FRÉDÉRIC FRANÇOIS CHOPIN (1810 – 1849), ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810 – 1856), and ANDERS ELIASSON (1947 – 2013): Personae—Beth Levin, piano [Recorded at Peter Karl Studios, New York City, USA, on 27 July 2015; Navona Records NV6016; 1 CD, 67:32; Available from ClassicsOnline HD (Download | Streaming), Amazon (USA), iTunes, Presto Classical (UK), Spotify, and major music retailers]

One of the foremost keys necessary to discerning an important pianist from the teeming throngs of people who endeavor to make their living by playing the instrument is the manner in which that key’s significance alongside its eighty-seven siblings is examined, analyzed, and conveyed to the listener. If such an assertion seems to be an exercise in semantics, that is because, as Hamlet might have suggested, knowing not ‘seems,’ it is, but it is nevertheless a logical assessment. The world’s conservatories continue to flood concert stages and recital halls with highly-educated pianists with chrome-plated techniques who play as though they cannot distinguish a ground bass from a gruppetto. When such distinctions are also lost on many audiences, it is too easy to surmise and accept that artistic standards no longer matter. Thankfully, vitally, there are some few artists like Beth Levin and discs of the calibre of her Navona release Personae to remind everyone from the casual listener to the aspiring pianist that important art and artists inevitably distinguish themselves: observers need only have the good sense to surrender to their charms. In the performances of works by Chopin, Schumann, and Eliasson on this disc, engineered by Peter Karl with balance and clarity that replicate the warm acoustic of an intimate recital hall, one of today’s most poetic pianists crafts musical verses that proclaim, ‘The legacy of great pianism is far from dead when fingers such as these still the keyboard tread.’

It is sometimes suggested that aural evidence of Robert Schumann’s struggles with sanity is manifested in his music. Perhaps there is some validity in this assertion, but it is equally valid to argue that the very act of attempting to translate one’s thoughts into musical notation that can be followed by others is madness. Insanity, it has been said, is performing the same action repeatedly with an expectation of different results, but is this not a defining property of artistic endeavor? That Beth Levin’s playing of Schumann is different from other pianists’ is what makes her work unique and markedly elevates the intrinsic merit of Personae. Essentially dances in name only, Schumann’s Opus 6 Davidsbündlertänze—mature works despite the opus number—are vibrant pieces that soar to the euphoric highs and plunge to the despondent lows that characterized the composer’s courtship of his beloved Clara. In the first three of the ‘dances,’ I. Lebhaft, II. Innig, and III. Mit Humor, Levin immediately discloses her uncanny ability to simultaneously pinpoint the vast differences among the pieces and establish and maintain an extraordinary degree of continuity. The extent to which Levin conveys the essence of each individual piece is exceptional, but her ability to identify and perpetuate the parallels among them is a hallmark of an atypically perceptive musician. The next sequence—IV. Ungeduldig, V. Einfach, and VI. Sehr rasch—also reveals surprising breadth of kinship, complemented by the searching treatment that they receive from Levin. Her approach to VII. Nicht schnell is particularly successful, but she plays VIII. Frisch, IX. Lebhaft, and the ingenius X. Balladenmäßig - Sehr rasch with similar effectiveness, the irreproachable rhythmic consistency of her playing lending each number its own expressive microcosm and also links it to its brethren among the Davidsbündlertänze. Most significantly, Levin unaffectedly realizes Schumann’s goal of pacing Davidsbündlertänze as a metaphysical conversation between his much-discussed musical alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius. In XI. Einfach, XII. Mit Humor, XIII. Wild und lustig, and XIV. Zart und singend, the debate rages, points and counterpoints discharged by Levin’s wrists with electric intensity. The final four pieces—XV. Frisch, XVI. Mit gutem Humor, XVII. Wie aus der Ferne, and XVIII. Nicht schnell—are played as thoughtfully as they are powerfully, the pianist’s technique encompassing fingering that enables her to bring off marvels of phrasing that elucidate frequently-overlooked details of Schumann’s impressive musical architecture. Some pianists make the mistake of misinterpreting the title of Davidsbündlertänze and playing the score as though it were a miniature Swan Lake, thereby depriving the work of much of its special cogency. Levin’s performance is perfectly calibrated to the scale of the music, divulging both the inventiveness of Schumann’s music and her incredible skill for playing it.

Playing Frédéric Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 in B♭ minor (Opus 35), often called the Funeral March owing to its emblematic third movement and the prevailing sobriety of the Sonata as a whole, is a pianist’s equivalent of singing the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde. The opening movement, Grave – Doppio movimento, demands the concentration of a prize fighter: if the pianist loses focus for a moment, Chopin’s music will leave her breathless and embarrassed on the mat. Levin’s playing of the movement combines the near-operatic phrasing of Ivan Moravec with the pragmatism of John Ogdon, but her reading is very much her own. Her handling of the Scherzo shudders with aggression masquerading as broad humor, and the rhythmic precision of her performance never jeopardizes the elasticity of her emotional response to the music. It is here especially difficult to believe that all of the music on Personae was recorded in a single day: few performances edited from material recorded in multiple sessions reach the levels of technical and sentimental mastery of the music that Levin exhibits. She plays the bel canto Marche funèbre: Lento with unexaggerated sincerity, finding Chopin’s tempo and dynamic markings liberating rather than confining. In the final movement, Finale: Presto, the pianist consistently places principal emphasis on the music itself rather than her playing of it, meeting Chopin’s requirements with unperturbed dignity. This is an account of the Sonata projected not to the last row of a recital hall but to each listener’s singular sensibilities, both engaging and empowering the hearer’s imagination. With her performance of the Sonata on Personae, this Brünnhilde of the keyboard earns her arms and armor.

Published in 1987 and first performed in Stockholm in 1988, Swedish composer Anders Eliasson’s Disegno 2 for piano solo is a mature but exploratory work, roughly contemporary with several of the larger-scaled pieces for which Eliasson is most known. The composer’s innovatively contrapuntal idiom is always apparent, but this is audibly the music of an artist still grappling with the collisions of centuries-old formulae with trends in late-Twentieth-Century avant-garde composition. It is a gift for pianists with the technical competency necessary to navigate its difficulties and interpretive insights sufficient to face its evocative nuances head on. Levin brings precisely these qualities to her playing of Disegno 2, her performance highlighting the cleverness of the piece’s construction. The ears are always lured to the primary subject as Eliasson surely intended, but none of the music’s inner voices can complain of being unheard. Perhaps most surprisingly, Levin’s execution of Disegno 2 causes Eliasson’s music to seem a wholly appropriate bridge between the works by Schumann and Chopin.

That Personae is a valuable release is evident from the first bars that issue from it. That it is a disc of rare interpretive insight and technical achievement becomes more evident with each subsequent bar. There are legions of pianists capable of accurately playing notes, but only true artists lift music from the page and give it life that becomes a part of the listener’s community of musical experiences. It seems counterintuitive to state that an artist should carve her own path within the landscape of traditions and methodologies because individuality is such an inalienable component of art, but the work of so many of today’s pianists suggests that they are taught that, like far too much of modern education, the interpretation of music is a conveniently finite, multiple-choice undertaking; not so Beth Levin’s profoundly personal playing on Personae. Emily Dickinson wrote that ‘Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed.’ As this disc plays, the sounds of true artistry at the piano fall all the more sweetly upon ears so unused to encountering them.

