LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827): Fidelio, Opus 72—Éva Marton (Leonore), James King (Florestan), Aage Haugland (Rocco), Lillian Watson (Marzelline), Thomas Moser (Jaquino), Theo Adam (Pizarro), Tom Krause (Don Fernando), Horst Hiestermann (Erster Gefangener), Kurt Rydl (Zweiter Gefangener); Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsoper; Wiener Philharmoniker; Lorin Maazel, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during the Salzburger Festspiele in the Großes Festspielhaus on 5 August 1983; ORFEO C 908 152; 2 CDs, 138:20; Available from Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

Whether presented in concert or in fully-staged form, whether in the guise in which it was first performed in 1805, the final version of 1814, or any other conflation of surviving materials, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio makes demands upon conductors, musicians, and singers that, in the two centuries since the composer’s final thoughts on the score were introduced to the public in Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater, have only occasionally been met with complete success. Since its inception in 1920, the Salzburger Festspiele has often witnessed momentous performances of Fidelio, including those in 1936 with Lotte Lehmann in the title rôle, unforgettable evenings in 1949 and 1950 on which Kirsten Flagstad’s Leonore donned Fidelio’s trousers in order to liberate Julius Patzak’s Florestan, and nights in 1957 and 1958 when Christel Goltz’s formidable voice resounded in the Felsenreitschule. To the document of the 1957 production already in the label’s catalogue ORFEO now adds a good-quality Österreichischen Rundfunks broadcast recording of the Salzburg Fidelio performance of 5 August 1983. Preserved in slightly boxy sound that faithfully reproduces the impact of large voices in the Großes Festspielhaus, the performance heard on ORFEO’s discs surprises by legitimately meriting inclusion among the preeminent Fidelios of the Festspiele’s distinguished history. The 1982 and 1983 Salzburg productions of Fidelio were conducted by Lorin Maazel, who presided over a DECCA studio recording of the opera with Birgit Nilsson and James McCracken nearly two decades before the performance on this ORFEO release. At Salzburg, Maazel clearly approached Fidelio not as an operatic warhorse with more than a century-and-a-half of accumulated performance traditions but as a still-evolving, still-relevant work of timeless, untiring sensibilities. The technical brilliance with which the Wiener Philharmoniker and Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsoper meet the formidable demands of Beethoven’s music is expected, of course, and there are remarkable feats of virtuosity in this performance, especially from the horns. Both the Ouvertüre and Leonoren-Ouvertüre No. 3 (Opus 72a), inserted before the Act Two finale as perpetuated by Mahler during his tenure with the Wiener Staatsoper, are impressively played, and the choristers make ‘O welche Lust!’ and ‘Heil sei dem Tag’ the awe-inspiring passages that they should and must be. Personally and institutionally, the Viennese musicians and choristers had by 1983 experienced the Fidelio interpretations of many renowned conductors, but they here adopt Maazel’s concept as their own, playing and singing with concentration and straightforward dramatic focus that complement Maazel’s unsensationalized concept. There are recordings of Fidelio from both stage and studio to suit virtually every taste, but this Fidelio offers many felicities that are unique to this performance.

A frequent enticement of Salzburger Festspiele performances is the opportunity to hear major artists in minor rôles, and this Fidelio fulfills that implicit promise by featuring acclaimed singers as the two prisoners who emerge from the throng of inmates to sing solo lines in the sublime scene for chorus in the Act One finale. German tenor Horst Hiestermann voices the lines for the Erster Gefangener with steady, silvery tone and verbal acuity. In addition to singing the Zweiter Gefangener, Austrian bass Kurt Rydl alternated as Rocco in both the 1982 and the 1983 Fidelios. In this performance, he dispatches the second prisoner’s cautionary words with compelling gravitas. As Don Fernando, Finnish bass-baritone Tom Krause (1934 – 2013) wields a voice worthy of an eleventh-hour savior. Don Fernando’s part in the drama is small but significant, and the character’s magnanimity is all the more compelling as Krause enacts it. Hiestermann, Rydl, and Krause all enhance enjoyment of this performance. Of how many Prisoners and Fernandos can that be said?

Fidelio’s pair of young lovers—Beethoven’s equivalents of Wagner’s Magdalena and David—are portrayed by singers who combine youthful timbres with genuine ability to sing their music—in reality, as rare a combination as there is in opera, no matter which composer’s name is on the score. A native Londoner, soprano Lillian Watson [there is seemingly considerable disagreement about whether the lovely lady’s first name is spelled with one or two l’s at the center: ORFEO’s materials accompanying this release prefer the single-l spelling, but many other sources, including the websites of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Royal Academy of Music, where she has been on the vocal faculty since 2007, cite the double-l form] is a sweet-toned and equally sweet-spirited Marzelline who sounds thoroughly and endearingly besotted with Fidelio. In the duet that opens the opera, Watson’s depiction of Marzelline’s annoyance with Jaquino's amorous persistence stops short of rendering her truly unkind to her ardent admirer, and she sings beautifully. Equally alluring is her singing of Marzelline’s aria, ‘O wär’ ich schon mit dir vereint,’ and she is pert without seeming saccharinely precious in the subsequent quartet, ‘Mir ist so wunderbar.’ Watson soars to the top C in the trio with Leonore and Rocco, ‘Gut, Söhnchen, gut,’ and achieves the rare accomplishment of being heard—and, rarer still, being heard with genuine pleasure—in the finales to both acts. With her impeccably-vocalized and thoughtfully-acted portrayal in this performance, Watson joins Irmgard Seefried, Sena Jurinac, Lucia Popp, and Edith Mathis among the finest Marzellines on disc. It is only natural that a student of Lotte Lehmann should excel in Fidelio, and Virginia-born tenor Thomas Moser’s singing of Jaquino in this performance would not disappoint his celebrated tutor. He joins his Marzelline in the opening duet, ‘Jetzt, Schätzchen, jetzt sind wir allein,’ with the good-hearted single-mindedness of a young lover who hears only ‘Ja, ich liebe dich’ no matter what the object of his affection actually says. Moser’s Jaquino is more robust than most, vocally and dramatically, his singing in the quartet in Act One and in both finales never lost among the powerful sounds produced by his colleagues. [It should be noted, too, that Moser returned to Salzburg in 1990 to sing Florestan opposite Gabriela Benačková’s much-admired Leonore.] Jaquino’s tenacity is ultimately rewarded, of course, and Moser’s stylish, lovingly-molded performance yields a Jaquino who truly deserves happiness with Marzelline.

A veteran of rôles as dissimilar as Wagner’s Wotan and Berg’s Wozzeck, bass-baritone Theo Adam is in this performance of Fidelio on splendid form as the malevolent Don Pizarro, a part in which singing almost as unpleasant as the character himself has sadly become the benchmark. Adam was an imaginative artist but rarely one to whose performances listeners refer as models of conventionally beautiful singing, but his traversal of Pizarro’s extroverted music in this performance impresses with its solidity and accuracy of pitch. It is no exaggeration to cite Adam in this context as one of the most musical Pizarros on disc, and he is all the more effective as a homicidal tyrant because his tones appeal: even in the awkwardly-written but bracingly effective aria ‘Ha! Welch ein Augenblick,’ Adam compels complete concentration on what this slyly conniving Pizarro fellow is plotting. Moreover, Adam sings the aria rippingly, with almost no evidence of the wobbling that sometimes affected his singing at this juncture in his career. In the duet with Rocco, ‘Jetzt, Alter, hat es Eile,’ this Pizarro plans Florestan’s demise with sadistic delight, again conveyed in firm, ingratiating tones. Even when raging in the Act One finale and throughout Act Two, Adam’s Pizarro is characterized by vocalism of a kind considerably above the recorded average, an average to which he contributed by singing Pizarro in several recordings of both Fidelio and its earlier incarnation, Leonore. It was Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that the best governments are those which govern least: a musical man, perhaps he might have modified that logic for the opera house by suggesting that the best antagonists of the lyric stage are those who bring their parts to life with the fewest tricks and distractions. Adam actually sings Pizarro’s music, and the character’s volatility is markedly more interesting for it.

Dutch bass Aage Haugland (1944 – 2000) is a worthy would-be partner in crime for Adam’s Pizarro, but his Rocco is so audibly a gentle soul that the notion of him participating in the assassination and disposal of Florestan seems ludicrous. As recorded here, Haugland’s voice is a tremulous, slightly dull instrument, but the care that he takes with words is very eloquent. His is a Rocco who seems to truly love and care not only for his daughter’s wellbeing but for Fidelio’s, as well, feelings that are unmistakable in his singing in the quartet in Act One. His performance of the aria ‘Hat man nicht auch Gold daneben,’ often treated by basses solely as an opportunity to display their voices, is unexpectedly circumspect, his message more paternal than pragmatic. In the trio ‘Gut, Söhnchen, gut,’ Haugland reaches heartening depths of good-natured humanity even when the actual vocalism is not wholly first-rate. There are no foolishness or cheap stock gestures in the duet with Pizarro, and the duet with Leonore, ‘Nur hurtig fort, nur frisch gegraben,’ and trio in which they are joined by the condemned Florestan in Act Two are sung with unwavering sincerity. In the opera’s penultimate scene, Haugland does not portray Rocco as a Leporello distancing himself from his punishment-bound master: he is a tired, traumatized man eager to return to a state of peace. Though there are uncertain pitches and moments of fallible singing, so benevolent is Haugland’s Rocco that one almost expects to hear him summarize Leonore’s and Florestan’s reunion with an aptly Biblical ‘Und es ward so.’

American tenor James King (1925 – 2005) sang Florestan under Karl Böhm’s baton at Salzburg in 1968, 1969, and 1970, as well as on Böhm’s Deutsche Grammophon studio recording of Fidelio released to celebrate the bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth. That he was still singing such a demanding rôle so well at the age of fifty-eight, thirteen years after celebration of the Beethoven centennial in 1970, is evidence not only of a marvelous voice but also of the good sense and training needed to use it properly. Throughout his career, King was rightly regarded as a preeminent interpreter of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, and his experience with this music provided him with special qualifications for Florestan, in whose introductory scene at the start of Act Two Beethoven started a new path leading to the music of Mahler and Richard Strauss via Wagner and Bruckner. Florestan’s ‘Gott! Welch’ Dunkel hier!’ is as challenging as the stratospheric entrance music for Gualtiero and Arturo in Bellini’s Il pirata and I puritani and Radamès’s ‘Celeste Aida,’ but King tames its savageries with pointed, commendably direct singing. The tenor copes manfully with the punishing tessitura, and his top B♭s remain secure and exciting. King voices Florestan’s noble sentiments in ‘Euch werde Lohn in besser’n Welten’ with handsome tone matched by a keen sense of the words’ meaning. In ‘O namenlose Freude’ and the opera’s finale, there are just enough indications of stress in the tenor’s performance to remind the listener of what a demanding rôle Florestan is, even for a singer with King’s decades-long experience with the part. Like Maazel’s conducting, King’s portrayal of Florestan is not a facsimile of a battle-tested interpretation. King was still a thinking, feeling, transitioning Florestan, and this is among his—and any tenors’—best-sung performances of this taxing music.

The intimidating title rôle was entrusted in this Salzburg production, as well as in its outing in the prior year’s Festspiele, to Éva Marton, who in 1983 was at a vocal crossroads, the path forged with rôles like Leonore, Verdi’s Leonoras in Il trovatore and La forza del destino, and the title rôle in Richard Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena intersecting with the road onto which she was embarking, one with Wagner’s Brünnhildes, Strauss’s Elektra and Färberin, and Puccini’s Turandot as notable destinations. A 1984 Metropolitan Opera broadcast in which she was partnered by Jon Vickers’s Florestan and Paul Plishka’s Rocco preserves what was clearly one of the finest performances of Marton’s career, but this Salzburg performance is in some ways superior. After she moved into heavier repertory, Marton’s singing seemingly lost a measure of the involvement displayed by her Leonore in this performance, the necessity of maintaining vocal potency outweighing the development of individualized characterizations. In the Act One quartet with Marzelline, Rocco, and Jaquino in this performance, though, her singing is confident and nuanced, Leonore’s reluctance to unjustly cause Jaquino pain nobly imparted by Marton’s careful management of her voice and unaffected enunciation of text. There is even a suggestion in the trio with Marzelline and Rocco that this Leonore, not unlike Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, feels that the game has been carried too far, both Marzelline’s and Jaquino’s future contentment being jeopardized by her actions. Aside from a final top B that lands a hair’s breadth short of the mark, Marton’s account of ‘Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin?’ is incredible. Hers is not a voice suited to filigree, but she sings the fiorature capably, mastering the runs in the aria with greater ease than many Leonores have brought to the music. Throughout Act Two, Marton is nothing short of ideal, combining Flagstad-like femininity and projection with the unstoppable power and stamina of a young Gladys Kuchta. She interacts with Haugland’s Rocco not with the indifference of using him as a means to an end but with the affection of one who has come to respect the man’s honesty and honor. Finally able to meaningfully defend Florestan, her cry of ‘Töt erst sein Weib!’ would stay the hand of the deadliest Pizarro, and her near-ecstatic singing in ‘O namenlose Freude,’ of which she and King deliver an effervescent performance, would gladden the soul of any husband. In the opera’s final scene, Marton gives generously of both voice and heart, phrasing ‘O Gott, o Gott, welch ein Augenblick!’ with great expressivity. Listeners familiar only with Marton’s Wagner recordings must be forgiven for any initial skepticism about the lady singing Leonore in this performance being the same singer later heard on disc as Ortrud and Brünnhilde. Along with her stunning 1981 Bayerische Staatsoper Ägyptische Helena [available on CD here] and performances in her native Hungarian in works like Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk bán, this Salzburg Fidelio wonderfully broadens appreciation of Marton’s artistry at its best.

Taking for granted that no one sets out to perform Fidelio badly, the bounty of poor singing and playing of Beethoven’s sole opera on stage and on disc confirms that the score remains as challenging for today’s practitioners as it was for those who first brought it to life in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Laden with spirituality and symbolism, Fidelio has often been utilized to celebrate milestones in humanity, service epitomized by the staging of the opera in 1955 for the ceremonial reopening of the Wiener Staatsoper after the devastation of World War Two. Its festival setting notwithstanding, this 1983 Salzburg performance proves that Fidelio works equally well on a more intimate scale. In this Fidelio, the heroics are those not of archetypes but of ordinary people subjected to extraordinary hardships. These are the travails of people one might encounter anywhere, but the folks in queue with you at the supermarket probably do not sing like Éva Marton and James King.

History suggests that it was Aristotle who mused that ‘the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance.’ One of the principal dismays of those who love Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century is the frequency with which even the most admired musicians fail to achieve that aim. The notes are there, the rhythms, the correct accents, those outward appearances, but where is the inner significance that transforms notes, rhythms, and accents into music? Few Americans with televisions in their homes can have avoided the ubiquitous Law and Order franchise, in the opening sequence of which it was famously stated that citizens are protected by those who enforce laws and those who prosecute offenders, complementary instruments of justice whose experiences the series sought to recreate. Music, too, is served by two groups of practitioners: those who make noise and those who communicate emotions in sound. Max Emanuel Cenčić, Michael Lewin, Timothy Myers, Andrew Owens, and Angela Renée Simpson are musicians whose aim is sure, their endeavors unerringly revealing the inner significance—the art—of the works that they perform. These are their stories.

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Baroque and beyond: Countertenor Max Emanuel Cenčić [Photo by Anna Hoffmann, © by Parnassus Arts Productions]

Not so long ago, countertenors were by their very existence remarkable. When Sir Alfred Deller on one side of the Atlantic and Russell Oberlin on the other dedicated their talents to sparing the works of Baroque composers the indignities of transposition and gender reassignments, they ushered in a new age of reassessing, rejuvenating, and respecting Baroque repertory. They also charted the course that in the later Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries has lead singers in their Fach to virtually all of the world’s important opera houses and concert stages. I have been aware of the artistry of Max Emanuel Cenčić since he was a golden-voiced treble soloist with the famed Wiener Sängerknaben. His was an astonishing talent then and is even more awe-inspiring now, but it is not solely an incredible natural instrument that elevates Cenčić into both the ranks of exceptionally gifted countertenors and the company of the greatest musical artists of any voice type and genre, past and present. His most recent disc, Arie Napoletane [DECCA 478 8422], my choice for Best Solo Vocal Recital Disc of 2015, epitomizes the qualities that mark Cenčić as one of the new millennium’s most important musicians​. Supported by Il pomo d'oro and harpsichordist and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, who unexpectedly headlines the disc’s virtuosic finale with a no-holds-barred performance of Domenico Auletta’s Concerto for harpsichord, two violins, and basso continuo in D major, Cenčić sings arias from Leonardo Leo’s Demetrio, Scipione nelle Spagne, and Siface, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s L'olimpiade, Nicola Antonio Porpora’s ​Germanico in Germania [a complete recording of which, recorded in June 2014, will be forthcoming on DECCA, following the February/March 2016 international release of Cenčić’s new recording of Händel’s Arminio] and Polifemo, Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il Cambise, Massimo Puppieno, Il prigioniero fortunato, and Il Tigrane, and Leonardo Vinci’s Demetrio and Eraclea, many of which appear on disc for the first time. When I saw Cenčić perform the rôle of the grieving Sposa of the title character in Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio with Les Arts Florissants in New York, he achieved the astonishing feat of making the exalted Alessio—portrayed by no less an artist than Philippe Jaroussky!—seem insignificant except as the Existential motivation for the Sposa’s suffering. A laudably finished artist even in his youth, when he recorded astoundingly mature interpretations of Lieder by Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, and Richard Strauss [alongside his Capriccio recordings of cantatas by Antonio Caldara, Domenico Scarlatti, and Antonio Vivaldi, his Lieder disc Schöne Fremde, recorded before his transition to the countertenor register, remains a title to which I listen often], Arie Napoletane and his DECCA recordings of Hasse’s Siroe, re di Persia [reviewed here] and Vinci’s Catone in Utica [reviewed here] reveal that Cenčić continues to refine both his technique and his wide-ranging artistic curiosity with every new project. Not yet forty years old, he has already enjoyed a career longer than those of many of the most admired singers of recent years, but each assertion that he has reached his artistic peak is confounded by his next effort. Among the eleven arias on Arie Napoletane, all splendidly sung, ‘Dal suo gentil sembiante’ from Leo’s Demetrio is emblematic of Cenčić’s work: handsomeness, stylishness, and expressiveness are hallmarks of both the singer and the man.

BEST SOLO VOCAL RECITAL DISC OF 2015 | D. AULETTA (16?? – 1747), L. LEO (1694 – 1744), G. B. PERGOLESI (1710 – 1736), N. PORPORA (1686 – 1768), A. SCARLATTI (1660 – 1725), & L. VINCI (1696? – 1730): Arie Napoletane—Max Emanuel Cenčić, countertenor; Il pomo d’oro; Maxim Emelyanychev, conductor & harpsichord soloist [Recorded in Villa San Fermo, Lonigo, Italy, 7 – 14 February 2015; DECCA 478 8422; 1 CD, 75:31; Available from DECCA and major music retailers]

To learn more about Max Emanuel Cenčić, please visit his website.

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Prophet of the Piano: Pianist and Steinway artist Michael Lewin [Photo by Lucy Cobos, © by Steinway & Sons]

‘How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world,’ Portia exclaims in Act Five of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. With which words might the Bard have extolled the work of a genuinely gifted, important pianist amidst the deafening babel of so much bad playing? Man of flesh or literary phantom, Shakespeare might have argued that the plethora of poorly-written plays that congested Elizabethan theatres caused the genius of his own work to shine all the more brightly. So, too, does the haphazard playing of poorly-trained, emotionally vacuous pianists serve a purpose in facilitating appreciation of and gratitude for the playing of Michael Lewin, whose triumphant new recording of music by Claude Debussy​, Starry Night [Sono Luminus DSL-92190], the sequel to the disc Beau Soir [reviewed here] yielded by the pianist’s exceptional and wholly natural affinity for Debussy’s music, is my choice for Best Solo Piano Recording of 2015. Encompassing a complete traversal of Book One of the composer’s genre-redefining Préludes​ and authoritative performances of several small-scaled gems, Starry Night is a fitting tribute both to Debussy and to the pianist whose technical and interpretive versatilities render him a conduit for Twenty-First-Century listeners’ spiritual communion with the composer. Lewin’s ardent but subtle account of ‘Jardins sous la pluie’ (Estampes, L. 100, No. 3) is aptly representative of the ingenuity of Starry Night and of his playing in general. From a vocal perspective, Lewin’s playing brings to mind Maria Callas’s singing of chromatic scales: every tone is discernibly touched, but none is unduly emphasized. In other words, an assured placement of each step ensures that the destination is never obscured by the journey. An instinctive comprehension of a piece’s provenances on its own, in the broader context of its setting, and within the narratives of the composer’s life and process, allied with an innate ability to convey these details to listeners, constitute the core of Lewin’s artistic identity. Many pianists play the works of Debussy, but, especially in the performances on Starry Night, Lewin experiences them—and enables the listener to experience them, as well. Thus does he cultivate art where others are content to hide behind artifice.

BEST SOLO PIANO RECORDING OF 2015 | CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 – 1918): Starry Night– Préludes, Book I; Estampes, L. 100; Arabesque No. 1 in E major, L. 66; Golliwog’s Cakewalk; Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon; and Nuit d’etoiles—Michael Lewin, piano [Recorded at Sono Luminus Studios, Boyce, Virginia, USA, 7 – 8 July 2014; Sono Luminus DSL-92190; 1 CD, 68:56; Available from Sono Luminus, ClassicsOnline HD (Download / Streaming), and major music retailers]

To learn more about Michael Lewin, please visit his website.

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Maestro on the ascendant: Conductor Timothy Myers [Photo by Simon Pauly, © by IMG Artists]

One of the simplest joys of exposing young children to Classical Music is watching their hilarious, often surprisingly intuitive efforts at mock-conducting. One of the most gnawing annoyances of loving Classical Music is observing how many conductors never truly outgrow that sort of naïve, unschooled stick-waving, retaining the puerility but not the uncomplicated elation. Great conductors are as varied as the scores that they conduct, the largesse of a Bernstein a world apart from the restraint of a Böhm. Indeed, insightful conducting is not always easily discerned from charismatic conducting, but it is a critical distinction. In his time with North Carolina Opera, of which company he is Artistic Director and Principal Conductor, and its previous incarnation, Opera Company of North Carolina, Timothy Myers has proved himself to be an invaluable asset to musical life in North Carolina and beyond and an exceptionally intelligent repertory conductor of the type all but extinct since the advent of the era of conductor-as-would-be-action-heroes. His accomplishments on the North Carolina Opera podium in recent seasons include a powerful semi-staged account of Dvořák’s Rusalka, a concert performance of Act Two of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that made contemporaneous Bayreuth efforts seem amateurish by comparison, and consistently engaging, unimpeachably musical productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Verdi’s La traviata. Living composers trust Myers with the preparation and premières of new music. Singers trust his leadership when making important rôle débuts. Audiences trust him to always give of his best. A prevalent theme in my writing for Voix des Arts is the worrying distrust among young conductors of the music that they conduct. A vital component of what makes a conductor great is belief in the absolute necessity of a piece being heard, a trait that is sometimes innate and sometimes acquired but is always apparent to a conductor’s colleagues and audiences. When conducting Don Giovanni, for instance, Myers clearly made choices not because Mahler did this, Maazel did that, and Mehta did something else entirely but because Mozart created a score in which the music makes its own demands, inviting individual interpretation, of course, but not to be ignored because some latter-day sage professes to know better. The results of Myers’s efforts at improving the quality of North Carolina Opera’s orchestral playing are, on their own scale, no less monumental than what first Mahler and then James Levine achieved at the Metropolitan Opera [in seasons before Myers’s residency in Raleigh, playing was seldom truly embarrassing, but it rarely increased enjoyment of performances as it has done recently], but I find the most comforting, enthralling, and gratifying aspect of Myers’s conducting to be the assurance that, no matter which score is before him, I will hear the composer’s music as it exists on the page, delivered with imagination, intensity, and, above all, uncompromising fidelity to no one’s notions of how the piece should sound other than the composer’s and his own—notions that in Myers’s performances are exceptionally compatible. Youngsters whose introduction to Classical Music is born of a fascination with the baton could find no more knowledgeable, thoughtful, and sheerly fun a rôle model than Timothy Myers.

To learn more about Timothy Myers, please visit his website.

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Bella voce di bel canto: Tenor Andrew Owens [Photo by Wilfried Hösl, © by IMG Artists]

​Dashing is a word that is tossed about with ridiculous regularity to describe every sort of performer and performance, but young American tenor ​​Andrew Owens is the personification of the overused term, vocally and histrionically. His Don Ramiro in Greensboro Opera’s August 2015 La Cenerentola [reviewed here] was the kind of performance about which Rossini aficionados dream, one in which every demand of the score was met without hedging or hesitation. In 2016, North Carolinians are granted another opportunity to hear this musical magician casting spells in Rossinian fiorature as Conte Almaviva in North Carolina Opera’s April production of Il barbiere di Siviglia. It is significant that Owens was mentored by fellow tenor Enrico Di Giuseppe, one of the unheralded heroes of American opera. When Dame Joan Sutherland’s Marie in Donizetti’s La fille du Régiment was introduced to Metropolitan Opera Saturday matinée broadcast listeners in 1972, her Tonio was not Luciano Pavarotti but Di Giuseppe, a beloved member of the New York City Opera company and frequent costar there of the incomparable Beverly Sills whose top Cs were no less stirring and even more reliable than those of his Italian colleague. The next year, Di Giuseppe partnered Gilda Cruz-Romo and Robert Merrill in a superb MET broadcast performance of Verdi’s La traviata, and he rescued the 1971 opening night of a new production of Massenet’s Werther, opposite the Charlotte of the magnificent Christa Ludwig, by substituting for Franco Corelli in the title rôle. Andrew Owens is among the very small number of tenors singing today whose vocal brilliance and firm technical footing qualify him as a legitimate inheritor of Di Giuseppe’s mantle. A true tenore di grazia, Owens is a bold singer who is unafraid of taking risks but is also unfailingly, meticulously prepared. His Ramiro provided much of the bel in the Greensboro Cenerentola’s bel canto, and his portrayals of parts ranging from Barbarigo opposite Plácido Domingo’s Francesco in Verdi’s I due Foscari to Chevalier Léon in Darius Milhaud’s La mère coupable during his tenure as a young artist with the company of Vienna’s Theater an der Wien have disclosed an uncommon capacity for thoughtful, thought-provoking characterizations. What I find most fascinating about Owens’s singing is the ambiguity that he conveys by vocalizing so confidently whilst finding and spotlighting among the traits of the men he portrays touching elements of vulnerability. There is something unique and endearing about a Ramiro who sings Rossini’s music with absolute ease but seems wholly sensitive to the fact that happiness is not something obtained by royal prerogative. In part, this is a parable of the genre itself. Opera in the new millennium is no longer conquered by voice alone, but Owens is a crusader who reminds us, as Enrico Di Giuseppe reminded a previous generation of listeners, that a well-schooled, well-used voice is the heart of an important artist, of a successful performance, and of the survival of opera.

To learn more about Andrew Owens, please visit his website.

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Queen [and Queenie] of the Stage: Dramatic soprano Angela Renée Simpson [Photo © by Angela Renée Simpson]

In the magnificently tumultuous history of song, there have been near-continuous progressions of great singers and great voices. In the first instance, there are singers who excel despite an absence of vocal resources of the highest order. By contrast, there are singers who are only occasionally satisfactory as technicians but whose voices are exquisite instruments. Perhaps rarer than any other occurrences in music are those in which talent and technique intersect, thereby genuinely meriting application of the oft-abused distinction of artist. Hearing the singing of dramatic soprano Angela Renée Simpson, whether she is portraying a storied heroine of the operatic stage or bringing a composer’s intentions to life in concert or recital, is to wholly understand the indelible catharsis of surrendering without hesitation to an artist whose voice is as miraculous as the intelligence that sustains it. When assessing performances by singers, my analyses are guided by what I hear, but it is impossible to consider a performance by Angela Renée Simpson without thinking first and foremost about what her singing causes me to feel. To experience her vocal acting as Serena in Porgy and Bess or Queenie in Showboat​ is to know how it must have felt to hear Nordica’s Brünnhilde, Fremstad’s Salome, Flagstad’s Isolde, and Varnay’s Elektra. Comparing voices, particularly those of great quality, is a dangerous and essentially useless sport, but the singers who voices resound in my mind’s ear when I contemplate Simpson’s artistry are Eileen Farrell and Jessye Norman. Like the former, Simpson is not heard in her native country’s opera houses with anything approaching the frequency that her talents warrant, and, like Norman, her vocal and dramatic abilities cannot be neatly compartmentalized and pigeonholed. Simpson has both suffered and benefited from today’s musical establishment’s bumbling ignorance of how to train and maintain dramatic voices. Crucially, though, she has thrived on the freedom granted by the failures of conventional methodologies, honing her technique according to the physical and expressive dimensions of her voice and polishing her artistry within her own parameters, not someone else’s. When hearing Simpson’s voice surging from the abyss of despair in ‘My man’s gone now,’ Serena’s lament for her murdered husband in Act One of Porgy and Bess, it is virtually impossible to not be reminded of the rôle’s creator, the radiant Ruby Elzy, whose brief life tragically ended not long before she was to have sung her first Aida. Could she have heard her successor as Serena sing Verdi, ‘ol’ man sorrow’ might have been held at bay for a while. Then again, it is difficult to imagine that a voice like Angela Renée Simpson’s does not reach heaven every time that its owner sets it free. Without question, her singing propagates cherished oases of heaven on earth whether the words are those of Catfish Row or the disconsolate daughter of the Ethiopian king.

To learn more about Angela Renée Simpson, please visit her website.

PIETRO GENERALI (1773 – 1832): Adelina—Dušica Bijelić (Adelina), Gabriele Nani (Varner), Gustavo Quaresma Ramos (Erneville), Silvia Beltrami (Carlotta), Elier Muñoz (Simone), Ugo Rabec (Firmino); Eliseo Castrignanò, fortepiano; Virtuosi Brunensis; Giovanni Battista Rigon, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during the XXII ROSSINI IN WILDBAD Festival in the Königliches Kurtheater, Bad Wildbad, Germany, on 14, 16, and 24 July 2010; NAXOS 8.660372-73; 2 CDs, 90:41; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Italy in the first half of the Nineteenth Century—when there was no unified Italy in the modern sense, that is—was a volatile menagerie of ever-changing cultures similar enough to foster a burgeoning sense of shared national identity and sufficiently dissimilar to perpetuate the divisiveness begotten by generations of political intrigues and constantly-shifting allegiances. With the establishment of the short-lived Napoleonic Republic of Italy in Alpine Italy in the century’s first decade, a vital step towards eventual unification was taken, but would-be Italians in reality only traded Hapsburg overlords for Buonaparte scions. The seeds of the Risorgimento were sown, however, and the dissolution of the Papal States further redefined dominion over the Italian peninsula. It was into this cultural and political maelstrom, the Italy represented by Sardou’s and Puccini’s Baron Scarpia, that Pietro Generali’s ‘melodramma sentimentale’ Adelina was born at Venice’s Teatro San Moisè in September 1810. Using a libretto adapted by Gaetano Rossi from a French model set to music in the previous decade by André Grétry, Adelina combines a bucolic Swiss setting reminiscent of that in Bellini’s La sonnambula with surprisingly modern sensibilities. No standard-issue concoction of mistaken identities and fortuitous last-minute revelations, the drama of Adelina is a convolution of illicit love, an illegitimate child, and the effects of shame and social stigmas on individuals and families. If this seems unlikely subject matter for the venue in which the eighteen-year-old Gioachino Rossini’s hastily-written first opera, the one-act farsa La cambiale di matrimonio, premièred less than two months after the first performance of Adelina, perhaps it was: after devoting the next eight years to producing a further five of Rossini’s operas—L’equivoco stravagante, L’inganno felice, La scala di seta, L’occasione fa il ladro, and Il signor Bruschino—and a forgotten opera by Giovanni Pacini, the San Moisè, inaugurated in 1640 by the first performance of Monteverdi’s L’Arianna, closed. Few things in opera are ever wholly as they seem, however. The nature of the reception that Adelina received at its première is undocumented, but it is recorded in The Harmonicon that Adelina was performed at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket in London in 1825, when the rôle of Erneville was sung by famed tenor Manuel García not long before his departure for New York at the invitation of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Ironically, it was stated by The Harmonicon’s unnamed author that Generali ‘has taken his best subjects from Rossini’—an interesting observation considering that the sole intersection among the two composers’ works was Adelaide di Borgogna, Rossini’s setting of which, utilizing a libretto by Giovanni Schmidt, premièred in 1817 in Rome, Generali’s, its libretto by Luigi Romanelli, in 1819 in Rovigo. There is no evidence that Generali was familiar with Rossini’s score, but he was clearly confident enough of his own renown to risk competing with his younger colleague. That Adelina was performed in London fifteen years after its première strongly suggests that the work won lasting favor in and beyond Venice. One of the defining missions of the ROSSINI IN WILDBAD Festival is exploring the music of Rossini’s contemporaries, and the Festival’s 2010 production of Adelina offered an unexpected opportunity to make the acquaintance of Generali’s fascinating score. Now, NAXOS’s ongoing commitment to recording ROSSINI IN WILDBAD productions brings Adelina to an even wider audience.

Born in 1773 in Masserano in the Piedmont, near today’s border with France, Generali is not among the most widely-known composers of his era, but he was clearly extensively and sincerely admired during his lifetime. His first opera having met with at least moderate success at its first performance in 1800, he was an established entity in northern Italian opera by the time of Adelina’s première. Eighteen years later, on 27 December 1828, Generali’s opera Francesca da Rimini had the distinction of reopening the extensively-renovated Teatro La Fenice, and one act from Francesca da Rimini was included in the gala performance featuring an act from each of the season’s greatest successes that was presented to mark the end of Carnevale in 1829. Logically, then, the impression that Adelina made in Venice almost certainly cannot have been negligible. Despite a few problems, this NAXOS recording also makes a vivid impression. Foremost among those problems is the recording itself. Likely a result of the staging rather than flaws in microphone placement, this is one of NAXOS’s noisiest recordings, every footfall, sneeze, and cough captured and reproduced with crystal-clear fidelity. Appreciation of Generali’s music is not adversely effected, but the near-continuous non-musical distractions are a considerable nuisance. Veterans of a number of ROSSINI IN WILDBAD productions recorded by NAXOS, the Virtuosi Brunensis play Generali’s score idiomatically under the direction of Giovanni Battista Rigon, whose steady beat keeps the performance moving without rushing either the singers or the pace of the drama. Occasionally, the editing of material from the three performances that yielded the recording makes transitions among tempi seem clumsier than they probably were in the theatre, but Rigon maintains a firm hand and instinctively supports the singers. The fortepiano continuo of Eliseo Castrignanò is one of the recording’s greatest strengths, his playing masterfully enlivening otherwise dull secco recitatives. Under Rigon’s direction, the musicians deliver a lively account of the opera’s Sinfonia, its initial Largo shaped with subtlety that gives way to exuberance in the animated Spiritoso, and musical standards are commendably high throughout the performance. This is not uniformly great or greatly difficult music, but there is never a moment in this recording when the musicians’ performances suggest anything other than complete faith in Adelina’s stage-worthiness.

