessed with an attractive instrument that he tenaciously refines and an aptitude for learning that he feeds through unabating study, this young singer’s artistic trajectory belies the relevance of Thomas Wolfe’s axioms. The prospect of returning home holds no fear for David Blalock. Place a score before him, anywhere in the world, and he is at home.

Piedmont Opera’s production of L’elisir d’amore opens at UNCSA’s Stevens Center in Winston-Salem on Friday, 15 March, with additional performances on 17 and 19 March. In addition to David Blalock’s Nemorino, the production’s cast includes Jodi Burns as Adina, Gregory Gerbrandt as Belcore, Brian Banion as Dulcamara, and Eliza Mandzik as Giannetta. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit Piedmont Opera’s website.

ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK (1854 – 1921): Hänsel und Gretel (sung in an English translation by Carol Palca Kelly) — Emily Wolber (Hänsel), Lilla Keith (Gretel), Jacob Kato (Peter), Lyndsey Swann (Gertrud), Gretchen Krupp (Die Knusperhexe), Jordan Winslow (Sandmännchen), Amber Rose Romero (Taumännchen); Members of Greensboro Youth Chorus; Greensboro Opera Orchestra; Garrett Saake, conductor [David Holley, Producer and Stage Director; Jeff Neubauer, Technical Director and Lighting Designer; Brad Lambert, Scenic Projections Designer; Greensboro Opera, Theater at Well•Spring, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Sunday, 10 March 2019]

It is said that anything worth doing is worth doing well. In the case of Greensboro Opera’s production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, first seen in the Pauline Theater in High Point University’s Hayworth Fine Arts Center [reviewed here], something done so well was worth doing again. Transferred to the recently-built theater in Greensboro’s Well•Spring community, not by a witch’s sorcery but by the hard work of a team dedicated to increasing the vitality of opera in the Triad, the production exerted its magic in the new space with the warmth and piquancy of fresh-from-the-oven gingerbread.

Produced and directed by the company’s General and Artistic Director David Holley, Greensboro Opera’s Hänsel und Gretel successfully allied the coruscating music of Humperdinck’s setting of his sister’s adaptation of the familiar Brüder Grimm tale with modern technological innovation in the form of Brad Lambert’s picturesque scenic projections. Owing to the theater’s open design, Jeff Neubauer’s lighting designs found a more congenial space in which to shine, illuminating the production’s participants and their actions with intelligibility. Only someone with no experience in performing opera could think that ensuring that singers are were they are supposed to be, both on stage and in the progression of the drama, is a simple task, but Holley’s direction and Christian Blackburn’s stage management created that illusion, recounting the opera’s story with fast-moving continuity.

Garrett Saake, Well•Spring’s Director of Resident Relations and Programs, brought a scholar’s concentration and a consummate entertainer’s flair to his conducting of the performance. [Anyone who values American vocal music should read Saake’s insightful dissertation on the too-little-remembered Irving Fine’s choral music for female voices.] As in High Point, he was notably successful in overcoming the challenges of minor lapses in ensemble and the small instrumental ensemble, retaining a firm grasp on the score’s innate momentum and achieving emotional catharsis without the benefit of the late-Romantic orchestra for which Humperdinck wrote. Now more comfortable with their parts, the musicians played confidently, individually and collectively. Particularly in the Hexenritt and the Traumpantomime, the orchestra should be an eighth character in the opera and, comprised of only seven players, could not quite manage that in this performance, but Saake paced the performance with such ardor that moments that perceptibly lacked orchestral power were surprisingly few and fleeting.

The children who preceded Hänsel and Gretel into the Knusperhexe’s clutches were endearingly portrayed by High Point University students and Greensboro Youth Chorus members, singing sweetly even when freed from their sugary captivity, and the dancers who represented the angels dispatched from heaven to watch over the stranded youths were figuratively and literally en pointe. Sopranos Jordan Winslow and Amber Rose Romero again donned the Sandmännchen’s and Taumännchen’s imaginative costumes and voiced their music with appealing tones and bountiful charm. Winslow dispensed reassurance as handily as sand, her serene demeanor and vocal fluidity enveloping Hänsel, Gretel, and the audience with a sense that, the predicament in which the adventurous siblings found themselves notwithstanding, all would be well. Romero sang with increased ease at the bottom of the range, projecting the sort of untroubled management of the tessitura that the bringer of dew might be expected to wield.