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione—Troy Cook (Figaro), Cecelia Hall (Rosina), Andrew Owens (Il Conte d’Almaviva), Adam Lau (Don Basilio), Tyler Simpson (Dottore Bartolo), Marie Ashley (Berta), Charles Hyland (Fiorello), Wade Henderson (Un ufficiale); North Carolina Opera Orchestra and Chorus; Timothy Myers, conductor [Stephanie Havey, Director; Scott MacLeod, Chorus Master; Jeff Harris, Lighting Designer; Sondra Nottingham, Wig and Makeup Designer; North Carolina Opera, Memorial Auditorium, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina; Friday, 1 April 2016]

Whether in opera, theatre, literature, or any other artistic genre, one of the finest of the proverbial fine lines is that separating true comedy from the merely inane. Few evenings in the opera house are more excruciating than those on which audiences are exposed to scores or productions—or scores and productions—that aim at comedy but consistently miss the mark. On the other hand, those few occasions when composers’, librettists’, and performers’ efforts at comedy find their targets can produce unforgettable experiences. Directed with flair and a raucous sense of joy by Stephanie Havey, North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia—a staging that originated at the Glimmerglass Festival and will be revived by Opera San Antonio in 2017—came tantalizingly close to stepping wholly over the line into genuine comedy that could be enjoyed without reservations; so close, in fact, that the performance’s few defects, none of which upset the equilibrium of the performance, quickly faded into insignificance. Perfection is admirable, but how often is it enjoyable on a level that prompts patrons to leave a theatre after a show, saying to one another, ‘That was really fun’?

When Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione, a setting of Cesare Sterbini’s adaptation of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s seminal 1775 play Le barbier de Séville, premièred at Rome’s Teatro Argentina on 20 February 1816, Rossini was a week away from his twenty-fourth birthday. Several of his most noteworthy and lucrative successes were already behind him, and his final opera, Guillaume Tell, lay only a dozen years in future. Despite the quality of many of his scores and the recent interest in them beyond the Rossini shrines of Pesaro and Bad Wildbad, Barbiere remains the opera upon the shoulders of which its composer’s fame is hoisted, and, no matter how many times an observer has seen the opera performed, a wholly satisfactory Barbiere justifies the score’s prominence in both the Rossini canon and the international repertory at large. With wonderfully colorful and occasionally slightly confusing costumes by Howard Tsvi Kaplan, originally designed for Sarasota Opera [Lindoro looked as though he strolled out of the pages of Pride and Prejudice, but the Conte was the epitome of Eighteenth-Century chic: were poor students more ‘fashion forward’ than aristocrats in Rossini’s Siviglia?], Sondra Nottingham’s typically effective wigs and makeup, and Jeff Harris’s intuitive lighting designs, North Carolina Opera’s Barbiere looked as lively as it sounded. The production’s mobile sets by the widely-admired John Conklin were essentially a character in the comedy but one whose part was not over-done, and strategically placing Rossini’s portrait above the rickety piano—no Bösendorfers or Broadwoods, chez Bartolo—for the Lesson Scene was a crafty touch. Best of all were the bicycles: Figaro ringing his bike’s bell in time to the orchestral introduction to his celebrated cavatina was fantastic. One shudders to think of the piles of money that are spent on far more elaborate productions that are far less successful than this picturesque but abidingly uncluttered Barbiere at conjuring the worlds depicted in composers’ scores.

Stationery storm: Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Dottor Bartolo (center) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

After witnessing his masterful conducting of Mozart, Timothy Myer’s confident, debonair handling of Rossini’s music was not unexpected, but it is always astonishing and gratifying to observe the manner in which this insightful musician wields his baton like a spotlight, focusing performers’ and listeners’ attention on details large and small that facilitate full appreciation of composers’ and librettists’ creations. In this performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Myers lit firecrackers in the orchestra that detonated hilariously, the playing of the North Carolina Opera Orchestra first-rate from the opening bars of the famous Overture—borrowed, of course, from Aureliano in Palmira and Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, both serious operas. Guided by Myers, whose ear for instrumental timbres rivals the late Sinopoli’s, the woodwinds had a particularly fine evening, their phrasing and intonation setting a high standard for their colleagues in the pit and on the stage. Even in the Temporale, its opening wind passages prefiguring the similar scene in Act Three of Verdi’s Rigoletto, the percussionists’ playing was restrained, allowing the palette of colors in the music to emerge with atypical clarity. In Myers’s handling of the score, complemented by Laurie Rogers’s inventive harpsichord continuo and red-blooded but always shapely singing by the gentlemen of Dr. Scott MacLeod’s impeccably-trained North Carolina Opera Chorus, it was unusually easy to imagine the central characters in Barbiere morphing into their older, more careworn selves in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. The enthusiastic ovations that Myers receives from Raleigh audiences are merited, not just for individual performances but, perhaps more significantly, for the continuing elevation of standards that his leadership has initiated, as well. With exuberant but logical tempi and management of ensembles that went awry commendably infrequently, Myers guided a performance of tremendous humor possible only through the work of a very serious musician.

A reliable aspect of recent North Carolina Opera productions has been excellent casting of secondary rôles, and this Barbiere di Siviglia furthered that trend in glorious fashion. Though not uttering a single word, Joseph Stephens’s Ambrogio enriched every scene in which he appeared, whether partially hiding under his laundry basket, suddenly taking a liking to swordplay, or rejoicing in the final scene at the return of a purloined equine figurine. The foremost regret inspired by tenor Wade Henderson’s singing as Melot in North Carolina Opera’s November 2014 concert performance of Act Two of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was that he had so little to sing, and the same complaint must be made about his Ufficiale in Barbiere. Appearing in the Act One finale, Henderson was splendidly commanding as the voice of constabulary authority, the voice ringing like the clink of handcuffs. As the bandmaster-for-hire Fiorello, baritone Charles Hyland sang ‘Piano, pianissimo senza parlar’ at the opera’s start with handsome tone and acted his part to perfection. [The onstage musicians’ eager petitioning of the Conte for immediate and generous payment brought to mind the Duke of Plaza Toro’s assessment in the Gilbert and Sullivan gem The Gondoliers: ‘That’s so like a band!’] A member of the University of Mount Olive music faculty, mezzo-soprano Marie Ashley schooled the audience in the art of operatic comedic timing with her live-wire performance as Berta, Bartolo’s long-suffering housemaid. Ashley’s voice soared in the Act One finale, encountering no trouble with doubling Rosina’s line as it climbed above the stave, and she was the rare Berta whose Act Two arietta ‘Il vecchiotto cerca moglie’ was a delight. Rossini clearly intended that Berta should be entrusted to a singer no less capable than the lady cast as Rosina, and North Carolina Opera heeded this implicit instruction, Ashley proving as wonderful in the second finale as in the first. The character’s predicament notwithstanding, there is no reason why Berta must sound like a superannuated comprimaria: rather, she ought to sound as Ashley sang her in Raleigh.

The slandering music tutor, or Seiji Ozawa makes a cameo in Raleigh: (from left to right) Baritone Troy Cook as Figaro, bass Adam Lau as Don Basilio, and bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Dottor Bartolo in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

The casting of Adam Lau, the fantastic Leporello in North Carolina Opera’s 2015 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as Rossini’s Don Basilio was an instance of an ideal intersection of singer and rôle. A delectably conspiratorial—and kleptomaniacal!—presence in Act One, Lau delivered the aria ‘La calunnia è un venticello’ with amplitude that packed the punch of a ‘colpo di cannone,’ only the final bars slightly compromised by forcing. In the Act One finale, Lau voiced Basilio’s lines with sonorous aplomb. His collapse when ‘wounded’ by a flying pillow in the cleverly-staged ‘battle’ between rival factions was worthy of vintage Rick Flair. As the centerpiece of the Act Two Quintetto, Lau amusingly sang and acted Basilio’s befuddlement, willing both to suffer his sudden malady’s ill effects and to recover from them with equal rapidity depending upon which circumstance yielded the greater windfall. Vocally, Lau was as solid a Basilio as can be heard in any production of Barbiere today, a rival to the exalted legacies of Ezio Pinza and Cesare Siepi, and he was fabulously buffo without being a buffoon.

Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson proved to be one of the most elusive commodities in opera: a Bartolo who actually sang his music. Looking quite smart and engagingly smug in his emerald-green suit and polished-copper periwig, Simpson’s Bartolo stalked the stage with the nervous energy of an out-of-practice predator. Briefly sparring with Rosina before her window in Act One, his was paternal sternness not to be ignored, and bass-baritone and bass were particularly well-matched in Bartolo’s scene with Don Basilio, Simpson’s querulous ‘No’ when rejecting Basilio’s suggestion of eliminating the Conte as a rival for Rosina via well-timed slander enunciated with deadpan disposition. Simpson’s performance of the aria ‘A un dottor della mia sorte’ was marvelous (and, again, truly sung), the patter dispatched with brilliance and the full range of the music covered with ease. Simpson took command of the Act One finale with sly humor, throwing caution to the wind and thrillingly unleashing the full power of his voice—and brandishing a walking stick with the braggadocio of Douglas Fairbanks. In his scene at the beginning of Act Two, this Bartolo made something peculiarly touching of his statement of ‘Ma vedi il mio destino!’ Like the most insightful interpreters of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Simpson allowed Bartolo’s heart to penetrate the brusqueness for a moment, giving his interpretation even greater immediacy. In the duet with the Conte, now disguised as Don Basilio’s supposed protégé Don Alonso, the bass-baritone’s vocalism radiated annoyance and suspicion. Unsurprisingly, his account of the arietta ‘Quando mi sei vicina amabile Rosina’ in response to Rosina’s singing lesson was music, not bluster. In the grand Quintetto and the opera’s final scene, Simpson gradually transformed Bartolo’s foolishness into graciousness: his gesture of kissing Rosina’s hand after realizing that he was outwitted was both conciliatory and affectionate. Vocally and histrionically, Simpson was a Bartolo in the now-endangered tradition of Sesto Bruscantini. Above all, his performance was a rousing confirmation of the oft-ignored wisdom of good singing being just as important in comedy as in tragedy.

The Doctor is in: Mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina (left) and bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Dottor Bartolo (right) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

The rôle of the amorous young Conte d’Almaviva was first sung by Spanish tenor Manuel García, a legendary figure in the history of opera as both a singer and a pedagogue, and has subsequently been interpreted by a wide array of tenors, some of whom had as little business singing Rossini as García would have had singing Verdi’s—rather than Rossini’s—Otello. To the class of natural-born modern Conti d’Almaviva like Cesare Valletti, Ugo Benelli, Alfredo Kraus, Luigi Alva, Bruce Ford, and Juan Diego Flórez belongs Andrew Owens, whose singing in Raleigh combined technical brilliance with tonal beauty that served as a reminder that the clever aristocrat was also an early rôle for Giuseppe di Stefano. All being fair in love and war but emphatically not in opera, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain during performances of Il barbiere di Siviglia why the cultivated Rosina would prefer her earnest but supposedly penniless swain Lindoro—our quick-thinking Conte in disguise, of course—to the canny Figaro. Looking as though he just stepped off of a Hollywood studio lot, Owens scored a triumph for the ranks of less-glamorous Conti by leaving no doubt of why Rosina’s well-guarded heart palpitated for him and him alone. What counted most was that the sounds that he made were as attractive as the smile that he wielded like a starburst. Spreading his irrepressible elation over the stage like a sunrise, this Conte serenaded his beloved with plangent tones. Owens phrased the Act One cavatina ‘Ecco ridente in cielo spunta la bella aurora’ with effortless bel canto, rising to the tops As and B with aptly noble poise. He decorated his performance of the lovely serenade ‘Se il mio nome saper voi bramate, dal mio labbro il mio nome ascoltate’ with dashingly original ornaments. Rosina was surely not the only lady in the theatre inclined to open her window to take in such golden sounds. Owens made easy going of the punishing triplets in the passaggio in the duet with Figaro, and his singing of ‘Ehi di casa...buona gente’ as the inebriated soldier in the Act One finale was side-splitting. The Act Two duet with Bartolo drew from this natural comedian repetitions of ‘Pace e gioia sia con voi’ that grew steadily more insistent. Accompanying Rosina’s lesson, Owens’s mock-pianism would have caused Victor Borge to blush with admiration and envy. His voice fizzed with excitement in the spirited Terzetto with Rosina and Figaro. With such a capable Conte on hand, it was a pity that time constraints conspired to exclude the aria ‘Cessa di più resistere’ from the performance, but Owens was in every other way a winningly complete Almaviva who emitted many a phrase that brought the inimitable Tito Schipa to mind.

Alter egos: Bass Adam Lau as Don Basilio (left) and tenor Andrew Owens as ‘Don Alonso’ (né Conte d’Almaviva, right) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

Rossini is rarely cited as a master of deeply-considered characterizations, but Rosina is a deceptively difficult rôle, especially for younger singers. Being a Spanish lady with a piquant streak, Rosina too often falls victim to interpretations that make her a sort of coloratura Carmen. Underplay her vivacity, and she is apt to seem a pallid waif unlikely to attract as practiced a tomcat as the Conte: overplay her independence, and she can seem an equally undesirable shrew. North Carolina Opera’s Barbiere di Siviglia had in mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall a Rosina of both style and substance, one who created a carefully-balanced, three-dimensional character without sacrificing any of the sheer fun—or the volleys of notes—of the part. Occasionally, she was slightly too subdued for her surroundings, though this admittedly deepened the contrast between this innocent young woman—she intended to bring along her doll, teddy bear, and favorite pillow when fleeing with the Conte, after all—and her boorish guardian. It was a most timid creature who appeared at the window during Lindoro’s serenading in Act One, but sparks flying in the recitatives with Bartolo and the Conte hinted at the fire that burned beneath the cool exterior. The newly-ignited conflagration melted the frost in Hall’s demeanor in the cavatina ‘Una voce poco fa,’ the singer spitting out the words in the Moderato section, ‘Io sono docile, son rispettosa,’ with well-controlled abandon. In the duet with Figaro, ‘Dunque io son...tu non m’inganni,’ her singing combined feminine charm and a wily grasp of sexual politicking. Hall’s awestruck articulation of the Andante ‘Freddo ed immobile come una statua fiato non restagli da respirar’ in the Act One finale was wonderful. In the Lesson Scene in Act Two, Rossini’s intended aria, ‘Contro un cor che accende amore,’ was preferred, and Hall reached its top As effortlessly. The Terzetto with the Conte and Figaro received especially dulcet treatment from the comely young lady, her unaffected pronouncement of ‘Ah! qual colpo inaspettato’ garnering a deserved burst of laughter from the audience. Her joy spilling over the footlights in the opera’s finale, Hall’s Rosina earned her happy ending. Aside from a few inaudible notes at the very bottom of the compass, likely the results of the singer’s judicious way with balancing head and chest registers, Hall’s comfort with both the range and the bravura requirements of Rosina’s music—including a respectable trill—was praiseworthy. Barbiere can function effectively enough with a merely serviceable Rosina, but how exhilarating this Barbiere was with an expert one!