In the opera’s opening scene, ‘Ecco il sol che spunta fuori’ introduces the listener to the Latin-spouting schoolmaster Don Simone and prominent man about town Varner, sung by baritones Elier Muñoz and Gabriele Nani. The Havana-born Muñoz interacts with his colleagues with expert timing and is often genuinely funny in his singing of Simone’s droll recitations of Latin maxims, a conceit that could quickly become tiresome. A native of Bergamo, Donizetti’s hometown, Nani sounds as though he has bel canto in his blood: his Belcore and Malatesta in his fellow Bergamascho’s L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale are sure to be as delightful as his paranoid, pompous Varner. They are joined by the sparkling Carlotta of Bolognese mezzo-soprano Silvia Beltrami in ‘Si tu vales, vale, valeo,’ delivered charmingly by all three singers, father and daughter—Varner and Carlotta—responding to Simone’s pseudo-scholarly bluster with wit and boundless energy.

Born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later resident in Serbia, soprano Dušica Bijelić brought to her assumption of the title rôle in the Wildbad Adelina a cosmopolitan résumé that belied her youth. In 2012, two years after the production heard on this release, she participated in a very selective Carnegie Hall masterclass with Renée Fleming, and even by 2010 she already had an impressive array of performances to her credit. Her portrayal of Adelina is a testament to the solid technical foundation of her musical education and to her gifts as an introspective singing actress. It is indeed sweet sound that characterizes her singing of ‘Dolce suon mi scendi al core,’ and she voices ‘Che farò?’ and ‘Chi mi consiglia?’ attractively and aptly pensively. Bijelić possesses a voice that seems destined for important contributions to performances of bel canto repertory in the Twenty-First Century, her upper register and negotiations of fiorature consistently impressive in this performance. She, Nani, and Muñoz sing the trio ‘Ah! l’avesse almen colpito’ engagingly, the soprano’s voice floating alluringly above the baritones’ grumbling.

In passages of recitative preceding the aria of Adelina’s seducer, said reprobate’s servant Firmino is portrayed by bass Ugo Rabec. Born in the French commune of Vittel, famous for its widely-distributed bottled water, Rabec voices his lines with dramatic directness and sturdy tone. When his master Erneville arrives on the scene, it is in the person of Rio de Janeiro-born tenor Gustavo Quaresma Ramos, a singer who, like Bijelić, seems earmarked for an estimable career in the tenor repertory of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. He phrases Erneville’s aria ‘Al respirar quest’aure, fra così ameni oggetti’ with suavity, his timbre taking on a lovely sheen as the vocal line climbs above the stave. The estranged lovers are reunited in the appealing duet ‘Oh, il più ingrato,’ Bijelić’s Adelina audibly falling in love with Quaresma Ramos’s Erneville anew as their voices intertwine. Indeed, their voices are as captivating in ensemble as they are individually: they would surely charm listeners as Rossini’s Comtesse Adèle and Comte Ory.

Muñoz provides a rollicking reading of Simone’s aria ‘Falsus, falsus est, che Amor sit,’ dispatching Generali’s patter writing with the acumen of a natural Figaro or Dandini. Muñoz is a source of vocal mettle and spirited but restrained humor throughout the performance: as Muñoz portrays him, it is hardly surprising that it is Simone who is the catalyst for the opera’s lieto fine. Bijelić sings Adelina’s aria proper—Generali identifies her first appearance in the manuscript solely as ‘Sortita di Adelina’—‘Oh dio! Esporre il sangue mio!’ with great immediacy, the ornaments elegantly integrated into her articulation of the vocal line. Likewise, her traversal of ‘Ma in ciel v’è un nume giusto, pietoso’ is distinguished by graceful nimbleness. The opera’s finale evinces an ‘all’s well that ends well’ philosophy, the wily Simone manipulating Varner’s prejudices and facilitating the ultimate reconciliation of father, daughter, and new son-in-law. ‘Oh natura, sì, ti sento’ and ‘La scelta del mio core’ receive from the entire cast the kind of what-will-happen-next concentration that can prove so effective in opera, no matter who wrote the score. Rigon and the Wildbad cast pay tribute to Generali with a rousing performance of Adelina’s effervescent finale.

It cannot be claimed that Adelina is a rediscovered masterpiece that is likely to carve for itself a niche in the international repertory among the better-known works of its composer’s generation. Making such a claim was not the purpose of ROSSINI IN WILDBAD’s production of the opera or of this NAXOS recording of it. What this and other Wildbad productions and NAXOS recordings of them do so efficaciously is confirm that Rossini was not a solitary genius in an artistic desert. If Adelina is representative of his work, Pietro Generali was a fantastic craftsman whose dramatic instincts transcended the uncomplicated frivolity of many of his contemporaries. Though imperfect in execution, this stylish, thoroughly enjoyable Adelina is much more valuable than another inadequate, half-hearted Barbiere di Siviglia.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Il re pastore, K. 208—John Mark Ainsley (Alessandro), Sarah Fox (Aminta), Ailish Tynan (Elisa), Anna Devin (Tamiri), Benjamin Hulett (Agenore); The Orchestra of Classical Opera; Ian Page, conductor [Recorded at St John’s, Smith Square, London, UK, 17 – 25 July 2014; Signum Classics SIGCD433; 2 CDs, 117:12; Available from Signum Records, ClassicsOnline HD (Download / Streaming), Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In terms of precocity and mastery of virtually every musical genre in vogue during his brief life, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a truly remarkable composer, perhaps rivaled only by Felix Mendelssohn. Mozart’s extraordinary genius and versatility have prompted later generations of admirers to assume and assert that every work of which his authorship is authenticated, from juvenilia to the undoubted gems of his maturity, is at least on some level a masterpiece. Well-meaning as such advocacy of the master’s work invariably is, in reality it does Mozart and his music few favors. The Romantic minds of the Nineteenth Century determined that, in order to deserve their adulation, Mozart must be a tragic hero, so his music was performed, promoted, and published with embellished subtexts of intrigue and strife, fabricating a larger-than-life persona that in many ways had little in common with the historical Mozart. The Wunderkind of Salzburg endured many hardships, to be sure, but the Mozart who emerges from the composer’s extensive preserved correspondence is not a brooding, melancholic, echt-Romantic figure. Rather, he is an engaging, sometimes delightfully ribald fellow who, for all his social frivolity, is both utterly serious about his craft and tremendously insightful in assessing the work of his contemporaries. As the significance of composers like Josef Mysliveček has gradually been reestablished in the past half-century, it has become increasingly apparent that Mozart was not the sole musical innovator in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, single-handedly responsible for the transition from Viennese Classicism to early Romanticism. From the earliest of his works, though, there is a singularity in Mozart’s music that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Splendidly-written as the operas of both Haydns, Mysliveček, Dittersdorf, Holzbauer, and Salieri often are, they only fitfully display the emotional directness—the heart, as it were—that Mozart’s operas consistently wield. It is a disservice to Mozart to claim that Il re pastore is a masterwork equal in importance to the later Singspiele and Da Ponte operas, but the serenata has a compelling charm of its own, the Arcadian delicacy of its setting contrasting with music that frequently pushes singers to the limits of their techniques. What makes Mozart one of the greatest composers of opera is the manner in which he lures audiences into genuinely caring about characters who go about their business in recitatives and roulades. What his Il re pastore needs in order to capitalize on that allure is a cast and conductor who are capable of mastering the score’s many difficulties without bloating the dimensions of the drama. What Signum Classics’ and Classical Opera’s recording of Il re pastore offers is, simply put, an account of the piece that comes as near to perfection as any performance might ever hope to do.

Mozart had reached the advanced age of nineteen when Il re pastore—his tenth endeavor in operatic form!—was first performed on 23 April 1775. Commissioned to celebrate a visit to the archiepiscopal see of Salzburg by Archduke Maximilian Francis, the youngest son of Empress Maria Theresa and an almost exact contemporary of Mozart, the serenata made use of an adaptation of a 1751 Metastasio libretto by Prince-Archbishop Colloredo’s resident chaplain and poet, Abbé Varesco, who would later supply the libretto for Mozart’s first fully mature opera, Idomeneo, re di Creta. Reducing Metastasio’s three acts to two for Salzburg, Varesco and Mozart condensed the drama into a taut nucleus from which attentive performers can extract surprising jolts of electricity. Il re pastore is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, English horns, bassoons, and trumpets, four horns, strings, and harpsichord and cello continuo, complemented here by double bass—and brilliantly done by harpsichordist Steven Devine, cellist Joseph Crouch, and double bass player Cecilia Bruggemeyer. The musicians of the Orchestra of Classical Opera approach the virtuosic hurdles of Mozart’s music as though clearing them were as easy as walking. Playing by strings and winds alike is exemplary, the atmosphere of concentration and assured grasp of the idiom apparent from the first bars of the Molto allegro Overtura, delivered with quicksilver rhythms that would make the piece an introduction as suitable to ballet as to opera. The courantes, passacaglias, and sarabandes of Baroque opera were not altogether forgotten in 1775, after all, especially in Salzburg, where Heinrich Biber had virtually redefined the passacaglia a century earlier. The Classical Opera musicians execute their parts with passion and precision, wholly sidestepping the pedantry frequently encountered in performances of music of this vintage. The musical component of the Prince-Archbishop’s court was under the supervision of Michael Haydn at the time of the first performance of Il re pastore [it is conjectured that Haydn’s wife, the soprano Maria Magdalena Lipp, may have sung Tamiri in the première], but it is difficult to imagine Mozart having heard his music played as well as it is on this recording. The very favorable impression made by conductor Ian Page’s leadership of Classical Opera’s previous recordings of Mozart’s Apollo et Hyacinthus, Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots and Mitridate, re di Ponto [reviewed here] is expanded exponentially by his conducting of Il re pastore. With traversals of the score led by committed Mozarteans Leopold Hager, Sir Neville Marriner, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt in the discography, Il re pastore has not been poorly served on disc, but Page’s direction reveals how greatly the music can benefit from a fresh approach that takes it cues solely from the music at hand, not from the perspectives of Mozart’s later operas. Conducting Il re pastore like a smaller-scaled Idomeneo or La clemenza di Tito is not wholly ineffectual, but the score yields far greater joys when treated not as a momentary stop on its composer’s journey but as its own entity. Page allows the specific atmosphere of Il re pastore to materialize on its own terms, guiding a performance that presents the opera without the editorial commentary of viewing the opera through lenses clouded by external influences. Page's focus remains solely on performing Il re pastore as Mozart’s score dictates.

Il re pastore is an opera in which the drama largely plays out in volleys of fiorature: passages of the lyrical delicacy familiar from the great operas of Mozart’s maturity, especially Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte, are few, but at the age of nineteen Mozart already possessed a gift for individualizing characters’ utterances despite similarities among the vocal lines composed for them. Both acts of Il re pastore subject the singers to progressions of arias as daunting as any written in the Eighteenth Century, and the greatest joy of this recording is the confidence with which the obstacles are overcome by this cast. In Act One, the amorous entanglements among Aminta, the modest shepherd who is actually the rightful king of Sidon, his fellow peasant Elisa, the unfortunate Tamiri, and the aristocratic but lovesick Agenore are tied into a Gordian knot of misunderstandings and shifting ambitions. Created in Salzburg by soprano castrato Tommaso Consoli, the rôle of Aminta is the sentimental spine of the opera, and the depiction of the character by soprano Sarah Fox is nothing short of authoritative. Fox sings the Andantino aria ‘Intendo, amico rio, quel basso mormorio’ with extraordinary poise, almost wholly avoiding shrillness at the top of the range. As a most welcome appendix to Act One [Il re pastore is not a long piece, after all], Mozart’s concert reworking of Aminta’s scene is provided, too, and Fox communicates with the histrionic force of a Hamlet or a Troilus in the Andante accompagnato ‘Ditelo voi pastori,’ unique to the concert version and strongly reminiscent of ‘Che farò senza Euridice’ in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. In both contexts, Fox sings the Allegro aperto aria ‘Aer tranquilo e dì sereni’ with winning panache, untroubled by the repeated top B♭s. Her vocalism is especially radiant in the aria’s Grazioso section, ‘Che, se poi piacessi ai fati di cambiar gl’offici miei,’ which she phrases with impeccable musicality and concentration on the meaning of the words.

The Phoenician shepherdess Elisa is portrayed with vivacity and awe-inspiring technical polish by soprano Ailish Tynan. She enlivens the proceedings with her every appearance, an accomplishment exemplified by her traversal of the Allegro aria ‘Alla selva, al prato, al fonte.’ Her singing of the tricky divisions taking her to top B and C shows no signs of effort, but she emotes with immediacy even when negotiating fearsome fiorature. Ending Act One with the accompagnato ‘Che? m’affetti a lasciarti?’ and exquisitely-written Andante duet in A major, ‘Vanne a regnar, ben mio,’ Tynan’s Elisa and Fox’s Aminta sing as stirringly together as apart, their timbres combining alluringly in the duet’s opening and excitingly in its Allegretto section. The ethos of Mozart’s later music for Idamante and Ilia in Idomeneo and Annio and Servilia in La clemenza di Tito resounds in the ensemble writing for Aminta and Elisa, but Fox and Tynan ensure that the singular charms of Mozart’s music for Aminta and Elisa are apparent to the listener. The age of its composer notwithstanding, music of this quality is not merely a ‘trial run.’

The meddlesome but ultimately magnanimous conqueror Alessandro’s—yes, that Alessandro, he of ‘the Great’ notoriety—ferocious Allegro aria in D major, ‘Si spande al sole in faccia nube talor così,’ is delivered by tenor John Mark Ainsley with grandeur and unerring precision of pitch befitting a regal personage. Ainsley’s voice has sometimes sounded slightly fatigued in the past couple of years, but he is here wholly in his element—quite a feat in such throat-threatening music—and sings with the kind of fluency and fluidity that Fritz Wunderlich brought to Belmonte and Tamino. Unflinchingly taming the bravura beasts of his part, Ainsley is a phenomenally virile, visceral Alessandro. Heard on disc in many rôles, including as an uncommonly sensitive but rousingly heroic Bajazet in Händel’s Tamerlano, Ainsley is reliably a suave, intelligent artist, but these qualities have never been more in evidence than they are in his singing on the present discs.

Singing Agenore, the Sidonian nobleman who is incurably besotted with Elisa, tenor Benjamin Hulett is, like Ainsley, audibly on familiar, comfortable terrain in the character’s Grazioso aria ‘Per me rispondete, begl’astri d’amore’ in Act One. Indeed, Hulett has never sounded better on disc. In a Moscow concert performance of Händel’s Alcina in January 2015, not long after this Re pastore was recorded, the young tenor, perhaps affected by a seasonal malady, occasionally struggled with Oronte’s music, and his singing of Agenore’s music is not wholly devoid of effort. Every endeavor made by this fine singer is put to telling dramatic use, however, and the effort that he expends in this performance of Il re pastore is indicative of the extent to which he genuinely cares about singing Mozart’s vocal lines as the composer intended them to be sung. There is no question that hearing Hulett’s splendid performance of ‘Per me rispondete, begl’astri d’amore’—the best on disc by a considerable margin—would have prompted a hearty ‘Bravo!’ from the punctilious Mozart.

Tamiri, the daughter of the tyrannical ruler of Sidon deposed by Alessandro, is portrayed by soprano Anna Devin with disarming sincerity and a profound exploration of the competing emotions that make the character so fascinating. Devin sang Morgana opposite Hulett’s Oronte in the Moscow Alcina, and her Tamiri brims with the same energy and sparkling tone that defined her performance of Morgana’s celebrated ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’ in Russia. Here, she sings Tamiri’s Allegro aperto aria ‘Di tante sue procelle già si scordò quest’alma’ exhilaratingly, soaring through the divisions with laudable poise. Devin, Fox, and Tynan take pains to ensure that their respective characters are discernible in recitatives and arias, and Devin’s Tamiri is a strong-willed, credibly conflicted woman who pursues her destiny most musically.

All five of the singers in this performance of Il re pastore are as expressive in their articulations of recitatives as in their readings of arias, and they are aided immeasurably in their avoidance of studio-bound ennui by Page’s conducting. Tynan bravely handles the task of jump-starting the drama of Act Two with her full-throated voicing of Elisa’s Andante aria ‘Barbaro! oh Dio! mi vedi divisa dal mio ben,’ making easy going of the punishing tessitura and technique-testing fiorature repeatedly cresting on top B♭. Her display of unflappable artistry is answered by Ainsley, who makes Alessandro’s arias in Act Two, the Allegro moderato ‘Se vincendo vi rendo felici’ and the Allegretto ‘Voi, che fausti ognor donate,’ penetrating studies of the mighty Macedonian’s complicated psychology. Still, even Ainsley’s meticulously-honed skills as a vocal actor pale in comparison with his stylish but imposing musical bravado.

Aminta’s E♭ major Andantino Rondeaux ‘L’amerò, sarò costante’ is the most familiar—a relative term in this context—number in Il re pastore, the only aria in the score to have enjoyed exposure beyond the handful of performances of the complete opera. It is a fine piece, worthy of its occasional inclusion in concerts and recordings of Mozart arias, but, in truth, it is not markedly superior to its siblings in Il re pastore, the music in the serenata being of admirably high quality from start to finish. As sung by Fox in this performance, though, ‘L’amerò’ is undoubtedly a zenith in both the score and this recording of it. Tamiri’s Andantino grazioso aria ‘Se tu di me fai dono’ is also a high point in the opera’s topography, and Devin phrases it with feeling and finesse. Hulett, too, sings as satisfyingly in Act Two as in Act One, his grand performance of Agenore’s Allegro aria ‘Sol può dir come si trova un amante in questo stato’ leaving the listener with an unforgettable souvenir of his artistry. The effect of the undeviating excellence achieved by the singers in this Il re pastore, bolstered by unusually well-informed conducting, cannot be overstated.

The closing Coro, ‘Viva, viva l’invitto duce,’ prefigures the extended finales of Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, but this recording succeeds again by presenting the serenata’s final scene not as a prototype for the concluding pages of later scores but as an intelligently-written resolution in its own right. In performances of music from the Eighteenth Century, authenticity is an elusive commodity. It is known, for instance, that Aminta in Il re pastore was first sung by a castrato, but how might he have sounded? Did the composer write to order for the capabilities of the musicians at his disposal, or did his music expand their technical boundaries? Though Mozart’s career is for the most part painstakingly researched, a work like Il re pastore nonetheless poses difficult questions. Rather than inventing hypotheses and then attempting to convincingly translate them into Mozart’s musical language, this performance seeks plausible answers to those questions in the music itself. Classical Opera’s endeavors aim not at the manufactured authenticity born of conjecture and dry theory but at insightful interpretation of the clues interwoven among the ledger lines, and this is a recording of Il re pastore that educates by making carefully-considered decisions rather than apologies and excuses. For what could a performance such as this need to apologize unless it is for eclipsing all previous recordings of this appealing score?

CHARLES-FRANÇOIS GOUNOD (1818 – 1893): Roméo et Juliette, CG 9—Jonathan Boyd (Roméo), Sarah Joy Miller (Juliette), Kimberly Sogioka (Stéphano), Kevin Langan (Frère Laurent), Efraín Solís (Mercutio), Brian Arreola (Tybalt), Susan Nicely (Gertrude), Ashraf Sewailam (Le comte Capulet), Eric Loftin (Le comte Pâris), Andrew McLaughlin (Grégorio), Martin Bakari (Benvolio), Keith Brown (Le duc de Vérone); Opera Carolina Chorus; Charlotte Symphony Orchestra; James Meena, conductor [Bernard Uzan, Director and Production Design; Michael Baumgarten, Production, Lighting, and Projection Designs; Kara Wooten, Ph.D., Fight Director; Martha Ruskai, Wig and Makeup Designs; A. T. Jones and Sons, Inc., Costume Designs; Opera Carolina, Belk Theater, Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Charlotte, North Carolina; Saturday, 30 January 2016]

When William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, opera in the form typified by the works of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini was in its infancy. Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, now widely though not universally acknowledged as the earliest known work recognizable as an opera in the modern sense, was first performed less than two decades before Shakespeare’s death, and the operas of Claudio Monteverdi, like Peri a close contemporary of the English playwright, influenced the development of Italian opera in the Seventeenth Century as powerfully as Shakespeare’s plays propelled writing for the English stage. Whether Shakespeare was musically inclined is unknown, but his characteristic iambic pentameter undeniably possesses an inherent melodiousness. This, combined with the psychological perspicacity of his depictions of the aspects of humanity that he brought to life in London’s theatres, makes Shakespeare’s dramas uncommonly fertile fodder for operatic treatment. From Francesco Bianchi’s La morte di Cesare, premièred in Venice in 1788, to Thomas Adès’s Twenty-First-Century masterpiece The Tempest, Shakespeare’s plays have inspired an astounding array of works spanning virtually the entire stylistic spectrum of opera. A pair of operas could hardly be more different than Rossini’s and Verdi’s settings of Otello, but they share a genuine dedication to translating the poetry of Shakespeare’s iconic play into music of equal sentimental impact. If Rossini succeeded in this aim only in his music for Desdemona, Verdi arguably produced a score that is a paragon of the art of setting a Shakespeare text—in this case, superbly adapted by Arrigo Boito—to music. In its very different way, so, too, is Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Jules Barbier’s and Michel Carré’s libretto for the opera having been justifiably praised as an exceptionally faithful recreation of Shakespeare’s play at the time of the work’s première at the Théâtre-Lyrique Impériale du Châtelet in Paris on 27 April 1867. Owing in no small part to the espousal of Hector Berlioz, whose symphonie dramatiqueRoméo et Juliette was first performed in 1839, Shakespeare was as revered in Nineteenth-Century France as Corneille, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, and Hugo, a reality of which Gounod, Barbier, and Carré were keenly aware. It is hardly surprising that English critics, de facto guardians of their literary heritage, found much to criticize when Roméo et Juliette reached London later in 1867, with the legendary Adelina Patti as Juliette, but it is intriguing—and, admittedly, amusing—to note that Gounod’s opera was unfavorably compared as a Shakespearean homage to Nicola Vaccai’s now largely-forgotten [except for its celebrated final scene, a favorite of Maria Malibran] 1825 Giulietta e Romeo, the libretto for which, like that of Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi, was not even derived from Shakespeare! Gounod was taken to task for composing a score that was dismissed as nothing more than an extended duet for the title couple, but, the complications of its drama notwithstanding, are the interactions between its hero and heroine not also the heart of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? Directed by Bernard Uzan and framed by Michael Baumgarten’s lighting and projections with the blend of imagination and insight absent from so many productions not just of Roméo et Juliette but of all the works that enliven the world’s stages, Opera Carolina’s new production, soon to also be seen at Virginia Opera, Toledo Opera, Opera Grand Rapids, and Lyric Opera Baltimore, excelled precisely as Gounod’s music and Shakespeare’s drama demand: in placing Roméo and Juliette at the center of the opera’s psychological journey. In details large and small, on the stage and in the pit, this was a Roméo et Juliette that kindled a suggestion that the Place du Châtelet runs through Charlotte.

It is indicative of the affection that Roméo et Juliette inspired in the first few decades after its première that the opera entered the repertory of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in April 1884, during the company’s inaugural season, albeit in Italian and on tour in Philadelphia. The opera subsequently opened the MET’s 1891 – 1892 Season with a phenomenal cast headed by the brothers Jean de Reszke and Édouard de Reszke as Roméo and Frère Laurent and Emma Eames—the MET’s first Contessa in Le nozze di Figaro, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, Charlotte in Werther, Alice Ford in Falstaff, Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana, Mascagni’s eponymous Iris, and Ero in Luigi Mancinelli’s forgotten Ero e Leandro!—as Juliette and, remarkably, was revived to launch the 1894 – 1895, 1895 – 1896, 1899 – 1900, 1900 – 1901, and 1906 – 1907 Seasons. The star-crossed lovers portrayed by Jean de Reszke and Dame Nellie Melba, Beniamino Gigli and Lucrezia Bori, and Jussi Björling and Bidú Sayão are rightly legendary, and it was as Juliette that Geraldine Farrar débuted at the MET in 1906. The stylistically insensitive but vocally refulgent Roméo of Franco Corelli looms large in the opera’s history in the second half of the Twentieth Century, contrasting markedly with the more refined Roméos of Nicolai Gedda, Alain Vanzo [never heard at the MET, unfortunately], and Alfredo Kraus. Extending this legacy into the Twenty-First Century, Opera Carolina’s production exuded respect for Gounod’s score, the team of artists performing it, and the audience gathered to enjoy their endeavors. The evocative juxtapositions of fantasy and realism in the production team’s set and projection designs, the rich tones of A. T. Jones and Sons’ costumes, and the unfailingly becoming wigs and makeup by Martha Ruskai credibly situated the drama in Fourteenth-Century Verona as stipulated by original source, librettists, and composer, compellingly depicting the isolation imposed upon Roméo and Juliette by the belligerent environment in which their love somehow takes root.

The grandeur conjured on the stage was enhanced by the Gallic sophistication that emanated from the orchestra pit. Without mimicking any of their individual styles, Opera Carolina’s General Director and Principal Conductor James Meena paced a performance of Roméo et Juliette—the score that was the vehicle for his début with Opera Carolina in 2001—that sporadically brought to mind celebrated traversals of the score led by Emil Cooper, Jules Gressier, and Jean Fournet. Like his conducting of Gounod’s Faust in Charlotte in 2008, Meena’s handling of this performance of Roméo et Juliette was attentive to the score’s nuances, reveling in the exuberance of the Ball Scene, luxuriating in the romance of the Balcony Scene, and mixing pained emoting with restraint in the opera’s final scene, but there were conspicuous lacks of cohesion among scenes and cumulative momentum. Using an edition that bizarrely restructured Gounod’s five acts into two [Opera Carolina’s website suggested that the production presented the opera in four acts, but the playbill specified two—and then the break curiously did not correspond with that indicated in the printed synopsis: for the sake of clarity for those readers not in Charlotte whose acquaintance is with Gounod’s five-act structure as published by Choudens, references in this review adhere to the five-act form], Meena nonetheless achieved musical and sentimental equilibrium on an impressive scale, managing orchestral textures and layers of ensemble with concentration that gave the singers the support that they needed without downplaying the music’s moments of Wagnerian largesse. Occasionally, the inconsistent energy of the conductor’s work threatened to break the silken thread of delicacy that envelops even the score’s most ironclad pages, and there were numerous instances in which tempi were sluggish. Under his baton, however, the playing of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra was competitive with the sounds produced by the world’s foremost opera house orchestras. Gounod’s music is often damned with the faint praise of being said to predominantly be pretty. Indeed, the music in Roméo et Juliette is frequently very pretty, but is that really a quality to be condemned? There are passages of great difficulty in the orchestral parts of Roméo et Juliette, and the Charlotte Symphony musicians executed them splendidly. Individually—the clarinet solo that prefaces Roméo’s ‘Ah! lève-toi, soleil!’ and the chamber-like writing for small groups of strings were fantastically played—and in ensemble, the musicians reacted to Meena’s leadership with shared vision, acquitting Gounod of charges of being a composer of tuneful but mostly uninspired music.

Whether making merry at the Capulets’ ball, perpetrating the street violence between the rival families, or reacting to Roméo’s banishment by the Duke, the choristers in Roméo et Juliette are, en masse, a character in their own right. In this performance, that character was entrusted to performers as committed to singing well as any of the principals. Building on their strong showings in Turandot and Fidelio, the ladies and gentlemen of the Opera Carolina Chorus ably partnered their colleagues in the pit by offering singing that challenged the performances by any of the world’s preeminent opera houses’ choruses. The choristers’ training resonated in every bar in this performance, the balances among parts often virtually ideal without the ensemble seeming transformed into an over-sized church choir. In the opening chorus of what Gounod and his librettists, following Shakespeare’s example, designated as the opera’s brief Prologue, ‘Vérone vit jadis deux familles rivales,’ the choristers proclaimed the familiar introduction of the feuding families and their beleaguered offspring with ominous depth of tone. At the Capulet ball in Act One, they voiced ‘L’heure s’envole joyeuse et folle’ with the carefree zeal of people ready for a good party. Their exclamation of ‘Ah! qu’elle est belle!’ upon catching sight of Juliette was appropriately filled with awe, but the ladies infused their singing of ‘Nargue! nargue des censeurs’ with darker implications. Sobriety also defined the choristers’ account of ‘Mystérieux et sombre’ in Act Two. The choral singing was at its peak when it counted most, in the Act Three finale. Every singer on stage contributed to a rousing performance of ‘Ô jour de deuil!’ that sparked a spiritual conflagration that was not extinguished until the curtain fell on Juliette dead in Roméo’s arms. Choral singing is a weakness in many performances of Roméo et Juliette: in Opera Carolina’s performance, it was a decided strength. Regrettably, the audience seemed not to realize that the chorus’s curtain call at the close of Gounod’s Act Three marked the choristers’ last appearance on stage: the tepid applause surely cannot have reflected the audience’s assessment of the choral singing.

Oh, Nurse: Mezzo-soprano Susan Nicely (center) as Gertrude with her Capulet tormenters in Opera Carolina’s production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, January 2016 [Photo by Jon Silla, © by Opera Carolina]

Opera Carolina’s Roméo et Juliette drew from a deep well of talent in casting supporting rôles. Donning the elaborate habit of the stern Duc de Vérone, bass-baritone Keith Brown articulated ‘Eh quoi? toujours du sang!’ in the Act Three finale with easy command of the compass of his part, resonantly sentencing Roméo to exile and futilely attempting to reconcile Capulet and Montague pères. Baritone Andrew McLaughlin’s bronze-voiced Grégorio and tenor Martin Bakari’s live-wire Benvolio were vibrant characterizations, the latter’s singing of ‘Sa blessure est mortelle!’ in the Act Three finale escalating the tension of the scene. As le comte Pâris, bass-baritone Eric Loftin potently portrayed the character’s wide-eyed wonder at the opulence of Capulet’s ball and Juliette’s beauty with a nobly-phrased ‘Richesse et beauté tout ensemble sont les hôtes de ce palais!’ in Act One. Mezzo-soprano Susan Nicely provided much-needed moments of levity with her effervescent portrayal of Juliette’s nurse Gertrude. She was delightful in her Act One scene with Juliette, breathlessly singing ‘Respirez un moment!’ with unerring comedic timing. Accosted by the roving Capulets, Nicely’s Gertrude safeguarded her matronly honor with hilarious seriousness. The mezzo-soprano’s best singing was done in the two quartets in which Gertrude participates, first joining with Juliette, Roméo, and Frère Laurent following the young lovers’ nuptials and then with Juliette, Capulet, and Frère Laurent in the scene in which her father informs the already-married Juliette that she is to wed Pâris. The quality of Nicely’s vocalism did not always parallel her histrionic dynamism, but she lifted the spirits of every scene in which she appeared. Though Opera Carolina’s production made her part seem even more superfluous than is sometimes the case, mezzo-soprano Kimberly Sogioka dispatched Stéphano’s chanson ‘Que fais-tu, blanche tourterelle’ attractively, negotiating its triplets and the top C in the cadenza with aplomb.

There was a time not so long ago, a time still remembered by many opera lovers, when opera houses fostered genuine troupes of singers rather than being the impersonal arrivals and departures lounges they have now largely become. Opera Carolina’s roster has an ensemble artist of the first order in tenor Brian Arreola, an accomplished singing actor who, among many lauded portrayals for the company, graced Opera Carolina’s recent productions of Verdi’s Nabucco and Beethoven’s Fidelio with world-class performances as Ismaele and Jacquino. He added another well-drawn portrait to his gallery with his bellicose Tybalt in Roméo et Juliette. He launched Act One with a bright-toned ‘Eh! bien? cher Pâris!’ and sang strongly in the Act One finale, in which the character’s rabble-rousing nature was fully revealed. In the Duel Scene in Act Three, Arreola proved marvelously balletic in his combats with both Mercutio and Roméo, and he exhibited rare perfection of the elusive art of dying on stage. In truth, Gounod’s declamatory music for Tybalt gives an artist of Arreola’s abilities limited opportunities for lyrical expression [he would undoubtedly prove a poetic, euphonious Roméo], but the tenor’s voice rang out excitingly, and his blade-to-the-throat acting provided the oppressive danger that must permeate a production of Roméo et Juliette if the opera’s tragedy is to be on a par with that of Shakespeare’s play.

Mortal enemies: Tenors Brian Arreola as Tybalt (left) and Jonathan Boyd as Roméo (right) in Opera Carolina’s production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, January 2016 [Photo by Jon Silla, © by Opera Carolina]

Acclaimed for assignments as diverse as the Pirate King in Lyric Opera San Diego’s rollicking 2010 presentation of the Gilbert and Sullivan chestnut The Pirates of Penzance and the black-hearted assassin Sparafucile in New Zealand Opera’s 2012 production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, Cairo-born bass Ashraf Sewailam introduced himself to Charlotte with a flinty but not unfeeling impersonation of Capulet, Juliette’s father. In Act One, his robust voicing of ‘Soyez les bienvenus, amis, dans ma maison!’ and ‘Allons! jeuenes gens!’ was intermittently compromised by weakness at the top of the range, but his singing in later scenes was unfailingly secure in all registers. Looking like a figure who stepped out of a Holbein portrait, Sewailam’s Capulet demanded justice for the slain Tybalt in tones of granitic solidity, and, unaware of his daughter’s union with Roméo, he informed Juliette of his accedence to Tybalt’s final desire for her betrothal and imminent marriage to Pâris with a concerted effort at lessening her dismay that only gradually metamorphosed into an angry insistence upon obedience. Sewailam’s vocal and dramatic representation of unbending paternal sovereignty placed a character often on the fringes at the nucleus of the drama in this performance of Roméo et Juliette.

After exchanging a few lines of recitative with his friend Roméo, Mercutio takes charge of Act One with the familiar Ballade de la Reine Mab, ‘Mab, la reine des mensonges.’ In this performance, baritone Efraín Solís took charge of the Ballade with an outpouring of soaring, virile vocalism, scaling the heights of the music with absolute confidence. Even this inadequately prepared the audience for Solís’s galvanizing singing in the Duel Scene. Sparring with Arreola’s Tybalt with feline prowess, the baritone proved a swashbuckler worthy of Douglas Fairbanks films. Solís delivered Mercutio’s famous ‘a plague o’ both your houses’ aggressively but sadly, his character sensitive even as his life was ending to the impact of the interminable violence on people he loves. Solís’s Mercutio allied swaggering machismo with refreshing subtlety, but it was the quality of Solís’s singing that truly exhilarated.

Anyone who heard his Timur in Opera Carolina’s 2015 production of Puccini’s Turandot cannot have been surprised by the humor, sincerity, and sonorous authority of bass Kevin Langan’s depiction of Frère Laurent, Shakespeare’s benevolent friar whose involvement in Roméo’s and Juliette’s predicament both engenders their greatest joy and precipitates their eventual tragedy. Langan sang ‘Eh! quoi! le jour à peine se lève et le sommeil te fuit?’ eloquently, and, in the trio in which Laurent clandestinely joins Juliette and Roméo in matrimony, his expansively-phrased ‘Dieu, qui fit l’homme à ton image’ radiated kindness and magnanimity. He anchored the subsequent quartet with Juliette, Roméo, and Gertrude with velvet-cloaked power. In the scene following Capulet’s announcement of Juliette’s engagement to Pâris, Langan reacted with heartbreak and compassion to Juliette’s longing for death. Giving her the potion intended to liberate her from her suffering and reunite her with Roméo, he became the father that Capulet was incapable of being, the natural father’s judgment clouded by insurmountable violence. Langan’s was the most distinguished singing of the evening, and his Frère Laurent was the poignant epicenter of the performance.