Humperdinck by hand: a page from the autograph score of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, showing the alternate ending composed for an 1894 production in Dessau
[Image from the Sotheby’s collection]

Also reprising the rôles that they sang in the High Point performances were soprano Lyndsey Swann and mezzo-soprano Gretchen Krupp. Experience in the part deepened Swann’s depiction of Gertrud, Hänsel’s and Gretel’s mother, heightening her response to the feelings of guilt and inadequacy that push her to the brink of contemplating suicide. Adept in the High Point performance at imparting the put-upon mother’s exasperation, she enriched her characterization in Greensboro by also revealing the profound sadness and fear with which Gertrud contends, not least by sharpening her focus on the text. Her top B was splendid in the opening-night performance: in this final show, it was genuinely seismic. There was greater malevolent elation in Krupp’s Knusperhexe in Greensboro than in High Point: in the intervening week, she clearly cultivated an appetite for gingerbread children. As before, the voice was a marvel, a veritable avalanche of centered, accurately-pitched tones.

In this Well•Spring performance, the rôle of the family patriarch Peter was sung by baritone Jacob Kato, who during and since his time at UNCG has been a frequent and welcome presence in opera in central North Carolina (he will also be North Carolina Opera’s Spoletta in that company’s April 2019 production of Puccini’s Tosca). As Humperdinck’s Peter, he was nimble of voice and body, creating a character who was both noble and a bit naughty. There was little doubt that this amiable fellow had seen the interiors of most of the nearby taverns, but there was also no doubting the vastness of his love for his family. Not even the most fervid admirer of Humperdinck’s art could honestly deny that Peter’s music is awkwardly written, requiring attention above and below the stave that can rob the voice’s central core of focus. Kato was happier at the top of the compass than at the bottom, but he eschewed the shouting often heard in the part. There are few opportunities for lyricism in Peter’s music, but this singer’s declamation exuded paternal tenderness. Kato was a Vater of whom his Kinder and the composer could be proud.

Like Swann, mezzo-soprano Emily Wolber participated in UNCG Opera Theatre’s 2016 production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, in which her harrowing performance as the Carmelite community’s old prioress, Madame de Croissy, disclosed a noteworthy talent for conveying tragedy without artifice. Hänsel could hardly be more different, musically and dramatically, but Wolber’s portrayal of the lad unveiled another valuable facet of her artistry. Convincingly boyish without overdoing the puerile shenanigans, her Hänsel was a disobedient but loyal son and a teasing but devoted brother. Vocally, the rôle was an excellent fit for Wolber. Her vocalism was reliably audible and dexterous. There were a few passages in which the mezzo-soprano’s intonation was slightly compromised, her pitch veering flat, but she recovered rapidly and capably. She seemed to be exercising caution in the upper register, suggesting that she was not feeling at her absolute best. Still, this expressive singer was a wholly enjoyable, unfailingly musical Hänsel.

Wolber’s ebullient Hänsel had a perfect foil in the frolicsome Gretel of soprano Lilla Keith. A willing partner in her brother’s escapades, this Gretel visibly relished her mischief, crisscrossing the stage with a gymnast’s agility. The voice was scarcely less pliable, mostly executing intricate writing with precision. Keith’s timbre was lovely throughout the range of the music, especially in the Abendsegen, which she and Wolber sang with an earnestness that eludes many exponents of these rôles. The soprano’s upper register had a polished-silver gleam but occasionally sounded forced: her top D in Act Three was solid but faintly tense. Keith gave Gretel her own unique identity, limning the girl’s distinct personality rather than portraying her as merely one half of a pair. Most importantly, Keith and Wolber joined their colleagues in the production’s previous performances in making Gretel and her brother absorbing figures whose fate mattered to the audience who spent two hours with them.

Owing to its fairy-tale subject and origins as a holiday diversion for young people, Hänsel und Gretel will likely always be regarded by most opera lovers as a children’s piece. The abiding joy of Greensboro Opera’s production of Humperdinck’s opera was that, though it unmistakably appealed to young eyes and ears, it avoided the stigma of opera for children. Things that were youthful delights may become guilty pleasures when experienced via bifocals and hearing aids, but laughter and tears are ageless. Opera should remind audiences of this, and that is precisely what Greensboro Opera’s Hänsel und Gretel did so well.