Boredom is hard to bear: Mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

With a Rosina and Conte such as North Carolina Opera’s production supplied, it was difficult for a Figaro to dominate the opera, but baritone Troy Cook left no doubt about whose name—or professional identity, at any rate—is on the score’s title page. [The opera having been first performed with the title Almaviva was an act of deference to Giovanni Paisiello, composer of a then-still-fashionable earlier setting of Il barbiere di Siviglia, it should be remembered.] Entering on bicycle like a vision from Il postino, Cook sang Figaro’s Act One cavatina ‘Largo al factotum della città,’ one of opera’s most iconic numbers, with swaggering virility, the high tessitura and tongue-twisting patter manfully conquered. The prowess of this Figaro’s Dulcamara-esque matchmaking was indeed magical: the portrayers of the adorable sevillano couple that he brought together on the stage, Chandler Clarke and clarion-voiced chorister Jacob Kato, are betrothed off the stage, too. Bravissimo, Figaro! Joining with the Conte in their brainstorming duet, the glee in Cook’s voicing of ‘All’idea di quel metallo’ was infectious, and he and Owens exhibited finely-honed synchronicity in the difficult triplets. Similarly impressive was Cook’s reading of Figaro’s part in the duet with Rosina, ‘Dunque io son...tu non m’inganni.’ Unlike many singers, he resorted to no faking or simplification: he had the notes and the skill needed to project them into the auditorium. With his cherry-red top hat and feline suavity, Cook’s Figaro danced through the Act One finale like a benevolent Mefistofele. Bounding about the stage with growing anxiety in the Act Two Quintetto and, even more so, the Terzetto with Rosina and the Conte, Cook’s Figaro was clearly unnerved by feeling dominion over his situation slipping from his fingers, but the baritone’s vocalism never faltered. Even in the opera’s final scene, Cook’s voice shone among his colleagues’ high-wattage singing. Hearing the assurance with which he sauntered through Figaro’s roulades, it was remarkable to recall that Cook was also a wholly satisfying Marcello in North Carolina Opera’s 2014 production of Puccini’s La bohème. Who since the retirement of Robert Merrill has beguiled the public with top-quality performances of such very different rôles?

Man in demand: Baritone Troy Cook as Figaro (center) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

What makes Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia genuinely funny is the nucleus of humanity that exerts an insurmountable force on the buzzing particles of the music, keeping even the orbits of the frothiest moments of comedy on course. What too many performers fail to realize or fully respect is that Rossini suffused his score with music that pulses with laughter of its own accord: Barbiere does not need singers’, conductors’, or directors’ assistance to be funny. No, what Barbiere needs is the integrity of a team of artists who approach the score not as a comic opera requiring special tinkering but simply as a musical work of art that deserves unbiased, unblemished interpretation and integrity, and this is what North Carolina Opera’s performance bestowed upon this still-precious gem of an opera.

[1] NIMROD BORENSTEIN (born 1969): Suspended opus 69—das freie orchester Berlin; Laércio Diniz, conductor [Recorded in Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin, Germany, 27 – 28 August 2015; Solaire Records SOL1001; 1 CD, 40:16; Available from Solaire Records and major music retailers]

[2] FRANZ LISZT (1811 – 1886): The Franciscan Works– Late Music for Piano—Sandro Ivo Bartoli, piano [Recorded in Reitstadel, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Germany, 28 May 2015; Solaire Records SOL1002; 1 CD, 60:56; Available from Solaire Records and major music retailers]

A few years ago, a supporter of Voix des Arts resigned from his ‘stable’ job in global finance in order to launch a new career with a boutique record label dedicated to the preservation of vintage Classical recordings and the recording of contemporary Classical Music. This decision prompted a mutual friend to opine, ‘There is no future in that,’ a sentiment with which many casual observers and even some industry insiders would surely have been inclined to agree. In the intervening few years, that prophecy has proved inaccurate, however. The challenges faced by the recording industry in general are intensified in the Classical arena by the inherent specialization of the music itself: the audience for Classical recordings is smaller than that for releases from the latest sensations in popular music, is more discerning, and—in an Utopian environment, at least—has distinctly higher expectations. Likewise, the problems of digital media are both manifold and inherently ambiguous, with even the Classical industry increasingly falling victim to the shadowy download circuit that undermines the integrity and exclusivity of new releases. Gone, perhaps forever despite the resurgence of recordings on vinyl, are the days when enthusiasts queued up to purchase new recordings as soon as they become available, but the most frustrating aspect of the difficulties faced by Classical recording labels is that this enthusiasm is now more prevalent ever. It hardly seems possible in a world in which new technologies making music more accessible emerge almost on a daily basis that uniting interested listeners with interesting music could be a daunting task, but the decision makers at the helms of many labels large and small often fail to take advantage of the opportunities available to them. Indifferently-engineered recordings of tired repertory are no longer acceptable in an environment in which opinions are expressed in 140 or fewer characters and unsatisfactory recordings are deleted as easily as they are downloaded. The brainchild of visionary Tonmeister Dirk Fischer, Solaire Records is an enterprise that defies the currents of slickly-produced, artistically inert recordings. The label’s inaugural releases, masterfully-recorded and intelligently-presented recordings of works by composers who on the surface seem as dissimilar as Cavalli and Cage, usher in a long-overdue return by like-minded artists to the aesthetics espoused by legends of the recording studio like Walter Legge and John Culshaw. It is regrettable that labels like Solaire are so few, but platinum has ever been scarcer than lead.

Premièred at London’s Royal Opera House in conjunction with the 2015 International Mime Festival as the musical score for Gandini Juggling’s 4x4 Ephemeral Architectures, Nimrod Borenstein’s Suspended opus 69 is a work that deserved to be recorded. A singular talent with interests as broad as his education and experiences, Borenstein has here created music of enduring value that demands to be heard, and this Solaire release offers the listener an extraordinary opportunity to make the acquaintance of Suspended within a proper context, complementing the superbly-engineered recording with informative, insightful essays by Tobias Fischer and Gandini Juggling’s presiding genius, Sean Gandini. Borenstein’s music is the soul and raison d’être for this recording, however, and it is difficult to imagine a traversal of any score that would be more fulfilling for its composer. To hold in one’s hands a disc upon which one’s own music is played so affectionately must inspire indescribable sensations, but the impact of hearing this disc is no less astonishing for the listener with no personal involvement with the music. Of course, one cannot hear this recording without developing profoundly personal involvement with Suspended.

The eight movements of Suspended reveal a deep comprehension of compositional techniques extending from Renaissance polyphony to trends in Twenty-First-Century music. There are occasional accents that recall other composers, but Borenstein’s musical language is engagingly original, stimulating the listener to seek meaning in the context of the score rather than relying upon preconceptions and much-abused formulae. In the Mysterious opening of ‘The world of yesterday,’ sound aptly emerges from primordial silence with much the same effect that Wagner achieved in the opening bars of Das Rheingold. The implications of the drama that simmers in Suspended are stingingly intimate rather than coldly heroic, however: as the Mysterious introduction evolves into the Moderato conclusion of ‘The world of yesterday,’ Borenstein’s ingenious manipulation of motivic writing undermines the tranquility of the aural landscape, suggesting that the reflection of himself that the listener is asked to contemplate is unnervingly unpleasant. This is representative of the tremendous power of Suspended. Propelled by sparsely-textured but beautiful, often almost Baroque string writing, Borenstein’s music lures the listener into charmed recesses that gradually shed their finery to reveal the ugly foundations, all too readily ignored, upon which beauty is built. Mahler was the great master of this elusive ambiguity, but Borenstein rivals Mahler’s expressive complexity with far greater economy of means. The purposes of every note are multifarious.

The subsequent movements, ‘Suspended’ and ‘Stillness,’ are starkly appealing, Borenstein’s writing for strings again cloaking uncomfortable sentiments in plush tonal velvet. Brazilian conductor Laércio Diniz and the musicians of das freie orchester berlin scale their performance to the natural dimensions of the music, unleashing avalanches of sound in extroverted passages that ideally complement the score’s prevailing if deceptive serenity. The spirited but subdued ‘Tango’ is as much a dance of the soul as of the body, its rhythms tightly-wound but strangely uninhibiting, an impression enhanced by Diniz’s energetic negotiations of the composer’s tempi and dynamic markings. The genuine spirit of the tango is here more present than in many composers’ more literal uses of the dance.