Man and wife: Tenor Jonathan Boyd as Roméo (left) and soprano Marie-Eve Munger as Juliette (right) in Opera Carolina’s production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, January 2016 [Photo by Jon Silla, © by Opera Carolina]

Tenor Jonathan Boyd was a hardworking, handsome, and earnestly heroic Roméo whose interpretation of the rôle stopped laudably short of emotional excess. Gamboling across the stage with libidinously boyish athleticism, he seemed endearingly out of place in Act One, both as an intruder in Capulet’s house and as a hapless voyager lured by the siren song of Juliette’s beauty and demeanor. The conversational bite that Boyd brought to his singing of recitatives was most welcome, and the fluidity of line with which he intoned ‘Ange adorable, ma main coupable profane, en l’osant toucher’ in the Madrigal with Juliette was beautifully maintained. In Act Two, his awestruck ‘Ô nuit! sous tes ailes obscures abrite-moi!’ was a suitably exultant prelude to Roméo’s widely-known cavatine, ‘Ah! lève-toi, soleil!’ Boyd manfully braved the number’s difficulties, applying every ounce of his technique to preserving legato. The three top B♭s did not come effortlessly, but the singer’s intonation was steady. Taking the nasalized vowels of French into consideration and noting that the tenor’s diction was, on the whole, quite good, the voice often sounded forced and pinched, particularly in and above the passaggio. Nevertheless, his stylish use of falsettone to achieve a diminuendo on the final B♭ was admirable. In the first duet with Juliette, Boyd’s impassioned ‘Ô nuit divine!’ throbbed with newly-minted eroticism that persisted into Act Three, his part in the trio with Juliette and Laurent in the Wedding Scene conveying irrepressible joy. Roméo’s elation quickly turned to horror and rage in the Act Three finale, Boyd detonating ‘Allons! tu ne me connais pas, Tybalt, et ton insulte est vaine!’ with the force of a thunderbolt. His despondent, desperate singing of ‘Ah! jour de deuil et d’horreur et d’alarmes’ was telling evidence of the extent to which this Roméo, stained with both Mercutio’s and Tybalt’s blood, matured from a optimistic lover into a tragic hero. Though on pitch and undeniably exciting, Boyd’s interpolated top C was an error in judgement: what the tone added to the scene was outweighed by the risk to the singer’s vocal health. In the Act Four duet with Juliette, Boyd caressed the melodic line in his hypnotically-phrased ‘Nuit d’hyménée!’ From his first notes in ‘C'est là! Salut! tombeau sombre et silencieux!’ at the start of Act Five until his poison did its work, Boyd’s Roméo followed his fate wherever it led. Courageous even in the throes of death, his foremost care was Juliette’s wellbeing. Roméo’s music sometimes taxed Boyd perilously, but he shrank from none of the part’s demands, depicting an impetuous but deeply-feeling young man whose path to happiness wound through snares from which he could not escape.

To beamingly youthful soprano Sarah Joy Miller fell the unenviable task of assuming the heroine’s gossamer mantle when the scheduled Juliette was taken ill after the production’s opening night. Making her entrance in Act One blindfolded, she sang ‘Ecoutez! ecoutez! C'est le son des instruments joyeux’ charmingly despite faltering in her first excursion into the upper register. Juliette’s F-major waltz arietta ‘Je veux vivre dans le rêve qui m’enivre’ is arguably the opera’s most famous number, and Miller sang it captivatingly, with secure top B♭s and sparkling fiorature. She did not quite reach the top D to which one roulade takes the line, but her performance of the piece was otherwise commendably assured. She voiced ‘Calmez vos craintes!’ in the Madrigal with Roméo pointedly, and her lovely timbre shone in the din of the Act One finale. Appearing on the fateful balcony in Act Two, Miller offered an ‘Hélas! moi, le haïr!’ that exuded girlish innocence and the awakening of unfamiliar passions. In the duet with Roméo that followed, Miller notably gained confidence, her vocalism growing ever more focused and lustrous. She joined Boyd, Langan, and Nicely in alluringly bel canto performances of the trio and quartet in Act Three before being crushed in the finale by the shock and dismay of seeing her cousin felled by a wound inflicted by her husband. Gently contradicting Roméo’s interpretations of the harbingers of dawn in their Act Four duet ‘Nuit d’hyménée!’ drew from the soprano sounds of radiant purity that contrasted unmistakably with her despair when reminded by Capulet of Tybalt’s dying directive that she should marry Pâris. Robbed by Laurent of the dagger intended to end her tribulations, Miller’s Juliette resolved to bow to the friar’s well-meaning advice in the often-cut aria ‘Amour ranime mon courage.’ Miller’s strong-willed singing of the aria, its trills and top Cs utterly secure and employed as dramatic as well as vocal devices, provided the zenith of her reading of Juliette and the dramatic climax of the performance as a whole. Miller and Boyd blended their voices seductively in Act Five, the soprano’s disarmingly simple statement of ‘Où suis-je? Ô vertige!’ lending Juliette’s final moments a touching sense of dedication, her physical fragility giving way to ethereal fortitude. On the whole, Miller’s potential seemed greater than her actual performance, but she brushed aside the adverse circumstances of her appearance, conquered the nerves those circumstances are likely to have induced, and sang with undaunted poise and professionalism.

Opera is an adventure that in ways seen and unseen by audiences epitomizes Charles Dickens’s frequently-quoted words from the opening page of A Tale of Two Cities, an art form that can in a single performance be both the best of times and the worst of times. The worst of times in opera is undoubtedly when a production’s leading lady succumbs to illness, but Opera Carolina’s Roméo et Juliette represented the ‘show must go on’ mentality at its best. Saturday evening’s performance displayed many of the qualities necessary to fashioning a memorable Roméo et Juliette, but what was missing despite diligent, thoughtful efforts from cast, chorus, orchestra, and production team was heart. Beautiful as the stage tableaux and music-making often were, one ultimately had to take on faith that one’s tears should flow for Juliette and her Roméo.

VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835): Norma—Dame Joan Sutherland (Norma), Marilyn Horne (Adalgisa), John Alexander (Pollione), Richard Cross (Oroveso), Betty Phillips (Clotilde), Karl Norman (Flavio); Chorus and Orchestra of Vancouver Opera; Richard Bonynge, conductor [Recorded ‘live in performance at Vancouver Opera on 26 October 1963; Immortal Performances IPCD 1055-3; 3 CDs, 216:41; Available from Immortal Performances; includes bonus material featuring Sutherland in arias and scenes from La traviata, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Alcina, Lucia di Lammermoor, Rigoletto, and Tosca]

When writing about music, my foremost goals are to assess performances fairly and as knowledgeably as my flawed and woefully incomplete education and comprehension permit and to do so in a manner that always remains respectful of artists and their endeavors. Reconciling the pursuit of the first of these goals with adherence to my commitment to the second is not always an easy task, but my work is guided by a maxim often quoted by my grandmother, who still personifies its wisdom at the age of ninety-five: if I have nothing positive to say, it is better that I say nothing at all. In this age in which artists must endure the venomous barbs not only of wagging tongues and agenda-laden pens but also of likes and shares, tweets and retweets, and every imaginable public degradation of dignity and privacy, there is a war on criticism that is not unjustified. What I regret most is that the demands faced by artists—demands that often have little to do with singing—beget an environment in which the insecurities even of singers with little to fear from the stupidities of would-be critics diminish their abilities to reciprocate the conviction of those writers who respect them whether they sing like paragons or pillocks. With every good intention under heaven, however, there are performances about which I cannot be wholly impartial. One of these is the Vancouver Opera performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma of 26 October 1963, an illustrious evening in the production that inaugurated one of the most widely-traveled operatic portrayals of the second half of the Twentieth Century, the Norma of Australian soprano Dame Joan Sutherland. It was for her singing of the title rôle in Händel’s Alcina, also the rôle of her American début in Dallas in 1960, that the Venetian public christened her as La Stupenda, but her impersonation of Norma, a characterization revealed by the near-miraculous sonics achieved by Richard Caniell and Immortal Performances—an achievement described in a 2001 letter, reproduced in Immortal Performances’ typically superb liner notes [both Fanfare critic Henry Fogel’s introductory essay and Caniell’s and Robert Dales’s remembrances of Irving Guttman, the director of the Vancouver Opera Norma and source of the original recording that yielded this release, meaningfully enhance enjoyment of this Norma], by the conductor of the performance, Sutherland’s husband and frequent collaborator and Artistic Director of Vancouver Opera from 1974 until 1982, Richard Bonynge, as ‘wonderful, so present and vibrant’—to have been remarkably consistent from its inception in Vancouver to its final outings in staged form in Costa Mesa, California, and Detroit, Michigan, in 1989. After being exposed as a musically unambitious high-schooler to John Pritchard’s studio recording of Raymond Leppard’s abridged edition of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, Lorin Maazel’s DECCA Fidelio with Birgit Nilsson and James McCracken, and Sir Colin Davis’s Philips La bohème with Katia Ricciarelli and José Carreras, it was hearing the 1980 DECCA recording of Verdi’s La traviata—recommended to the aspiring singer that I was twenty years ago for Matteo Manuguerra’s under-appreciated Giorgio Germont rather than for its Violetta—that introduced me to Sutherland, and it was Sutherland whose tenacious dedication to respecting audiences by always giving of her best planted the seeds of my own diligence in respecting conscientious artists even when they fail. The most savage of Sutherland’s detractors, those who complain that her Norma lacked the psychological acuity brought to the part by Maria Callas and the fire-breathing abandon of Leyla Gencer’s study of the character, could never accuse her of outright failure; not when she sang the music as she does on these discs. What would a critic like Winthrop Sargeant, who wrote in The New Yorker in response to Sutherland’s first Norma at the Metropolitan Opera in 1970, among words of praise for the overall quality of her vocalism, that ‘hers is a cold coloratura voice, without much emotional coloring,’ say were he able to hear Immortal Performances’ restoration of this document of Sutherland’s Norma in its infancy with performances of Norma at the MET—indeed, in any of the world’s opera houses—in recent seasons in his mind’s ear?

Richard Bonynge said of his wife in a 2011 interview with The Australian, not long after her passing on 10 October 2010 [perhaps some sort of cosmic symmetry is reflected in this most balanced of artists having made her final exit from life’s stage on 10.10.10], that ‘she didn’t need applause, she was a very down-to-earth, practical lady. It’s quite true she had no idea of the importance of what she’d done in the world. You could tell her, but I don’t think she really listened. She loved to sing and that was it.’ The bonus material included on this Immortal Performances release confirms the validity of Bonynge’s appraisal of his consort’s musical ethos. From her first North American performances of Violetta in La traviata with Opera Company of Philadelphia, also directed by Irving Guttman, are drawn the final ten minutes of Act One and the magnificent scene for Violetta and Germont père in Act Two, pairing Sutherland first with Mississippi-born tenor John Alexander’s Alfredo and then with French baritone Gabriel Bacquier’s Giorgio. Predictably superb in ‘Sempre libera degg’io folleggiar di gioia in gioia,’ she reaches more exalted heights of expression in her interactions with Bacquier than contemporary accounts of her Violetta, most of which are founded upon unfavorable comparisons with Callas’s very different interpretation of the rôle, suggest were within her purview.

An especially valuable addition to Sutherland’s discography is the scene from Act Three of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg that culminates in the great Quintet, here sung in English in a performance extracted from a 1957 Covent Garden gala and nobly conducted by Rafael Kubelík. Alongside James Pease’s Hans Sachs, the young Jon Vickers’s Walther, John Lanigan’s David, and Noreen Berry’s Magdalene, Sutherland voices Eva’s lines with an ideal blend of vocal freshness and amplitude. This is an Eva with a genuine trill whose tones are not apt to go missing in ensembles! Die Meistersinger, sung in Wagner’s original German, was in Covent Garden’s repertory in the 1956 –1957 Season, during which Sutherland’s Eva auf Deutsch was complemented by the David of Sir Peter Pears and the Beckmesser of Sir Geraint Evans, with Pease singing Sachs and the little-remembered Erich Witte as Walther: perhaps some collector has a recording of a complete Meistersinger from the January 1957 run that could be shared with Immortal Performances.

Sampling the opera that was the vehicle for her Teatro La Fenice and North American débuts in 1960 and the rôle of her triumphant MET début a year later, excerpts from a 1959 BBC concert broadcast conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent offer arias from Alcina and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The brilliance of Sutherland’s fiorature in Lucia’s ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ is unsurprising, but ears accustomed to the avian fluttering of the small voices frequently employed in Baroque repertory since the 1970s may be stunned to hear an instrument as vast as Sutherland’s reveling in the intricacies of Alcina’s ‘Dì, cor mio, quanto t’amai’ and Morgana’s familiar ‘Tornami a vagheggiar,’ the Dame from Down Under hardly being the only Alcina guilty of usurping her sister’s showpiece aria. Sutherland was a far more stylish Händel singer than many historically-informed performance practice advocates have been willing to acknowledge, her ornamentation when left to her own devices—the differences among the Kölner Rundfunk performance of Alcina conducted by Ferdinand Leitner and the DECCA studio recording prepared and led by Bonynge are particularly telling in that regard—unfailingly tasteful and far more restrained than might be imagined. The richness of the timbre and, of course, the trills are truly revelatory and inarguably period-appropriate. After all, she famously quipped whilst recording the title rôle in Händel’s Athalia with The Academy of Ancient Music late in her career that she was the oldest period instrument in the room! Under the direction of Donald Vorhees in gems from the Bell Telephone Hour transmission of 22 March 1968, Sutherland’s Gilda manages to marginalize Tito Gobbi’s Rigoletto, Nicolai Gedda’s Duca di Mantova, and Mildred Miller’s Maddalena in the rightly beloved Quartet from Act Four of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Gobbi takes revenge of sorts in Scarpia’s confrontation with the heroine from Act Two of Puccini’s Tosca. Gobbi is not as secure of voice or dramatic instincts as when he sparred with Callas’s Tosca in the 1950s, but he remains a Scarpia of visceral menace, here facing a Tosca he could not dominate solely via vocal means. Sutherland’s studio recording of Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’ was appended in one CD reissue to her DECCA recording of Suor Angelica, another piece in which she excelled, not least in Australian Opera performances that united her in 1977 with the implacable Zia Principessa of Rosina Raisbeck, but the thoroughly competent studio reading of the aria pales in comparison with this performance. For once, one need not make apologies for the sounds with which the Tosca at hand professes to have lived for Art. Sound quality in these selections is not High Fidelity, but, as in the Vancouver Norma, Caniell’s wizardry produces aural ambiances in which one hears all that one needs to hear in order to marvel at the stylistic variety of which Sutherland—she of the ‘cold coloratura voice’—was capable.

Recorded at Irving Guttman’s request via a house feed in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the audio quality of the Vancouver Norma is imperfect, the voices sounding varyingly distant as the singers move about the stage and the orchestra frequently over-prominent, but, based upon surveys of previous recorded incarnations of this performance, the source materials for which are conspicuously unidentified, Caniell has considerably brightened the sonic landscape, granting the voices clear focus without jeopardizing accuracy and stability of pitch. Vitally, though, the depth of the sound enables a far better cognition of the size and thrust of Sutherland’s voice than her studio recordings permit, and one adjusts to the sound quickly as the performance draws one into the drama. To Vancouver Opera’s credit, Sutherland is surrounded by an ensemble of singers who merit the distinction of taking part in such an historic occasion. Bonynge remained ‘green’ as a conductor of opera when he mounted the podium for the Vancouver performances of Norma, and if his pacing of the performance on these discs lacks the idiomatic drive and command of nuance brought to the score by Vittorio Gui and Tullio Serafin there is no want for attentive support of the singers, an element for which one often searches in vain in today’s performances. The Vancouver Opera Chorus and Orchestra, giving Bellini’s score its first hearing in Canada, obviously prepared fastidiously for their tasks, their work undermined by commendably—astonishingly, really—few mistakes and virtually no lapses in ensemble. Soprano Betty Phillips and tenor Karl Norman are more than serviceable as Clotilde and Flavio, never embarrassing themselves in their scenes with their larger-voiced colleagues. Bass-baritone Richard Cross is a vocally solid Oroveso who evinces a measure of sympathy for the father’s predicament, his voicing of ‘Ite sul colle, o druidi’ in Act One and ‘Ah! del Tebro al giogo indegno’ in Bellini’s Act Two—Vancouver Opera’s Act Four—gratifyingly secure. Sutherland’s Philadelphia Alfredo, as well as her leading man in MET performances of La sonnambula, Lucia di Lammermoor, Norma, La fille du régiment, Les contes d’Hoffmann, La traviata, and Esclarmonde, John Alexander is in this Vancouver performance an even more reliable Pollione than he was in the 1964 RCA Victor/DECCA studio recording of Norma, in which he and Sutherland were also reunited with their Vancouver Adalgisa and Oroveso. Here, Alexander sings ‘Meco all’altar di Venere era Adalgisa in Roma’ phenomenally, his top notes impressive despite the paucity of the squillo of a Lauri-Volpi, Penno, or Corelli, and machismo mixes with suavity in his red-blooded account of the cabaletta ‘Me protegge, me difende un poter maggior di loro.’ The impact of Alexander’s bronze-toned singing of ‘Va', crudele; al dio spietato offri in dote al sangue mio’ in the duet with Adalgisa is tremendous, and he continues to build momentum with fearless showings in the trio that ends Act One and the stirring duet with Norma in Act Two [again, Act Four in the Vancouver production], ‘In mia man alfin tu sei,’ in which he proves more capable than many Polliones by singing all of the roulades entrusted to him by Bellini rather than ceding half of them to Norma. Moreover, when he sings ‘Ma tu morendo, non m'aborrire, pria di morire, perdona a me’ in the opera’s final scene, Alexander is the rare Pollione who sounds as though he means it.

Mira, o Norma: Mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne as Adalgisa (left), Thomas Garadis as Norma’s and Pollione’s son (center), and soprano Dame Joan Sutherland as the title heroine (right) in San Francisco Opera’s 1982 production of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma [Photographer not credited; photo © by San Francisco Opera]

Listeners familiar with the 1964 studio recording or the storied MET broadcast of 4 April 1970, one of the truly legendary afternoons in MET history, are already acquainted with the feats that Marilyn Horne accomplished in her performances of Bellini’s music for Adalgisa. Composed for Giulia Grisi, the rôle was commandeered by mezzo-sopranos by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but Horne, though a mezzo-soprano herself, restored to the part the flair and unflinching command of the range of the music that Grisi surely brought to it. From the first notes of her expansively-phrased ‘Sgombra è la salva secra’ in this performance, she fashions a depiction of Adalgisa that veritably defines bel canto, musically and dramatically. She answers Alexander’s ‘Va', crudele’ with a firm but feminine ‘E tu pure, ah! tu non sai quanto costi a me dolente!’ Then, divulging the shame of her affair with Pollione to Norma, she projects both embarrassment and the frisson of young love in ‘Sola, furtiva, al tempio io l’aspettai sovente.’ Sutherland’s and Horne’s singing of ‘Ah! sì, fa' core, e abbracciami’ was one of the musical wonders of the Twentieth Century, and here, in one of its earliest manifestations, it is an artistic equivalent of Old Faithful—a sensation both in the moment and in the dependability with which it was repeated throughout the duration of the singers’ Norma partnership. Horne articulates ‘Oh! qual traspare orribile dal tuo parlar mistero!’ and ‘Ah! non fia, non fia ch’io costi al tuo core sì rio dolore’ in the trio with the potency of an earnest Sieglinde pleading for Brünnhilde’s protection. Norma’s and Adalgisa’s ‘Deh! con te, con te, li prendi,’ ‘Mira, o Norma, a' tuoi ginocchi questi cari pargoletti,’ and ‘Sì, fino all’ore estreme compagna tua m’avrai’ in Act Two constitute one of the finest sequences in Italian opera, and no listener past, present, or future could hope to hear this music executed more electrifyingly than Sutherland and Horne sing it in this performance. One of the gnawing enigmas of Norma is the uncertainty of Adalgisa’s fate after her final duet with Norma: some productions insert her into the opera’s final scene as an observer, but this is an extrapolation rather than a faithful realization of Bellini’s and his librettist Felice Romani’s stage directions. The singing of many recent Adalgisas has inspired an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ reaction: having endured their vocalism, one is not overly concerned with the future of the character they portrayed. Horne’s Adalgisa, on the other hand, deserves her own opera in which to explore her life post-Norma. Horne did not long retain Adalgisa in her repertory, reuniting with Sutherland at Covent Garden in 1967 and for seven performances at San Francisco Opera in 1982 and singing the rôle at the MET twenty-five times in 1970 from her company début on 3 March until the matinée broadcast performance of 19 December, Sutherland her Norma in each of those performances, but not returning to the part at the MET between the opening of the 1973 revival of the Deiber production for Montserrat Caballé and her retirement from the company in 1996, but she was already an Adalgisa for the ages at the time of this Vancouver performance. From perspectives of both technical prowess and histrionic credibility, few singers in recent memory have as completely inhabited a rôle as Horne did Adalgisa.

Vocally, neither Callas nor any other singer consistently sang Norma’s music as accurately or as easily as Sutherland sang it, and this performance reveals that her dominion over the notes of the part was present from the inception of her interpretation. That an artist as attentive as Sutherland was to ensuring that she gave every audience who gathered to hear her a memorable experience should have sung a rôle only when she was painstakingly prepared to do so might be taken for granted, but this recording confirms the breadth of Sutherland’s artistic integrity. A weapon in Sutherland’s vocal arsenal that few singers in the Twenty-First Century can cite as a component of their own work is the immediately-identifiable timbre: she has here produced no more than two notes in ‘Sedizïose voci, voci di guerra’ before an irrefutable signal rushes from the ears to the brain, saying, ‘Ah, yes, this is definitely Dame Joan!’ Few Normas would be likely to dispute the assertion that ‘Casta diva, che inargenti queste sacre antiche piante’ is one of the most difficult arias in the soprano repertory, its exacting legato—the ‘melodie lunghe, lunghe, lunghe’ of which Verdi wrote—taxing a singer’s breath support as dauntingly as the most fiendish fiorature. Nevertheless, there is nothing tentative about Sutherland’s singing of the aria in this performance. She must have been nervous to some degree, but whatever apprehension she felt was kept far from the vocal cords. It was frequently said even at this juncture in her career that Sutherland’s diction was quite poor, but I am apparently fluent in the idiosyncratic dialect in which she sings on these discs as I encounter little trouble with discerning the text. The aria’s cantilena is shaped with intelligence and imagination. Sutherland does not treat ‘Fine al rito; e il sacro bosco sia disgombro dai profani’ merely as a conduit from aria to cabaletta, but, once arriving at the cabaletta, she hurls out the divisions and top notes in ‘Ah! bello a me ritorna del fido amor primiero’ with almost insouciant assurance. The first duet with Horne is pure magic: if Giuditta Pasta and Giulia Grisi sang this more beautifully than Sutherland and Horne sing it here, they can hardly have been of this world. Not even Callas and Ebe Stignani or Giulietta Simionato sang the passages in thirds so precisely. Bonynge has not yet fully sorted out how to keep the sprawling trio moving seamlessly, but Sutherland, Horne, and Alexander generate energy that propels the music towards its organic conclusion. Many Normas come to grief in the coloratura outbursts that preface a pair of top Cs, but Sutherland is unperturbed, her calm negotiations of her part’s obstacles encompassing unflappable traversals of ‘Oh, non tremare, o perfido’ and ‘Oh! Di qual sei tu vittima crudo e funesto inganno!’ Vehemence seemingly was not part of her natural temperament, but her singing of ‘Vanne, sì: mi lascia, indegno, figli oblia, promesse, onore’ is not without flashes of the anger of a scorned woman. Among her Normas widely available on compact disc, only the top Ds that brought the curtains down on Act One in the 1969 Teatro Colón broadcast and the earlier of the two 1970 MET broadcasts match the stellar D6 in this performance in conveying a sense of the titanic dimensions of Sutherland’s voice.

Sutherland was not the singing actress to unleash Imelda Staunton-esque intensity in the scene at the start of Act Two in which the distraught Norma contemplates slaying her own children, but in this performance her ‘Dormono entrambi’ throbs with the conflicting passions of a betrayed lover and maternal instincts. It is inconceivable that any Norma could ignore the entreaties of Horne’s Adalgisa in ‘Mira, o Norma,’ but Sutherland’s Norma’s acquiescence is all the more touching for being voiced with such beauty and impeccable sculpting of line. Assiduous students of bel canto could find no better models for perusal than Sutherland’s and Horne’s singing of the duets for Norma and Adalgisa in this performance: their tones ideally projected, the breath support unfaltering, with lines driven by vowels, the ladies’ endeavors perfectly embody the primary tenet of bel canto defined when Mathilde Marchesi wrote that ‘sound is a property of the air, as colour is of light, for there can be no sound without air, any more than there can be colour without light.’ Following his colleagues’ examples, Alexander’s singing in the duet ‘In mia man alfin tu sei’ is gloriously heroic but unimpeachably stylish, but even his sterling efforts are eclipsed by Sutherland’s Herculean performance. What warmth and profundity of emotion that ‘cold coloratura voice’ radiates! The interpolated E♭6 with which she crowns the duet—a note that she attempted in performances of Norma only in Vancouver and in her first Covent Garden Normas in 1967, when Horne was again her Adalgisa—is staggering, a colossal, thrillingly secure sound from the throat not of a canary but of a cannon cloaked in velvet. Sutherland does not rival Callas’s dramatic fervor with her utterance of Norma’s critical mea culpa, ‘Son io,’ but her unaffected enunciation of those two most important words in the opera is effective on its own terms. The sheer tonal pulchritude with which she delivers ‘Qual cor tradisti, qual cor perdesti’ and ‘Deh! non volerli vittime del mio fatale errore’ is arresting, ending the opera not as a singer who has put in a good evening’s work but as a Norma who, burned by life, seeks refuge and respite in a fiery death.

As mind-boggling as the sangfroid with which Sutherland ascended to this summit of Lyric Art on her first attempt is the fact that Norma remained in her repertory for nearly twenty-six years. Amassing more than 120 performances of the rôle in the quarter-century spanning the period from her Vancouver performances to those for Opera Pacific and Michigan Opera Theatre, she is likely the most-heard Norma in the opera’s history. In a Los Angeles Timesinterview after a rehearsal for one of her valedictory Costa Mesa Normas in 1989, Sutherland responded to a question about bel canto purists who objected to her downward transpositions of certain passages by saying, ‘Well, the purists don’t have to sing, do they?’ This epitomizes her candor and no-nonsense approach to maintaining equilibrium among service to the composer, management of her vocal resources, and fulfilling audiences’ expectations. Listening to Immortal Performances’ edition of this Vancouver Opera Norma has given me pause to consider why Norma is my favorite opera—a favorite opera alongside Händel’s Tamerlano, Verdi’s Don Carlos and Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, that is. The enchantingly diverse Normas of Gina Cigna, Zinka Milanov, Maria Callas, Leyla Gencer, Cristina Deutekom, Rita Hunter, and Marisa Galvany are those that have molded my understanding of the opera’s theatrical potential, but hearing this Vancouver performance with the clarity and scope of detail that Richard Caniell’s restoration facilitates causes me to fully appreciate and extol the extent to which Dame Joan Sutherland is as responsible as Bellini might claim to be for my love for Norma.

Belles of bel canto: Soprano Dame Joan Sutherland as Norma and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne as Adalgisa in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at the Metropolitan Opera in April 1970 [Photo by Louis Mélançon, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759), CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK (1714 – 1787), and WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Kings, Princes & Heroes– Opera Arias—Zvi Emanuel-Marial, countertenor; Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin; Shalev Ad-El, conductor [Recorded in b-sharp Studio, Berlin, Germany, 19 – 21 April 2015; Thorofon CTH2622; 1 CD, 52:42; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes (USA), jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

For the Twenty-First-Century listener with interest in and affection for music composed before 1800, one of the most frustrating missing pieces in the puzzle of musical history is the inability to know precisely how the legendary castrati of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and early Nineteenth Centuries actually sounded. It is possible through careful study of the music written for them to ascertain profiles of their technical proficiencies, but evidence of the characteristics of the sounds that they produced is circumstantial at best. Comparing critical assessments of today’s singers with what the ears hear often reveals broad chasms between the two points of view, and it cannot be assumed that writers of previous centuries were any more reliable in translating aural realities into literary mementos. It must be assumed, however, that among the ranks of castrati were as many varied timbres and distinct tonal palettes as exist among modern singers. The sole recordings of a castrato, made when their subject, the greatly-admired Cappella Sistina singer Alessandro Moreschi, was in his mid-forties, are invaluable documents but preserve a voice that bears no resemblance to the instruments described in Eighteenth-Century accounts of the work of singers like Senesino, Farinelli, and Carestini. Moreschi was trained for liturgical rather than operatic singing, of course, but his quavery tones as bequeathed to posterity via his 1902 and 1904 recordings, though poignant and sporadically lovely, only hint at the extraordinary brilliance attributed to his similarly-altered forebears. In some cases readied for the stage by the composers who wrote rôles for them, how can the castrati of the Baroque and Classical eras have sounded? Were the thoughts of diarists and writers like Charles Burney and Tobias Smollett, who wrote—fictionally but almost certainly reflecting authentic opinion among his contemporaries—in his 1771 picaresque novel The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker that the voice of Giusto Tenducci, a tremendously popular singer in London and among the few castrati who married, ‘to be sure is neither man’s nor woman’s but...is more melodious than either,’ clouded by the kind of hero worship that star castrati obviously inspired?

From the pioneering efforts of Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin to the generation of singers like James Bowman and René Jacobs who reclaimed a place for their Fach in the world’s opera houses, perhaps the most significant vocal development of the past half-century has been the emergence of countertenors who sing the music written for castrati with passion and polish that at least suggest the inimitable mastery of their physically-metamorphosed ancestors. Since the 1988 Metropolitan Opera débuts of Jeffrey Gall and Derek Lee Ragin in Händel’s Giulio Cesare, countertenors have prevailed both in the MET’s National Council auditions and in international competitions, excelled in virtually all of the world’s major opera houses, and revitalized repertory not performed—or performed badly—since the deaths of the original interpreters. Moreover, countertenors of varying degrees of showmanship and natural vocal talent have in the past quarter-century significantly expanded the Fach’s territory beyond the confines of lute songs and Baroque repertory, an effort furthered by the gifted artist featured on this disc. Following a mesmerizing, superbly-sung Thorofon recording of Schubert’s Winterreise [reviewed here], Israeli-born countertenor Zvi Emanuel-Marial further enriches that label’s catalogue with Kings, Princes & Heroes, this recital of arias by Georg Friedrich Händel, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—arias first sung by castrati and now central to the modern countertenor repertory. Under the direction of Shalev Ad-El, whose uniformly ideal tempi disclose both affinity for the repertory and excellent working relationships with soloist and orchestra, the Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin musicians provide period-appropriate but full-bodied accompaniments that, without miring the performances in idiosyncrasies, simply sound right for music by Händel, Gluck, and Mozart. Moreover, the conductor’s tempi and the orchestra’s sonorities complement the singer’s musical and dramatic inflections, providing him with a wholly sympathetic environment in which to explore the musical legacy of which his strikingly beautiful and immaculately-trained alto voice make him a natural and deserving inheritor.

Opening his thoughtfully-arranged programme with the title character’s aria ‘Dopo l’orrore’ from Händel’s superb (and still too-little-known) 1723 opera Ottone, re di Germania (HWV 15), Emanuel-Marial begins his journey into the heart of the castrato repertory with music composed for one of the most celebrated of these musical marvels, Francesco Bernardi. Using the nom de guerre Senesino, Bernardi frequently collaborated with Händel, who entrusted to him the creation of the primo uomo rôles in a number of his London operas. Emanuel-Marial sings both ‘Dopo l’orrore’ and Ottone’s ‘Ritorna, o dolce amore’ with considerable depths of feeling and focused tone. Especially in ‘Ritorna, o dolce amore,’ he compellingly uses the text to shape and propel the melodic line, both revealing the intelligence of Händel’s word setting and suggesting the intuition with which the composer clearly expected his star castrato to interpret the music. In all of the arias on Kings, Princes & Heroes, Emanuel-Marial exhibits an exceptional ability to depict three-dimensional characters within the duration of a single aria. He gives the listener a more comprehensive portrait of Ottone in a pair of arias than many singers have managed to do in performances—and recordings—of the full opera.

It was also Senesino who originated the rôles of the presumed-dead king Bertarido in Rodelinda (HWV 19, 1725) and the title warrior in Orlando (HWV 31, 1733), the second of these having earned the castrato particular praise for his nuanced performance of the character’s innovative mad scene. The furious fiorature of Bertarido’s ‘Vivi, tiranno’ challenge Emanuel-Marial’s technique and breath control, but he emerges unscathed: his natural gifts are better suited to lyrical effusions, but he dispatches the difficult divisions in ‘Vivi, tiranno’ with even tone, precise pitch, and exciting brio—qualities that bring to mind Charles Burney’s oft-quoted 1775 description of Senesino’s ‘powerful, clear, and sweet contralto voice,’ ‘perfect intonation,’ and ‘excellent shake.’ Indeed, Burney’s assertion that Senesino’s ‘manner of singing was masterly, and his elocution unrivalled’ is equally valid as an assessment of Emanuel-Marial’s singing of the Händel arias on this disc, an impression furthered by the countertenor’s dramatically fiery but vocally unperturbed account of Orlando’s ‘Fammi combattere mostri e tifei.’ As in Bertarido’s music, he emotes poetically without neglecting the sheer athleticism demanded by ‘Fammi combattere mostri e tifei.’ His negotiations of passagework are as clean as his insights into Händel’s characters are intelligent.

The title rôle in Händel’s idiosyncratic 1738 charmer Serse was created by Gaetano Majorano, acclaimed as Caffarelli by audiences in virtually all of the major European cities where opera was performed in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. An ingenious departure from the opere serie that typified Händel’s scores composed for London, Serse baffled Londoners in 1738, but the popularity of the aria rediscovered in the Nineteenth Century and ultimately—and stupidly—christened ‘Händel’s Largo’ rapidly endeared itself to listeners who had never so much as walked by an opera house. In the performance on this disc, Emanuel-Marial lends great tenderness to his delivery of the recitative ‘Frondi tenere e belle del mio platano amato,’ and his subdued, sincere traversal of the famous aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ evinces an almost erotic sensitivity: this Serse’s affection for his beloved plane tree permeates to the cellular level. Even more expressive is his traversal of Ruggiero’s exquisite ‘Verdi prati, selve amene’ from Alcina. First sung by Giovanni Carestini, the aria is one of Händel’s most haunting numbers, its lilting principal theme exuding a tranquility so profound as to almost seem disquieting. Emanuel-Marial’s dulcetly-phrased singing grants his Ruggiero a vulnerability that he ought to possess but so rarely does in performance, and the simplicity of his reading is touchingly effective.