Graphic © by À la carte

The visitor to North Carolina whose prior impressions of the state were shaped by industry, college and professional sports, and magnificent natural beauty may be surprised by the abundant and diverse artists and Arts institutions populating the Old North State. From top-caliber opera companies and orchestras in the major cities to Saturday-evening celebrations of roots music in places that leave GPS devices in states of perpetual recalculation, it is possible to find musicians pursuing their passion almost anywhere the curious adventurer in North Carolina chooses to seek them. On Friday, 15 March 2019, the best of the musical variety that immeasurably enriches life in North Carolina can be found in Greensboro’s Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, where the third season of the À la carte concert series culminates in a performance that promises to satisfy virtually any musical appetite.

Founded and guided by a pair of North Carolina’s eminent musicians and educators, mezzo-soprano and Associate Professor of Voice at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Clara O’Brien and composer and Assistant Professor of Sight Singing and Ear Training, Music Theory, Composition, and Music Industry studies at North Carolina Central University Lance Hulme, À la carte was created as a showcase for the prodigious array of talented artists who reside in or have ties to North Carolina. Building upon the accomplishments of their aptly-named earlier enterprise Ensemble Surprise, O’Brien and Hulme have lovingly cultivated À la carte’s emphasis on musical inclusivity, previous concerts in the series having featured music from an expansive selection of historical eras and genres, performed by some of the Triad’s most engaging established and emerging artists.

Furthering the mission of mirroring North Carolina’s cultural heterogeneity in their programming, O’Brien and Hulme have devised an excitingly flavorful bill of fare for the musical banquet of À la carte’s Spring Concert. Spanning seven centuries, the concert’s repertory includes Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century motets, works by Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695), Ernest Chausson (1855 - 1899), George Crumb (born 1929), and Chick Corea (born 1941), and other unexpected treats. In additional to O’Brien and Hulme, artists scheduled to perform include flautist Erika Boysen, clarinetist Kelly Burke, lutenist and banjo virtuoso Samuel Taylor, percussionist Erik Schmidt, pianist James Douglass, violinists Marjorie Bagley and Phoenix Deng, violist Scott Rawls, cellist Alexander Ezerman, and The Brian Horton Ensemble.

An evening of music as thought-provoking and pulse-quickening as that planned for this concert is priceless, but admission to the performance is free. No tickets are required. Simply turn up, find a seat, make yourself comfortable, and prepare your palate to experience a banquet of delicacies from the world of music.

Please visit À la carte’s website to learn more about the organization and the 2019 Spring Concert. Please consider lending your generous support to bringing plans for À la carte’s ambitious 2019 - 2020 Season to fruition.
À la carte is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

Graphic © by À la carte

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): L’elisir d’amore— Jodi Burns (Adina), David Blalock (Nemorino), Gregory Gerbrandt (Belcore), Brian Banion (Dulcamara), Eliza Mandzik (Giannetta); Piedmont Opera Chorus, Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra; James Allbritten, conductor [Cara Consilvio, Director; Piedmont Opera, UNCSA Stevens Center, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 15 March 2019]

When attempting to analyze the foibles of operatic history, it can be difficult to discern why one work in a composer’s œuvre achieved greater prominence than its brethren. With hindsight influenced by pioneering performances and recordings of forgotten works, it is possible to hear a piece like Gioachino Rossini’s La gazza ladra and wonder why it was for so long eclipsed by Il barbiere di Siviglia. Why has La sonnambula been welcomed into the international repertory whilst La straniera has been heard only a few times since its composer’s death?

Rarely is a piece’s widespread acceptance by the public solely a product of good fortune. Espousal by a celebrated singer or conductor has often improved an opera’s lot, but there are almost always other elements that contribute to a work’s continuous or rediscovered allure. This is especially true of the operas of Gaetano Donizetti, the least remembered of which wield musical and dramatic felicities that qualify them for renewed interest. Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore requires no reappraisal, however, never having relinquished its place in the international repertory. Bringing the much-loved tale of the free-spirited Adina’s entanglements with the unpretentious Nemorino, the arrogant Belcore, and the irrepressible Dulcamara to Winston-Salem’s historic Stevens Center, Piedmont Opera’s production of L’elisir d’amore legitimized the opera’s reputation by earning the affection it is still capable of inspiring 187 years after its first performance.