The ethos that permeates ‘Annoyed’ perpetuates the ambivalence that Borenstein cultivates so tellingly in Suspended. Perhaps the anxiety that gurgles like a spring beneath the surface of the music is reassuring because Borenstein’s score presents it as a wholly normal, omnipresent element of humanity. To doubt, Suspended seems to say, is to feel. What is felt in ‘Annoyed’ is not so much an obvious perturbation as a mounting exasperation at calling out without being heard. Carefully managing the orchestral sound, Diniz heightens the emotional impact of the composer’s depiction of isolation even in the midst of a vibrant community.

The dichotomy at the heart of ‘Boys and girls’ is not a conventional gender paradigm but a far simpler evocation of the divisions that occur in society: female and male, gay and straight, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. In the dangerous soil of these fields, Borenstein cultivates a delicate, lusciously erotic pas de deux that at once sweetly cajoles and insinuates more sinister meanings. Diniz and the Berlin musicians shape their performance of ‘Boys and girls’ with great eloquence, creating an atmosphere in which it is apparent to the listener that Borenstein is no less successful than Tchaikovsky at conceiving music for dance in which far more of the drama’s psychology is heard in the orchestra than is seen upon the stage. The title of ‘Pizzicato serenade’ says much about the message and construction of the movement, and the Berlin musicians play it marvelously, the strings’ pizzicato playing as full-bodied and resonant as their bowing. Suspended’s final movememt, ‘Tomorrow’s waltz,’ is both a wistful farewell to the past and a profoundly optimistic anticipation of the future, both within the context of the score and in the broader sense of Borenstein’s path as an artist. Like all of the score’s movements, the striking waltz is played with compelling immediacy by das freie orchester berlin and conducted with skill and emotional involvement by Laércio Diniz. Musically, emotionally, and technologically, this is a disc of perception-altering, genre-redefining significance.

The Franciscan Works, Italian pianist Sandro Ivo Bartoli’s disc featuring under-appreciated music by Franz Liszt, is no less potent and revitalizing than Solaire’s recording of Suspended. Recorded in a single day in the kind of marathon, artistically taxing takes that are now virtually extinct in the realm of commercial recording, The Franciscan Works deviates from pianists’ usual paths through the barn-burning pieces upon which Liszt’s fame in the Twenty-First Century largely relies. Playing a clear-toned Steinway D #595313 prepared by Christian Niedermeyer, little troubled by the tinny sound at the extreme top of the compass that afflicts many Steinway instruments, Bartoli traverses Liszt’s music with a singularity of purpose that yields a reading of extraordinary cumulative impact. Like Suspended, The Franciscan Works benefits from liner notes by Tobias Fischer that instruct the listener on what to listen for but not what to hear in the music, as it were. Bartoli, too, focuses on providing the listener with a full realization of Liszt’s scores. His playing is stirringly alert, every dynamic marking observed to the utmost degree of its musical and expressive spirits, but even at its extremes his individual approach to the music is never excessive or distractingly idiosyncratic. This is music making as inspiring as it is inspired, the pianist inviting the listener into a very personal segment of the composer’s fascinating musical world.

The final two decades of Liszt’s life were marked by puzzling, poignant contrasts. One of the great piano virtuosi of the Nineteenth Century, the composer was as skilled a master of beguiling ladies’ hearts as he was of taming the piano’s keys, but a series of personal tragedies gradually turned his thoughts from the secular to the ecclesiastical. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the influence of religious faith on Liszt’s life is overlooked by modern observers, but the products of his piety among his works for piano are undoubtedly overshadowed by the well-known display pieces. This is unfortunate, particularly as Bartoli reminds with his performances on this disc that these musical acts of religious fervor make technical demands no less monumental than works like the operatic and symphonic transcriptions and the widely-appreciated Hungarian Rhapsodies. The Deux Légends (S.163) are exquisite works of soulful invention, and Bartoli plays them with unapologetic Romantic fervor. The first of the pair, Saint François d’Assise: La prédication aux oiseaux, receives from Bartoli a performance of gossamer beauty maintained by unbroken concentration. This persists in his playing of Saint François d’Assise: Marchant sur les flots, which is characterized by rhythmic vitality that enhances the rhapsodic nature of the music. The Preludio per il Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi (S.498c) and Cantico di San Francesco (S.499) are as tightly constructed as any of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, and Bartoli draws out the harmonies among the inner voices rather than over-emphasizing the obvious links between the pieces.

Bartoli possesses an unique ability to use music to create an atmosphere in which the sounds that he coaxes from the piano no longer seem to come from speakers or headphones: as he plays, his visceral connection with the music seems to arise from nature itself with the communicative power that Saint Francis discerned. Playing Liszt’s Alleluia et Ave Maria d’Arcadelt (S.183), the pianist summons the grandeur of a cathedral organ within the appropriate scale of the music, phrasing with the ambulatory lilt of a religious procession. The character of Les Jeux d’eaux à la Ville d’Este (S.163/4) could hardly be more different, but the vigor with which Bartoli plays the piece perpetuates the keen sensitivity that makes this disc so uplifting. Miserere d’après Palestrina is not only one of the finest pieces on The Franciscan Works but also a pinnacle in Liszt’s creative career. The sheer grace of Bartoli’s performance of the Miserere is arresting. Ave Maria: Die Glocken von Rom (S.182) wields the force of a sermon by Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather, but Liszt channeled this electricity into music of hypnotic brilliance. If there are two adjectives that more perceptively describe Bartoli’s pianism throughout the numbers on The Franciscan Works than any others, they are hypnotic and brilliant, but this artist does not hypnotize by blinding the listener with flashes of his technical brilliance: rather, he serves as a conduit via which the composer’s genius captivates the hearer.

Walter Legge once wrote that ‘democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality.’ Perhaps this was primarily a quip offered in justification of his tyranny in the control room, but Legge’s sentiment illuminates a critical truth of Art in general. An exchange of ideas benefits any enterprise, but the efficacious recording of Classical Music requires a firm integration of resolve among artists and technicians. With both of these discs, Dirk Fischer and Solaire Records strip away the artifice that has compromised the quality of many record labels’ output in recent years. These discs are precious examples of music played as it deserves to be played and recorded as the performances merit.

FRANCIS POULENC (1899 – 1963): Dialogues of the Carmelites—Shelley Marie Mihm (Blanche de la Force), Emily Wolber Scheuring (Madame de Croissy), Lyndsey Swann (Madame Lidoine), Megan Callahan (Mother Marie of the Incarnation), Rachel Anthony (Sister Constance of St. Denis), Allyson Goff (Mother Jeanne of the Child Jesus), Dana MacIntosh (Sister Mathilde), Nicholas Dankner (The Marquis de la Force), Derek Jackenheimer (The Chevalier de la Force), Michaela Kelly (Mother Gerald), Emily Frye (Sister Claire), Grace McKinnon (Sister Antoine), Emily Armstrong (Sister Catherine), Ashley Buffa (Sister Felicity), Jessica Hannah (Sister Gertrude), Brittany Infranco (Sister Alice), Olivia Boddicker (Sister Valentine), Mary B. Safrit (Sister Anne of the Cross), Shelby Thiedeman (Sister Martha), Cassie Machamer (Sister St. Charles), Jesse Herndon (The Father Confessor), Benjamin Ramsey (First Commissaire, Second Officer), Baker Lawrimore (Second Commissaire, First Officer), James Scarantino (Jailer), Brent Byhre (Thierry, Monsieur Javelinot); UNCG School of Music, Theatre and Dance Opera Theatre Orchestra and Chorus; David Holley, Conductor, Stage Director, Producer, and Music Director [Donna Rendely, Chorus Master; Amanda Warriner, Scenic Designer; Deborah Bell, Costume Designer; Louis Costanzo, Lighting Designer; Shane Burgett, Technical Director; University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Music, Theatre and Dance Opera Theatre, Aycock Auditorium, Greensboro, North Carolina; Thursday, 7 April 2016]