Hearing his music alongside arias like those for Ruggiero and Serse reveals that Gluck learned much from Händel, but, though the Saxon had been dead for less than four years when Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice premièred in Vienna in 1762, much had changed in the composition of opera. Like Johann Adolf Hasse, Gluck was a contemporary of both masters of the late Baroque like Händel and Johann Sebastian Bach and avant-garde exponents of Viennese Classicism like Joseph Haydn, Antonio Salieri, and Mozart. By the time that Gluck revised Orfeo for Paris in 1774, however, the advocacy by rival camps for French and Italian opera had reached its fervent peak. Gluck’s operas energized and epitomized the argument on behalf of eschewing Italianate excess in favor of Gallic grandeur, thereby ostensibly returning opera’s ethos to its roots in Greek drama. Ironically, though, Orfeo became more florid, not less, when the opera was staged in Paris, the daunting bravura canzonetta ‘L’espoir renaît dans mon âme’ borrowed from Il Parnasso confuso and Le feste d’Apollo in order to provide the Paris Orphée, haute-contre Joseph Legros, with a suitably decorative showpiece. His own notes reflect that the renowned castrato Gaetano Guadagni, Gluck’s first Orfeo, ornamented his vocal lines in Vienna but tastefully and in a manner that gave his interpretation of the rôle heightened spontaneity. The effect of Guadagni’s vocalism in Orfeo’s ‘Che puro ciel’ cannot have failed to enchant audiences, but it can hardly have been more eloquent or unaffectedly musical than Emanuel-Marial’s singing of it on this disc. It is again the utter simplicity of the singer’s approach that awes: the concentration on purity of line engenders an acutely hypnotic performance. Emanuel-Marial movingly imparts the despair of ‘Che farò senza Euridice’ without wallowing in it, the voice poised even in the expression of tragic grief. This most famous of Gluck’s arias receives from Emanuel-Marial a voicing entirely free of routine but replete with the doleful sentiments of a fabled musician mourning the loss of his true love.

Mozart was an old man of fourteen years when his Mitridate, re di Ponto (KV 87/74a) premièred at Milan’s Teatro Regio Ducal in 1770. The feuding brothers Farnace and Sifare, a veritable operatic Cain and Abel, were first interpreted by the castrati Giuseppe Cicognani and Pietro Benedetti, the latter known to the public as Sartorino. The ingenuity with which Mozart differentiated the brothers by varying their music is remarkable for a composer of any age but thoroughly gobsmacking for one on the boyhood side of adolescence. In his brief survey of the young Mozart’s writing for castrati, Emanuel-Marial sings arias for both of Mitridate’s sons. Farnace’s ‘Venga pur, minacci e frema’ and ‘Va, l’error mio palesa’ are subtly contrasted, Mozart’s instrumentation already displaying noteworthy maturity, and the countertenor’s vocalism here adds a further level of individualization. In ‘Venga pur, minacci e frema,’ Emanuel-Marial’s voice glistens with the steely glint of indolence, his impassioned singing of the roulades aptly hinting at the character’s self-serving ambition and ruthlessness. His performance of ‘Va, l’error mio palesa’ manifests confidence and swagger, though, as in ‘Vivi, tiranno,’ the coloratura demands are met capably but not completely comfortably. Of an altogether divergent spirit is Sifare’s ‘Lungi da te, mio bene.’ Emanuel-Marial duets magnificently with the virtuosic horn obbligato, played wonderfully by the unidentified Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin soloist, but the foremost accomplishment of his singing is the spectrum of emotions that he unfurls by emphasizing not sequences of notes but words and long-breathed phrases. Emanuel-Marial’s prowess at so palpably distinguishing Farnace from Sifare in the context of a recital disc is indicative of the magnitude of his artistry.

It is impossible to judge whether Zvi Emanuel-Marial’s singing on Kings, Princes & Heroes in any way resembles the sounds with which Senesino, Caffarelli, Carestini, Guadagno, Cicognani, and Sartorino beguiled audiences in the Eighteenth Century, but it is impossible to judge Kings, Princes & Heroes as anything but a very enjoyable, often enlightening disc. It is regrettable that history and technology do not allow today’s listeners to hear the great castrati as they sounded when the ink was still wet on Händel’s, Gluck’s, and Mozart’s scores. With the work of a singer as skilled as Zvi Emanuel-Marial to savor, though, that regret disappears the moment that his first notes take flight.

Le roi, l’amant, et la favorite: Scene from Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite, to be performed in concert in Lisner Auditorium by Washington Concert Opera on 4 March 2016, by artist Lee Woodward Zeigler [Image © 1899 by the artist; public domain]

Many events in the life of Gaetano Donizetti would not seem out of place in the plots of his operas. Born in the town of Bergamo in Lombardia in 1797, Donizetti was only five years younger than Gioachino Rossini but is often regarded by modern observers as belonging to a markedly different generation of bel canto. Rather than an elder statesman and a younger protégé of sorts, Rossini and Donizetti were for a decade of their respective careers rivals on Italy’s stages. Though he retired from the composition of opera after the première of Guillaume Tell in 1829, before the scores for which Donizetti is most remembered—Anna Bolena (1830), L’elisir d’amore (1832), Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Maria Stuarda (1835), Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), La fille du régiment (1840), and Don Pasquale (1843)—were first performed, Rossini outlived Donizetti by twenty years, after all. In the half-century of his life, Donizetti endured crippling hardships on and off the stage, many of which inevitably exerted indelible influences on his artistic development. Unlike many of his contemporaries who were born into musical lineages, Donizetti’s very humble beginnings did not afford him the luxury of an established artistic pedigree. Enrolled by his father in a school for choirboys in his native city, his prodigious musical gifts were soon discovered and cultivated by Johann Simon Mayr, the Bavarian maestro di capella at the Duomo di Bergamo throughout most of Donizetti’s life. None of Donizetti’s three children survived infancy, and the death of his young wife Virginia in 1837, less than a year after the deaths of both his parents, left him a lonely widower whose two brothers were seldom in proximity. Battered by failures and legal entanglements, clashes with theatres’ managers and impresarios, the underhanded machinations of rivals and their cabals, the damaging work of censors, and decades-long effects of ailments ultimately diagnosed as symptoms of syphilis, the final years of the composer’s life were a dispiriting maelstrom of depression, mental and physical decline, and dedicated but increasingly desperate work. It was in the midst of what must have been near-constant struggles to meet his professional commitments whilst confronting the tribulations of his life beyond Europe’s opera houses that La favorite clawed its way to life in the autumn of 1840. Now rarely heard, La favorite will receive from Washington Concert Opera on 4 March not only the gift of being performed by an exceptionally well-chosen cast with the technical dexterity that the music requires but also the great benefit of being sung in the original French rather than the more familiar but largely ineffectual Italian translation.

​A setting of an adaptation by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz of François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud’s play Les Amants malheureux, ou le Comte de Comminges, La favorite was composed to order for the Paris Opéra, Donizetti’s initial subject for his second commission from that venerable institution, his never-completed Le duc d’Albe, having fallen victim to a force far more insurmountable than government censorship—the objection of a theatre manager to a score without an appropriately significant rôle for his paramour, in this case the renowned mezzo-soprano Rosine Stoltz. Repurposing his music for an opera entitled L’ange de Nisida, composed in 1839 [and itself a reworking of an earlier score that was never performed, 1834’s Adelaide] but never performed first because of anticipation of the Italian censors’ rejection of the subject matter and then owing to the French institution contracted for the work’s première crumbling into insolvency, Donizetti followed the example of his first opera for Salle Le Peletier, Les martyrs, a French adaptation of Poliuto. For Rosine Stoltz, the soprano rôle of Comtesse Sylvia de Linares was transformed into the mezzo-soprano Léonor de Guzman, and the action was transplanted from the original Naples to Fourteenth-Century Castile. Examining an opera through the lens of its composer’s life is often a dangerous business, but it is difficult to imagine that Donizetti was not affected by the intrinsic sentimental parallels among the situations in La favorite and his own experiences. To the extent of the knowledge that history permits, Donizetti never suffered the misfortune of falling in love with a royal personage’s mistress, but, by the time that La favorite was premièred at the Académie Royale de Musique on 2 December 1840, he surely knew all too well the agonies of loss and isolation. Musically, La favorite is by no means an inadequate companion for the scores upon the virtues of which Donizetti’s enduring popularity rests, so why is it performed so infrequently when Lucia di Lammermoor and L’elisir d’amore remain in regular rotation in the repertories of virtually every major opera house?

Such a question is never answered easily. With the Metropolitan Opera’s 2015 – 2016 Season including the company’s first performances of Roberto Devereux, alongside revivals of Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda as components of the so-called Tudor Trilogy, the mounting of which is also a first in MET history, a lauded production of Poliuto having been one of the triumphs of Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s 2015 offerings, and revivals and new productions of a number of Donizetti operas occupying prominent places in many opera company’s current and future seasons, the neglect of La favorite seems perplexing, at least on the surface. In truth, however, wholly satisfying performances of Anna Bolena, Lucia di Lammermoor, La fille du régiment, or any of Donizetti’s operas—performances, that is, in which every musical element fully meets the composer’s demands—are no more common than flawless stagings of Tristan und Isolde and Die Frau ohne Schatten. Perhaps, then, familiar imperfections are more palatable to Twenty-First-Century tastes than unfamiliar ones. The four acts of La favorite, the last of which was reputedly composed in less than four hours (an accomplishment of which Rossini would have been proud), contain music of consistently high quality that necessitates the participation of singers possessing bel canto techniques of the highest order in each of the principal rôles. By heeding this necessity with the engagement of a cast distinguished by the presence of a singer as gifted as tenor Rolando Sanz in the supporting rôle of Don Gaspar, as well as liberating the cast, all singing their rôles for the first time, from the worries of stage action by presenting the opera in concert under the baton of Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker, Washington Concert Opera’s performance advances a singular opportunity to make the acquaintance of La favorite as Donizetti intended.

Confident confidante: Soprano Joélle Harvey, Inès in Washington Concert Opera's performance of Gaetano Donizetti's La favorite, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Arielle Doneson, © by Joélle Harvey]

Man of the cloth: Bass John Relyea, Balthazar in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Shirley Suarez, © by John Relyea]

To the rôle of Balthazar, Supérieur of the monastery of the Orden de Santiago de Compostela and father of Alphonse XI’s queen consort, Toronto-born bass John Relyea brings an astonishingly wide spectrum of experience exemplified by his appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, where his assignments have included Garibaldo in Händel’s Rodelinda, the Voce dell’oracolo di Nettuno, Figaro, and Masetto in Mozart’s Idomeneo, re di Creta, Le nozze di Figaro, and Don Giovanni, bel canto parts like Rossini’s Don Basilio in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Alidoro in La Cenerentola (the rôle of his MET début in 2000), Giorgio in Bellini’s I puritani, and Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor, and later repertory such as Banco in Verdi’s Macbeth, Méphistophélès in Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust and Gounod’s Faust, Colline in Puccini’s La bohème, and Vodník in Dvořák’s Rusalka. One of the finest Verdi singers of his generation, Relyea is acutely attentive to the strong link between Donizetti’s Balthazar and the bass rôles in several of Verdi’s greatest scores. ‘Balthazar’s character is set in a similar position to the Monk in Don Carlo,’ Relyea remarked. ‘Both have broad, stentorian, declamato passages in the music.’ Even the oft-analyzed suspicion of ecclesiastical authority that pervades Verdi’s mature operas is suggested in the interactions of Balthazar and Alphonse in La favorite. ‘The aspect of the church’s power over the crown is evident, similar to Don Carlo’s Inquisitor,’ Relyea observed, ‘but Balthazar is a much more sympathetic, less fiery character, dramatically and musically, as shown in some rather flowing lyrical lines, especially in the final scenes with chorus—a rôle best suited to a true basso cantante.’​ In the twenty-five MET performances, in New York and on tour, of La favorite—La favorita, actually, as all performances were sung in Italian—between its 1895 company première and its most recent outing at Virginia’s Wolf Trap in 1978, Balthazar’s habit has been donned by only three singers: Pol Plançon, Bonaldo Giaiotti, and James Morris. In voice and appreciation of Balthazar’s significance in both La favorite and the broader context of the development of rôles for bass in the course of Nineteenth-Century opera, Relyea is a sensationally worthy successor to these very different but imposing artists.

Un jour de règne: Baritone Javier Arrey, Alphonse XI in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite, 4 March 2016 [Photo © by Javier Arrey / Harrison Parrott]

The singing of ​Chilean baritone ​Javier Arrey​​ portends a welcome restoration to Donizetti’s troubled King of Castile, Alphonse XI, like Balthazar an ancestor of dynamic figures in the Verdi canon (in Alphonse’s case, Don Carlo in Ernani, Conte di Luna in Il trovatore, and Anckarström/Renato in Un ballo in maschera, primarily), of the regal profile that he enjoyed when sung in years past by Louis Quilico and Sherrill Milnes. Combining the rugged vocal strength of Paolo Silveri with the insightfulness of Rolando Panerai, Arrey constructs his interpretation of Alphonse upon the foundation of the confounding ambiguity of the king’s predicament. ‘One of the most interesting and difficult things about Alphonse is the contrast that takes place in this character, the mix as a powerful king and also a vulnerable man in love capable of [doing] everything for the love of his life,’ he shared. This critical duality is, Arrey maintains, the heart of Alphonse. ‘For me,’ he went on, ‘one of the more complex things in the interpretation of this rôle is to be able to maintain his core temperament—as a king—alongside the shades of the man in love, vulnerable and betrayed.’ Arrey cited as an ideal example of this dichotomy Alphonse’s aria in Act Three, ‘Pour tant d’amour.’ Here, the king’s public persona and private emotions come into open conflict, passion warring against decorum. Baritones losing their lovers to tenors is as essential a part of opera as costumes and scenery, but in La favorite the stakes are higher than in many operatic amorous intrigues. The opera’s outcome is determined, of course, but Arrey is a singer adept at credibly giving Alphonse the strength of a king and the suavity of a lover.

O mon Fernand: Tenor Randall Bills, Fernand in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Crystal Pridmore, © by Randall Bills]

The ranks of tenors with the vocal wherewithal needed to sing Fernand are hardly over-populated, but even fewer are those singers whose work induces one to truly want to hear them sing the character’s ​difficult, high-flying music. Celebrated for his performances of bel canto heroes including Don Ramiro in La Cenerentola, Elvino in Bellini s La sonnambula, and Ernesto in Don Pasquale, native Californian tenor ​Randall Bills​​ is a Fernand with the skill set needed to soar, not solely survive, in the part. Like his colleagues in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of La favorite, Bills approaches his rôle as both a musical and an histrionic challenge. ‘I think Fernand and La favorite as a whole [have] a lot of ideas and issues relevant to today, perhaps dressed up in some fancy French (and later Italian),’ he opined. Likewise, he views Fernand not solely as a standard-issue operatic swain but also as a study in the delicate balance between desire and duty. ‘As tenors, we are always in love, it’s part of our territory,’ Bills stated, ‘but I feel [that], throughout the piece, Fernand is trying to put together this idea of being in love versus the religious [and] social constraints he’s accustomed to—something that’s not far removed from today. The ideal of “honor” prevents him from accepting his true feelings of love towards Léonor, but only after he discovers her status! Fortunately, in the end, love wins out: “Mon amour est plus fort,” but that resolution comes with a price. On top of all this, there’s the non-stop beautiful music propelling these dramatic life moments forward before our very eyes and ears. That’s why people go to experience opera!’ The collisions of life-or-death situations with exquisite music are indeed among the most spellbinding attractions of opera, but how much more attractive they are when they are sung with the savvy of an artist like Bills.

La belle favorite: Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, Léonor de Guzmán in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Rosetta Greek, © by Kate Lindsey]

​​In the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, what interest La favorite has garnered has been sustained by a​ procession of eminent mezzo-sopranos who have sung the central rôle of Léonor, an honorable sorority including Ebe Stignani, Giuseppina Corbelli, Fedora Barbieri, Giulietta Simionato, Fiorenza Cossotto, Shirley Verrett, Dolora Zajick, Daniela Barcellona, Elīna Garanča, and Alice Coote​​​. Returning to Lisner Auditorium, where she sang Romeo in Washington Concert Opera’s 2014 performance of Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi [reviewed here], to sing Léonor in La favorite, ​mezzo-soprano ​Kate Lindsey​​ is uniquely qualified to chisel her name among those of the superlative Léonors past and present. In the seasons since her company début as Javotte in Massenet’s Manon in 2005, Richmonder Lindsey has been heard at the MET as one of the Three Ladies in Die Zauberflöte, a Wagnerian Norn and Rhinemaiden, and a wood sprite in Rusalka, but her artistic flair has shone most compellingly in travesti rôles like Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, Siébel in Faust, Stéphano in Roméo et Juliette, Nicklausse and the Muse in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, Tebaldo in Don Carlo, and Hänsel in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. Surveying her rightly-applauded turns in trousers, especially her Romeo for Washington Concert Opera, Lindsey ponders the contrasting responsibilities of portraying operatic heroes and heroines. ‘Well, as I’ve been preparing Léonor, I must be honest in saying that I haven’t considered the idea of singing the rôle any differently than I would have sung Romeo, outside of the fact that I have to remind myself to take some time to go through my closet and find a gown to wear before I depart for DC!’ she quipped. She then added, ‘I think if I considered this more closely, I would probably notice that I do make alterations in the way that I might approach a portamento or how I might consider my approach to the expression of the text. However, I am not conscious of the “gender” within that approach, truthfully, just as I’m really not conscious of trying to be more “manly” when I sing or play trouser rôles. I know I do make adjustments based on the gender of the character, but I don’t consider it on a conscious level, if that makes any sense.’ It is indicative of Lindsey’s commitment to her craft that she not only thinks deeply about creating individual characters but also expresses a wish that her thoughts about doing so are intelligible! ‘Rather than think in terms of gender,’ she continued, ‘I tend to prefer to think in terms of what is honest within the emotion of the text, along with, certainly, the musical intentions. For me, the music always signifies the heartbeat and subtext for the character, and I find the deepest expression emerges from this source. That being said, after ten months playing trouser rôles, it will be nice to wear a dress on stage again!’ The adage that the clothes make the man was likely no less applicable at the Fourteenth-Century Castilian court than it is today, but it is the voices that make Donizetti’s La favorite: with Kate Lindsey, whichever frock she selects from her closet, at the center of a cast of singers for whom bel canto is not a chapter in a vocal primer but a way of life, these voices promise to make this La favorite an event that, 175 years ago, would have brought comfort and sadly uncommon happiness to its disconsolate composer.

Washington Concert Opera’s performance of La favorite begins at 7:00 PM on Friday, 4 March 2016, at Lisner Auditorium, 730 21st Street NW, on the campus of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. To purchase tickets for the performance, please visit Washington Concert Opera’s ticketing website or phone the Box Office at 202.364.5826.

ALFRED HOLLINS (1865 – 1942), HERBERT HOWELLS (1892 – 1983), SIR ERNEST MACMILLAN (1893 – 1973), RAFFAELE MANARI (1887 – 1933), FRANÇOIS MOREL (born 1926), CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835 – 1921), LOUIS VIERNE (1870 – 1927), PERCY WHITLOCK (1903 – 1946), and HEALEY WILLAN (1880 – 1968): Music for Organ—David Baskeyfield, organ [Recorded in St. Paul’s, Bloor Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 19 – 21 May 2015; ATMA Classique ACD2 2719; 1 CD, 80:07; Available from ATMA Classique, ClassicsOnlineHD (Download | Streaming), Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Whether a teeming metropolis or a sleepy crossroads, a community is defined in part by its musical footprint. By harnessing the powers of music to unite and uplift, locales as diverse as muddy fields in the Catskills and the ancient Terme di Caracalla have altered both musical and human histories, witnessing phenomena that transcended the simple acts of producing sounds. In generations past, academic, civic, and ecclesiastical communities often rightly venerated the organists who served them as . In German-speaking Europe, the names of Heinrich Schütz, Dieterich Buxtehude, Johann Jakob Froberger, and Johann Pachelbel became virtually synonymous with those of the towns in which they were master organists, and Pachelbel's son Karl Theodor perpetuated that association in the New World when he became organist at St. Philip's Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Even Johann Sebastian Bach was primarily celebrated as an organist rather than as a composer by many of his contemporaries and his own children. Disrupting the French traditions of organ playing and composition shaped by César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Charles-Marie Widor, the death of Jehan Alain was one of the foremost musical tragedies of World War II. In North America, the contrasting styles of E. Power Biggs and Virgil Fox lent the organ greater interest and prominence than it might otherwise have enjoyed in the increasingly frenetic Twentieth Century.

Becoming an institution’s designated organist no longer depends as it sometimes did in Bach's time upon meeting conditions like marrying a predecessor's daughter, but the emergence of a new organist in the exalted tradition of Buxtehude, Bach, Franck, and Widor remains an important milestone in the global musical community. Completed in 1914, the Casavant Frères Opus 550 organ in the imposing Anglican church of St. Paul’s, Bloor Street, in Toronto is a magnificent instrument, its 106 stops, 137 ranks, and four-manual console rivaling in quality the organs that Bach played in Arnstadt and Weimar and the famous organ in Stift Sankt Florian so loved by Anton Bruckner. Moreover, the sonically grandiloquent St. Paul’s instrument, which celebrated its centennial—sadly not honored with a much-deserved restoration—with the planning and release of this disc, is likely the fifth largest organ of its kind in the world, an astounding achievement of musical craftsmanship. A young musician at the start of what promises to be a career to recall those of Twentieth-Century titans of the instrument like Biggs, Fox, and Marie-Claire Alain might dream of introducing his work to the public at the command of such an organ, and British-born organist David Baskeyfield, winner of the 2014 Canadian International Organ Competition, provides with this ATMA Classique disc, masterfully engineered and edited by Carlos Prieto with aural clarity that honors the enormity of the instrument’s sound without sacrificing the intimacy of some of the music, an introduction wholly worthy of his substantial talent.

Currently serving as Director of Music at Christ Episcopal Church in Pittsford, New York, near his alma mater, the prestigious Eastman School of Music, Baskeyfield was an organ scholar at St. John’s College, Oxford, simultaneously reading law during his tenure there, and at Dublin’s Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedrals. In addition to his victory in the Canadian International Organ Competition, 2014 also witnessed the awarding of his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Eastman School. Highly-educated musicians are now nearly as prevalent as poorly-trained ones, but Baskeyfield is clearly an artist whose gifts warrant the plaudits he has received to date. In the performances on this disc, he discloses an affinity for drawing out the inner voices of both the instrument at his disposal and the music before him by making full use of the organ’s timbres. This quality is vital in all of the selections on the disc, and its significance is established immediately in Baskeyfield’s playing of the opening selection, Canadian composer and organist Sir Ernest MacMillan’s 1953 Cortège académique. The young organist’s performance of the piece succeeds in sounding anything but academic, the sentimental scope of the music receiving an exceptionally penetrating examination. Depth of feeling also characterizes Baskeyfield’s playing of Québécois composer François Morel’s 1954 Prière, a piece that benefits from the unaffected lyricism with which it is handled here. Both Herbert Howells’s 1918 Rhapsody No. 2 in E♭ major (Op. 17, No. 2) and Alfred Hollins’s 1917 Scherzo are products of the demoralizing era of the Great War, but they could hardly be more different, musically and emotionally. Howells’s work in general is colored by an ineradicable melancholy, and the Rhapsody, though a youthful work in a major key composed less than a decade after his auspicious first meeting with Ralph Vaughan Williams, exhibits suggestions of the composer’s mature idiom. Baskeyfield is careful to play the Rhapsody on its own terms, however, avoiding even the slightest hint of anachronistic bleakness by viewing the piece from the perspective of Howells’s 1932 Requiem and his powerful Hymnus Paradisi. By contrast, the prevailing mood of Hollins’s Scherzo is, as its title suggests, far lighter, but Baskeyfield’s playing is no less expert at conveying the irrepressible good humor of this work of a musician who managed to impress as prickly a critic as Queen Victoria.

The five movements of Percy Whitlock’s Plymouth Suite are individually and collectively tests of the player’s capacity for nuanced interpretation of musical subtleties. Baskeyfield unleashes an athletic robustness in the Allegro risoluto first movement, followed by a restrained, almost mysterious atmosphere in Lantana. The lilting Chanty has a rollicking, rustic charm in Baskeyfield’s performance, and his faculty for emphasizing the consequence of specific notes, especially in resolving cadences, without negatively impacting the integrity of broader phrases is inestimably valuable in Whitlock’s music. The sonic landscapes of Salix and Toccata are evoked with undaunted musicality, the capabilities of the organ mined for every nugget of sparkling interpretive depth. Inspired by mythological accounts of water nymphs, Louis Vierne’s Naïades (Pièces de fantaisie pour orgue, Op. 55, No. 4) wields an ethereal allure not unlike the music for the trio of nymphs in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, and Baskeyfield phrases Vierne’s impressionistic lines with grace and delicacy to which ladies who sing Strauss’s Naiad, Dryad, and Echo should aspire.

Beyond the milieux of organists and listeners who love music for the instrument, Camille Saint-Saëns is likely the most widely-known of the composers represented on this disc, but, aside from his famous Symphony No. 3 in C minor that prominently features organ, his works for the instrument of which he was the revered master at the Madeleine for nearly twenty years are not as familiar to many listeners as his orchestral music and the opera Samson et Dalila. His Prélude et Fugue in G major (Op. 109, No. 2) was dedicated to fellow composer and organist Albert Périlhou, an homage from the man proclaimed by Franz Liszt to be the best organist in the world to a respected colleague. The second of the three similarly-conceived pieces that constitute Saint-Saëns’s Opus 109, the G-major Prélude et Fugue is a work in which the wit of the creator of Le carnaval des animaux is apparent, and Baskeyfield’s traversal of the music insightfully explores its ceremony and its cleverness. Italian organ pedagogue Raffaele Manari in many ways occupies the opposite end of the artistic spectrum from Saint-Saëns, his sporadic compositions inhabiting an environment of liturgical austerity. Nevertheless, hisStudio da concerto “Salve Regina” is a bold work, and Baskeyfield delivers it with virtuosity that encompasses simplicity and complexity equally, his approach lending the piece the effect of plainchant resounding in an ornate cathedral.

Born in London but resident during much of his career in Toronto, Healey Willan was organist at St. Paul's, Bloor Street, in which he capacity he was among the first organists to play the instrument heard on this disc. Composed in 1916, three years after his immigration to Canada, Willan’s Introduction, Passacaglia, and Fugue possesses fanfare sufficient to inaugurate a majestic instrument and the career of its custodian. It is natural that composers who were themselves renowned organists should write for the instrument with special skill, but Baskeyfield’s performance of Introduction, Passacaglia, and Fugue makes the music sound as though Willan composed it exclusively for him. The youthful energy with which Baskeyfield negotiates the transitions is complemented by expressive maturity which, frankly, many musicians with considerably more years to their credit do not exhibit. In particular, the perspicuity with which Baskeyfield articulates individual voices in Willan’s contrapuntal writing marks his playing as the work of a commendably intuitive musical mind.

An organist’s technique can be difficult to assess based solely upon audio recordings, but bad playing asserts itself to the ears of even the most casual of listeners. Like the large voices that have become an endangered commodity in opera due to inept training and misuse, potentially brilliant organists now often grapple with indifference and ignorance in pursuit of the nurturing and support that their development requires. With his playing on this disc, dedicated to captivating repertory overlooked by many, less-adventurous organists and record labels, David Baskeyfield announces his prominence among the superior organists of the still-nascent Twenty-First Century. In the case of this young artist, jurisprudence’s loss is emphatically music’s gain.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937): L’heure espagnole, M. 52 and Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, M. 84—Isabelle Druet (Concepción), Luca Lombardo (Torquemada), Frédéric Antoun (Gonzalve), Marc Barrard (Ramiro), Nicolas Courjal (Don Iñigo Gomez); François Le Roux (Don Quichotte); Orchestre National de Lyon; Leonard Slatkin, conductor [Recorded at the Auditorium Maurice-Ravel, Lyon, France, 22 – 26 January 2013 (L’heure espagnole) and 18 – 20 September 2013 (Don Quichotte à Dulcinée); NAXOS 8.660337; 1 CD, 55:42; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD (Download | Streaming), Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

There are magical qualities in the music of Maurice Ravel that are found in the work of no other composer. The son of a father raised near Genève and a Basque mother whose childhood was spent in Madrid, Ravel was born in the small commune of Ciboure in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department of France, near the Golfe de Gascogne. The Ravel household was a nurturing environment for the young composer and his brother Édouard, one in which matters mechanical and musical were discussed with equal enthusiasm and Madame Ravel serenaded her sons with Basque folk songs recalled from her own youth. His engineer father’s scientific inclinations and his mother’s Basque libertarianism undoubtedly exerted powerful influences on Ravel’s artistic development. This is perhaps more evident in none of his works than in his ‘comédie musicale’ L’heure espagnole, first performed at the Opéra-Comique on 19 May 1911, when Ravel’s score shared the evening with Jules Massenet’s now-little-remembered Thérèse. An adaptation of the like-titled 1908 ‘comédie bouffe’ by Franc-Nohain (né Maurice Étienne Legrand, 1872 – 1934), L’heure espagnole was the first of Ravel’s two one-act operas, the only works in the genre that he completed despite having worked with varying degrees of diligence on three further operatic projects, and in its twenty-one scenes he created as entrancing a work as graced the French lyric stage in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. Olin Downes wrote in The New York Times after L’heure espagnole’s Metropolitan Opera première in 1925, when Concepción and Ramiro were sung by luminaries of the era Lucrezia Bori and Lawrence Tibbett, that ‘there is not a measure that fails to tell its tale; not an innuendo of a racy text which fails to find its echo in the score.’ The text likely seemed racier to audiences ninety years ago than to today’s listeners, but Downes’s assessment struck the L’heure espagnole nail on the proverbial head: there is not in the opera’s fifty-minute duration a single bar that misses its musical and dramatic marks. The same can be said of the performance recorded by NAXOS in Lyon’s Auditorium Maurice-Ravel—as fitting a venue for L’heure espagnole as exists—in 2013 and now released in spacious, atmospheric sound produced, edited, and engineered by the team of Hugues Deschaux, Quentin Hindley, and Daniel Zalay: from the playing of the Orchestre National de Lyon to Leonard Slatkin’s conducting and the singing of a first-rate cast, this is a L’heure espagnole that bedazzles with the precision of a fine Swiss—make that a Spanish—timepiece.

Reusing the template that partnered Slatkin’s excellent Naxos recording of L’enfant et les sortilèges with a delightful account of Ma mère l’Oye [reviewed here], the label here pairs L’heure espagnole with the last of Ravel’s musical Iberian sojourns, his setting of three songs with texts by Paul Morrand (1888 – 1976), Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. Since the first publication in 1605 of Book One of Miguel de Cervantes’s El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, Don Quixote has been as ubiquitous a figure in Spanish literature as Sir John Falstaff and Tartuffe are in English and French literary traditions. Sentimentally, there are definite parallels between Massenet’s valedictory opera Don Quichotte and Ravel’s Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, heightened in provenance if not in practice by both works having been written for Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin. Unlike the earlier L’heure espagnole and Massenet’s wistful but ultimately cathartic opera, the clamor of the approaching catastrophe typical of the entre-deux-guerres years resounds in Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. Backed by the Orchestre National de Lyon’s affectionately virtuosic accompaniment and refreshingly straightforward conducting by Slatkin, French bass François Le Roux highlights the music in Morrand’s words and the poetry in Ravel’s music. Morrand’s and Ravel’s Don Quichotte is a man wearied by his much-tested chivalry but unwilling to accept or admit his decline. The sharp quajira of the opening Chanson romanesque, ‘Si vous me dissiez que la terre,’ is shaped by Le Roux and Slatkin with unflagging energy, the dance of a man no longer light on his feet but still upright, still forging his own choreography. The subsequent Chanson épique, ‘Bon Saint Michel qui me donnez loisir,’ undulates with the feverish intensity of the zortzico, tempered by a softening of the hard textures of the music when the beloved Dulcinée is conjured. The vibrant jota of Chanson à boire, ‘Foin du bâtard, illustre Dame,’ fizzes with inebriated high spirits, but Le Roux’s vocalism remains focused and uncaricatured. Only a few minuscule instances of unsteadiness betray the singer’s years of service, the voice on the whole remaining a solid, well-trained instrument with a timbre like best-vintage cognac. Hearing Le Roux as Massenet’s Don Quichotte—or as Sancio Pancia in Giovanni Paisiello’s 1769 opera Don Chisciotte della Mancia, for that matter—would be most welcome, so complete is his characterization even in the seven minutes of Ravel’s portrait of the crestfallen knight errant, and his performance joins those by Camille Maurane, Max von Egmond, and José van Dam as one of the recorded accounts of Don Quichotte à Dulcinée to be cherished.

With orchestrations that, in addition to full complements of strings, brasses, woodwinds, celesta, and a pair of harps, call for a percussion section including timpani, three clock pendulums (for which Ravel specified metronome speeds), bass drum, bells, castanets, cymbals, glockenspiel, sleigh bells, spring, ratchet, tambourine, tam-tam, triangle, whip, and xylophone, L’heure espagnole is a score distinguished by an early flowering of the imaginative instrumentation of which Ravel was a consummate master. From the opening bars of the orchestral introduction, the Lyon musicians play with fervor and finesse. No section of the orchestra is less than excellent, but the low brasses and woodwinds are often spectacular, this disc featuring some of the best bassoon playing ever committed to disc. [Whether the Orchestre National de Lyon employs the sarrusophone requested by Ravel or substitutes contrabassoon is not indicated in the liner notes: the latter seems—and sounds—more likely.] In all of the opera’s twenty-one scenes, Slatkin adopts tempi that closely adhere to Ravel’s markings without causing the performance to seem like a pre-fabricated, paint-by-the-numbers run-through. Effective as Slatkin’s conducting of the Naxos L’enfant et les sortilèges was, his pacing of L’heure espagnole is even better.

In the opera’s opening scene, Ramiro, the muleteer arriving to submit his watch for repair, and Torquemada, the dully industrious clockmaker, are introduced with extraordinary wit, their voices differentiated by far more than range. Ravel intended for Ramiro to be sung by a baryton-martin, a Fach of which there are scarcely more modern representatives than of the near-mythical Falcon. Pursuant to his intention, Ravel gave Ramiro a punishingly high tessitura, with which baritone Marc Barrard contends with formidable assurance in this performance. Beginning with his titanium-cored voicing of ‘Señor Torquemada, horloger de Tolède?’ and ‘Or je suis – à votre service,’ he vaults through Ramiro’s music—and hauls those clocks and their clandestine cargo to and fro—with ease that appeals as much to the listener’s ears as to Concepción’s eager eyes.

Concepción’s dullard of a husband Torquemada—yes, one almost expects a Monty Python trouper to suddenly exclaim (en français, bien sûr), ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’—responds, ‘Torquemada, c'est moi, Monsieur,’ in the firm tones of tenor Luca Lombardo. Though he apparently is not overly proficient in cleaning his wife’s clock, literally or figuratively, there is no reason that he should sound like a superannuated geezer, and this performance is all the more amusing for having in Lombardo a Torquemada who is not a whining marionette.