Premièred at Milan’s Teatro della Canobbiana on 12 May 1832, L’elisir d’amore was the third of four operas by Donizetti that were first performed in 1832. Its companions—Fausta, Ugo, conte di Parigi, and Sancia di Castiglia—are now only occasionally performed, but L’elisir, followed in December 1833 by one of Donizetti’s most successful and enduringly popular serious operas, Lucrezia Borgia, was beloved from its start. The composer’s melodic genius was at its freshest during the creation of L’elisir and was unquestionably stimulated by the wit of Felice Romani’s libretto.

Created by Sabine Heinefetter and Gianbattista Genero, the rôles of Adina and Nemorino have captivated generations of artists and audiences, the former having been enthusiastically appropriated by Maria Malibran and innumerable singers of varying degrees of vocal suitability. [Less helpfully, Malibran discarded Donizetti’s cabaletta for Adina in Act Two and inserted in its place ‘Nel dolce incanto,’ a superfluous piece of long-debated provenance that is now thought to be Malibran’s own work and was sung by Dame Joan Sutherland in her studio recording of L’elisir.] Furthermore, L’elisir has in Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ and Adina’s ‘Prendi per me sei libero’ a sequence of the kind occurring in many of Händel’s operas in which the manic romp abruptly halts when emotions of life-altering importance emerge from the fray. Piedmont Opera’s performance facilitated a genuinely moving depiction of these moments of unaffected feeling, revealing the poignant sincerity at the heart of the opera’s timeless magnetism.

Directed by Cara Consilvio, Piedmont Opera’s production of L’elisir d’amore was visually appealing, genuinely funny, and touching without being cartoonish, foolish, or embarrassingly sentimental. The pacing of the opera’s action exploited the expert comic timing of the production team and the cast, incorporating a whirlwind of physicality that rarely interfered with the science of singing. Malabar Limited’s costumes and Martha Ruskai’s wigs and makeup similarly enhanced the production’s entertainment for the eyes without lessening its beauty for the ears. Eduardo Sicango’s scenic designs, originally devised for Virginia Opera, and Norman Coates’s lighting created a detailed but never distracting setting for the story, following Donizetti’s and Romani’s directions with complementary fidelity and imagination. The effectiveness of a production of L’elisir d’amore relies in large part upon equilibrium: accentuating either slapstick silliness or saccharine melodrama reduces the opera’s power to connect with audiences’ sensibilities. Piedmont Opera’s production attempted to make the piece neither a Molière farce nor a Shakespeare comedy. By allowing Adina and Nemorino to be who Donizetti and Romani intended them to be, this staging confirmed the wisdom of trusting an opera’s creators’ instincts.

The doctor is in: bass-baritone Brian Banion as Dottor Dulcamara in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Mariedith Appanaitis / Piedmont Opera]

Piedmont Opera’s General Director and Principal Conductor James Allbritten conducted the performance with eloquence and panache, avoiding the practice of approaching the score as music that leads into and out of ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ that disfigures some readings of the piece. Rather, Allbritten was attentive to the inherent musical logic of each scene, fostering dramatic continuity by recognizing the momentum with which Donizetti infused the score. The Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra followed his beat impeccably and played with little of the sloppiness often heard in this music—music that is sometimes erroneously dismissed as mere unchallenging, unimaginative accompaniment. The wind playing was especially commendable, the lively writing for trumpet preceding Dulcamara’s arrival and the gorgeous bassoon obbligato in ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ executed with skill and brio. Throughout the performance, the orchestra’s rhythmic ebullience and intonation garnered admiration. Comic operas can be more difficult to bring off than tragedies, but Allbritten and his colleagues in the pit projected the same sense of enjoyment that emanated from the stage.

Piedmont Opera’s choristers also embodied the good humor that bursts from almost every page of Donizetti’s score. Establishing the mood of the opera’s first scene, they sang ‘Bel conforto al mietitore’ charmingly, and their voicing of ‘Che vuol dire codesta suonata’ conveyed the appropriate excited anticipation. In Act Two, the choristers added to the gaiety of Adina’s banquet with their cheerful singing of ‘Cantiamo, facciam brindisi a sposi così amabili.’ Later, the ladies’ singing of ‘Saria possibile?’ upon hearing the news of Nemorino’s unexpected inheritance was the musical equivalent of raised eyebrows and suspicious shrugs. Choral singing is rarely a factor in a spectator’s decision to purchase a ticket for a performance of L’elisir d’amore, but the spectators for this L’elisir d’amore were treated to choral singing of a standard that reinforced the overall excellence of the production.