Opera in the Twenty-First Century is often compelled to make Herculean efforts to justify an anachronistic relevance that was never among the genre’s foremost objectives. From the time of the first performance of Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, likely in the 1598 Carnevale season, composers of opera have repeatedly reiterated in diaries, correspondence, conversations, and interviews that their goals in writing for the stage have been, as Händel reflected about the creation of his Messiah, to educate and enlighten audiences. That this requires relevance is a modern conceit that belittles composers’ achievements and audiences’ intelligence. Heroes and deities of Antiquity are no more relevant in any meaningful sense to Twenty-First-Century audiences than they were to observers in previous centuries, but the ways in which composers translated the all-too-human stories of these irrelevant figures of fable, myth, and distant history into music transcend modern notions of relevance. Composed between 1953 and 1956, during a tumultuous period in the composer’s life, Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites tells the story of the sixteen martyrs of Compiègne, Carmelites whose courageous refusal to denounce their faith and austere way of life led to their condemnation and execution by France’s Convention nationale in 1794. Though at odds with some aspects of Church doctrine, Poulenc embraced Catholicism whilst Dialogues of the Carmelites took shape, his spirituality perhaps arising from the uncertainty and recriminations that gripped France as the nation grappled with the fallout from Nazi collaboration, resistance, and the Holocaust. It was Poulenc’s explicit wish that the opera always be performed in the vernacular of the audience at hand: the world première at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1957, five months before the French premième in Paris, was therefore sung in Italian, and the British and American premières were given in English. Furthering this tradition, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production employs the excellent English translation of Poulenc’s original libretto by Joseph Machlis*, removing any linguistic barriers between the opera and the audience. Returning Dialogues of the Carmelites to Greensboro after an absence of nearly two decades, this production serves as a powerful reminder of the awesome kinetic energy of opera. If two-and-a-half hours of music can break the heart with reminiscences of the dialogues of ladies whose voices were silenced more than two centuries ago, what need is there for concocted relevance?

With atmospheric, visually compelling scenic designs by Amanda Warriner and costume designs by Deborah Bell that both firmly established the drama’s provenance and emphasized the Carmelites’ isolation from the world in which their communal destiny was determined, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production succeeded more completely than many productions by well-funded professional opera companies at bringing the composer’s intentions to the stage with poignant immediacy. Imaginatively but clear-headedly illuminated by Louis Costanzo’s lighting designs and brought off with utter conviction under the guidance of Technical Director Shane Burgett, the blocking and stage action could virtually have been used to transcribe Poulenc’s stage directions verbatim. Regrettably, this observation might be misconstrued as having a negative connotation, the notion of following a composer’s instructions having become anathema in many operatically-inclined camps, but it is very gratifying to witness a production in which a pervasive respect of the composer’s specifications is the obvious core of the design team’s focus. In truth, Dialogues of the Carmelites is an opera that can withstand updating: relocate the ladies of Compiègne to occupied France during World War II or the modern Paris of François Hollande, and their story is no less harrowing than when they are allowed to dwell in 1790s France. How much more challenging it is to combine creative license with fidelity to the composer, however, and UNCG Opera Theatre’s production disclosed how sublime the results of such endeavors can be, providing the audience with a Dialogues of the Carmelites that complemented Poulenc’s music rather than distracting from it. Like the celebrated John Dexter production at The Metropolitan Opera, this Dialogues offered strikingly memorable tableaux of incredible beauty and emotional impact. With a production of this quality representing the nurturing of the next generation of guardians of opera, is the oft-expressed fear for the genre’s survival truly rational?

La foi dans les chaînes: a scene from UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Poulenc scored Dialogues of the Carmelites for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons (one doubling on contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two harps, piano, timpani, percussion, and strings. Musically, the opera is a triumph of fundamental tonalism, the prevailing idiom of the vocal writing being, as Poulenc readily admitted, unapologetically rooted in late-Romantic tradition. Though Madame de Croissy’s death scene and the opera’s final minutes are gruesome, the music never abandons the rich lodes of melody and innovative but consistently tonal harmonies that Poulenc mines throughout the score. Under the baton of the production’s conductor, producer, Stage Director, and Music Director David Holley, the UNCG Opera Theatre Orchestra musicians executed their parts with extraordinary vigor, clearly inspired by Holley’s leadership. The score’s difficulties were mostly conquered with absolute confidence. Bringing to his guidance of this production experience with Dialogues of the Carmelites that began in graduate school and encompasses a presentation of the opera at Greensboro’s Our Lady of Grace Church in 1997, Holley divulged an abiding affection for this music that shone in his handling of every bar of the score. Conceived in twelve scenes with interconnecting orchestral interludes, the construction of Dialogues of the Carmelites is not unlike that of Britten’s Peter Grimes, and the operas share the central theme of an individual at odds with the wider community. As in Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, there is perhaps a link between Blanche’s predicament and an artist’s relationship with society, but this production approached Blanche and her companions in the Carmel de Compiègne not as archetypes or symbols of elements of universal social orders but as people, wondrously complex in their simplicity, whose lives intersected at a specific, tragic historical crossroads. Holley adopted tempi that highlighted the skill with which Poulenc wrote for voices and instruments, the conductor’s instinctive understanding of the composer’s exquisite vocal writing enabling the listener to fully experience the rousing breadth of Poulenc’s creation. A singer himself, Holley conducts in a manner that seemed to breathe with the singers, and his approach to Dialogues of the Carmelites balanced nuanced negotiations of the composer’s demands with close but not coddling support of singers and instrumentalists.

Student productions at even the most prestigious institutions can be compromised by unfinished, ‘green’ singing, but a particular strength of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Dialogues of the Carmelites was the uniformly high standard of the singers’ work; a standard, set in the opera’s opening scene, from which the young, hearteningly capable cast never deviated. Each of the ladies portraying the martyrs of Compiègne—Dana MacIntosh as Sister Mathilde, Michaela Kelley as Mother Gérald, Emily Frye as Sister Claire, Grace McKinnon as Sister Antoine, Emily Armstrong as Sister Catherine, Ashley Buffa as Sister Félicité, Jessica Hannah as Sister Gertrude, Brittany Infranco as Sister Alice, Olivia Boddicker as Sister Valentine, Mary B. Safrit as Sister Anne of the Cross, Shelby Thiedeman as Sister Martha, and Cassie Machamer as Sister St. Charles—sang her part with integrity. Temporary weaknesses rapidly passed into insignificance, and both the ensemble of Carmelites and the excellent UNCG Opera Theatre Chorus, fastidiously prepared by Chorus Master Donna Rendely, substantially enhanced the professionalism of the performance, singing not only with musicality but with audible conviction.

Doubling as the First and Second Commissaires and the Officers, tenor Benjamin Ramsey and bass Baker Lawrimore brought firm tones and dramatic involvement to their performances. In the scene in Act Two in which the Carmelites are matter-of-factly informed of their impending expulsion from their cloister, the cold indifference of the text was reflected in the vocalism. Likewise, baritone James V. Scarantino was an imposing Jailer. Baritone Brent Byhre, the energetic Strephon in Greensboro Light Opera and Song’s 2015 production of Gilbert’s and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, sang handsomely as the valet Thierry and Monsieur Javelinot, the physician who tends to the Old Prioress during her final agony. As an industrious, concerned Chaplain, tenor Jesse Herndon sang ‘My faithful daughters, I know that some among you already have heard what I m about to say’ in Act Two with the concentration that the dramatic importance of the character’s words demands. Likewise, mezzo-soprano Allyson Goff met every demand of Poulenc’s music for Mother Jeanne of the Child Jesus, her voicing of ‘My sisters, our Reverent Mother is coming to say goodbye to you all, for she must go to Paris tonight’ in Act Two disclosing an insightful use of text allied with a focused voice of great potential.