In Scene Two, Concepción joins her husband and his customer Ramiro with a typically unsubtle exclamation of ‘Totor!’ Assigned by Ravel to a soprano, Concepción is sung in this performance by mezzo-soprano Isabelle Druet with the velvet-throated sass of the young Giulietta Simionato. [Did someone mention Falcons?] She toys with Ramiro with her Carmen-esque ‘Il reste, voilà bien ma chance!’ in Scene Three, but her seductive greeting to the poetry-spouting student Gonzalve in Scene Four, ‘Il était temps, voici Gonzalve,’ falls on deaf-by-distraction ears: dulcetly sung by tenor Frédéric Antoun, who veritably sighs ‘Enfin revient le jour si doux,’ this is a Gonzalve whose head is quite happily in his clouds of verse.

Exchanging fire with Concepción and Gonzalve in Scene Five, Barrard delivers Ramiro’s ‘C’est fait! l’horloge est à sa place’ rousingly. In the subsequent scene, Concepción continues her assault on the hapless Gonzalve, Druet dispatching ‘Maintenant, pas de temps à perdre!’ and ‘Oui, c’est fou, je te le concède’ with marvelous insouciance. In the opera’s early scenes, Concepción’s music rarely departs from the lower octave of the soprano range, and the richness of Druet’s tones in this part of the voice lends her Concepción an alluring voluptuousness. As a matter of convenience, she shifts her amorous attentions in Scene Seven to the banker Don Iñigo Gomez, who greets her as he enters through a window with ‘Salut à la belle horlogère!’ in the clarion tones of bass Nicolas Courjal, leading to an uncomfortably close encounter with Ramiro, whose ‘Voilà ... Et maintenant à l’autre!’ Barrard predictably sings vigorously.

Scenes Nine and Ten give first Iñigo and then Ramiro rare chances to have the stage to themselves, variously disappearing into and emerging from clocks, and the interpreters of both rôles seize their opportunities with glee. Singing with suavity that recalls recorded souvenirs of the vocalism of Ravel’s first Iñigo, Hector Dufranne (also Debussy's first Golaud in Pelléas et Mélisande), Courjal makes Iñigo’s ‘Evidemment, elle me congédie’ a most entertaining interlude. The level-headed machismo of Barrard’s recitation of Ramiro’s ‘Voilà ce que j appelle une femme charmante’ is comparably droll. Both gentlemen bring their rôles to life with the authentic Gallic magnetism often lamented as extinct among today’s artists.

With her ‘Monsieur, ah! Monsieur! Dans ma gorge, les mots s arrêtent de dépit!’ in Scene Eleven with Ramiro, the tessitura of Concepción’s music climbs as the comedy escalates, Druet’s top G rocketing above the masculine grumblings with the force of the Mistral. Courjal’s Iñigo launches Scene Twelve with a riotous ‘Enfin, il part! Dieu! que ces muletiers sont de fâcheux bavards!’ that Barrard’s Ramiro answers with a galvanizing ‘Que faut-il que j’en fasse?’ in Scene Thirteen. Scene Fourteen reunites Concepción with Gonzalve, and the sting of Druet’s enunciation of ‘Ah! vous n’est-ce pas, preste! leste!’ is more piquant owing to the attractiveness of the sound. This is also true of Antoun’s singing of Gonzalve’s ‘En dépit de cette inhumaine’ in the next scene. How much more poignant many performances of Puccini’s La bohème might be were they populated by Rodolfos who sound as legitimately poetic as Antoun’s Gonzalve!

The sextet of scenes that proceed from Ramiro’s and Concepción’s return to the opera’s end, set in motion by Barrard’s stirringly-vocalized ‘Voilà ce que j’appelle une femme charmante,’ constitute one of the most purely fun sequences in opera, Ravel’s invention growing more exuberant with every subsequent phrase. The vocal potency and wily femininity of Druet’s handling of Concepción’s descent from F at the top of the stave to the D just below it on ‘Oh! la pitoyable aventure!’ and its repetition later in Scene Seventeen, as well as her fortissimo top As, bring to mind the similar qualities of Renata Tebaldi’s Gioconda, Tosca, and Wally. Indeed, Druet has at her disposal complete security throughout the full compass of the voice of which many spintos and dramatic sopranos should rightly be envious. All of the players trade barbs in the opera’s final minutes, Barrard discharging Ramiro’s ‘Voilà! ... Et maintenant, Señora, je suis prêt’ like a firecracker and Courjal’s burly elocution of Iñigo’s ‘Mon œil anxieux interroge’ giving way to Antoun’s heralding Gonzalve’s awakening of sorts with his sustained fortissimo top A♯. Torquemada gets a last word in before the vaudevillian finale with ‘Il n’est, pour l’horloger, de joie égale à celle,’ sung by Lombardo with the exasperation of a cuckolded husband and long-abused civil servant. The twisted ‘moral’ of L’heure espagnole is intoned by the cast with good-natured satisfaction in ‘Pardieu, déménageur, vous venez à propos!’ They all make credible efforts at producing the trills devilishly demanded by Ravel, and Druet confirms with her incandescent top B that, in the wake of so much mayhem, Concepción retains the upper hand over her band of hombres.

The first recording of L’heure espagnole was made under Ravel’s supervision in 1929, and that performance, now available in restored form, established a benchmark that has survived the test of the subsequent eighty-seven years. Per capita, recordings of L’heure espagnole have maintained a higher standard of artistry than those of many—most, in truth—operas, so the competition faced by this new NAXOS recording is fierce. Pas de souci! Featuring expertly-sung, brilliantly idiomatic performances of both Don Quichotte à Dulcinée and L’heure espagnole, this is one of the most enjoyable discs in the NAXOS catalogue. Give this L’heure espagnole an hour wherever you happen to be, and Ravel’s musical sorcery will transform your surroundings into the bustling Alcázar.

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Acis and Galatea, HWV 49a [original chamber version of 1718] and Sarei troppo felice, HWV 157—Aaron Sheehan (Acis), Teresa Wakim (Galatea), Douglas Williams (Polyphemus), Jason McStoots (Damon), Zachary Wilder (Coridon); Amanda Forsythe (soprano – HWV 157); Vocal and Chamber Ensembles of Boston Early Music Festival; Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, leaders [Recorded in the Sendesaal, Bremen, Germany, 27 June – 1 July 2013; cpo 777 877-2; 2 CDs, 107:18; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD (Download | Streaming), jpc (Germany), Amazon (USA), fnac (France), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Whether the medium at hand is literary, musical, political, or visual, the Zeitgeist of an age is of necessity manifested in the creative energy of its artists. There are of course Existentialist ties among artists, their work, and their communities, but the bonds that unite a work of art with its physical, social, and temporal environments are often as unglamorous as financing and fortuitous intersections of space and supplies. From the relatively broad perspective facilitated by the Twenty-First Century’s unprecedented access to information, it seems extraordinary that a society that, if accounts by writers of the ilk of Lytton Strachey are to be trusted, so dismayed Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with its paucities of discipline, imagination, and integrity should a century before Victoria’s ascension in 1837 have inspired Georg Friedrich Händel to create for its entertainment some of the finest music produced in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. It has sometimes been suggested by observers for whom art begins and ends with money changing hands that Händel was essentially an opportunist: with a new, friendly dynasty upon the throne, Britain was a singer in search of a song, and Händel marketed himself as just the man to write it. He faced obstacles and suffered losses in the capital along the Thames that would have sent opportunists scurrying back to the Continent, however, and in the last fifteen years of his life he gave Britain several of his greatest scores, gifts that musical Britons did very little to deserve. It cannot have solely been opportunism that compelled the stern composer to permanently trade Halle for Mayfair, but there is no question that Händel and the English musical establishment enjoyed a mutually-beneficial relationship that continues to pay lavish returns.

Before permanently throwing his lot in with that of the English in 1712, Händel followed the tide of his burgeoning interest in opera, ignited in Hamburg, to the land of the genre’s birth. Continuing the serendipitous pattern of recording studio-made souvenirs of lauded Boston Early Music Festival performances, this cpo release unites Händel’s early Italian cantata ‘Sarei troppo felice’ (HWV 157) with the 1718 Cannons edition of the pastoral masque Acis and Galatea. Composed in September 1707 during the young Händel’s fruitful time in Rome and contemporaneously with Rodrigo, his first opera wholly in Italian, ‘Sarei troppo felice’ uses a text wholly or partially by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj. Unfortunately, the full manuscript of the cantata is not known to survive, but despite its early date—Händel was twenty-two years old when it was completed—the score often reveals the composer’s fledgling ingenuity at its most expressive. Sung for cpo by soprano Amanda Forsythe and accompanied in part by gambist Laura Jeppesen, ‘Sarei troppo felice’ proves to be an intriguing companion for Acis and Galatea. One of today’s most impressive singers in any repertory, Forsythe here makes much of little, heightening the emotional significance of each repetition of the opening line, ‘Sarei troppo felice.’ She phrases the Largo ‘Se al pensier dar mai potrò’ with great feeling, her use of text enabling the listener to sense the words’ meaning without comprehending a single syllable of Italian. The disquietude that floods her voice when she sings ’Clori, schernita Clori’ seems to flow from the most intimate recesses of her soul, and the emotive power of her traversals of ’Giusto Ciel se non ho sorte’ and ’Ah! che un cieco ho per guida’ is, on a scale appropriate to Händel’s music, no less than that borne by the utterances of an insightful Fiordiligi or Gilda. That Forsythe is an important singer is a fact acknowledged by virtually every listener fortunate enough to have heard her, and her singing of ‘Sarei troppo felice’ here confirms that she is an artist with the rare capacities to discern in any music a journey of the heart and to guide the listener in discerning—and exploring—it, too.

It was during his residency at Cannons, the Middlesex seat of the eventual Duke of Chandos [prior to 1719, when his Marquessate and Dukedom were created by the Crown, His Grace was but a lowly Baron, Viscount, and Earl], that Händel composed Acis and Galatea, the twelve Chandos Anthems, and the earliest of his pioneering English oratorios, Esther. Using as his libretto an adaptation of John Dryden’s translations of Ovid on which John Gay, John Hughes, and other writers, perhaps even Alexander Pope, likely collaborated, Acis and Galatea in its Purcellian masque form was completed in 1718. The circumstances of its first performance are unknown, but it is logically conjectured that a masque in which the hero is granted riparian immortality was conceived for al fresco performance, Cannons boasting of greatly-admired waterworks in its gardens. BEMF’s 2009 production sought to restore to Händel’s 1718 pastoral masque the authentic provenance of its birth, and this recording offers felicitous proof of the Festival’s success. Dismissive critical assessments of the scale of the performance—and the singers’ individual performances—on these discs, some authored by generally respected advocates for Baroque repertory, are mystifying. It is important that the 1718 Acis and Galatea not be confused with its brethren in the Händel catalogue, the 1708 Neapolitan serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, the three-act 1732 score premièred by Anna Maria Strada del Pò, Senesino, and Antonio Montagnana, and the 1739 two-act English adaptation. Measured against the proper standard, that of the known and probable contexts of the first performance of the Cannons version, the performance spurred by the bar-raising work of the BEMF Vocal and Chamber Ensembles exemplifies the best fusion of scholarship and timeless musicality.

The tuneful Sinfonia introduces Acis and Galatea with aptly Arcadian grace, and the playing of BEMF’s team of peerless Händel stylists—violinist and leader Robert Mealy, violinist Cynthia Roberts, cellist Phoebe Carrai, Rob Nairn on double bass, Gonzalo X. Ruiz playing solo oboe and recorder, oboist and recorder soloist Kathryn Montoya, bassoonist Dominic Teresi, harpsichordist Avi Stein, and musical directors Paul O’Dette on archlute and Stephen Stubbs on Baroque guitar and theorbo—sets the stage for a performance in which Händel’s music sounds newly-minted. Each of the musicians is an undoubted virtuoso, but the most remarkable aspect of their playing is the skill with which they furnish precisely the magnitude of sound that each number requires. As at Cannons in 1718, the vocal soloists also serve as the choristers, and the integration of their voices in the opening chorus, ‘O the Pleasure of the Plains,’ is superb. They seem an altogether different ensemble in the anguished pronouncements of ‘Wretched Lovers! Fate has past this sad decree, no joy shall last’ and ‘Mourn, all ye Muses, weep, all ye Swains.’ Comforting the despondent Galatea and then entreating her, ‘Galatea, dry thy Tears,’ their sound is again transformed, now glowing with melodious optimism. Under O’Dette’s and Stubbs’s direction, the decorous drama plays out plaintively, every embellishment enacted by singers and instrumentalists displaying absolute refinement.

Blame for the principal and, fundamentally, only flaw in the performance of Acis and Galatea on cpo’s discs must be laid at Händel’s feet. It is unpardonable that the shepherd Coridon has so little to do when he is given life by the hypnotic tones of tenor Zachary Wilder. His performance of Coridon’s air ‘Would you gain the tender Creature’ is exquisite, his timbre suiting the music as though Händel composed the piece with it in mind. The Polyphemus who could ignore this Coridon’s earnest effort at calming his ire must be audiologically as well as visually limited. In the history of recorded opera, there are moments that can never be replicated or forgotten: Pagliughi’s ‘Regnava nel silenzio,’ Flagstad’s Liebestod, Callas’s ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,’ Mödl’s Todesverkündigung, Björling’s ‘Donna non vidi mai.’ To these must be added Wilder’s ‘Would you gain the tender Creature.’ A performance such as this makes the dearth of memorable Isoldes and Toscas far easier to bear.

Equally effective is tenor Jason McStoots’s sweetly-vocalized portrayal of Acis’s confidant and fellow shepherd Damon. The sincerity that shapes his singing of the recitative ‘Stay, shepherd, stay!’ is mirrored in the confidence of his vocalism, and his performance of the air ‘Shepherd, what are thou pursuing?’ exudes concern for the course upon which Acis has set himself. Still more affecting is McStoots’s voicing of the air ‘Consider, fond Shepherd.’ His technique equal to every difficulty of his part, McStoot depicts an urbane but gratifyingly frank Damon. Like Wilder’s, his voice sounds tailor-made for the music.

Bass-baritone Douglas Williams creates within the boundaries of Händel’s music a multi-dimensional Polyphemus who manages to be strangely sympathetic even when crushing shepherds under boulders. His strapping tones, stronger at the top than at the bottom of his character’s range, give the one-eyed giant an atypical depth, this Polyphemus unapologetically wearing the scars of a continually-scorned lover. Williams surges through the accompanied recitative ‘I rage, I melt, I burn’ with the unstoppable force of an avalanche, but his is the voice of a creature consumed by love, not that of a schoolyard bully. Not unlike Jean-Philippe Rameau’s merciless mocking of the title character’s would-be lovemaking in his Platée, there is an unmistakable vein of humor in the famous air ‘O ruddier than the Cherry!’ Williams’s Polyphemus sounds as though he truly knows no other way of wooing than ham-fisted blustering, but he blusters most musically, jigging through the divisions rather than shouting them into submission as many of his fellow cyclopses have done. In the recitative with Galatea, the object of his unsubtle desire, he phrases ‘Whither, Fairest, art thou running’ with a concerted effort at artless charm, but his frustration erupts anew in his air ‘Cease to Beauty to be suing.’ In the fateful trio with Galatea and Acis, Williams’s voice throbs with fury that does not disguise accents of sorrow: no mindless brute, he knows on some level, like Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana when she reveals Turiddu’s affair with Lola to Alfio, that his actions have neutralized his rival but also deprived him of any possibility of winning his beloved’s affection. Williams makes Polyphemus a wounded beast whose shortcomings are all too human but whose voice is as dangerous a weapon as the stone with which he seals his fate.

By contrast, soprano Teresa Wakim’s Galatea is the personification of delicate femininity. The gleaming tone with which she illuminates the words in the accompanied recitative ‘Ye verdant Plains and woody Mountains’ is followed by an outpouring of concentrated bel canto in the air ‘Hush, ye pretty warbling Quire!’ Both the recitative ‘Oh, did’st thou know the Pains of absent Love’ and the air ‘As when the Dove’ are sung with rapt probity, and the moonstruck fervor of her delivery of Galatea’s words in the duet ‘Happy We!’ is both touching and tasteful. The soprano articulates the recitative ‘Cease, o Cease, thou gentle youth’ poignantly. Her terror in the trio with Acis and Polyphemus is as gripping as her grief in ‘Must I my Acis still bemoan’ and ‘’Tis done’ is heartbreaking. Wakim ends the masque with a rapturous performance of the air ‘Heart, the Seat of soft Delight,’ her voice soaring with renewed ardor. How could any Acis and Polyphemus not lose their hearts to this Galatea?

There is a sort of clairvoyance at the core of tenor Aaron Sheehan’s portrayal of Acis that ushers the listener into the character’s very private, endearingly uncomplicated world from the first golden notes of the singer’s performance of the air ‘Where shall I seek the charming Fair?’ Clairvoyance is not the correct term, really, for Sheehan’s conveyance of Acis’s introverted but all-consuming passion transcends sensory perception. Sheehan’s lean, agile voice moves gorgeously through the airs ‘Lo, here my Love, turn, Galatea, hither turn thy Eyes’ and ‘Love in her Eyes sits playing,’ his handling of fiorature as natural as his eloquent diction. He joins Wakim in the duet ‘Happy We!’ with beaming devotion. The titanium core of Sheehan’s voice lends his singing of the recitative ‘His hideous Love provokes my rage’ and air ‘Love sounds th’Alarm and Fear is a-flying!’ smoldering masculinity, and he fights fearlessly in the trio ‘The Flocks shall leave the Mountains’ for the love that has changed Acis’s life. Death is as innate a part of opera as of life, but few operatic deaths are as profoundly stirring as Sheehan makes Acis’s demise in the accompanied recitative ‘Help, Galatea, help, ye Parent Gods!’ The singer’s quiet, almost serene realization of the extinguishing of Acis’s life brings to mind the bittersweet death of Mr. Barkis in David Copperfield, in which Dickens wrote that, ‘it being low water,’ the noble-hearted, seafaring fellow ‘went out with the tide.’ His plangent vocalism having engendered a captivating character, Sheehan is an Acis whose destiny reaches the loftiest heights of tragedy.

Anyone approaching this recording of Acis and Galatea expecting Siegmund, Sieglinde, and Hunding speaking the language of Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda is destined for self-imposed disappointment. After his immigration to London, when his life became fodder for the diary-keeping gossips of English society, Händel may well have lacked the virtues of carefully-honed diplomacy and tactfulness, but his music suggests that his thorny manner defended a sensitive spirit. The cantata ‘Sarei troppo felice’ and the 1718 Cannons incarnation of Acis and Galatea are not the works of a curmudgeon, no matter how fiercely their creator guarded his most personal emotions. There is no hiding the tenderheartedness of the man who composed music that inspires performances like this ‘Sarei troppo felice’ and Acis and Galatea.

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Le duc d’Albe—Laurent Naouri (Le duc d’Albe), Angela Meade (Hélène d’Egmont), Michael Spyres (Henri de Bruges), Gianluca Buratto (Daniel Brauer), David Stout (Sandoval), Trystan Llŷr Griffiths (Carlos), Robin Tritschler (Balbuena), Dawid Kimberg (Un tavernier); Opera Rara Chorus; Hallé; Sir Mark Elder, conductor [Recorded at Hallé St Peter’s, Ancoats, Manchester, England, in June 2015; Opera Rara ORC54; 2 CDs, 93:22; Available from Opera Rara, Amazon (USA – CD | mp3), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

One of the most confounding dilemmas in opera is the question of what to do with scores that were left incomplete by their composers or exist in multiple forms. There are instances in which the decisions are easy, of course: though her earlier guise is not without obvious assets, Beethoven’s Fidelio is almost universally preferred over her younger self, Leonore, and the version of Massenet’s Werther adapted to accommodate a baritone protagonist for the benefit of Mattia Battistini is very rarely heard in comparison with the performance diary of the canonical version with a tenor protagonist. Händel’s Radamisto, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice/Orphée et Eurydice, Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, and Verdi’s La forza del destino and Don Carlos all present riddles that are not easily solved. In the nearly 230 years since the opera’s première, conductors, opera house managers, and impresarios have debated whether to perform the Prague or Vienna version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Should both of Don Ottavio’s arias be included, or must fidelity to the letter of one of the versions be preserved; and what of Donna Elvira’s ‘Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata’? Is Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer to be staged in a single act or in three acts, set in Scotland or Norway? Should a performance of Puccini’s Turandot end at the point at which the composer’s death halted his work on the score, employ the sanctioned completion by Franco Alfano, or devise another option? There are as many possible solutions as there are people to ponder the questions, but the very notion of a single right answer is as fanciful as the ‘chimere’ and ‘castelli in aria’ of which Rodolfo sings in La bohème.

In a sense, the death of Gaetano Donizetti in 1848 was a merciful release, the last three years of the composer’s life having subjected him to the agonies of disease, deterioration, and institutionalization. Particularly in his final year, bouts of lucidity and work alternated with periods during which it was reported that he had virtually no sensory engagement with his surroundings. Perhaps he retreated in those distant moments into the theatre within him, where new works continued to take shape. The deaths of his parents, his wife, and all three of his children by the autumn of 1837 undoubtedly made his fifth decade a lonely time when the characters to whom he gave life in his scores were his closest companions. Though such projects were rarely without plentiful headaches, the prospect of writing a new score for the Paris Opéra must have at least given Donizetti a welcome outlet into which his energy could be channeled. When the composer abandoned Naples after the censors denied his Poliuto a première on the stage of the Teatro di San Carlo and relocated to Paris in October 1838, he was hardly a stranger in the French capital, where his Anna Bolena, Lucia di Lammermoor, and other scores had attained popularity in the repertories of several theatres, most notably the Théâtre-Italien, performances under the auspices of which—a momentous example being the 1835 première of Donizetti’s Marino Faliero, commissioned by the company and first performed not long after the première of Bellini’s similarly-conceived I puritani—bounced during Donizetti’s residencies in the city among four venues including the famed Salle Favart. After Salvadore Cammarano’s Poliuto underwent redressing by Eugène Scribe as Les martyrs and the resulting opera received its first production at the Opéra in April 1840, Donizetti turned his attention back to fulfilling the second of his two commissions from the Opéra, a setting of a libretto by Scribe and Charles Duveyrier: Le duc d’Albe.

By the time that Les martyrs reached the stage, the score of Le duc d’Albe, begun in 1839, was half-completed, vocal lines for the incomplete portions, mostly Acts Three and Four, already substantially sketched. The real impetus for the regrettable ultimate abandonment of Le duc d’Albe will now likely never be known. The oft-repeated story, worthy of Gaston Leroux’s Le fantôme de l’Opéra, of the Opéra’s manager’s dismissal of Le duc d’Albe because its heroine, written with tessitura similar to that of the title rôle in Anna Bolena, was not congenial for the company’s—and his—leading lady, mezzo-soprano Rosine Stoltz, may be wholly or partially apocryphal, but, if not on Stoltz’s behalf surely to her benefit, Hélène in Le duc d’Albe was cast aside in favor of Léonor in La favorite, a reworking of Donizetti’s 1839 score L’ange de Nisida, recently announced as a future Opera Rara recording project. Rather than employing the completion of the score fashioned by Donizetti’s pupil Matteo Salvi and first performed using an Italian translation [Scribe’s libretto did not languish in neglect, eventually being recalled to duty for Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes] in Rome in 1882 or exploring other avenues like the jarringly divergent completion by Giorgio Battistelli staged by Vlaamse Opera in 2012, this Opera Rara release presents Roger Parker’s critical edition of only the music completed by Donizetti, augmented by a handful of newly-composed passages, the work of Martin Fitzpatrick, necessary for the continuity of the existing material. True to the label’s mission of ensuring that ‘operas once threatened with extinction [are] now brought vividly back to life,’ this recording enables Twenty-First-Century listeners to hear Le duc d’Albe as it was bequeathed to posterity by its composer in a performance that would have caused the Opéra to reconsider its rejection, Rosine Stoltz and her admirers be damned.

Their work having been featured on previous Opera Rara recordings, the excellent playing of the Hallé musicians and the vigorous but stylish conducting of Sir Mark Elder are not surprising, but they here surpass their own high standards. The orchestra’s crackling account of the opera’s atmospheric Prélude launches a performance in which every Hallé member uses his or her instrument not as an impersonal conduit for sound but as a participant in the drama. As in their acclaimed performances and recordings of Wagner’s Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung, the Hallé players excel in the construction of a sonic profile consistent in its brilliance but adaptable in scope to the needs of the score. Donizetti’s skill as an orchestrator became ever more refined as his career progressed, and his writing for strings in Le duc d’Albe has a Mozartean elegance that dovetails very effectively with his bold, Verdian music for brasses and woodwinds. Elder’s ear for individual instrumental timbres and the ways in which Donizetti manages and manipulates them is invaluable in this score, and his trust in his Hallé colleagues’ impeccable musical integrity frees him to focus on presiding over a performance that balances brawn and bel canto. Central to the preservation of that balance is the singing of the Opera Rara Chorus. At the start of Act One, the choristers’ exclamations of ‘Espagne! Espagne! Espagne!’ immediately elevate the temperature of the performance to a feverish level, and the force with which they declaim ‘Honneur à lui! Ce guerrier notre idole’ later in the act is breaktaking. In Act Two, their caroling of ‘Liqueur traîtresse’ introduces wry humor into the otherwise deadly serious circumstances. Then, their ominous ‘Les derniers feux meurent dans l’ombre’ establishes the dangerous tension of the act’s final minutes. The sincere religiosity of their intoning of ‘Liberté! ... Liberté chérie!’ makes Donizetti’s depiction of the Flemings’ quest for freedom from their Hapsburg overlords a relative of the struggles against oppression in Verdi’s Nabucco, I Lombardi alla prima crociata, Attila, and Macbeth. Had Le duc d’Albe been completed, it might well have proved as galvanizing a work of musical politics as Verdi’s Risorgimento operas and Auber’s La muette de Portici. Nevertheless, the most appreciable accomplishment of Elder’s conducting is that nothing about this performance of Le duc d’Albe sounds incomplete.

Another expectation of Opera Rara recordings is casting of supporting rôles with artists of markedly higher quality than many opera companies and record labels have sufficient resources or vision to engage. In this regard, too, this Le duc d’Albe is a particular triumph for Opera Rara. Heard in Act One, South African baritone Dawid Kimberg as the Tavernier and Welsh tenor Trystan Llŷr Griffiths as Carlos sing attractively and securely. One of today’s most communicative Lieder singers, Irish tenor Robin Tritschler voices Balbuena’s intoxicated haranguing of Hélène in Act One, ‘Pourquoi dans cette foule heureuse et satisfaite,’ with appropriate swagger, his light but plush voice filling his character’s lines with greater beauty than their coarseness merits. Appearing in both acts, the captain of the Spanish garrison, Sandoval, is portrayed with fittingly martial fortitude by bronze-timbred baritone David Stout, a former head chorister at Westminster Abbey. There is smarmy self-satisfaction in his delivery of ‘Par Saint-Jacques, messieurs, on ne boit qu’à Bruxelles,’ and he chants ‘Voyez donc cette belle’ repulsively—perfectly in character, that is. His mettlesome study of Sandoval continues to gain stature in Act Two. Donizetti deserves no less than Kimberg, Griffiths, Tritschler, and Stout contribute to this Le duc d’Albe, but how many performances or recordings of any repertory enjoy the participation of artists of their calibre?

The aptly-named Daniel Brauer is brewed into a potent figure by Italian bass Gianluca Buratto. An uncompromising Flemish patriot, Daniel occasionally seems like a refugee from Meyerbeer’s Less Huguenots, premièred in Paris in 1836. [Incidentally, Scribe also collaborated on the libretto for Les Huguenots.] Buratto detonates ‘Quelle horreur m’environne’ in Act One with dark implications, but he interacts with Hélène with affection and restraint. In the fast-paced second act, the bass takes care to highlight the emotional chasm that opens between ‘Ici l’on travaille et l’on chante!’ and ‘Mais j’entends battre la retraite.’ Buratto’s voice and demeanor are perhaps slightly too refined for the heroic but pragmatic Daniel, but the singer’s performance validates the realization that being a man of action and a man of thought are not mutually-exclusive concepts. Most importantly, he sings Daniel’s music capably and handsomely.

The rôle of the enigmatic Duc d’Albe, the Spanish viceroy of Flanders, likely suffers more than any of the other principal characters from the truncated form in which the opera survives, the beginning of Act Three having been planned as a solo scene for the Duc, but French baritone Laurent Naouri takes full advantage of every opportunity given to him and succeeds in creating a remarkably three-dimensional figure whose presence in the drama is considerably greater than the sum of its relatively few musical parts. In Act One, Naouri voices ‘Race faible et poltronne’ powerfully, the character’s ambivalence obvious from the start. The singer’s native French diction is a definite advantage, but the worst French among the cast is very good. The baritone phrases ‘J’aime son audace’ with toughness that does not impede the suggestion of warmth towards his rediscovered son. Absent from Act Two, the Duc’s shadow is perceived nevertheless, largely owing to Naouri’s incendiary portrayal. Along with some splendid high notes, Naouri produces sporadic patches of strenuous, unsteady singing. His reading of the troubled Duc embodies dramatic and musical authority, however, and, solely on vocal terms, he is a legitimate successor to Louis Quilico and Silvano Carroli in the character’s draconian music.

The notion that Missouri-born tenor Michael Spyres could sing more excitingly than in his assumption of the rôle of Polyeucte in Opera Rara’s 2014 concert performance and studio recording of Donizetti’s Les martyrs might seem ridiculous to listeners who have not heard this recording of Le duc d’Albe. As the colloquialism promises, though, hearing is believing, and there are sensational things to be heard in Spyres’s singing of Donizetti’s music for Henri de Bruges. In Henri’s exchanges with Hélène, Daniel, and the Duc in Act One, Spyres adopts a lover’s, a fellow patriot’s, and a defiant freedom fighter’s inflections, all while singing magnificently. The tenacity of Spyres’s articulation of ‘Punis mon audace!’—reminiscent of the title character’s ‘Giudici...ad Anna!’ in the Act One finale of Anna Bolena—is thrilling, and his virile ‘Non, non, point de grâce’ transforms the final scene of Act One of Le duc d’Albe from a standard-issue operatic clash into a life-or-death campaign against despotism. His excursions into the vocal stratosphere in the finales of both acts are as invigorating as they are secure. Duetting with his beloved and pursuing his determination to terminate the incumbency of the tyrant who is actually his father, Spyres provides the stimulus that propels Act Two to its electrifying conclusion. In the duet with Hélène, he vocalizes ‘Ah! Oui, longtemps en silence’ with fearlessness and sophistication. These qualities define Spyres’s singing in every scene in which he appears in Le duc d’Albe. The celebrated tenor Gilbert Duprez created the rôles of Polyeucte in Les martyrs and Fernand in La favorite, and it is feasible that it was for Duprez that Donizetti intended the rôle of Henri in Le duc d’Albe. If Duprez was capable of singing Henri’s music half as well as Spyres sings it on this recording, Parisians having been deprived of hearing his interpretation of the part was one of the foremost musical misfortunes of the Nineteenth Century.

Spyres’s Henri warrants a first-rate leading lady, and soprano Angela Meade, hailing from Centralia, Washington, and here making her Opera Rara début, fits the bill spectacularly. With a repertoire including lauded outings in rôles as diverse as the Contessa in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda and Norma, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Lucrezia Borgia, Verdi’s Elvira in Ernani, Leonora in Il trovatore, and Alice Ford in Falstaff, and Fidelia in Puccini’s Edgar, Meade is one of today’s most intrepid singers. Vocal dauntlessness is best justified by technical confidence, and Meade’s singing on this recording exudes mastery of red-blooded bel canto. From her first appearance in Act One, she personifies an Hélène whose resilience is nearly as impressive as her vocal resources. Donizetti’s opera essentially enacts upon the stage the events represented in Beethoven’s familiar Egmont Overture, the opera’s plot beginning on the day after Hélène’s father, the Count of Egmont, was executed under orders from the Duke of Alba. With her impassioned singing of ‘Au sein des mers et battu par l’orage,’ Meade confirms that her Hélène is a daughter in whom the spirit of her father lives. The causticity of ‘A quoi bon des prières vaines’ is mirrored in the icy glint that the soprano’s singing takes on, but the lady’s comportment softens with Meade’s lusciously-phrased ‘Ah! Que du ciel descende.’ Then, the aristocratic bearing with which she voices ‘Moi-même je frissonne’ discloses Hélène’s innate nobility of heart. The ease with which Meade rises to the challenges of Act Two is staggering, her utterance of ‘Henri! Noble jeune homme! Ah, j’ai lu dans son âme’ amazing with its blend of technical aptitude and histrionic panache. Equally gripping is her expressive ‘Ton ombre murmure, o mon père!’ In the duet with Henri, she sculpts the line in ‘Oui, longtemps en silence’ with the unerring hand of a Rodin, capturing in sound the souls of both the text and the woman she portrays. Meade’s jaunts above the stave are fantastic, not least the extraordinary top E♭ in unison with Spyres in Act Two, but it is the solidity of the sound throughout the wide compass of her music that is so gratifying. With her performance in Le duc d’Albe, Meade affirms that in her Opera Rara’s discerning decision makers have found a prima donna who earns a place alongside Nelly Miricioiu, Majella Cullagh, and Annick Massis.

Opera Rara’s commitment to recording ignored treasures of Nineteenth-Century opera—or, as in the case of the label’s planned studio recording of Rossini’s Semiramide, recording these treasures as they ought to be but are so rarely performed—sometimes leads into musical territory that Alexander Pope might have described as ground ‘where angels fear to tread,’ but no fools rushing in are Opera Rara and the artists who take part in the label’s projects! The Opera Rara catalogue is a lavish collection of performances that allow scores to exhibit their efficacy as their composers intended, but even among many gems this Le duc d’Albe sparkles very brightly.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Winterreise, D911—Dimitris Tiliakos, baritone; Vassilis Varvaresos, piano [Recorded in Stichting Westvest 90, Schiedam, Netherlands, 21 – 25 July 2015; Navis Classics NC16008; 1 CD, 76:27; Available from Navis Classics, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In the wondrously discombobulating realm of music written for the human voice, there are works that artists with sufficient good sense to safeguard their vocal endowments and respect their places in the distinguished history of song approach—or should approach—with healthy reverence. The soprano who regards Norma’s ‘Casta diva,’ Isolde’s Liebestod, or Brünnhilde’s Immolation as mere intersections of notes and words is unlikely to find lasting success singing any of these epic pieces. The violinist who perceives in the scores of the Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruch concerti only opportunities for technical peacocking is not worthy of the music. For the conscientious Lieder singer, Franz Schubert’s genre-defining Winterreise is a work of similar significance, one that must be studied, absorbed, felt, even loved before it can be satisfactorily sung. In this music, it is not enough to master the notes and correctly pronounce the words. Unsurprisingly, the Schubert discography is littered with merely competent recordings of Winterreise, many of which sound beautiful to the ears but communicate nothing to the heart. For those who cherish the Art of Song, the release of a new recording of Winterreise is cause for equal excitement and trepidation. Recorded with great skill and obvious affection by the label’s manager, Daan van Aalst, with the ideal natural acoustical balance between voice and piano for which all labels recording Lieder repertory should strive, Navis Classics’ Winterreise is a traversal of this epic cycle that is truly a journey, one that takes the listener into ominous, uncomfortable recesses of the psyche with the emotional directness and collaborative musicality missing from so many performances and recordings of Winterreise. Most crucially, the heart that beats tumultuously at the core of this Winterreise is Schubert’s, an attribute that has eluded the endeavors many of the most famous names in the cycle’s storied history on records.