The rôle of Adina’s confidante Giannetta was delightfully sung by soprano Eliza Mandzik, an alumna of Providence College and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Voicing the part’s music with a bright timbre and easy command of the range, she created a three-dimensional character with her few lines in the opera’s opening scene. Alert to every detail of the action, this Giannetta never disappeared into the crowd. Informing Belcore of the arrival of orders from his superior with a sly voicing of ‘Signor sargente,’ the soprano intoned her lines in the subsequent quartet with the bemusement of a concerned party just distant enough from the emotional collisions to observe and comment on them without fear of becoming collateral damage. Mandzik’s conspiratorial utterance of Giannetta’s ‘Possibilissimo’ in response to the ladies’ expression of doubt of the truth of the rumor of Nemorino’s vast inheritance in Act Two made it clear that she was a savvy gossip who vetted her sources of information. She flirted with the newly-rich but still befuddled Nemorino with the coquetry of an ambitious young lady already picturing herself leaving the altar on the arm of a wealthy husband. A Giannetta should sound like an Adina in training rather than an overactive comprimaria, and Mandzik’s performance was that of a leading lady honing her craft.

Glances at Donizetti’s score and Romani’s libretto can leave the impression that the rôle of the egotistical, chauvinistic, and disarmingly dashing sergeant Belcore is indestructibly straightforward. To the contrary, two centuries of performance history document wrongheaded realizations of the part that have marred many productions of the opera. The foremost dramatic challenge of the rôle is that an effective Belcore should be smug and self-obsessed but also suave and mesmerizing. Vocally and temperamentally, baritone Gregory Gerbrandt was a world-class Belcore, as capable of inducing swoons as of brandishing a sword. The character’s larghetto cavatina in Act One, ‘Come Paride vezzoso,’ received a debonair performance from Gerbrandt, his technique making easy going of the florid writing and demanding tessitura despite marginal unevenness that dissipated as the performance progressed. This electrifying artist lent diverting swagger to Belcore’s lines in the trio with Adina and Nemorino and the quartet in which the sergeant reacts to his marching orders, exhibiting the character’s priggishness without being unpleasant.

This Belcore arrived at his wedding feast in Act Two in high spirits, unmistakably relishing the notion of being an ardent if none-too-faithful spouse. His exchanges with his intended bride and the wedding guests exuded the confidence of a soldier for whom affairs of the heart are won by strategizing akin to that employed on the battlefield, an attitude that was still more apparent in the duet in which he duplicitously—but in this performance not cruelly—goaded Nemorino into enlisting in his regiment with the promise of a signing bonus that will finance the new recruit’s love-elixir therapy. In the opera’s final scene, Gerbrandt was a Belcore who accepted defeat manfully, certain of his undamaged irresistibility to members of the opposite sex. The foremost marvel of Gerbrandt’s performance was the confidence with which he put the bel in Belcore’s canto, but his superlative acting provided a frame that perfectly suited his vocal portrait of the seductive sergeant.

Three’s a crowd: (from left to right) tenor David Blalock as Nemorino, soprano Jodi Burns as Adina, and baritone Gregory Gerbrandt as Belcore in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Mariedith Appantaitis / Piedmont Opera]

Bass-baritone Brian Banion was the frighteningly menacing Sparafucile in Piedmont Opera’s 2015 production of Verdi’s Rigoletto [reviewed here], a part that shares little more than a vocal range and an Italian text with Donizetti’s Dulcamara. The uninhibited dramatic involvement that served Banion well in Rigoletto was no less valuable L’elisir d’amore. Making his entrance in Act One with a commanding account of the maestoso cavatina ‘Udite, udite, o rustici,’ splendidly conquering its profusion of top Es, Banion enlivened the too-often-clichéd Dulcamara with reminiscences of Jerry Lewis’s comedy and Sesto Bruscantini’s singing. The cunning of his utterance of his lines in the duet with Nemorino was embodied by his mercurial articulation of ‘Ah! sì, sì, capisco, intendo.’ Banion’s caricature of the dilapidated senator in the barcarola with Adina at the start of Act Two, ‘Io son ricco e tu sei bella,’ was riotously funny; more so, in fact, because his vocalism was so good. The hilarity of Dulcamara’s parts in first the madcap quartet and then his duet with Adina was again heightened by the bass-baritone’s fantastic singing. If any doubt remained about Dulcamara’s pivotal rôle in the intoxicating comedic potency of this L’elisir d’amore, it was swept aside by the vigor of Banion’s voicing of ‘Ei corregge ogni difetto’ in the opera’s finale. A few words of the rapid-fire patter challenged him, but Banion’s Dulcamara peddled the eponymous elixir with savvy that Madison Avenue would clamor to bottle.