Fils et père: Tenor Derek Jackenheimer as the Chevalier de la Force (left) and baritone James V. Scarantino as the Marquis de la Force (right; performing on 8 April) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Tenor Derek Jackenheimer, unforgettable in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei, and baritone Nicholas Dankner were a musically and dramatically well-matched son and father as the Chevalier and Marquis de la Force. In the opening scene of Act One, father and brother conducted their discussion about the worryingly unconventional Blanche with appropriate gravity. Only Dankner’s youth undermined the credibility of his portrayal of the troubled Marquis, whose wig, incidentally, made him uncannily resemble Beethoven. In Act Two, Jackenheimer brought moving urgency to the Chevalier’s scene with Blanche at the cloister. Urging his willful sister to abandon the Carmelite community in order to seek refuge from the Terror among her family, he voiced ‘Blanche, why do you behave like this?’ with frustrated anger. The discord between brother and sister, only partially set right by their reconciliation at the scene’s end, set the tone for the balance of the opera, and Jackenheimer’s agitated presence contributed to comprehension of the foundations of Blanche’s complicated psychology. As used here, baritone and tenor possess voices destined for admirable careers.

Mother Marie of the Incarnation, the stern voice of dogmatic rigidity within the Carmelite community, was sung by mezzo-soprano Megan Callahan with ironclad assurance and a wide emotional spectrum that was evidence of what promises to develop into a noteworthy interpretive acuity. Reacting to the Old Prioress’s death throes in Act One, Callahan lent Mother Marie’s dire proclamations startling intensity, especially in her appalled objections to the sisters seeing the Old Prioress in her diminished state. A suggestion of humanity was infused by the singer into the Act Two scene in which Mother Marie confronts Blanche as she begins to leave the Old Prioress’s corpse unattended, and the voice rang out with even greater impact. Mother Marie’s greatest challenges come in Act Three, and Callahan delivered ‘My daughters, I propose that we take upon ourselves the vow of martyrdom, to give our lives for the glory of Carmel and the salvation of our land’ with a determination that conveyed the character’s formidable zealotry. Later entreating Blanche to return to the company of her Carmelite sisters, this Mother Marie was torn between maternal kindness and exasperation with her frightened, recalcitrant charge. Finally, learning from the Chaplain that the Carmelites have been condemned and will soon be executed, she lamented the dishonor of her broken vow, a crippling failure made devastatingly momentous in this performance. In many ways, Mother Marie is the most enigmatic of the opera’s characters and one of the most vividly drawn by Poulenc. Callahan portrayed her not as an unfeeling gorgon but as a woman whose harshness seemed to arise from vulnerability. There was no harshness in Callahan’s vocalism, however: her unforced vocalism and solidity of tone throughout the range were most welcome in music too often subjected to stridency.

Sœur et frère: Soprano Ashley Oliveira as Blanche de la Force (left; performing on 8 April) and tenor Derek Jackenheimer as the Chevalier de la Force (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Performing the rôle of the fanciful but touchingly sincere young Sister Constance of Saint-Denis, soprano—and gifted photographer, as her photographs of this production prove—Rachel Anthony shaped her lines with freshness and grace, her description of Constance’s memories of her brother’s nuptial festivities in her native village just before taking her vows sparkling with girlish joy. Telling Blanche in Act One of her premonition of their shared death, Anthony’s Constance exuded innocence and seemed genuinely hurt when Blanche scoffed at her vision. In the Act Two scene in which Constance and Blanche stand vigil before the Old Prioress’s corpse, Anthony sang ‘One would think when He have such a death to her, our good Lord made a great mistake; like in a cloakroom when you’re given someone else’s coat’ with telling lightness, conveying the purity of spirit that enables the character to discuss matters of such import with levity and humor. Then, the seriousness of Anthony’s voicing of ‘We die not for ourselves alone, but we die for each other, or probably even instead of each other’ was evidence of the depth of through of which Constance is capable. This unexpected profundity is continued in Act Three in the noble-hearted sister’s confession that she was the source of the sole vote against taking the vow of martyrdom. Constance is not a traditional operatic seconda donna or confidante in the tradition of Belinda in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas or, more closely related, Suor Genovieffa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and Anthony’s performance, centered on youthful, attractive singing and particular brightness in her secure, exhilarating upper register, reminiscent of the young Roberta Peters, confirmed the significance of the character’s stature in Poulenc’s thoughtfully-wrought drama.

The Old Prioress, Madame de Croissy, received from mezzo-soprano Emily Wolber Scheuring a reading of sonorous vocal force and histrionic specificity. Phrasing expansively and rising to the uppermost reaches of her music with undaunted strength, Scheuring was visually too young to be fully believable as the illness-ridden Old Prioress even with artful wig and makeup. From her first appearance in the second scene of Act One, though, she inhabited the rôle completely, impressively establishing the character’s pragmatism with her singing of ‘Do not believe this comfortable chair is a privilege of my position.’ There was tenderness in her statement of ‘My daughter, the outside world often questions the purpose of our Order’ to the uneasy Blanche, revealing the magnetism of the connection that she feels with the young postulant. Scheuring’s singing and acting in the Old Prioress’s death scene were riveting, her declamation of ‘God has become a shadow’ filling the auditorium with chilling sound. Her agonizing death fell like a pall upon the community that she safeguarded, but even the singer’s parlando last utterances were supremely musical. Only a few of the rôle’s lowest notes were of reduced brawn, partially owing to Scheuring’s careful negotiations of vocal registers, but her performance was gripping.

D'une génération à l'autre: Mezzo-soprano Natalie Rose Havens as Madame de Croissy (left) and soprano Ashley Oliveira as Blanche de la Force (right), both performing on 8 April, in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

The rôle of Madame Lidoine, the Carmelite community’s new prioress, has one of the most prestigious and diverse sororities of first interpreters of any part in opera: Leyla Gencer in the Italian première, Régine Crespin in the French première, Dame Joan Sutherland in the British première, Hilde Zadek in the score’s first hearing in Austria, Leontyne Price in the San Francisco Opera production that introduced Poulenc’s intrepid nuns to America, and Shirley Verrett in the opera’s belated Metropolitan Opera première. In fact, these storied singers’ repertoires likely intersected in only two other rôles, Verdi’s Aida and Amelia in Un ballo in maschera. Astonishingly comfortable across the large compass of the New Prioress’s music, soprano Lyndsey Swann was even at this early juncture in her career by no means an inadequate successor to the great ladies of the stage from whom she inherited Madame Lidoine’s habit. Introducing herself to her new flock in Act Two, she phrased ‘My dear daughters, I don’t need to remind you of your terrible misfortune in losing your beloved Mother’ with the enthusiasm of a new leader eager to make a good impression. Responding to Constance’s lament for the state of the Church in Revolutionary France, Swann’s Madame Lidoine intoned ‘When there are no priests there’ll be martyrs in plenty, thus the balance of grace is very soon restored’ with unmistakable certainty of faith. She was resolute in correcting Mother Marie’s misunderstanding of the meaning of her comment about offering their lives for the survival of the Church, however, her voicing of ‘We are not allowed to decide if our humble names shall be inscribed among the martyrs’ lashing at her subordinate with stinging accuracy of intonation. In Act Three, the composed dignity with which ‘My daughters, we have almost come to the end of our first night in prison’ was sung to the desolate Carmelites was beautifully comforting, the singer’s voice enveloping her fellow nuns like a protecting embrace. The sadness that emanated from Swann’s singing of ‘My daughters, I wanted to save you, save you with all my heart’ completed Madame Lidoine’s transition from authority figure to fellow martyr, her heroism scaled to that of her companions. The amplitude of Swann’s voice suited Madame Lidoine’s music almost perfectly, and this compelling young artist unhesitatingly surrendered herself to Poulenc’s drama.