Born on the picturesque island of Rhodes, situated just off the southwest coast of Turkey but one of Greece’s Dodecanese islands, baritone Dimitri Tiliakos brings to his work an artistry steeped in the millennia of history and traditions of his homeland. Following study of the viola, he honed his vocal technique under the tutelage of his illustrious countryman, the still-too-little-appreciated baritone Kostas Paskalis. Upon that foundation, he has built an impressive international career that, to date, has taken him to many of the world’s important opera houses, including New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where he débuted as Schaunard in Puccini’s La bohème in 2010. His resonantly masculine but sympathetic Aeneas opposite Simone Kermes’s Dido on Teodor Currentzis’s fascinating recording of Purcell’s operatic magnum opus will soon be joined by his performance of the title rôle in the conductor’s Sony recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, recorded in Perm in December 2015. His partner in this Winterreise, prize-winning pianist Vassilis Varvaresos, is also a native of Greece, born in Thessaloniki, the capital of Greek Macedonia. Having been heard in prestigious venues including New York’s Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Paris’s Salle Gaveau, and The White House, where he played at the invitation of President Barack Obama, Varvaresos has garnered a reputation as an exceptional interpreter of a wide repertory that includes his own compositions. It is fanciful to suggest that the baritone’s and pianist’s common nationality engenders heightened artistic accord, but the synergy that this pair of artists bring to their performance of Winterreise is incredible. The songs, first published in 1828, here sound as though they are being extemporized by a single artist before the studio microphones. Tiliakos and Varvaresos phrase in tandem with the synchronicity of dance partners, the baritone’s voice and the pianist’s fingers executing an eloquent pas de deux that bridges the two centuries between Schubert’s composition of the Lieder and today with startling immediacy. This is a reading of Winterreise that does not shrink from extremes of dynamics and tempo and is all the better for it. Winterreise is not a dainty odyssey: why do so many performers fidget with the music as though it were?

From the start of ‘Gute Nacht,’ it is apparent that this will be no ordinary, ‘safe’ Winterreise. Tiliakos’s mezza voce is wonderful, sustained and projected by his exemplary breath control, and his soft singing is often mesmerizing. He touches notes above the stave gently but without resorting to falsetto, and he shares with Hermann Prey and Heinrich Schlusnus the ability to sing piano without crooning or condescending. The modulation to the major for the last stanza of ‘Gute Nacht’ is cathartic as Tiliakos sings it, the tension unostentatiously resolved. Varvaresos executes the trills in the opening bars of ‘Die Wetterfahne’ with uncommon rhythmic crispness, the ornaments for once bring perfectly in time with the melodic line as they should be but seldom are, and Tiliakos displays the strength of his voice, slight hints of unsteadiness at the top of the range showing themselves when the volume increases. However, the baritone does not use Schubert’s most animated passages as an opportunity to overwhelm the music with pseudo-operatic grandstanding. Varvaresos’s playing of the restless accompaniment of ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ complements Tiliakos’s listless, almost embarrassed interpretation of the song, and their sensitive but unsentimental ‘Erstarrung,’ a song that goes for nothing in many performances of Winterreise, is unexpectedly one of the most vivid numbers in their cycle. ‘Der Lindenbaum’ is justifiably among Schubert’s most admired Lieder, and the delicacy of singing and pianism with which it is shaped here is very effective, disclosing the inherent rightness of handling the song with simplicity. The effortlessness with which Tiliakos braves Schubert’s awkward intervals in ‘Wasserflut’ lends the song eerie charm.

The enigmatic atmosphere of ‘Auf dem Flusse’ is conjured by the pianist and deepened by the singer, their work highlighting the haunting power of the song. The rumbling accompaniment of ‘Rückblick’ is played by Varvaresos with pinpoint accuracy and Stravinskian buoyancy. Tiliakos traces the uncertain, somewhat disjointed vocal line with the kind of technical security that enables searching dramatic introspection. Their ‘Irrlicht,’ too, possesses an unnerving charisma that permeates the performance: the song’s essence is both chilling and comforting. With its suspended resolutions of cadences and ritornello-like piano part, ‘Rast’ is a link with the Baroque, its dialogue between voice and instrument reminiscent of music like the Largo ma non tanto movement of Bach’s D-minor Concerto for Two Violins (BWV 1043). Tiliakos and Varvaresos duet with the sacrosanct trust of chamber musicians. Echoes of Haydn resound in ‘Frühlingstraum,’ translated by both singer and pianist into statements in Schubert’s most concentrated Romantic language. In a sense, the first strains of ‘Einsamkeit’ are like a fun-house mirror reflection of ‘Der Lindenbaum,’ but Tiliakos sings it so unaffectedly that the song’s latent spiritual grotesqueries seem less like torments and more like much-needed companions.

‘Die Post’ is an example of the breadth of Schubert’s talent for cinematic use of the piano, the unmistakable sounds of galloping post carriage horses and the post horn in the song’s accompaniment contrasting with the unperturbed stasis of the vocal line. Varvaresos and Tiliakos present the song straightforwardly, completely avoiding some performances’ intimation that it is a piano recital into which a singer wanders. There is a vein of affection in ‘Der greise Kopf’ that many artists do not bother to tap, but Tiliakos and Varvaresos extract the plasma from the piece and transfuse it into their musical veins, portentously imparting the text’s ambivalence about growing old. The inquisitive crow that appears in ‘Die Krähe’ is welcomed as a comrade by Tikiakos’s narrator rather than being dismissed as an intruder, and he and Varvaresos give the song a gentle humor. ‘Letzte Hoffnung’ is not as bleak as its title suggests, and this performance focuses on an unexaggerated articulation of the text, eschewing the melodramatic wailing in which some performers mire the song. As sung here, ‘Im Dorfe’ is an unusually clear-sighted examination of the perceived manifestations of human emotions in their physical surroundings, an exploration furthered in ‘Der stürmische Morgen,’ imaginatively played and sung. Throughout his survey of the Lieder in Winterreise, Tiliakos exhibits propitious confidence in the full range demanded by the music, rising without strain to notes above the stave and descending with similar assurance to the bottom of the compass. His diction is clear without seeming stilted or artificial, and so well-matched is Varvaresos’s phrasing, even when piano and voice pursue divergent paths, that it would be easy to erroneously regard this Winterreise as the product of a single musician.

The unique sensibilities of Tiliakos’s and Varvaresos’s explication of the psychological intricacies of Winterreise are distilled into a laser-like focus in the sequence of the final six songs of the cycle. The subtleties of ‘Täuschung’ are insightfully differentiated from the prevailingly desolate mood of ‘Der Wegweiser,’ and the hymn-like ‘Das Wirtshaus’ is expansively phrased, giving the song’s ethos a proto-Wagnerian depth. The dramatically alert elocution of ‘Mut!’ takes its strength from the performers’ organic musicality, the song’s expressive potency—undermined by many artists’ over-emphatic approaches—intensified by the singular metaphysical sagacity with which Tiliakos and Varvaresos convert the meaning of the text into sound. The stark imagery of ‘Die Nebensonnen’ is brought to disconcerting life by the baritone’s visceral singing: one practically squints at the blinding glare of the fraudulent suns of which he sings. In this performance, the hurdy-gurdy man of ‘Der Leiermann’ is not a terrestrial Charon demanding remuneration for passage to another plane of existence but a Delphic harbinger of a new reality. As elucidated by Tiliakos and Varvaresos, the narrator’s journey does not reach a tragic terminus: here, Winterreise is truly a cycle, an orbit through an ever-changing landscape scarred but not obliterated by loss and disillusionment.

Perhaps the most telling ambiguity in Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century is the contrast between the disheartening lack of civility among artists and the damning politeness of their work upon the world’s stages. When Giulietta Simionato’s Santuzza hurled tidings for a ‘mala pasqua’ in Turiddu’s face, the audience, whether in the theatre or listening at home, felt the blow down to the marrow of their bones. When Maria Callas’s Anna Bolena demanded justification of ‘giudici—ad Anna?’ from the hypocritical Enrico, she for a moment wore not costumes and rhinestone jewels but the martyr’s crown of the unjustly accused. When the Busch Quartet played the music of Beethoven, one listened not for particular notes or phrases but for whispered messages from the composer. Schubert’s Winterreise deserves this same level of commitment from those who perform it—and from those who hear it. The performance by Dimitris Tiliakos and Vassilis Varvaresos allows the listener to genuinely experience Winterreise. If the sonnets of Shakespeare, the canvases of El Greco, and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston could be condensed into seventy minutes of song, this Winterreise might be the result, but this Winterreise is a compelling work of art all on its own, a vision of humanity shared by three artists—Franz Schubert, Dimitris Tiliakos, and Vassilis Varvaresos—courageous enough to look beyond the façades of pretty fusions of music and text.

The radiant face of Twenty-First-Century bel canto: Soprano Jessica Pratt [Photo © 2015 by Benjamin Ealovega]

There are voices that are wholly forgettable and voices that one actively endeavors to forget. There are voices that, try as one might, can never be purged from the memory. Very rarely, though, there are voices that one hears and, for all the right reasons, never forgets, voices that etch into the memory the circumstances of the first hearing with the vivid significance of a life event. There was the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Wagner’s Die Walküre on 6 December 1941, for instance, when, with the world on the brink of cataclysmic war, an untested soprano named Astrid Varnay introduced herself to the airwaves as Sieglinde. There were MET performances when Plácido Domingo and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa unexpectedly made company débuts as substitutes for ailing colleagues. There was that 1959 Covent Garden Lucia di Lammermoor when an Australian soprano who had been on the Royal Opera’s roster for nearly a decade, Dame Joan Sutherland, became a sensation. Much as the perceived paucity of important voices among today’s singers is lamented, the truth is that Melbas and Nordicas, Flagstads and Callases, Slezaks and Pertiles have ever been rare: even in the Eighteenth Century, when singers first gained celebrity-status notoriety in the modern sense, it was reportedly said that there were one God and one Farinelli, deities of equal scarcity. In this remarkable Twenty-First Century, when young singers face pressures for which conservatories can only partially prepare them, the future of opera depends more than ever before upon unforgettable voices—voices, that is, like that of soprano Jessica Pratt. Though hardly a novice, she remains a fresh-voiced young lady on the cusp of stardom, but her dedication to continually honing her craft reveals that she is anything but blinded by her success. A lovely lady of integrity both on and off the stage, she embodies bel canto in art and in life.

Born in England, Pratt relocated to Australia in her teens but now makes her home in Italy. It seems only natural that an artist with an insatiable thirst for knowledge of her chosen profession should reside upon the land from which the first founts of operatic creativity sprung, but Pratt is delightfully clear-sighted about the benefits of her intercontinental upbringing. ‘As a singer growing up in Australia​,​ Joan Sutherland and Nellie Melba were and are great examples whom I find extremely inspiring​,’ she says with obvious affection and respect for her forebears. In opera, there’s nothing like a Dame from Down Under, but this sophisticated soprano’s musical perspective is unusually global. ‘I also adore listening to recordings of Sills, Cuberli, Studer, Devia, Scotto, Olivero, Anderson, Moffo, Caballé, and Callas, among others,’ she confides. ‘I also find Fritz Wunderlich to be a very healthy singer to listen to. I think [that], as time goes on, I have started to realize that the wonderful sounds these singers produce are done with their minds and without forcing.’ An equilibrium of mental acuity and physical exertion is critical to vocal well-being, especially among singers at the starts of their careers, Pratt advocates. ‘As young singers, we always try to make something happen physically: however, the more that you step out of the way and just let your body do what is essentially a natural thing, the better the quality of sound. Less is more.’ This is wisdom with which one of her Australian idols concurred. ‘Nellie Melba writes at the beginning of her treatise on singing, The Melba Method, [that] “it is easy to sing well, and very difficult to sing badly! How many students are really prepared to accept that statement? Few, if any. They smile, and say: ‘It may be easy for you, but not for me.’ And they seem to think that there the matter ends. But if they only knew it, on their understanding and acceptance of that axiom depends half their success. Let me say the same in other words: In order to sing well, it is necessary to sing easily.” That phrase struck me as a young singer, and only after years of study and performance experience am I actually, really understanding it.’ Has this understanding changed her reactions to the work of the predecessors she so admires? ‘Yes, now, with experience, I admire the ease and freedom in Sutherland’s recordings more than anything else,’ she muses.

Method of her madness: Soprano Jessica Pratt in the title rôle of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at Teatro di San Carlo, Napoli [Photo by Luciano Romani, © by Teatro di San Carlo]

Though still well shy of forty, Pratt has already sung many of the most challenging rôles in the bel canto repertory, garnering critical acclaim and the appreciation of audiences throughout the world. Whether breathing new life into well-traveled characters like Elvira and Amina in Bellini’s I puritani and La sonnambula, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata or resurrecting long-forgotten or under-served heroines like Donna Isabella in Nicola Vaccaj’s La sposa di Messina [recorded in performance at the XXI ROSSINI IN WILDBAD Festival by NAXOS] and Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco [recorded in performance at the 2013 Festival della Valle d’Itria and recently released on CD and DVD by Dynamic], her performances are noteworthy for the intelligence in planning her career that her singing divulges. Especially in the first few seasons of a singer’s career, staying on the path that is healthiest for the voice can be nearly as daunting an effort as discerning that path in the first place. ‘In the beginning,’ Pratt recalls of the foremost hurdles of the earliest days of her international career, ‘it was the constant pressure to accept more lyric rôles which would have been entirely inappropriate as I did not yet have the discipline to measure out the voice over the entire performance of an opera and to resist the urge to push when things get dramatic.’ Nonetheless, there are forces at work that are not wholly within even an exceptionally wise singer’s control. ‘Of course, the temptation is strong because it is more common for a theatre to put on La traviata, for example, so there are more offers with a higher cachet, but I prefer to keep to the repertoire I love singing and that I believe is right for my voice for as long as possible.’ She quickly adds, ‘That is not to say I don’t enjoy singing Violetta. [She] is a part of my repertoire, too, but must remain a minor part like the Queen of the Night’—the rôle in which she will make her début at the Metropolitan Opera in the 2016 – 2017 Season—‘and eventually the more lyric Donizetti and Bellini rôles. I think that keeping eighty percent of my engagements in a year to lighter bel canto rôles and then adding the occasional rôle which is slightly more lyric gives me the basis to keep things healthy.’

Even so, there is nothing formulaic about Pratt’s artistry. ‘Purity, vulnerability, honesty, and intimacy come to mind,’ she responds when asked how she might describe her artistry, and her interpretation of the eponymous Babylonian queen in Rossini’s Semiramide—a rôle added to her repertory in 2015 with performances for Opéra Municipal de Marseille and Washington Concert Opera [reviewed here]—is an ideal manifestation of those qualities and the care that she exercises in discerning among the notes of a composer’s music not just a character but also indications of how to portray her. Significantly, Pratt’s performances epitomize the delicate balance between score and self. Her characterizations are redolent not of the ostentatious concept of being a woman like Semiramide in a Stanislavskian sense but of in-depth connections with composers’, audiences’, and her own perspectives. ‘I think it is natural for us to portray parts of ourselves or to see ourselves reflected in the characters we play,’ she suggests. ‘For singers, it is also a type of catharsis: we can work on exploring more vulnerable or more powerful parts of ourselves which might help those parts to grow in real life, too. I certainly feel like I have lived many lives through the characters I have played on stage.’ She sees finding the points at which composers’ and singers’ creative capacities intersect as the key to providing audiences with engaging portrayals. ‘Obviously, we often have to use our imaginations and exaggerate smaller feelings or observe others in similar states to the characters we play as we cannot live all the experiences we portray—I would be locked up in an asylum by now!’ she explains. ‘I enjoy playing Lucia di Lammermoor very much as it is a chance to put absolutely everything out before an audience. It is a portrayal of madness, a depression that fascinates me.’ Viewed through various lenses, this fascination is at the heart of Pratt’s artistic philosophy. She goes on to say, ‘I also felt a strong connection with Violetta in La traviata because the society who judged her​ ​for her lifestyle reminded me of being judged badly in the past as a possible partner because I am an opera singer, traveling the world alone [and] thus not marriageable because of my independence and not being able to be physically present all the time.’

Lady with a mission: Soprano Jessica Pratt, star of Festivale della Valle d’Itria’s 2013 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, released on CD and DVD by Dynamic [Cover art © by Dynamic]

Pratt’s candid observation illuminates an aspect of a singer’s career that proves a challenge too insurmountable for some artists. Further outlining her approach to Violetta, she says. ‘I had also experienced in my life some very difficult health situations, and when Verdi portrays the moment that Violetta realizes she has been betrayed by her own body, which will no longer do what she wants, which is simply to get dressed and leave the house, I saw myself in hospital many years ago, when all I wanted in the world was to just stand up. I think that certain situations come with extremely strong emotions, and they can remain blocked inside us. Music is an important part of our social fabric because it helps us to explore these emotions and to unblock them.’ Contemplating the hardships that she has overcome gives Pratt pause to think of the toll that the realities of a singer’s life take on the individual. ‘Harder sacrifices are missing weddings and family milestones and not being present in the day-to-day lives of my nieces and my family in Australia and England,’ she reflects. ‘The worst [sacrifice] is being far away in a time of crisis. A recent example of this is having to go on stage and perform a comedy, Barbiere di Siviglia, in front of 14,000 people at Arena di Verona when I’d just found out [that] my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. I went on stage, played the part, and cried in my dressing room during the breaks. The lady who was doing my makeup very kindly kept fixing my face all evening without saying a word about it. Thankfully, a few days later, I had six days off and could fly to Australia to be with my father during his operation to remove the lung. He is now on the road to recovery. We have a strange kind of pressure on us in the theatre: “the show must go on” is really ingrained in our character, a sense of responsibly towards all the people who have bought tickets and traveled to see a performance.’

What makes such deprivation and isolation worthwhile? How can the pain and guilt of absence be justified? Every singer must answer these questions from her or his own unique point of view, and Pratt’s thoughts again stem from her undeviating attention to the quality of the product that she is ‘selling’ to audiences. ‘The most fulfilling [aspect of an artist’s career] is when someone tells you that watching the opera helped them in some way to overcome or to explore emotions,’ the soprano opines. She endeavors to dispel one of the hoary myths of opera, sharing that ‘the difficulties are of course many. It is not glamorous living out of a suitcase for eleven months of the year.’ Far from being glamorous, the life of a conscientious singer—a singer, that is, with as much concern for her health and happiness off the stage as for her success on the stage—is a continual process of self-evaluation. ‘We have to stay constantly healthy and well-rested, especially in my repertoire, as the vocal line is so exposed that any glitch in the legato or sounding tired is immediately noticeable,’ she imparts. ‘This means, at least in my case, hardly ever going out in the evening, not drinking alcohol or being in noisy places, a whole series of foods to avoid to reduce the possibility of reflux and so on and so forth. These lifestyle changes in all honesty are not so difficult to do and not much of a sacrifice for the moment in the theatre when a cadenza or a phrase [comes] off just right and [everyone in] the whole theatre holds their breath together.’

Sempre libera: Soprano Jessica Pratt as Violetta in Victorian Opera’s 2014 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata in Melbourne, Australia [Photo by Jeff Busby, © by Victorian Opera]

With the demands that today’s singers face focusing her thoughts on the progress of her career, Pratt ponders the choices that she has made and, could she begin anew, how she would advise her younger self with the benefit of her experience. ‘I could say take an easier life path, but I would never have listened!’ she laughs. ‘I would advise her to learn as many languages as possible as they are absolutely necessary: it is much easier to cover a memory lapse when you speak the language you are singing in!’ A vital lesson seldom relayed to young singers in lecture halls, Pratt affirms, is that the greatest obstacle to a singer’s success—and, perhaps more momentously, to a singer’s enjoyment of that success—is the singer’s own drive. ‘Don’t let perfectionism get in your way,’ she remarks with special concentration. ‘If you get eighty percent of the things you wanted to do right in a performance, that is good. The next time will be better. It is not a perfect reading of the score that the audience needs. We have to move the audience with our performance. Let go of perfectionism and interpret.’ In the midst of such introspection, the serious young lady’s innate good humor gushes to the surface with a flourish of the practical applications of her sixth sense. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ she jokingly whispers to the Jessica Pratt of years past, ‘the last five Super Bowls were won by...’

Pratt’s début solo recital disc, Serenade, a programme of songs by the defining geniuses of Italian bel canto Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, the French masters Gounod, Delibes, Massenet, and Bachelet, and the unjustly-neglected Belgian composer Eva Dell’Acqua, now remembered almost solely for her 1893 song for coloratura soprano ‘Villanelle,’ splendidly sung on the disc by Pratt, was recently released in the Opus Arte label’s Rosenblatt Recitals series. The combination of French and Italian music on Serenade, delivered with musical and linguistic naturalness exemplified by her unaffectedly charming performance of Rossini’s 1822 ‘Addio ai viennesi,’ highlights an invaluable facet of Pratt’s artistry. Unlike many singers of any age, she is sensitive to the extent to which the expressive power of music is markedly undermined by indifferent use of text. ‘Young singers should learn as many languages as they can,’ she explains. ‘They will need them and will have no time to learn them later.’ This, she contends, should be supplemented by literary awareness. ‘As to approaching rôles, read books, as they will develop your imagination, especially with similar characters and in time periods similar to [those] in which operas [are] staged so that you can immerse yourself in that world,’ she advises. Pratt is adamant that textual acuity must be paralleled by vigilant, unending refinement of the technique. ‘Do your technical training and study so that the mechanical part of singing is in your muscle memory when you go on stage,’ she counsels. ‘You cannot express an emotion properly if you are thinking about how to make a sound. Do your technique at home, and then you mentally put it in a box and close it with the key so it will be there when you come back, but you must go on stage and express emotions and trust that your muscle memory and technique will take care of the vocal production. You will have to sing in every position imaginable, and many are not conducive to good singing. Very​ ​few stage directors care about this: you will be wasting your breath asking them for pity, so you might as well start practicing singing lying upside down on the couch now​.’

Bella figlia: Soprano Jessica Pratt as Gilda in Teatro de la Maestranza’s 2013 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto in Sevilla, Spain [Photo by Jesús Morón, © by Teatro de la Maestranza]

Advice is easily given but far less easily followed. How does this uncommonly shrewd singer apply her insights about the methodology of singing to her own career? Not surprisingly, she starts at the beginning—as Julie Andrews and Maria von Trapp might agree, a very fine place to start. ‘I never listen to the operas until I know them well myself, have written my variations, and [have] decided what I want to do with the phrasing as I am afraid I will be subconsciously influenced by another artist’s performance,’ she discloses. ‘I imagine that when these rôles were written they were all learned without the chance to ever hear them sung by other performers as there were obviously no recordings. Now we have this wonderful wealth of knowledge and ideas at our fingertips, but we also are in danger of losing our individuality. Not only the singers but also the audience perhaps run the risk of getting stuck into stereotyping rôles, expecting to hear the same type of voice and the same variations in a role that originally was varied by each individual performer to suit their particular vocal gifts. Lucia di Lammermoor is a perfect example of this. The audience waits all night to hear the traditional flute cadenza written by Tetrazzini (most call it the Callas cadenza as our recording memory only goes so far), resulting in a situation in which one of the most famous parts of the opera was not written by Donizetti!’ Losing her individuality hardly seems a reason for anxiety for an artist of Pratt’s discernment. Understandably, though, she would cherish the occasion to create a rôle written for her by one of her operatic idols. ‘I would love [for] Donizetti to come back and write an opera on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. [Hardy’s] description of Tess’s descent into madness due to a string of terrible life circumstances and societal pressure is haunting.’

In many ways, hearing Jessica Pratt sing—or hearing her talk about singing, for that matter—offers the Twenty-First-Century listener extraordinary opportunities to relive the Golden Age of bel canto, a time when Giuditta Pasta, Giulia Grisi, and Maria Malibran graced the stages of Europe. From these legendary ladies of the distant past to more recent luminaries, Pratt is commendably reverential of the now-endangered legacy of true bel canto and her place in it. ‘Bel canto is just that: beautiful singing,’ she says. ‘It has very little to do with how high you can sing but of how purely you can sing. Bel canto is about ease and beauty of sound. One has to spin an uninterrupted web of sound the whole evening, expressing emotions through beauty like a painter might paint a terrible scene but with beauty and elegance that take your breath away.’ This analogy is wonderfully appropriate for an artist who summarizes the focus of her creative energy with three compelling words: ‘observe, experience, and portray.’ Words are cheap, but voices like Jessica Pratt’s are priceless.

First lady of song: Soprano Jessica Pratt’s début recital disc, Serenade, on the Opus Arte label [Cover art © by Opus Arte]

To learn more about Jessica Pratt, please visit her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

ARTHUR HONEGGER (1892 – 1955) and JACQUES IBERT (1890 – 1962): L’Aiglon—Anne-Catherine Gillet (L’Aiglon, duc de Reichstadt), Marc Barrard (Séraphin Flambeau), Étienne Dupuis (Prince de Metternich), Philippe Sly (Maréchal Marmont, L’autre, Arlequin), Pascal Charbonneau (L’attaché-militaire, Un manteau vénitien, Pierrot), Isaiah Bell (Frédéric de Gentz, Un matassin, Un polichinelle), Tyler Duncan (Chevalier de Prokesch-Osten, Un Gilles), Jean-Michel Richer (Comte de Sedlinsky), Hélène Guilmette (Thérèse de Lorget), Marie-Nicole Lemieux (Marie-Louise), Julie Boulianne (Fanny Elssler), Kimy McLaren (Comtesse Camerata, Une marquise, Isabelle); Chœur de l’Orchestre Symphonie de Montréal; Orchestre Symphonie de Montréal; Kent Nagano, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during three concert performances in Maison symphonique de Montréal, Québec, Canada, on 17, 19, and 21 March 2015, and in sessions with Hélène Guilmette and Marie-Nicole Lemieux in the same venue during September 2015; DECCA 478 9502; 2 CDs, 92:29; Available from DECCA Classics, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

There are many reasons why operas disappear from the repertory. Some scores quickly outlived their usefulness for the occasions for which they were composed. Others were conceived for individual artists whose singular qualities have not been replicated among singers of subsequent generations. Some of the music simply does not merit revival, and some libretti are rubbish. There are also operas afflicted with the inseparable baggage of uncomfortable associations. The neglect of some scores can only be attributed to ignorance, however, and this must be the case with Arthur Honegger’s and Jacques Ibert’s L’Aiglon. With the problems created by the interventions of multiple pairs of hands in operas like Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Puccini’s Turandot looming large in the international repertory, perhaps there is a stigma attached to the appearance of more than one composer’s name at the head of a score. Premièred at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1937 by a cast that included Fanny Heldy and Vanni Marcoux, L’Aiglon is an opera with none of the hallmarks of merited obscurity. Its libretto, based upon a play by Edmond Rostand, respected throughout the world for his Cyrano de Bergerac, is of high literary quality, the characters convincingly drawn and differentiated. The opera’s plot is engaging and fast-paced, its ending restrained but no less touching than the final scenes of La traviata, La bohème, and Werther. Most significantly, Honegger’s and Ibert’s music—extant evidence discloses that Honegger substantially composed Acts Two and Four, Ibert Acts One and Five, and that they worked closely together on Act Three—is consistently superb, the cohesiveness produced by their collaboration nodding to virtually every idiom in French opera from Grétry and Philidor to Debussy and Ravel. Recorded by DECCA with unobtrusive but unmistakable technical wizardry during concert performances that furnished the opera’s long-overdue North American première, L’Aiglon here receives an introduction to the Twenty-First Century wholly worthy of the progeny of one of the most fascinating figures in human history.

Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, history’s and Honegger’s and Ibert’s l’Aiglon, was born at the Tuileries in Paris on 20 March 1811, the son of Napoléon and his second empress consort, Marie Louise, the eldest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. Napoléon’s sole legitimate heir, the young Prince Imperial was from the time of his birth the titular King of Rome, but his crowns ultimately shielded him from few of life’s difficulties. His tenuous claim to the French imperial throne when his father abdicated, provisionally in 1814 and unconditionally in 1815, was not recognized by Napoléon’s vanquishers: safe in exile in his mother’s native Austria, the tyke may never have known that he was briefly proclaimed emperor after Napoléon’s decisive defeat at Waterloo. Sadly, the younger Napoléon’s life was destined to be little longer than his unheralded tenure as the head of the Empire Français. Sidelined by statesmen understandably wary of seeing another Bonaparte rising to power, Napoléon II lived in a sort of official limbo, his brief career in the Austrian army largely an exercise in keeping him distant from the goings-on at the court of his Hapsburg relatives. Chancellor von Metternich having used the youth as a pawn in his eternal chess match with France, a tribulation that figures prominently in Henri Caïn’s libretto, politics may even have hastened his demise when a request to be allowed to relocate to the healthier climate of Italy was denied. His constitution undermined first by a long bout with pneumonia and then a virulent strain of tuberculosis that plagued Austria in the wake of the cholera pandemic of 1832, l’Aiglon stretched his wings for the last time on 22 July 1832, four months after his twenty-first birthday.

His skill in leading Twentieth-Century French operatic repertory, not least Francis Poulenc’s harrowing Dialogues des Carmélites and Olivier Messiaen’s sprawling Saint François d’Assise, having been revealed in numerous critically-acclaimed performances and recordings, California-born conductor Kent Nagano was an inspired choice for presiding over the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal performances planned to lift L’Aiglon aloft. The orchestra’s lauded mastery of Tchaikovsky repertory during the tenure of former Artistic Director Charles Dutoit was a fantastic preparation for approaching L’Aiglon. Fusing elements of the French and Viennese traditions so beloved by Tchaikovsky, Honegger’s and Ibert’s score mixes portions of Stroh and Courvoisier into an intoxicating musical cocktail. The brief scene for L’Aiglon and Thérèse in Act One is reminiscent of Richard Strauss’s Presentation of the Rose in Act Two of Der Rosenkavalier, and there are echoes of Massenet’s Don Quichotte, the libretto of which was also written by Henri Caïn, in the final scene of Honegger’s and Ibert’s score. The opera’s surrealistic fourth act would not seem out of place in the pages of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert. If these resemblances suggest a disconcerting stylistic mélange, the unimpeachable continuity of the music will be especially astonishing to the listener. Even in Act Three, on which both composers toiled, transitions are seamless. The fluidity of Nagano’s conducting makes them seem even more so. Under his baton, the spirited waltz of the ballet music—a sequence that might easily be assumed to be the work of Johann Strauß II—sounds like bona fide music for dancing, and every dramatic point made by Honegger, Ibert, and Caïn is recreated by Nagano. There are no suggestions of ticking boxes or crossing moments off of a list, however. The whole of the Impressionistic Act Four is paced with the abstract inevitability of a play by Harold Pinter, and Act Five, which has the potential to be maudlin and treacly, is all the more moving for being allowed to progress steadily, eschewing tears and hollow dramatics. The conductor’s baton often seems to soar as if borrowing the eaglet’s wings. Not one passage in the opera’s ninety minutes sounds anything other than ideally-paced.

Following Nagano’s lead, both the orchestra and the Chœur de l’OSM contribute accounts of their parts that none of their Parisian counterparts could surpass. Whether playing passages scored with the gossamer effects of chamber music or those steeped in the bloody din of battle on the hills of Wagram, the OSM musicians play with authentically Gallic elegance and bristling intensity. The ballet receives from them the requisite grace, and the contrasting tumult of Act Four and melancholic subtlety of Act Five are conveyed with complete conviction. The inventiveness of the composers’ instrumentation is apparent throughout the performance owing to orchestral playing that is without shortcomings. As the disembodied voices of the Wagram battlefield, the twenty singers of the chorus, trained by Andrew Megill, deliver the utterances of the veterans of the engagement and those of the hallowed ground itself with menace, mystery, and resounding musicality. Allied with Nagano’s imaginative but accurate conducting, the OSM instrumentalists’ and choristers’ performances give L’Aiglon a brilliant, cloudless sky into which to take flight.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this recording of L’Aiglon is the uncompromisingly excellent work of a true ensemble cast of native French speakers. Large casts without weaknesses among their ranks are now only very rarely encountered in the world’s opera houses. Honegger’s and Ibert’s music is good enough to make a vivid impression even if not ideally sung, but the artists assembled in Montréal’s acoustically spectacular Maison symphonique prove on disc to be a far better-integrated ensemble than many casts with extensive experience in staged productions. Among the alluringly phonogenic gentlemen, tenor Jean-Michel Richer is a Comte de Sedlinsky whose brief presence in the drama lingers in the memory, the character’s lines poured out in a stream of silvery tone. Fellow tenors Isaiah Bell and Pascal Charbonneau are similarly effective in their respective rôles, including their turns in the Act Three masque as Un polichinelle and Un manteau vénitien and Pierrot. Bell’s dulcet-toned Frédéric de Gentz matches Richer’s Sedlinsky in seizing the listener’s attention. As L’attaché militaire, Charbonneau’s slender, pointed voice chills and calms in equal measures, his timbre perfect for the character who clings to the periphery of the plot with ambiguous intentions. The Chevalier de Prokesch-Osten was among the young Prince’s few true friends, and it is impossible to imagine his operatic incarnation being more deserving of the confidence of an emperor’s son than he is as portrayed here by baritone Tyler Duncan. Both his Prokesch and his Gilles in Act Three are luxuriously voiced, the warmth of both the sound and the demeanor endearing him to the listener as an inspiringly reliable beacon of safety and genuine camaraderie for the increasingly isolated l’Aiglon.

Alongside such a strong cast of male singers, the female contingent of DECCA’s L’Aiglon command admiration for their own finely-judged, capably-voiced portrayals. Mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne sings Fanny Elssler so attractively as to make the character markedly more appealing to the senses than Caïn’s words permit her to be in the drama. Soprano Kimy McLaren’s Comtesse Camerata, the agent of l’Aiglon’s escape from his Austrian wardens, and impersonations in the masque in Act Three are also sung and acted with youthful charm and tones that seem to effervesce from a freshly-uncorked bottle of champaign. Soprano Hélène Guilmette’s Thérèse de Lorget, the widowed empress’s reader and the young Prince’s de facto love interest, is distinguished by radiant singing, her voice glowing with ardor even when the words that she articulates express the character’s embarrassment in the presence of l’Aiglon. ‘Little Brooklet’ is a wonderfully appropriate epithet for Guilmette’s Thérèse: her singing flows like the crystalline waters of an unspoiled spring.

Though dismissive of her concern for him in one scene, the operatic Napoléon II is kinder to his mother than his historical counterpart is known to have been, accounts of his life documenting his wish that the more famous Joséphine were his mother rather than Marie-Louise. Who would not be inclined to deal affectionately with a mother sung by contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux? Throughout the opera, Lemieux depicts Marie-Louise as a stern, aptly imperious figure who loves her son and regards him wistfully as the only remaining vestige of a glorious past. Hers are the misfortunes of political disgrace and outliving both spouse and child. Lemieux’s vocalism occasionally sounds flustered, the pitch secure but the tone not as formidably solid as it has often been. Marie-Louise’s music does not provide Lemieux with opportunities for the kind of bold, full-throttled singing at which she excels, but her artistry engenders a consequential performance.