A resident of Winston-Salem and an alumna of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, soprano Jodi Burns returned to Piedmont Opera, with which company she shone in Kevin Puts’s Silent Night, to portray the fiercely independent heroine of L’elisir d’amore. It was immediately evident that her Adina was fanciful but honorable, traits that shaped her account of the andantino cavatina ‘Della crudele Isotta il bel Tristano ardea,’ the ascents to the top Bs adroitly managed. Burns delivered the cantabile ‘Chiedi all’aura lusinghiera’ in the duet with Nemorimo with dulcet tones, and her singing in the succession of ensembles that propel Act One to its close was winsome if compromised in a handful of passages by uncertain pitch and fiorature that were not ideally tidy, issues with which she found little assistance from the pit.

Fetchingly impersonating the gondoliera opposite Dulcamara’s dentally-deficient senator in the banquet scene in Act Two, Burns voiced ‘Qual onore! un senatore me d’amore supplicar’ with charisma that recalled Mirella Freni’s singing of this music. The voice soared in the quicksilver exchanges of the quartet. Burns dazzled in the duet with Dulcamara, suffusing ‘Quanto amore! Ed io, spietata! tormentai si nobil cor!’ with a depth of feeling that indicated the profundity of Adina’s affection for Nemorino. Her performance of the aria ‘Prendi per me sei libero,’ crowned with a strong top C, was superb—her finest singing of the evening. Regrettably, Adina’s cabaletta ‘Il mio rigor dimentica’ was not performed, making the transition from Adina’s confession of her true feelings for Nemorino to the final scene seem slightly perfunctory. Burns nonetheless created a fully-rounded character, and her Adina’s inherent integrity made the pure-hearted Nemorino’s love for her more credible that it is in some productions. Inflicting upon the rôle none of the cooing and crooning to which it is often subjected, Burns also sang Adina’s music uncommonly attractively.

When a man loves a woman: tenor David Blalock as Nemorino (left) and soprano Jodi Burns as Adina (right) in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Mariedith Appantaitis / Piedmont Opera]

Making his rôle début as Nemorino and his Piedmont Opera début in this production, North Carolina-born tenor David Blalock personified the humility and sensitivity that the character should possess. From the first bars of his larghetto cavatina ‘Quanto è bella, quanto è cara,’ Blalock demonstrated a connection with the rôle that intensified with the cavatina’s transition to allegretto. The effects of first-night nerves were discernible in a slight sense of tentativeness in his first scene and a few very brief losses of intonational focus, but the limpidity of Blalock’s plea of ‘Una parola, o Adina’ was ample compensation. Launched with an eager enunciation of ‘Voglio dire...lo stupendo elisir che desta amore,’ pure joy permeated his vocalism in the duet with Dulcamara. Confiding that the sole purpose of his experiment with the elixir was winning one cruel lady’s heart, his statement of ‘Ah! dottor, vi do parola ch’io berrò per una sola’ was unusually affecting, Blalock’s mastery of the passaggio-punishing G₄s accentuating the plangency of his timbre. In the duet with Adina and the trio in which Belcore joins them, the tenor’s submissive demeanor evoked sympathy for Nemorino’s plight. Blalock’s singing of ‘Adina, credimi, te ne scongiuro’ in the quartet was a highlight of his performance, the voice beautiful and movingly plaintive.

Nemorino’s duet with Belcore in Act Two is one of the finest pieces in the score, and Blalock’s ecstatic interjection of ‘Venti scudi!’ was followed by a tender account of ‘Ai perigli della guerra.’ In the rollicking quartet, the tenor sang ‘Dell’elisir mirabile bevuto ho in abbondanza’ fervently. The bittersweet romanza ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ is one of opera’s most famous tenor arias and a formidable test of singers’ technical acumen. Nemorino’s music has no applause-inciting top notes like Edgardo’s written—but almost never sung—E♭₅ in Lucia di Lammermoor or Tonio’s top Cs in La fille fu régiment, but the vocal line requires imperturbable concentration. The silence that filled the auditorium as Blalock sang the piece was a testament to the nobility of his performance. Phrasing with total comprehension of music and text, he fully realized the aria’s expressive potential. Finally winning Adina’s love, this Nemorino’s bliss was visible in every movement and expression—and in the solid top B♭ with which he ended the opera. In his first interpretation of the rôle, Blalock displayed an understanding of the character that some singers never attain. Nemorino describes himself as ‘un idiota,’ but his ignorance is that of innocence and inexperience. Blalock’s characterization emphasized the young man’s simplicity, which he never confused with stupidity. Singing so sweetly and honestly, it was inevitable that Blalock’s Nemorino would win Adina’s love: the audience’s collective heart was in the palm of his hand from the first sight of his gentle, guileless smile.

Bel canto operas are sometimes described as ridiculous plots set to beautiful tunes with meager musical substance. There is a bit of accuracy in that assessment, especially when bel canto is examined from a post-Wagnerian perspective, but is life always sensible? Does love always advance with linear orderliness? In L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti imitated the absurdities of life and love with graceful, mirthful melodies. Relying upon the fecundity of the composer’s musical ingenuity, Piedmont Opera’s L’elisir d’amore compellingly provided the substance this sparkling score is accused of lacking.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): String Quintets in C minor (K. 406/516b), G minor (K. 516), and D major (K. 593)— Chauncey Patterson, viola; Amernet String Quartet [Whitley Auditorium, Elon University, Elon, North Carolina, USA; Thursday, 14 March 2019]

Perhaps no other composer of Classical Music has equalled the comprehensive mastery of form achieved by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In a life that was brief even by the standards of his time, Mozart applied his genius to virtually every musical genre then in existence, drawing inspiration from Baroque masters and contemporaries including the Haydns, Mysliveček, and Salieri and transforming this artistic inheritance via new modes of expression. More than two centuries after his death, Mozart’s music resounds in concert halls, recital rooms, opera houses, cinemas, and private homes throughout the world, not as pedantic homage to a legendary artist but as exploration of still-undiscovered nuances of his artistry.

Composed during a period spanning eighteen years, from the month in which he celebrated his seventeenth birthday to eight months before his death, Mozart’s six quintets for two violins, two violas, and cello occupy seminal positions both in the composer’s output and in the evolution of chamber music from Baroque trio sonatas to modern works for diverse combinations of instruments. Building upon the foundations of Joseph Haydn’s enterprising string quartets, Mozart linked the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries with his quintets. In these works, the contrapuntal intricacy and near-mathematical precision of Johann Sebastian Bach’s part writing intersect with harbingers of Beethoven’s expressive intensity, Schumann’s poignant Romanticism, and Brahms’s ambiguous formality. The best performances of Mozart’s quintets are those in which past and future audibly meet within the confines of Mozart’s singularly sophisticated Classicism.

Joined in this performance by acclaimed violist and Burlington native Chauncey Patterson, a product of the string program instituted in Alamance County schools by Dr. Malvin Artley, the renowned Amernet String Quartet players—violinists Misha Vitenson and Franz Felkl, violist Michael Klotz, and cellist Jason Calloway—brought a programme comprised of three of Mozart’s quintets to Elon University’s intimate Whitley Auditorium. In their playing of these pieces in this space, the musicians explored the subtleties of the quintets with an extraordinary degree of clarity. The resonance of the room occasionally obscured individual pitches in fast-moving, ornamented, and slurred passages, but the accuracy of their playing in other passages confirmed the inviolable certainty of the musicians’ intonation.

The quintet’s ensemble playing was remarkable, but the resonance of each individual’s distinctive timbre was no less impressive. A musical aristocrat among equals, Patterson’s sound was strikingly rich and beautiful. Calloway’s sonorous pizzicati punctuated the phrases in which they were deployed with unmistakable dramatic significance. The aural patinas of both violins and Klotz’s viola combined brightness with darker undertones in a manner that accentuated the interplay of light and shadow in the music. The acoustics of large halls are not necessarily unsuited to chamber music, but this performance demonstrated that hearing music like Mozart’s quintets in a space of relative equivalence to that in which it was originally intended to be heard can be revelatory.