Singing the rôle of Maréchal Marmont, bass-baritone Philippe Sly enriches the performance with every note that he sings. The shame and sadness with which he intones ‘Je ne l’ai pas revu’ when confronted by l’Aiglon about having abandoned Napoléon on the battlefield are deeply poignant. Still more stirring is the sense of honor with which Sly phrases ‘Ah! monseigneur, accusez la fatigue. Que voulez-vous?’ Sly’s burnished timbre lends his portrayal of the Maréchal both humanity and tragic grandeur, but it is the beauty of his singing that sustains his haunted, haunting performance.

The Prince de Metternch and Séraphin Flambeau of baritones Étienne Dupuis and Marc Barrard are the dueling forces that collectively form the fulcrum upon which the opera’s diegesis teeters. Vocally and dramatically, the gentlemen are on equal footing, the importance of their opposing loyalties cogently expressed through their impactful singing. Dupuis and Barrard spar with the sure aim of Olympic fencers in the second and third scenes of Act Two, when Flambeau terrorizes Metternich with the pseudo-shade of Napoléon. Barrard’s vocal acting in Flambeau’s phantasmagorical death scene affords the character’s suicide the honor of a hero’s passing. In the opera’s final scene, Dupuis manages to suggest that Metternich at last sympathizes with l’Aiglon. Perhaps his compassion is born solely of the relief of the legacy of Napoléon finally receding into the past, but the dignity with which Dupuis pronounces ‘Vous lui remettrez son uniforme blanc’ as the curtain falls rings with sincerity. Like Sly, Barrard and Dupuis proffer such expressive performances principally because they sing so handsomely.

Continuing the tradition established by Monteverdi with Nerone in his L’incoronazione di Poppea and advanced by Sesto in Händel’s Giulio Cesare, Mozart’s Cherubino and Massenet’s Chérubin, and Richard Strauss’s Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Komponist in Ariadne auf Naxos, Honegger and Ibert made their l’Aiglon a brother of Gounod’s Siébel and Stéphano. If her singing on this pair of discs is indicative of her work in general, l’Aiglon could hope for no better interpreter than Belgian soprano Anne-Catherine Gillet. Hearing her assured command of the wide range of l’Aiglon’s music, it is hardly unexpected that she is also a noted interpreter of Massenet’s Manon. Gliding through the awkward adolescent exchanges of Act One, Gillet’s upper register gleams. Gillet garners pity for the merciless treatment that l’Aiglon receives from Metternich in Act Two. The son that Gillet depicts in Act Four wants desperately to live up to the impossibly imposing stature of his diminutive father. In Act Five, the serenity and simplicity with which Gillet’s Prince takes leave of life, revisiting the grandeur of his christening, elevates the opera’s final scene to the heights of Machiavellian tragedy. Not surprisingly, the soprano’s diction is splendid. Every word that she caresses with her dazzling voice has its place in her captivating portrayal of l’Aiglon. This eaglet’s plumage is a musical wonder of nature.

The lion’s share of artistic works fashioned by collaborative efforts suffer from an unequal distribution of riches. In L’Aiglon, a passage here emphatically says, ‘Honegger,’ and a passage there just as emphatically says, ‘Ibert,’ but every passage in the score renders a message of artistically advantageous cooperation. Indeed, the heart of this recording of L’Aiglon is cooperation: respect among artists for themselves, one another, and the score in their hands yields a performance that enchants and enlightens. A more plaintive memorial to the hapless Eaglet of Napoleonic France and a finer performance of L’Aiglon are unfathomable.

Un prince et son ami: Le Chevalier de Prokesch-Osten and Napoléon II in a scene from Edmond Rostand's L'Aiglon [Print by Lacroix, Paris, circa 1910; public domain]

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): La favorite—Kate Lindsey (Léonor de Guzmán), Randall Bills (Fernand), Javier Arrey (Alphonse XI), John Relyea (Balthazar), Joélle Harvey (Inès), Rolando Sanz (Don Gaspar); Washington Concert Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Antony Walker, conductor [Lisner Auditorium, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA; Friday, 4 March 2016]

It might never be deduced from its lamentably few appearances in the world’s major opera houses in recent seasons that La favorite is one of Gaetano Donizetti’s finest scores. Composed in fulfillment of a commission from the Paris Opéra, an offer that any ambitious composer could hardly refuse, La favorite was in part adapted from the never-performed L’ange di Nisida, replacing the aborted Le duc d’Albe. Premièred at the Académie Royale de Musique on 2 December 1840, by a cast headed by mezzo-soprano Rosine Stoltz, whose reign as prima donna of both the Opéra and its manager, Léon Pillet, may have played at least a small part in the demise of Le duc d’Albe, the heroine of which was written for a higher voice, and the famous tenor Gilbert Duprez, La favorite solidified Donizetti’s reputation in the French capital, his home since an irreconcilable feud with the Neapolitan censors prompted him to turn his back on his native Italy. Despite the advocacy of singers as gifted as Giulietta Simionato, Fiorenza Cossotto, and Shirley Verrett, the appreciation that La favorite rightfully garnered in the Nineteenth Century has not persisted in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Last heard at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1978, the opera has been best served in recent years by concert performances, including Opera Orchestra of New York outings in 1975 with Shirley Verrett, Alfredo Kraus, and Pablo Elvira and in 2003 with Jennifer Larmore, Gregory Kunde, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky; a 1989 Wiener Konzerthaus presentation with Agnes Baltsa, Kraus, and Paolo Gavanelli; a previous Washington Concert Opera showing in 1991 with Florence Quivar, Vinson Cole, and Christopher Robertson; the 2014 Salzburger Festspiele account with Elīna Garanča, Juan Diego Flórez, and Ludovic Tézier; and 2015’s Bel Canto at Caramoor offering with Clémentine Margaine, Santiago Ballerini, and Stephen Powell. Compared with recorded souvenirs of these performances, Washington Concert Opera’s 2016 performance in Lisner Auditorium was finer than any of them. Opera lovers’ affection for the genre is sustained by those gloriously few occasions when every aspect of a performance excels. In the past several decades, aficionados have learned to subsist on very meager diets of memorable performances. This La favorite was a gluttonously fulfilling experience for ears and hearts that hunger for genuine bel canto.

Written by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz, the libretto of La favorite examines collisions of regal authority, the power of the Church, and individual emotions in the piquant setting of Fourteenth-Century Castile. Alphonse XI, King of Castile, is a archetypical Latin lover, a playboy whose amorous appetite is not quenched by the attentions of his consort, the daughter of Balthazar, superior of the monastery of the Order of Santiago de Compostela. The King keeps as his preferred mistress—voilà, la favorite—Léonor de Gusmán, a beautiful lady of the court whose fervor at prayer has been noticed by Fernand, a postulant in the monastery who eventually abandons his ecclesiastical intentions, accepts a commission in Alphonse’s army procured for him by Léonor, wins royal favor in battle, and claims as his reward from his sovereign Léonor’s hand in marriage—a hand given with the knowledge of everyone except Fernand that her other hand remains firmly grasped by the King. Fernand rejoices at being granted his wish to marry Léonor without knowing of her liaison with Alphonse: Léonor’s confidante Inès, dispatched before the wedding ceremony to reveal Léonor’s past, having been arrested before communicating the crucial information, Fernand pledges himself to a woman he does not truly know and who believes that she is accepted and loved despite her transgressions. Such a plot can be difficult to sort out in staged performances, and concert presentations can make it even more incomprehensible for listeners, especially those without good French—or, more frequently in the case of this opera, Italian. The atmosphere established by the efforts of all participants in Washington Concert Opera’s La favorite lent the performance a strong dramatic profile, elucidating plot elements despite erratic interactions among the principals. The singers’—soloists and choristers—generally very good diction was advantageous. Concert performances of operas often provide opportunities to more intimately savor scores’ musical qualities without visual distractions, but this La favorite in concert was more histrionically effective than many fully-staged productions of familiar works manage to be.

The leadership of Washington Concert Opera’s Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker reliably brings the excitement of staged opera to the concert setting, never more so than in this performance of La favorite. His work with Pinchgut Opera in his native Australia has revealed the stylistic versatility of his conducting, but his appearances with Washington Concert Opera, with which company his repertoire encompasses lesser-known scores by Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, and Richard Strauss, have confirmed that he has a special affinity for bel canto, spotlighting the inherent elements of bel canto as much in Strauss’s Guntram as in Rossini’s Semiramide and Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi. In Walker’s hands, the kinship between La favorite and Verdi’s mature style was particularly apparent. Donizetti’s music for Alphonse XI, the King of Castile, would dovetail perfectly with Verdi’s music for the Conte di Luna in Il trovatore, and Fernand’s high-centered vocal lines might be uttered just as convincingly by Henri in Les vêpres sicilienne. Balthazar’s scenes might have been cut from the same cloth as similar episodes in La forza del destino and Don Carlos. Without applying pressure greater than the music can withstand, Walker’s approach made Donizetti as much a peer of Verdi, Ponchielli, and Boito as of Rossini and Bellini, and the lesson in this is unmistakably legitimized by the composers’ bodies of work. Rodolfo’s ‘Quando le sere al placido’ in Verdi’s Luisa Miller is a close relative of Fernand’s ‘Ange si pur,’ and what is la Cieca’s ‘Voce di donna’ in Ponchielli’s La gioconda if not bel canto? Walker’s tempi were consistently appropriate for music and musicians, and he enhanced the continuity of the score by refusing to linger over ‘purple’ passages. Every emotion, gleeful or doleful, was given its due but not allowed to dominate unless its domination was clearly Donizetti’s intention. The circumstances of the company’s performances prohibit extensive periods of rehearsal, but such was Walker’s commitment—and the commitment that he inspired in his colleagues on the Lisner Auditorium stage—that this La favorite sounded like the culmination of a lifetime of study and preparation.

Under Walker’s guidance, the quality of the playing by the Washington Concert Opera Orchestra continues to improve, the musicians’s slightly rough-edged account of the Ouverture’s opening Larghetto smoothing to a well-integrated, exciting account of the Allegretto mosso. The Act Two ballet, de rigueur in a score commissioned by the Opéra, was omitted from Washington Concert Opera’s performance, but plentiful opportunities for orchestral glory remained. There were a few very small mistakes and instances of imperfect ensemble, but the playing mostly set and adhered to a high standard. The horns that introduced Léonor’s celebrated ‘O mon Fernand’ were commendably sure of intonation, and harpist Eric Sabatino’s playing was always heard with pleasure. Among the sometimes thin-sounding strings, principal cellist Gita Ladd’s spirited rallying of her section remains a marvel: even her pizzicato playing is emotionally charged. As the Santiago de Compostela organist in Act Four, Joel Ayau phrased his music with bel canto sensibility.

La favorite et ses hommes: (from left to right) Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey as Léonor, tenor Randall Bills as Fernand, Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker, baritone Javier Arrey as Alphonse, tenor Rolando Sanz as Don Gaspar, and bass John Relyea as Balthazar in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite in Lisner Auditorium, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

Prepared by Assistant Conductor and Chorus Master Bruce Stasyna, the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington Concert Opera Chorus sang with potency and impressive balance. The men intoned the Andante introduction in Act One, ‘Pieux monastère, de ton sanctuaire que notre prière monte vers les cieux,’ expansively, and the ladies were luminous in the scene with Inès, sounding aptly girlist in ‘Rayons dorés, tiède zéphyre, de fleurs parez ce doux séjour.’ In both the Act Three finale and the first scene of Act Four, the dramatic force of the choral singing was gripping. Their accounts of ‘Frères, creusons l’asile où la douleur s’en dort’ and ‘Que du Très-Haut la faveur t’accompagne,’ the latter sung from the wings as Donizetti stipulated, were deeply poignant. Choral music plays a very important part in La favorite, and the success of this performance was considerably influenced by the choristers’ skillful contributions.

Interpreting the part of Don Gaspar, an officer in service to Alphonse, tenor Rolando Sanz acquitted himself expertly, his intuitive mastery of Donizetti’s style evident even in his character’s declamatory lines. Considering the quality of Sanz’s instrument, it was atypically regrettable that Donizetti and his librettists did not give Don Gaspar an aria. This talented tenor made the most of all that his character had to do, however, his voice ringing heroically—no whimpering character tenor, he!—in the scene with Alphonse at the start of Act Two. Sanz proclaimed Don Gaspar’s dramatically portentous lines in the Act Two finale with the machismo of a world-class Pollione. Of similar quality was his execution of his music in the Act Three finale. Sanz’s voice was always audible in ensembles, and even in the concert setting he was the smug, insinuating courtier to the life. Few operatic courtiers match their machinations with such firm, focused singing. It is too much to expect a Don Gaspar to sound as though he might respectably sing Fernand should circumstances necessitate it, but Sanz was one who seemed more than up to the task.

As Léonor’s confidante Inès, beautiful soprano Joélle Harvey enlivened the otherwise dark drama with singing as radiant as her smile. In her Act One scene with the young ladies of Alphonse’s court, she voiced ‘Rayons dorés, tiède zéphyre, de fleurs parez ce doux séjour’ with girlish glee, unleashing a splendid top B♭ in the cadenza. Then, her ‘Doux zéphyr, sois-lui fidèle’ wafted the fragrances and warmth of spring through the chilly auditorium, the spot-on accuracy of her pitch complemented by well-supported projection. She performed her part in the Act Two finale with poise and tireless assurance above the stave. As much a victim of Alphonse’s jealous cruelty as Léonor and Fernand, Harvey’s Inès was as good-natured and golden-voiced a champion of illicit love as Donizetti and the Washington audience could have hoped to hear in the rôle.

At the opposite end of the vocal and dramatic spectrum, the Balthazar of bass John Relyea pronounced the teachings and dictates of the Church with thundering tones that scorched the air with fire and brimstone. In the first scene of Act One, Relyea declaimed ‘Ne vas-tu pas prier avec eux?’ with gravitas, and his handling of Balthazar’s stern counseling of Fernand in the Allegro duet drew from him an imposing ‘Toi, mon fils, ma seule espérance.’ The bass’s voice relayed the wills of God and Pope in the finales of Acts Two and Three with the unanswerable authority of a man personally acquainted with both the Holy Spirit and the Holy Father. Welcoming Fernand into the monastic brotherhood at the start of Act Four, Relyea’s Balthazar assumed a paternal benevolence that shone in his singing of ‘Les cieux s’emplissent d’étincelles.’ Hearing Relyea’s portrayal, utterly solid throughout the part’s two-octave range, it is interesting to note how often Balthazar is easily ignored by recorded Alphonses. Relyea’s emphatic, smoldering singing could not be ignored by King or commoners, but who could have wanted to close his ears to such an electrifying performance of great music?

Le roi et ses plus belles dames: (from left to right) Soprano Joélle Harvey as Inès, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey as Léonor, and baritone Javier Arrey as Alphonse in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite in Lisner Auditorium, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

Baritone Javier Arrey endowed the throne of Castile in this La favorite with a young, virile Alphonse XI whose vocalism was as handsomely chiseled as his visage. Among high-octane colleagues, he dominated Act Two, phrasing with distinction and respecting Donizetti enough to make an honorable effort at the trill asked of him. Arrey dispatched the libidinous King’s Larghetto aria ‘Léonor! Viens, j’abandonne Dieu, mon peuple et ma couronne’ and cabaletta ‘Léonor, mon amour brave’ with contrasting sensuality and swagger, his easy top Es and Fs ricocheting through the auditorium like musket balls. He and his Léonor blended their voices stirringly in their Larghetto duet, ‘Léonor, Léonor, tais-toi,’ and his vitriolic singing in the Act Two finale was galvanizing. To the trio with Léonor and Fernand, ‘Fernand de votre amour, Madame, vient de me faire ici l’aveu,’ Arrey brought the bemused confidence of royal prerogative, his voice radiating offended pride. A noticeably softer heart pulsed at the core of Alphonse’s Act Three aria ‘Pour tant d’amour ne soyez pas ingrate,’ the baritone revealing the soul of the man rather than the persona of the King. In the Act Three finale, Arrey depicted a touchingly wounded, suddenly frightened monarch on the brink of collapse: denounced by Rome, abandoned by his lover, and mocked by his court, he was a Mediterranean Macbeth stained by sin. Minimizing the significance of a few suspect pitches and moments of compromised tonal quality, Arrey’s performance was both pompous and poetic—and, most winningly, sung with style and nuance.

La favorite et le malheureux: Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey as Léonor (left) and tenor Randall Bills as Fernand (right) in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite in Lisner Auditorium, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

Tall and as attractive in white tie and tails as a fair-haired Tony Curtis, tenor Randall Bills was a boyish, earnest Fernand who sang with heartwarming expressivity. In a rôle created by Gilbert Duprez, credited as having been the first tenor to publicly unveil the now-expected ut de poitrine, Bills unsurprisingly faced high tessitura, but his voice retained its youthful bloom to the top of the range. In Fernand’s Larghetto cavatine in Act One, ‘Un ange, une femme inconnue,’ he managed the ecstatic rise to top C♯ without strain, but the most gratifying aspects of his singing were his smooth, clear timbre and impeccable breath control. In the duet with Balthazar, his exclamation of ‘Mon père, je l’aime!’ soared with lovesick sincerity, and he subsequently greeted Inès with a believably awestruck ‘Gentille messagère et nymphe si discrète.’ Finally united with his beloved Léonor, her identity still withheld from him, ‘Pour toi des saints autels j’ai brisé l’esclavage’ poured from him like lava, his vocalism igniting one of Donizetti’s most incendiary duets. Bills gave an understated performance of the martiale aria ‘Oui, ta voix m’inspire,’ its sentiments being in his hands a statement of very private resolve. The first scene of Act Three was defined by Bills’s affectionately-phrased utterance of ‘Me voici donc près d’elle,’ his urgent, athletic singing in the trio with Léonor and Alphonse and the act’s finale surging with emotion and musicality. Hesitating before taking his final vows as a brother in the fraternity of Santiago de Compostela in Act Four, the tenor’s Fernand voiced ‘Dans un instant, mon frère’ with humility. Like the Duca’s ‘La donna è mobile’ in Rigoletto and Rodolfo’s ‘Che gelida manina’ in La bohème, it is Fernand’s C-major Larghetto aria ‘Ange si pur, que dans un songe’ for which audiences eagerly wait in La favorite, and Bills’s performance of the piece, one of Donizetti’s most inspired arias for tenor, fulfilled the expectation engendered by his effective singing throughout the evening. Shaping the aria with obvious mastery of bel canto, he faithfully observed Donizetti’s dynamic marking by taking the famous top C in genuine voix mixte, sustaining the tone beautifully and with the softness requested by the composer. In the harrowing final duet with the dying Léonor, he seemed transformed by ‘Ses pleurs, sa voix jadis si chère portent le trouble dans mes sens,’ his coldness towards his one true love thawed in an instant. This was a Fernand whose suggestion that his fellow monks’ prayers for the repose of Léonor’s soul would on the following day be lifted in requests of intercession for his own seemed inevitable: having borne too much, one could virtually feel the sensitive young man’s heart breaking. Particularly in early scenes, Bills’s gestures revealed nervousness, but the thoughtful young artist’s preparation and innate stylishness prevailed. Further experience will undoubtedly increase his comfort in the rôle, but few of even the most acclaimed Fernands have sung the music so securely and serenely.

After her début at the Opéra in 1837, Rosine Stoltz was frequently compared to one of the most popular singers in Paris, the sui generis Cornélie Falcon. Acclaimed for performances of rôles composed by Rossini for Isabella Colbran, as well as Falcon parts like Rachel in Halévy’s La Juive and Valentine in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Stoltz was admired for the excellent quality of her voice throughout its wide range and the dramatic verisimilitude of her characterizations, attributes that likely made her Léonor de Gusmán a memorable portrayal. The same praise can be justifiably directed at mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, whose Léonor for Washington Concert Opera was a spectacular junction of singer and rôle. In her Act One duet with Fernand, Lindsey caressed the line and cajoled her Fernand with a bewitching ‘Mon idole, mon idole, Dieu t’envoie.’ Her singing in the Act Two duet with Alphonse was better still, the bitterness that flooded her enunciation of ‘Dans vos palais, ma pauvre âme soupire’ altering the mood of the scene and of the opera as a whole. Her voice rocketed through the tricky writing in the Act Two finale. After enduring crippling shame in the trio with Fernand and Alphonse, depicted by Lindsey with unaffected dignity, Léonor’s majestic solo scene is the centerpiece of Act Three and the climax of the opera. Lindsey phrased the recitative ‘L’ai-je bien entendu?’ with great feeling, and her performances of the aria ‘O mon Fernand! tout les biens de la terre’ and cabaletta ‘Mon arrêt descend du ciel’ were galvanizing, a masterclass in the art of dramatic bel canto. Lindsey has flashing, unforced top Bs, used sparingly and to great effect, and her upper register was on sterling form throughout the performance, not least in the difficult Act Three finale. Entering in Act Four, Lindsey delivered ‘Fernand! Fernand! pourrai-je le trouver?’ with a voice already touched by death, and her piano singing of ‘Fernand, imite la clémence du ciel à qui tu t’es lié’ in the final duet was ravishingly plaintive. When singing quietly, Lindsey's tones sporadically lost focus, and her cautious management of vocal registers, commendably maintaining head resonance in the interest of preserving the line, led to a few moments of awkwardness at the bottom of the range. Like Bills, however, she reduced minor imperfections to immateriality with a performance that, taken as a whole, qualified her as a Léonor worthy of the legacy of Simionato, Cossotto, and Verrett.

It is never easy to explain why some of a composer’s operas enjoy enduring success while others of equal or greater quality languish in relative obscurity. For Donizetti’s La favorite, the argument is often made that the opera is neglected because there are no singers active today who are capable of doing justice to the score. Washington Concert Opera’s performance delightfully disavowed that notion. Are audiences’ collective attention spans too brief to enable exploration beyond the handful of Donizetti’s operas that remain in the standard repertory? Do today’s listeners fail to respond to the tragedy of La favorite as readily as Nineteenth-Century observers must have done? Whichever reasons are most valid for explaining the infrequency with which La favorite adorns the world’s stages, performances of the prowess of Washington Concert Opera’s traversal of the magnificent score are worth waiting for.

Receiving thanks for a job well done: (from left to right) Bass John Relyea (Balthazar), mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey (Léonor), tenor Randall Bills (Fernand), Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker, baritone Javier Arrey (Alphonse), soprano Joélle Harvey (Inès), and tenor Rolando Sanz (Don Gaspar) in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s La favorite in Lisner Auditorium, 4 March 2016 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Messiah, HWV 56 [Edition by Mack Wilberg]—Sonya Yoncheva (soprano), Tamara Mumford (mezzo-soprano), Rolando Villazón (tenor), Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone); Mormon Tabernacle Choir; Orchestra at Temple Square; Mack Wilberg, conductor [Recorded in the Mormon Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, during sessions in February, May, July, September, and December 2014, and August, September, October, and November 2015; Mormon Tabernacle Choir CFN 1631-2; 2 CDs + DVD, 143:26 (Highlights disc also available); Available from Mormon Tabernacle Choir and major music retailers]

Few are the courageous souls who would dare to contradict the notion that Georg Friedrich Händel’s Messiah is one of the most beloved creations in the history of Western Art. Composed in a three-week period in 1741 at a pace that astounds modern observers but was unremarkable for the famously industrious Händel, the score of Messiah is noteworthy for its relative originality: per capita, more of its numbers are unique to the score than their brethren in many of the composer’s operas and oratorios. What is unjustly less frequently the subject of laypersons’ praise are the extraordinary histrionic quality and emotional impact of Charles Jennens’s (1700 – 1773) libretto for Messiah. His work was merely arranging Biblical passages, it might be argued, but he did so with the theatrical acuity of Metastasio, da Ponte, and Boito. Jennens’s was a life of comfort that enabled him to dabble in the Arts, and his appreciation of Händel’s music yielded libretti for several of the Saxon’s oratorios, not least among which is his persuasive text for the masterful Saul. Jennens’s advantageous situation afforded him considerably greater access to the Arts community in Eighteenth-Century Britain than his talent and education likely merited, but his libretto for Messiah confirms that he was not merely a dilettante with a measure of piety. Relying slightly more upon the poetic prophesying of the Old Testament than on the New Testament’s fulfillment narrative, Jennens created with a commendable economy of words as complete a portrait of the life Christ as has grace any book, canvas, or score in the two millennia of Christian ideology. His oft-quoted low opinion of Händel’s treatment of his libretto notwithstanding, Messiah was from the time of its 1742 première in Dublin acknowledged as a pinnacle of its composer’s art. In the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, Messiah remains one of the most frequently-performed works in the standard repertory, its popularity having endured a fascinating cycle of performance trends. Like the King James Version of the Bible, Messiah is a compelling work of art whether the individual listener accepts its subject matter as fact, fable, or a synthesis of the two. Regardless of its provenance, this new recording of Messiah by the renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir is most valuable because it approaches the score not as a dogmatic sermon in three parts but as an artistic entity of extraordinary global significance. Recorded with meticulous attention to recreating within the confines of the listener’s space the legendary acoustics of the Mormon Tabernacle, this Messiah distills nearly three centuries of traditions into a performance shaped not by fads and theories but by undeviating trust in the unimpeachable quality of Jennens’s wordsmithing and, above all, Händel’s music.

Owing in large part to the commendable emphases placed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on respecting and maintaining both body and soul, Salt Lake City, Utah, is one of America’s fittest, most vibrantly youthful metropolitan areas, its stunningly beautiful setting at the foot of the Wasatch Range reflected in the exuberantly reverent architecture of Temple Square, the Mormon Church’s Vatican City. When walking the streets of Salzburg, seeing the twin spires of Salzburger Dom and the majestic Festung Hohensalzburg towering over the city, it is impossible to ignore the ethos of the place that must have stoked the young Mozart’s imagination, and a similar energy, the spirit that has inspired generations of Utahans since Brigham Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, permeates modern Salt Lake City. It was on 22 August 1847, less than a month after ending his cross-continental trek to Utah, that Young organized the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, thus establishing a musical institution that now has nearly as extensive a history with Messiah as the British choral societies by which the score was stewarded throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In the performance on these discs, Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Music Director Mack Wilberg offers his own edition of Messiah, combining elements of historically-informed performance practices with vestiges of the Viennese tradition enshrined in the version of the score prepared by Mozart at Baron van Swieten’s request and the monumentally-scaled Victorian approach to the score. With its ensemble of nearly 450 singers and instrumentalists, this is a Messiah that will not find favor with many period practice purists, but not one bar of Händel’s music is expanded to proportions greater than it can support. Under Wilberg’s direction, the Orchestra at Temple Square musicians play virtuosically, the winds making their lines retained from Mozart’s edition of Messiah sound indispensable alongside Händel’s authentic scoring. Propelled by the creative but unobtrusive organ and harpsichord playing of Richard Elliott, Clay Christiansen, and Andrew Unsworth and the cello continuo of Elizabeth Marsh, the orchestra’s performance is robust yet refined. Aided by the expert engineering team, Wilberg molds a traversal of Messiah that is enjoyably grandiose without being detrimentally elephantine.

The familiar names among the quartet of soloists might at first be interpreted as a conscious endeavor to spur sales of this recording. Be that as it may, each of the soloists contributes distinctive qualities that heighten the artistic standard of the performance. The opening bars of the recitative ‘Comfort Ye My People’ reveal Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón to be in fine voice. The surprising fluency in florid writing evident in his previous recordings of Monteverdi, Händel, and Mozart works is even more prominent in his singing here. Villazón’s stylish ornamentation encompasses a genuine trill, and he mostly eschews operatic posturing, instead phrasing with intelligence and straightforward eloquence. His English is accented but clear; far more intelligible, in fact, than the diction of a number of native English speakers who have recorded Messiah. Villazón dispatches the divisions in ‘Ev'ry Valley Shall Be Exalted’ with aptly exultant ease. The sequence of anguished utterances for the tenor in Part Two receives from this tenor a performance of touching simplicity, the drama extracted from rather than imposed upon the music. The stinging bitterness of ‘All They That See Him, Laugh Him to Scorn’ and ‘Thy Rebuke Hath Broken His Heart’ is all the more visceral for the music being sung with such beauty, and Villazón voices the deceptively lilting ‘Behold, and See If There Be Any Sorrow’ as enthrallingly as any tenor who has recorded it, recalling both Jon Vickers’s power and the reedy brilliance of Philip Langridge. The halting uncertainty of his singing of ‘He Was Cut Off out of the Land of the Living’ suggests an inner struggle to express sentiments too appalling to be given voice, but the contrast with the brighter, almost cathartic ’But Thou Didst Not Leave His Soul in Hell’ is stirring, Villazón’s bronzed timbre glowing in the major-key sunlight. An atmosphere of anxiety permeates his readings of ‘Unto Which of the Angels Said He at Any Time’ and ‘He that Dwelleth in Heaven.’ Particularly impressive musically and dramatically is Villazón’s singing of the demanding ‘Thou Shalt Break Them,’ his voice darting through the runs and attacking the tricky intervals with the resonant strike of the rod of iron of which he sings. There is a sense of absolving vindication in his articulation of his lines in the brief duet ‘O Death, Where Is Thy Sting.’ Villazón is a gifted, unfailingly interesting singer whose work is not always conventionally appealing. There is nothing unappealing in his singing in this Messiah, and the healthy dose of Latin fervor that he injects into the performance is welcome when the instrument of its injection is such solid, satisfying singing.

Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel is no stranger to recording Messiah, and it is encouraging to hear his voice on splendid form in this traversal of the bass solos. The passagework in ‘Thus Saith the Lord’ is no longer negotiated as suavely as it was when Terfel first recorded Messiah, but the sheer brawn with which he navigates his way through the music remains impressive. His polished-teak timbre conveys the gravity of ‘For Behold, Darkness Shall Cover the Earth’ and ‘The People That Walked in Darkness’ without artificial heaviness, and he still ascends to E above the stave without strain. The attacks on the fearsome fiorature in ’Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage Together’ are not completely clean but lack nothing in terms of raw energy, the text coursing through the music like venom. Terfel is at his best in Part Three, in which his voicing of ‘Behold, I Tell You a Mystery’ is characterized by subtlety and enigmatic serenity. Dueling with trumpeter Alan Sedgley in ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound,’ Terfel’s sonorous voice booms authoritatively. Terfel now brings to Messiah the voice of Wotan or Hans Sachs and the slightly reduced flexibility that this implies, but his singing in this performance is by no means undistinguished. He remains a confident, captivating Händelian.

It is unusual for the contralto soloist to be the foremost attraction of a performance or recording of Messiah, but Utah-born mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford is here a pillar of flair and finesse, traits which also defined her portrayal of Smeaton in the recent Metropolitan Opera revival of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. Introduced in the fiery ‘But Who May Abide The Day of His Coming,’ Mumford employs her well-honed bravura technique and flickering vibrato to dig into the text, mastering words and notes with equal sagacity. The tranquility that emanates from her phrasing of ‘Behold, a Virgin Shall Conceive’ is quietly moving, and she beautifully evinces the simple joy in ‘O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion.’ Simplicity is also the hallmark of Mumford’s unaffected singing of ‘Then Shall the Eyes of the Blind Be Opened.’ Her performance of the first part of ‘He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd’ is one of the finest stretches of singing in this Messiah, followed in the opening minutes of Part Two by her exquisitely-wrought ‘He Was Despised.’ The equal of the sublime ‘Erbarme dich, mein Gott’ in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, ‘He Was Despised’ is essential listening for anyone who questions the extent of Händel’s genius, and Mumford’s singing of it on this recording rivals unforgettable performances by Helen Watts and Dame Janet Baker. The evenness and integration of Mumford’s voice enable her to cover the full range of the music without disruptive register shifts, and she tastefully decorates the aria’s da capo with gorgeous floated notes in the upper octave. The tongue-twisting text in ‘Thou Art Gone Up on High’—try repeating ‘Thou hast led captivity captive’ in quavers and semiquavers!—is nearly as daunting as the music, but Mumford conquers every difficulty. The recitative ‘Then Shall Be Brought to Pass’ and duet ‘O Death, Where Is Thy Sting’ in Part Three draw from the mezzo-soprano radiant, resolute singing. Mumford’s may be the least-familiar of the soloists’ names to many potential purchasers of this Messiah, but her singing is one of the foremost reasons why this recording should be heard.

Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva has in the months since her 2013 Metropolitan Opera début as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto become a much-lauded member of that company’s roster, opening the 2015 – 2016 MET season as Desdemona in a new prodiction of Verdi’s Otello. Though her repertoire includes ‘early’ parts like the title rôle in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, mesmerizingly performed opposite the Nerone of Max Emanuel Cenčić at Opéra de Lille and preserved on DVD by Virgin Classics [reviewed here], Baroque music is hardly a cornerstone of Yoncheva’s renown. Like Villazón, she sings English with an accent that rarely compromises her elucidation of text, but English phrasing and vowel placement are audibly new territory for her. Still, from her entrance in ‘There Were Shepherds Abiding in the Field’ and through the nativity narrative of ‘And Lo! The Angel of the Lord Came Upon Them,’ ‘And the Angel Said unto Them,’ and ‘And Suddenly There Was with the Angel,’ she emits sounds of considerable allure, the focus of the tone only intermittently undermined by difficulties with English phonetics. Her top A is fantastic, however, and she sings ‘Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion’ rousingly, tossing off the roulades with appropriate zeal. Following Mumford in ‘He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd,’ Yoncheva at first seems slightly prosaic, but her experience with bel canto quickly uplifts her extension of lines, her F and G at the top of the stave rounded and full-bodied even when sung softly. In Part Two, the soprano nearly rivals Mumford’s ‘He Was Despised’ with her shimmering singing of ‘How Beautiful Are the Feet.’ After this, her lovely but earthbound traversal of the poignant ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’ at the beginning of Part Three is somewhat disappointing. Nonetheless, her assured voicing of ‘If God Be for Us, Who Can Be Against Us’ just before the final chorus leaves a decidedly favorable impression. In the long history of Messiah on records, prime donne of the operatic stage have rarely been the most accomplished soprano soloists in Händel’s most popular oratorio. Though not yet fully comfortable with words or music in the performance on these discs, further experience with the score—unlikely considering the demands of her international career, alas—might well usher Yoncheva into the company of those few sopranos who singMessiah and their preeminent operatic rôles with equal excellence.