Dating from 1787, the C minor Quintet (K. 406/516b) with which the performance began is Mozart’s own adaptation of his earlier K. 388 Serenade for wind octet. The opening Allegro movement was played with expansive phrasing and a palpable sense of conversation among the parts. The quintet offered a serene account of the deceptively uncomplicated Andante, navigating the music’s modulations like a captain piloting a vessel through canal locks. Arriving in the open waters of the Menuetto, the musicians pursued a course of firm adherence to the dance rhythm that never impeded rhapsodic expressivity. The ‘Trio in canone al rovescio’ is unique in Mozart’s chamber music, in both form and temperament: the emotional ambivalence of the shifting moods of the music was limned by the seamless handling of the intertwining melodic line. The concluding Allegro evokes the grandeur of a symphonic finale, anticipating the symphonies of Schubert and Mahler, and this performance was characterized by an enchanting realization of the music’s contrasting introspection and angst.

The D major Quintet (K. 593) was completed in 1790, the year that also witnessed the composition of Mozart’s exquisite twenty-second and twenty-third String Quartets (K. 589 and 590). This devotion of his creative energy to chamber works yielded some of his most profound, perhaps autobiographical music, epitomized by the discourse among the instruments in K. 593. In their performance, these five musicians lent the first movement’s metamorphosis from Larghetto to Allegro particular gravitas, the lightening hues of the music suggesting a triumph over hardship. Modern listeners are often tempted to attribute psychological meanings far more convoluted than Mozart likely conceived to his slow movements, but the Adagio in K. 593 withstands post-Freudian analysis. Amernet’s playing imposed no extrapolated sentiments upon the music, instead allowing the audience to interpret Mozart’s musical ideas on their own terms. In this Quintet, too, the terpsichorean essence of the Menuetto and Trio was delightfully prominent in the musicians’ performance. Confusion about the emblematic descending chromatic figuration in the final Allegro persisted for many years owing to a corruption of the passage having appeared in an early printing of the Quintet, but Amernet’s playing exuded technical and interpretive assurance.

Like K. 406/516b, the Quintet in G minor (K. 516) was composed in 1787. G minor is a key used sparingly and with emotional specificity by Mozart: of his forty-one symphonies, only the Twenty-Fifth and Fortieth—two of his finest and best-loved symphonies—are in G minor. The brooding passion of the G-minor symphonies also permeates K. 516 and billowed from Amernet’s playing with volcanic force. The turbulent argument of the Allegro drew electrifying playing from the musicians, and the charge was sustained in the allegretto Menuetto. The sunny G major of the trio, blithely played, momentarily dispersed the ominous clouds that oppress the soul of the Quintet. Tchaikovsky, whose adoration of Mozart is apparent in his own music, expressed special admiration for the doleful candor of the G-minor Quintet’s Adagio ma non troppo movement. Amernet’s performance of this elegiac music communicated its tragic subtext without sacrificing momentum to unwarranted heaviness. The enigmatic Adagio introduction of the Quintet’s finale, again prefiguring Mahler’s whimsical manipulation of sonata form, was sensitively played. The impact of the culminating Allegro was therefore markedly heightened. Mozart’s decision to resolve this foreboding Quintet with music of impish jocularity has been criticized, but the dizzying virtuosity of Amernet’s playing validated the sagacity of Mozart’s inventiveness.

Few things imperil the health of art more direly than unquestioning acceptance of an artist’s reputed greatness. That Joseph Haydn declared Mozart to be the finest composer with whose work he was acquainted is indicative of the respect that Mozart garnered, but the accomplishments of many ordinary people have been exaggerated by well-meaning praise. His music affirms that Mozart was no ordinary person, but too many performers seemingly believe that they, rather than the music, bear the responsibility of perpetuating the composer’s genius. The music says all that needs to be said, however, and Amernet String Quartet’s majestic performances of three of Mozart’s string quintets enabled the music to speak with accents as vibrant and relevant now as when Mozart devised them.

Hometown Mozartean: violist Chauncey Patterson, Mozart interpreter with Amernet String Quartet at Elon University on 14 March 2019 (shown here as Principal Violist of Florida’s Palm Beach Symphony Orchestra)
[Photograph © by Palm Beach Symphony Orchestra]

On a personal note, I thank Mr. Patterson and his Amernet String Quartet colleagues for dedicating their performance of K. 516 to the memory of Dr. Artley (1921 – 2017), whose vision, dedication, and indefatigable work ethic were devoted to fostering and advocating for the string orchestra program in Alamance County schools. Like Mr. Patterson, I am an alumnus of the Alamance-Burlington School System orchestra program. Without exposure to the work of Dr. and Mrs. Artley and the encouragement and tutelage of my orchestra teacher, Nancy Jones, I may never have experienced Classical Music and enjoyed the friendships that my love for music has engendered.