Not surprisingly, it is the singing of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that is the core of this Messiah even amidst an ensemble of high-calibre soloists—if not its sole raison d’être, surely its principal raison d’écouter. The precision with which a choir of such prodigious numbers executes Händel’s contrapuntal writing is staggering, but the recording fails the choristers to a small degree in this regard. Though balances are for the most part thoughtfully rendered, aside from what sounds like very close recording of the soloists, possibly in an effort to minimize the inevitable acoustical variations among even meticulously-controlled sessions, there are passages in which clarity is lost, especially at top volume. In Part One, the divergent emotions of ‘And the Glory of the Lord,’ ‘And He Shall Purify,’ and ‘O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion’ are contrasted via management of dynamics. The complementary relationship between ‘For unto Us a Child Is Born’ and ‘Glory to God’ has rarely been more apparent in a recorded performance. The wall of sound built by the choristers in ‘His Yoke Is Easy, and His Burthen is Light’ ends Part One with a deluge of unexaggerated devotion. ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ at the start of Part Two could hardly be more different, the singers’ hushed awe surging on a tide of undiluted musicality. The electrifying progression of ‘Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs,’ ‘And with His Stripes We Are Healed,’ and the figuratively and literally breathtaking ‘All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray’ is guided with a sure hand by Wilberg and sung with impeccable poise and formidably reliable tone by the choir. No less gripping are the articulations of ‘He Trusted in God That He Would Deliver Him,’ the exhilarating ‘Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates,’ ‘Let All the Angels of God Worship Him,’ ‘The Lord Gave the Word,’ and ‘Their Sound is Gone Out into All the Lands’ that shape the central arc of the Passion chronicle. The choristers enunciate the ingenious figurations of ‘Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder’ with gleeful accuracy of intonation and rhythm. Triumphant as the choir’s performance of ‘Hallelujah’ is here, it does not assume greater prominence in the oratorio’s musical and dramatic structures than Händel intended. It is a profound summation of faith and prophecies come to fruition, but it is not bloated as in many performances so that the music that follows seems anticlimactic. Part Three here begins with as galvanizing a performance of ‘Since By Man Came Death’ as has ever been presented in a complete recording of Messiah, and the choir’s soaring tones make ‘But Thanks Be to God’ a number similar in significance to its better-known companions in Messiah. The magnificent fugues of ‘Worthy Is the Lamb That Was Slain’ and the concluding ‘Amen’ are not so much sung as felt: the conviction with which the voices ring out is palpable, igniting sparks that illuminate the skill with which Händel ended this world-altering score.

Amidst the plethoras of challenges facing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century, efforts to record Messiah are no longer as regular as death and taxes. This makes the appearance of a recording like this new one by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir all the more valuable. Händel’s Messiah is a perpetual feast, and this recording offers a delectable new course. Were he to hear the music performed with the sincerity and grandeur achieved on this recording, might Jennens revise his opinion of Händel’s setting of his carefully-tailored text?

GAETANO VENEZIANO (1656 – 1716): La passione secondo Giovanni—Raffaele Pe (Evangelista), Luca Cervoni (Christus), Marco Bussi (Pilatus), Renato Dolcini (Simon Petrus, Servus I), Valentina Argentieri (Ancilla, Servus II); Ghislieri Choir; Cappella Neapolitana; Antonio Florio, conductor [Recorded in Collegio Ghislieri, Pavia, Italy, 12 – 15 April 2015; Glossa GCD 922609; 1 CD, 56:04; Available from Glossa, ClassicsOnline HD (Download | Streaming), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

For every work that clings to a place in the international repertory there are countless others that are neglected, forgotten, or lost. This is especially true of musical settings of scriptural accounts of and responses to the Passion of Christ. From the earliest unions of words and music, the persecution, death, and resurrection of Christ have been themes that engage the imagination, the parallels among Christ’s suffering, the tribulations endured—and perpetrated—by the Church, and man’s daily struggles inspiring artists to seek in music modes of expression for sentiments too ephemeral for words alone. From the medieval courts of Europe to the studios of Twenty-First-Century composers, music exploring the anguish of Christ’s crucifixion and the hope of the resurrection has occupied the creative energies of many artists, but it is no exaggeration to assert that the Passion music of Johann Sebastian Bach has not unjustly garnered prominence that casts shadows from which other scores toil, often futilely, to emerge. The prevalence of Bach’s fleet, viscerally exciting Johannes-Passion and compellingly profound Matthäus-Passion in Eastertide performance schedules leaves little time for the Passions of Heinrich Schütz, Johann Mattheson, and Georg Philipp Telemann, all more widely influential in the first half of the Eighteenth Century than Bach’s Passions. Händel’s Brockes-Passion remains lamentably under-appreciated, and even his Messiah, Parts Two and Three of which deal with Christ’s trial, execution, and resurrection, is often inexplicably scheduled for performance only in the Christmas season, especially in the USA. Aside from a pitifully small handful of works by Alessandro Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Jommelli, Salieri, Paisiello, and Cimarosa, known but rarely performed, Italian Passion music is one of the least-explored niches of Classical Music. From this perspective, Glossa’s recording of Antonio Florio’s new performing edition of Gaetano Veneziano’s little-remembered Passione secondo Giovanni is especially treasurable, but a recording as fine as this one is welcome from any point of view. Given an opportunity of this artistic magnitude to make the case for its renaissance, Veneziano’s music brings John the Apostle’s harrowing recounting of his beloved master’s last days among men to poignant, devoutly melodious life in a performance that makes the more than three centuries of silence to which the score has been subjected all the more mystifying and exasperating.

Born in Bisceglie in the Apulia region of southeastern Italy in 1656, Gaetano Veneziano is now little more than a footnote in musicological tomes documenting the progress of Italian vocal music from the stylistic bellwethers Monteverdi, Cavalli, and Frescobaldi to the High Baroque of Alessandro Scarlatti, Benedetto Marcello, and Vivaldi. A pupil of Francesco Provenzale at Naples’s Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto, where he was named maestro di cappella in 1684, Veneziano was sufficiently respected as a composer of sacred music to later be selected as Alessandro Scarlatti’s replacement as director of the Spanish Viceroy’s Capilla Real in Naples—a post from which politics ousted him after only three years when the Austrian Hapsburgs wrested Naples from their Spanish cousins’ control. Early in his Neapolitan tenure, likely in 1685 [the year of Bach’s birth, appropriately enough], Veneziano composed his Passione secondo Giovanni for his adopted city, where he died in 1716. Whether the work, scored for soloists, a choir of nine parts, strings, and basso continuo, was intended for performance by Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto personnel is a matter of conjecture, but the dual intimacy and splendor of the edition and performance prepared by Florio suggest that Veneziano’s music would prove uniformly effective in academic, ecclesiastical, or theatrical settings.

The Passione is an intriguingly multi-faceted work, pockets of fiorature in the style of Provenzale mingling with pages of blossoming lyrical expression; and in that vein as much an intersection of old and new styles as Pergolesi’s Stabat mater. Following Florio’s lead, the musicians of Cappella Neapolitana play with technical acumen that never supersedes the beauty of the sounds that they produce. Organist Carlo Barile, harpsichordist Patrizia Varone, and theorbists Franco Pavan and Paola Ventrella collaborate to fashion a basso continuo that is a vibrant organism within the drama. They create a foundation upon which Florio and the strings—violinists Alessandro Ciccolini, Marco Piantoni, Rossella Pugliano, and Matteo Saccà, violist Rosario Di Meglio, cellists Jorge Alberto Guerrero and Adriano Fazio, and double bassist Giorgio Sanvito—create a stunningly beautiful aural edifice, the sounds of their instruments often eerily replicating the moods of the Latin text. It is expected that Florio’s knowledge of and affection for the Passione should be extensive, but the organic cohesion and unflagging drive of his pacing of this performance are admirable in any context. Aided by his cast and chorus, several of whom adhere to Baroque practice by singing solo and choir parts, Florio translates his zeal for revitalizing this score into a performance that, even on disc, exudes a deeply visceral commitment to musical storytelling.

In the introduction to the Gospel that begins the Passion, ‘Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi,’ it is immediately apparent that the Evangelista will face very demanding music and that countertenor Raffaele Pe will meet every demand unflinchingly. Articulating the words of the Apostle, Pe’s effortlessly-projected voice traverses the range of the music with chameleonic colorations rarely heard in a male alto’s singing. When joined by the sensitive but virile Christus of tenor Luca Cervoni and the chorus in ‘Iesus itaque sciens omnia,' Pe’s Evangelista interacts with his colleagues with far greater immediacy than many Evangelists in Bach’s Passions, participating in the events that are unfolding rather than uninvolvedly reciting Scripture. With the bass incarnations of Christ in Bach’s Passions prominent in the mind’s ears, a tenor Christ is a novelty, and Cervoni’s sympathetic portrayal is characterized by ingratiatingly full-toned but stylish singing. The Ghislieri Choir singers—sopranos Valentina Argentieri, Marta Redaelli, and Sonia Tedla, altos Isabella Di Pietro and Marta Fumagalli, tenors Michele Concato and Paolo Tormene, and basses Renato Cadel and Renato Dolcini—also dedicate their throats and their intellects to serving the needs of the drama, enhancing the performance with utterances that have the impact of chorus interjections in Greek tragedy.

Cervoni’s singing lends ‘Mitte gladium tuum in vaginam’ wonderful momentum, and Pe again delivers the Evangelista’s lines with astounding beauty of tone and a degree of technical accomplishment as near to perfection as is imaginable in such challenging music. Emerging from the chorus, Argentieri and Dolcini provide a dangerous account of the Ancilla’s accusation and a wrenching statement of Simon Petrus’s first denial of Christ. Pe phrases ‘Stabant autem servi et ministri’ with anxious intensity, the focus of his tone imparting the Apostle’s sense of foreboding, and his subtle but nuanced expressivity is matched by Cervoni and Dolcini. Cervoni voices ‘Si male locutus sum’ with refinement, but Argentieri’s reading of the Servus’s denunciation of Simon Petrus introduces a disquieting menace that erupts in Dolcini’s pained fulfillment of the prophecy of his threefold denial of Christ. The choristers again execute their parts with spot-on musical and dramatic instincts.

Bass Marco Bussi’s dark-grained timbre renders his Pilatus easily discernible, but he shares Pe’s gift for insightful inflection though, not inappropriately for Pontius Pilatus, his vocalism is less polished than his colleague’s. Bussi unleashes an unmistakable arrogance in ‘Quam accusationem affertis,’ openly challenging Christ and seemingly reveling in his character’s feeble but insurmountable authority. Singing with the unperturbed grace of undiminished faith, Pe’s Evangelista imparts to the listener that, for all of his self-conscious regality, Pilatus is merely playing the part meant for him by divine will. Here and in ‘Et dabant ei alapas,’ Pe, Bussi, and the choristers employ both their voices and the words that they sing like brightly-hued tiles in a mosaic, creating a landscape in which Gethsemane and Golgotha are conjured with plaintive credibility. The potency of Cervoni’s enunciation of ‘Non haberes potestatem’ is answered by Pe, the chorus, and Bussi in accents of starkly divergent despair and insouciance, differentiated not by compromising tonal quality but by giving full weight to every word and full expression to every emotion.

‘Ut Scriptura impleretur, dicens,’ the Passione’s closing sequence, in many ways resembles an extended motet for the Evangelista and Christus, a powerful exposition of the individual and universal implications of Christ’s death and resurrection. Pe’s interpretation of the Apostle’s words delves deeply into the man’s, not just the disciple’s, love for his master, but it is the unaffected beauty of his vocalism that reveals the Evangelista’s heart to the listener. Cervoni’s Christus, too, is a portrayal focused on examining Christ’s individuality by singing his music stylishly and straightforwardly. In this performance, Veneziano’s music succeeds as few composers’ works in a similar vein have done at humanizing both Christ and the Evangelist: they are archetypes, of course, but they are not carved-stone icons that sink in seas of symbolism. Owing to the uncommon musical integrity of this performance, they are here what they surely were in life: extraordinary, ordinary men.

Some scholars now question not only whether the Apostle John penned the canonical Gospel that bears his name but also whether such a man actually existed. The Twenty-First Century is an era of doubts of which even Thomas could not have dreamed—if there was a doubting Thomas, that is. Like the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare, though, is the question of authorship really so important that appreciation of the quality of the work is lessened by uncertainty? Music of the quality of Gaetano Veneziano’s Passione secondo Giovanni speaks for itself regardless of whose words inspired its melodies. Its beauties communicated by a performance like the one lead by Antonio Florio and Raffaele Pe, the only relevant question that should be asked about Veneziano’s Passione is, ‘How can such a consequential score have been so long unheard?’

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Arminio, HWV 36—Max Emanuel Cenčić (Arminio), Layla Claire (Tusnelda), Ruxandra Donose (Ramise), Vince Yi (Sigismondo), Juan Sancho (Varo), Xavier Sabata (Tullio), Petros Magoulas (Segeste); Armonia Atenea; George Petrou, conductor [Recorded in Megaron, The Athens Concert Hall, Athens, Greece, 7 – 18 September 2015; DECCA 478 8764; 2 CDs, 150:35; Available from DECCA, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

When Georg Friedrich Händel’s Arminio was premièred in London on 12 January 1737, with alto castrato Domenico Annibali in the title rôle, soprano Anna Maria Strada del Pò as Tusnelda, and soprano castrato Gioacchino Conti as Sigismondo, the remaining days of the composer’s career as a purveyor of Italian opera were numbered. The growing popularity of satirical, vaudevillian works in the manner of The Beggar’s Opera, as well as his own English oratorios, combined with decreasing tolerances for singers’ and audiences’ capriciousness and the endless responsibilities of managing operatic enterprises to sour opera in Händel’s esteem. A product of a burst of operatic creativity that also yielded Giustino and Berenice, Arminio is one of its composers tautest scores, musically and dramatically, the skill with which the characters’ emotions are given musical expression exceptional even for Händel. Having created an opera of such quality, Händel’s increasing frustration with the musical fickleness of his adopted countrymen is understandable. What is less easily comprehended is why, in this era of interest in every niche of Händel’s output for the stage, Arminio has waited so long for its sole commercial recording, an engaging performance with the late Alan Curtis leading the Arminio, Tusnelda, and Sigismondo of Vivica Genaux, Geraldine McGreevy, and Dominique Labelle, to be joined in the discography by a competitive alternative. With the gender paradigms of the rôles composed for castrati reversed, DECCA’s new studio recording of Arminio is more than just a welcome alternative to the Curtis set. Few claims in the realm of Baroque music are more provocative than assertions of faithfully restoring to any of Händel’s large-scale theatrical compositions a full measure of authenticity, this being a commodity for which there is no reliable, universally-accepted gauge, but this Arminio provides a carefully-judged performance which the demanding Meister from Halle would surely endorse with enthusiasm and gratitude.

A number of recent DECCA recordings of Baroque repertory have benefited from the playing of Armonia Atenea and the conducting of George Petrou, but their work in this Arminio sets new standards for performances of Händel’s operas. Bolstered by the basso continuo ensemble of Markelos Chryssikos and Petrou on harpsichord, Theodoros Kitsos on theorbo, Iason Ioannou on cello, and Dimitris Tigkas on double bass, the orchestra’s efforts serve as a catalyst to the opera’s drama, not just an accompaniment. Concertmaster Sergiu Nastasa leads the strings in a whirring, invigorating performance that honors the best elements of historically-informed performance practices without compromising listeners’ enjoyment with the acerbic sounds, faltering intonation, and exaggerated rhythms that constitute the worst aspects of period-appropriate methods. Capitalizing on the individually virtuosic but refreshingly tight ensemble playing of the strings and the wonderfully confident winds, Petrou paces the Allegro and Lentement of the Ouverture with fluidity that highlights Händel’s talents for orchestration and prefacing his operas with music that is considerably finer and more imaginatively conceived than similar pieces by many of his contemporaries. The elegant Menuet that launches the opera’s first scene and the tuneful Sinfonie that introduce Acts Two and Three are delivered with panache. Petrou uses Händel’s score as an atlas: each of the opera’s three acts is a journey with a clearly-defined destination. Reaching those destinations is here more enthralling than in the context of almost any other recording of any of Händel’s operas.

That Händel was a master dramatist has been irrefutably confirmed in recent years by productions of Alcina, Giulio Cesare, Rodelinda, and Tamerlano spanning the spectrum from unforgettable to unsightly, and his mastery of creating vibrant portraits of characters using a musical palette is as evident in Arminio as in any of his more familiar scores. Here, his writing for Segeste, Prince of the Chatti, provides Greek bass Petros Magoulas with the raw materials with which to construct even in the compact space of the rôle’s duration a fully-rounded figure whose part in the action is credibly rendered. Magoulas voices Segeste’s aria in Act One, ‘Fiaccherò quel fiero orgoglio,’ with robust tone and aptly regal declamatory power that in a few stressful passages threatens to upset the singer’s intonation. It is to Händel’s credit that he made from librettist Antonio Salvi’s somewhat stilted words for Segeste a man of flesh and blood, and it is to Magoulas’s credit that he audibly makes Segeste’s flesh ruddy with the rich flow of his vocal plasma.

The Roman Tribune Tullio roars to life in the resonant singing of Catalan countertenor Xavier Sabata, an artist whose every appearance on disc divulges new depths of his bold, charismatic musicality. Tullio’s Act One aria ‘Non deve roman petto dar all’amor ricetto’ inspires Sabata to a performance of uncontainable energy. His timbre glows with overtones that grant his diction special sharpness, and his bravura technique is, as ever, awe-inspiring. Sabata voices Tullio’s aria in Act Two, ‘Con quel sangue dipinta vedrai,’ with an unerring instinct for phrasing that exposes the heart of the text. He is uniquely qualified for enlivening music other singers are content to overlook, and his singing of Tullio heightens the character’s importance in the drama and enhances the histrionic impact of the performance as a whole.

In his heroic portrayal of the Roman general Varo, Spanish tenor Juan Sancho deploys the fearlessness in both fiorature and his upper register that have come to typify his work. In the Act One aria ‘Al lume di due rai più fiero io pugnerò,’ Sancho marches through Händel’s passagework commandingly, the occasional wiriness of the voice enhancing the martial sternness of the character’s proclamations. In Act Three, Sancho dispatches ‘Mira il ciel, vedrai d’Alcide le guerriere armi’ with slancio worthy of a servant of mighty Rome, every challenge met head-on. Sancho’s vocal production can sound strenuous, especially when he seems to be forcing the extreme top of the voice, but it is a process that, while dangerous for other singers, apparently works for him. In Arminio, Sancho’s singing certainly works for Varo.

Singing Sigismondo, Segeste’s son and Ramise’s beloved, countertenor Vince Yi deals handily with the challenging tessitura of music composed by Händel for Gioacchino Conti, known as Gizziello. A singer admired by fellow castrati Caffarelli and Farinelli, arguably the two most famous singers of the Eighteenth Century, Conti’s voice was appreciated for both its emotive capacities and its range, which in Händel’s parts for him extended to C6. A native of South Korea but a child of California, Yi is as plausible a modern stand-in for Conti as could have been engaged for this recording of Arminio, his timbre’s bright patina allied with vowel-centric, on-the-breath vocalism that is here stronger than in past performances and recordings. In Act One, Yi sings Sigismondo’s aria ‘Non son sempre vane larve’ compellingly, his demeanor convincingly masculine and the increased solidity of his singing’s core giving him an edge over similarly-voiced colleagues. Yi’s singing legitimizes Händel’s decision to entrust to Sigismondo the duty of bringing down the curtain on Act One: with his galvanizing account of the aria ‘Posso morir, ma vivere,’ the countertenor verifies that he is among today’s preeminent Händel singers, the voice secure throughout the range and the technique equal to every roulade. Sigismondo’s Act Two aria ‘Quella fiamma, ch’il petto m’accende’ is one of the finest numbers in Arminio, and Yi sings it accordingly, his manner melding refinement with vocal athleticism. In Act Three, Sigismondo’s pair of arias, ‘Il sangue al cor favella’ and ‘Impara a non temer dal mio costante amor,’ are effectively contrasted by Yi’s meticulously-managed tonal shading. Nature provides an unmistakable contrast between Yi’s and Sabata’s voices, but the singers’ stylistic choices, very different but equally effective, enable Yi’s Sigismondo to be easily distinguished from Sabata’s Tullio.

The object of Sigismondo’s affection (and Arminio’s sister), Ramise, is portrayed with sophistication and entrancingly cobalt-hued tones by Romanian mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose, a singer whose renown does not do justice to the tremendous singing of which she is capable. Marginally off her very best form, she is nonetheless a phenomenal asset to this recording of Arminio. As sung by Donose, Ramise’s Act One aria ‘Sento il cor per ogni lato circondato’ is a tour de force, the vocal line churning with the lady’s emotion and drawing from the mezzo-soprano an effusion of glamorous sound, steady and consistent in quality across the wide range. Of similar effectiveness is Donose’s singing of ‘Niente spero, tutto credo’ in Act Two, her dramatic restraint as mesmerizing as her skyrocketing coloratura. In the Act Three duetto with Tusnelda, ‘Quando più minaccia il cielo,’ Donose touchingly limns Ramise’s emotional response to her predicament, her voice shimmering with a theretofore-unheard determination. The electric atmosphere that she creates in the aria ‘Voglio seguir lo sposo’ is evidence of the breadth of Donose’s confidence in this music: whereas many singers must focus their attention primarily upon getting the notes right, Donose has even the most daunting passages well under control and is therefore free to search in her singing for the meanings beyond the notes. Her voice is a magnificent instrument, but her singing of Ramise here confirms anew that the voice is but one element in her vibrantly reactive musical molecule.

Born in British Columbia, soprano Layla Claire brings to her portrayal of Arminio’s wife and Segeste’s daughter Tusnelda a voice touched by a purity like that of the first autumn snows in the Canadian Rockies. From the start of Tusnelda’s Act One duetto with Arminio, ‘Il fuggir, cara mia vita,’ Claire sings attractively and often ravishingly, the freshness of the sound of her upper register bringing to mind the singing of the young Arleen Augér and Helen Donath. The arias ‘Scaglian amore e sangue’ and ‘È vil segno d’un debole amore quel dolore’ provide complementary vistas of Claire’s artistic intelligence, their sentiments handled with consummate good taste and the musical difficulties sweetly cajoled into submission. In Act Two, Claire summons delightfully unexpected bile in her assured, animated singing of ‘Al furor che ti consiglia.’ Tusnelda ends Act Two with her aria ‘Rendimi il dolce sposo,’ and it is difficult to imagine Anna Maria Strada del Pò singing it more plangently than Claire sings it here, the text communicated with great passion and the melodic line traced with moving delicacy. The youthful soprano voices ‘Ho veleno, e ferro avanti’ in Act Three with unstinting dramatic fortitude, her upper register sparkling. Duetting with Ramise in ‘Quando più minaccia il cielo,’ Claire joins her voice with Donose’s organically, their phrasing almost ideally matched. The arias ‘Tra speme e timore mi palpita il core’ and ‘Va, combatti ancor da forte’ are, like those in Act One, managed insightfully. The level of assurance in fiorature is never less than first-rate but is often stellar, and intonation is virtually unassailable. In her final duetto with Arminio, ‘Ritorna nel core vezzosa,’ Claire’s Tusnelda unites with her husband in a beautiful display of bel canto. Many are the Händel heroines who would benefit from Claire’s singing, but her Tusnelda is a particularly valuable addition to the discography.

Interpreting the title rôle of the proud Germanic prince Arminio, Croatian-born countertenor Max Emanuel Cenčić offers some of the best singing he has committed to disc since transitioning from a clarion-voiced male soprano to a mature countertenor with a voice of true star quality. The technical sorcery that Cenčić accomplishes in his traversal of Arminio’s music is not surprising, but it is the incisiveness and ingenuity that he invests in his depictions of the character’s emotions that mark him as an artist of particular importance. When hearing performances of Händel’s music for alto castrati by the preeminent Händel singers of past generations, male and female, the bravura singing is often rousing, but rarely have singers of any era brought to Baroque repertory the finesse and imagination that Cenčić devotes to the music that he sings, not least in Arminio. From his first notes and words in Arminio’s Act One duetto with Tusnelda, ‘Il fuggir, cara mia vita,’ delivered with nobility and focused tone in the lower register that resembles the plangent timbre of a bassett clarinet, Cenčić brings to mind the Angelica of Victoria de los Ángeles in the now-dated Scimone recording of Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso. Cenčić’s singing is a model of Händelian style, of course, but he shares with de los Ángeles a dedication to portraying a character to whose plight listeners will respond rather than crafting an aural pedagogy. The sheer dramatic force of his performance of ‘Al par della mia sorte è forte questo cor’ is riveting. Dominating Act Two as he ought to do, Cenčić’s Arminio lays his soul bare in the aria ‘Duri lacci, voi non siete per me rei di crudeltà,’ the singer’s invigorating vocalism seconded by an actor’s intuitive use of text. He sings ‘Sì, cadrò, ma sorgerà’ with unforced fervor, and his traversal of the exquisitely-written ‘Vado a morir, vi lascio la pace ch’ho nel cor’ throbs with emotion expressed through song. Cenčić catapults into Act Three with a fiery reading of the accompagnato ‘Fier teatro di morte!’ He follows this with an account of the aria ‘Ritorno alle ritorte’ that radiates familiarity with and love for Händel’s vocal idiom, qualities as audible in his singing as his impeccable training and experience. In both the aria ‘Fatto scorta al sentier della gloria’ and the duetto with Tusnelda, ‘Risplende nell’alma amante,’ Cenčić sings superbly whilst also characterizing with laudable specificity. His dexterity remains a marvel, but what distinguishes Cenčić from his countertenor colleagues is the calibre of the voice. Many countertenors sing opera, but Cenčić is a rare countertenor who is a true opera singer in the tradition of Farinelli, Malibran, Pasta, Flagstad, and Callas. His Arminio on these discs is a performance worthy of the tradition of Farinelli’s Artaserse, Malibran’s Maria Stuarda, Pasta’s Norma, Flagstad’s Isolde, and Callas’s Violetta.

Modern technology has in some ways made the recording of opera a far easier undertaking than it was in bygone years, but there are also drawbacks, not the least significant of which is a loss of the unique continuity possible with assembling a group of artists and recording in long takes that, in terms of personal interaction, replicated the excitement of the stage. The performance that the closing chorus, ‘A capir tante dolcezze troppo angusto è ’l nostro cor,’ receives on this recording perfectly illustrates the collaboration that gives this Arminio much of its charisma. The singers truly perform the opera: in recitatives, here rendered as engagingly as on any recording of a Baroque opera, they seem to listen to one another, something that too few singers bother to do even in staged performances. Whether the music being sung is by Händel or Henze, opera is a team sport. With Max Emanuel Cenčić and George Petrou as its co-captains and a team of all-stars playing all positions, this Arminio never misses an opportunity to score.

SIR LENNOX BERKELEY (1903 – 1989), GAVIN BRYARS (born 1943), HERBERT HOWELLS (1892 – 1983), and JOHN JEFFREYS (1927 – 2010): British Music for Harpsichord—Christopher D. Lewis, harpsichord [Recorded at Belvedere Estate, Belvedere, California, USA, 16 – 18 March 2015; NAXOS 8.573668; 1 CD, 71:17; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD (Download | Streaming), Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Like many aspects of human culture, as well as life itself, music is in many ways inherently cyclical. Musical styles are continually evolving, but the courses of trends in both composition and performance are rarely linear. Perhaps the greatest marvel in music in the past century is the way in which musicians have simultaneously looked to the past and the future, the revival of interest in and study of music from the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries markedly influencing the creation of new music. Still, this is anything but an isolated reality. From the pioneering efforts of Wanda Landowska, now regarded by the outspoken Early Music community in nearly equal measures as pariah and prophetess, to the attention of an array of composers spanning the spectrum from Francis Poulenc to Gerald Busby, the harpsichord has benefited enormously from the unique rejuvenation of an unparalleled fusion of past and present. At the apogee of this juggernaut of reassessment and repurposing of an instrument still linked in the minds of many listeners solely with music composed before 1800 is Welsh harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis. As much a musical adventurer as a well-trained virtuoso, Lewis takes the listener during the seventy-one minutes of this thoughtfully-planned and expertly-engineered NAXOS disc on a sometimes challenging, always captivating trek through under-explored compositions for the harpsichord by contemporary British composers. Like Poulenc’s Concert champêtre and Busby’s Court Dances, Parallel, and Camera, these works greatly enrich the harpsichord repertory. Hearing them played by Christopher D. Lewis with a delightfully sophisticated but still unsullied blend of youthful exuberance and artistic maturity substantially enriches appreciation of the capabilities of the harpsichord.

Born in Rhiwbina, Wales, Lewis has obviously been influenced virtually since infancy by his native land’s love of music. His pursuit of education and expansion of his cosmopolitan sensibilities having taken him throughout the world and brought him into contact with some of the foremost masters of the harpsichord, he is especially qualified to bring ‘new’ music for the instrument to the attention of today’s listeners. Sir Lennox Berkeley’s Mr. Pilkington’s Toye and For Vere are ideal showcases for Lewis’s abilities. Playing harpsichord music of any era naturally requires mastery of the technical constitution of the instrument’s mechanism, and this Lewis has of course attained and displays uninhibitedly, but engagingly performing music for an instrument that in many modern minds belongs in Baroque basso continuo consortiums and opera house orchestra pits demands interpretive skills of a particular order. It is apparent in his jocular, even impish playing of Berkeley’s Mr. Pilkington’s Toye that Lewis is the man for the job. Of a wholly different emotional fettle is For Vere, but the performance that it receives from Lewis is of complementary excellence, technique again sharing pride of place with expressive intuition. These pieces do not inhabit the progressive world of Berkeley’s Symphonies, the opera Ruth, and the Missa Brevis, but they possess a purity of invention that is tellingly highlighted by Lewis’s unaffected style of playing.

Herbert Howells was one of Britain’s most gifted composers of the Twentieth Century, but aside from his poignant motet Take him, earth, for cherishing, written to memorialize President John F. Kennedy and imbued with the composer’s mourning for the death of his own son, his work is little known and far too infrequently performed beyond Britain’s borders. The excerpts from Howell’s Clavichord presented here by Lewis provide opportunities to examine facets of Howell’s ingenuity that are astonishingly unlike the melancholically atmospheric choral works upon which his reputation is mostly—and not unjustly—founded. The pieces on this disc afford a glimpse of a lighter-hearted Howells, his talent for musical portraiture making the sequence of works played by Lewis a study in the art of tuneful characterization akin to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The identities of the ‘visitors’ in each of the pieces are not difficult to discern, but the voice that emerges most resonantly from the chorus is Howells’s. The lovely ‘Goff’s Fireside’ is offered in performances on the 1997 Flemish double harpsichord after the Ruckers school by San Francisco-based maker Kevin Fryer employed for the balance of the Howells pieces and a 1982 Australian replica of a 1604 muselar, the peculiar northern European, right-oriented virginal, both responding dulcetly to Lewis’s touch. [Other selections on the disc are played on a Pleyel harpsichord dating from the 1930s, an instrument of the type espoused by Wanda Landowska and in this case originally purchased by Toronto’s historic Eaton Auditorium.] The Arcadian lilt of ‘Patrick’s Siciliano,’ enchantingly phrased by Lewis, is followed by the explosive ‘Jacob’s Brawl,’ in which the young harpsichordist’s nimble fingers deliver jabs and hooks that never miss their marks. Then, the deceptive flow of ‘Dart’s Sarabande’ is transformed by Lewis into a radiant, almost operatic account of ‘Andrew’s Air,’ the musician’s technical and interpretive dexterities finding compelling outlets in Howells’s music. An early champion of restoring to Baroque repertory some measure of authentic, period-appropriate performance practices, Sir Adrian would be thrilled by Lewis’s crisp, rhythmically dazzling playing of ‘Boult’s Brangill.’ ‘Dyson’s Delight’ is, as played here, just that: a delight. ‘Ralph’s Pavane and Galliard’ are unconventionally symmetrical, and the intelligence with which they are dispatched by Lewis gives them elements that bond as naturally as hydrogen and oxygen. The title of ‘Finzi’s Rest’ might at first glance be deemed a misnomer, but the quietude at its core, enhanced by Lewis’s finely-judged approach, confirms the sagacity of Howells’s insight. There is indeed a visionary epic lurking beneath the simple façade of ‘Malcolm’s Vision,’ and Lewis is careful to spotlight but not exaggerate it and succeeds by interpreting the piece succinctly. His performance of ‘Julian’s Dream,’ one of the finest of these pieces, is aptly ethereal without descending into saccharine over-emoting. Any listener whose view of Howells is of a humorless wretch composing in order to excise his demons should hear Lewis’s performance of ‘Walton’s Toye’ if only to realize how unfair it is to thus dismiss this wonderfully multi-dimensional composer. Lewis has performed a great service to Howells with this recording.

Played by Lewis with precisely the right balance of free-spiritedness and seriousness, Gavin Bryars’s After Handel’s “Vesper” is a work of considerable charm and artistic merit, an affectionate homage that wields the cutting edge of typically British parody. There is nothing explicitly satirical in Bryars’s music, per se, but the nod to the great tunesmith of Brook Street is at least as good-naturedly humorous as it is artistically reverential. The same can be said of Lewis’s playing of the piece: in short, his performance is tremendous fun but never farcical. One hears Händel like a voice from another room—a mighty, strongly-accented voice, natürlich, but not an overbearing one. The amiable conversation that Bryars shared with Händel is gleefully shared by Lewis with the listener.

Among the composers whose works are featured on this disc, John Jeffreys will perhaps be the least-familiar to listeners without in-depth knowledge of British music in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Lacking the widespread recognition allotted to Britten and Tippett, Jeffreys was no less a dedicated artist than his more famous countrymen, and in certain respects, not the least of which is its unapologetic melodic appeal, his music is more accessible than his colleagues’ frequently-played scores. His Four Little English Dances in the Georgian manner are vibrant pieces, their broadly-styled structures reminding the listener that, from a strictly historical perspective, the ‘Georgian manner’ encompasses virtually all of the Eighteenth Century and a sliver of the Nineteenth, too. The Poco allegro dance transports the hearer to the stately sitting rooms of Bath, where one might have a turn about the floor with the denizens of Henry Fielding’s novels. There is as much of Sir Arthur Sullivan in Jeffreys’s idiom as there is of Thomas Arne and William Boyce, and Lewis plays the music with sonorous, mercurial charm. He phrases the Andantino with a delicacy that seems more Victorian than Georgian, disclosing a lightness in the music that hints at strict-mannered aloofness. Likewise, the subtle but uncomplicated strains of the Poco andantino might just as accurately be described as being in the Edwardian manner, there being a vein of restraint coursing through the music. Ever a communicative artist, Lewis here divulges that his gift for subtlety is as commendable as his flair for boldness. The vivacious Allegro ma non troppo dance is a boisterous British stag party in musical form: Lewis’s playing earns him—and the composer—a hearty pint.

For many otherwise well-informed advocates of Classical Music, the harpsichord is perceived as an instrument that, in its natural habitats of sorts, tinkled unobtrusively as fat castrati shouted hours of tedious recitative at one another and as bewigged ladies, corseted within a millimeter of asphyxiation, chatted about nothing; and that it is now a living relic, a quaint musical dinosaur encountered without great interest except when entrusted to the hands of virtuosi who play the immortal masterworks of Bach, Händel, Rameau, the Couperins, and the Scarlattis. In music, though, anything of extraordinary merit is unlikely to go unnoticed indefinitely, and it is to their credit that Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century composers have embraced the harpsichord as a thriving, thrilling vehicle for their creative impulses. Neither this fascinating instrument nor the contemporary composers who write for it could hope for representation on disc by a more persuasive musical proselytizer than Christopher D. Lewis.

Old instrument, young master: Welsh harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis [Photo © by Christopher D. Lewis]