De cloître au martyre: a scene from UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Blanche de la Force, the ostensible protagonist in an opera with a multitude of heroines, has a performance history no less distinguished than that of Madame Lidoine. Created at La Scala by Virginia Zeani, in Paris by Denise Duval, in London by Elsie Morison, and in San Francisco by Dorothy Kirsten, Blanche, too, makes incredible demands on the singer intrepid enough to don her drab attire. Minnesota-born soprano Shelley Marie Mihm met those demands unflinchingly, soaring above the stave with effortless control and sure pitch. Conversing with Blanche’s father and brother in the opening scene of Act One, she sang both ‘Little lambs do not often find themselves straying so far from the fold’ and ‘Dear father, there is no incident so small or unimportant that it is not written by the hand of God’ with musical and metaphysical muscle. As her cheerful victim observed, there was something ferocious in this Blanche’s query of ‘Are you not afraid that God will grow rather tired of your good humor?’ in her scene with Constance. The shame of having given in to fear and abandoned her watch over the Old Prioress’s remains was redoubled by Mother Marie’s insinuations, Swann’s voice quivering with emotion. Blanche’s scene with her brother, the Chevalier, brings to mind the famous encounter between Angelica and the implacable Zia principessa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and Swann matched wits with Jackenheimer viscerally, the soprano’s Blanche giving ‘I now am a daughter of God, who will suffer for you, and whom I ask you most sincerely to respect, from now on, as a companion in battle’ an eerie aura of reluctant triumph. The climax of the tense Act Three scene in the dead Marquis’s house, to which Mother Marie has come to coax Blanche back to her Carmelite sisters, was Mihm’s despondent cries of ‘What have they got against me? Have I done them any harm?’ That this Blanche would appear to assume her place among her sisters as they marched to the scaffold, in this production exiting through the house as the sound of the bloodthirsty blade’s repeated fall sliced through the orchestra, seemed inevitable. Mihm occasionally lost the battle to be heard when singing in the lower octave of her range, but the upper register was unfailingly resilient at any dynamic level. Never wholly sympathetic, Blanche demands concentration and expressive boldness and received both from Mihm. Like Swann, she continued the exalted lineage of notable interpreters of her part.

Musical criticism is and should be an embodiment of Abraham Lincoln’s sentiment in the Gettysburg Address that the words that describe an auspicious occasion will be quickly forgotten whilst the deeds that inspired them will be long remembered. Too often, though, the productions about which critics write are memorable primarily for these reactions rather than the actions to which they respond. The UNCG Opera Theatre production of Francis Poulenc’s harrowing and thought-provoking Dialogues of the Carmelites was an example of what opera in the Twenty-First Century can and should aspire to be. It is passion, not ‘relevance,’ that sustains opera, and this performance of Dialogues of the Carmelites passionately reaffirmed that, to again adapt the words of Lincoln, opera of, by, and for the people is no less viable and vital now than when the sixteen martyrs of Compiègne gave their lives for daring to live as their hearts dictated. This was a performance that will not be soon forgotten.

*There were in UNCG Opera Theatre’s performance some few very minor differences from the text of the Machlis translation as published at the time of the Covent Garden première. Efforts have been made to accurately reflect what was actually sung in Greensboro, but there are instances in which the texts referenced are those that appear in the published English libretto.

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Don Pasquale—Steven Condy (Don Pasquale), Gregory Gerbrandt (Dottor Malatesta), Ariana Wyatt (Norina), Daniel Curran (Ernesto), Albert Carter (Un notaro), Anthony Quaranta (Un maggiordomo), Cheryl Carter (Una domestica di Norina); Opera on the James Chorus and Orchestra; Douglas Kinney Frost, conductor [Patricia-Maria Weinmann, Stage Director; David Latham, Light Design; Maggie Caudhill, Wig/Makeup Artist; Teddy Moore, Set Designer; Aaron Chvatal, Costume Design; Rachel Zapata, Assistant Conductor; Kaley Smith, Stage Manager; Opera on the James, Joy and Lynch Christian Warehouse Theatre, Academy Center of the Arts, Lynchburg, Virginia; Friday, 8 April 2016]

Generations of artists active in all genres of the Performing Arts have been trained with one precept at the core of the cultivation of dedication to their respective crafts: come what may, at whatever cost, the show must go on. Whether or not the familiar verbal expression of this mantra truly originated, as some academics surmise, with Nineteenth-Century circus managers, as cutthroat a lot as any operatic impresarios, the spirit of the sentiment is memorably exemplified in the work of the final decade of Gaetano Donizetti’s life. Born in 1797 and a pupil in his native Bergamo of the Bavarian master Johann Simon Mayr, Donizetti was one of the defining geniuses of Italian bel canto despite a life that was not all beautiful singing. Having suffered the losses of his wife and children, the composer was ravaged by disease, perhaps syphilis contracted in his youth, the last three years of his life stolen by worsening illness. Like his contemporary Rossini, whose withdrawal from the musical world was voluntary, Donizetti was awesomely industrious, not least when mere survival can only have left him with minimal energy for creation. Create he managed to do, however: some of his most accomplished scores came after the deaths of his wife, children, and parents. It was a man bent but not broken by hardship who in 1842 accepted a commission from Paris’s Théâtre-Italien for a new work that would evolve into Don Pasquale, an opera universally acclaimed as one of its creator’s finest achievements and widely regarded as the tuneful terminus of the beloved Italian opera buffa tradition. Superlatives are easily hurled at scores but are often far more difficult to employ in describing performances of them, but the greatest experiences in opera are those rare evenings when music and musicians achieve an exalted state of communion. Staged in Lynchburg’s intimate, 250-seat Joy and Lynch Christian Warehouse Theatre, the Opera on the James production of Don Pasquale bewitchingly realized the full comic potential of this gem of an opera, filling every cubic millimeter of available space with laughter and that rarest commodity in opera, genuine bel canto.

As difficult as filling a large space can be, designing and executing an operatic production in a small space can be even more daunting. Without the benefit of forgiving distance, details of staging and characterization that are effective in mammoth theatres can seem ridiculous (or worse) when observed in closer proximity. Accustomed to making maximum use of the space at the company’s disposal, Opera on the James provided with this Don Pasquale a model to similar enterprises of how fascinating opera can be when a production engages rather than merely occupying its surroundings. Teddy Moore’s simple but eye-pleasing set designs and David Latham’s evocative lighting dressed the stage in fine style, and Aaron Chvatal’s Roaring Twenties costume designs and Maggie Caudhill’s artistry with wigs and makeup dressed the characters with witty outward manifestations of their personalities. Stage Director Patricia-Maria Weinmann and Stage Manager Kaley Smith handled the opera’s zany plot with sure timing and a splendid avoidance of mindless and unmusical tomfoolery. Singing ignoramuses can be interesting but are rarely truly funny: the most amusing people in opera are those whose sensibilities attract the listener sufficiently so that he cares enough to laugh. Updated to 1927, this production allowed Don Pasquale and his band of players to be individuals, not idiots, and the audience therefore could laugh unforcedly at Donizetti’s comedic genius rather than at a feeble attempt at faking it. Laugh they did, often and raucously, making this kind of evening at the opera that leaves one smiling and humming for days on end.

Conductor Douglas Kinney Frost maintained commendable control of the performance from first note to last, keeping balances clear and insightfully integrated and lavishing great care on preserving rhythmic tautness even when granting singers latitude in virtuosic passages. Following his lead, the well-trained musicians of the Opera on the James Orchestra jaunted with brio through the reduction of Donizetti’s scintillating score used for the production, the string playing occasionally slightly frantic but providing a solid, suitably propulsive foundation for the pit’s [here cleverly placed behind the scenery, conjuring the atmosphere of Roman cafés] contribution to the performance. For this production, space necessitated elimination of the chorus, thereby excising ‘I diamanti, presto, presto’ and ‘Che interminabile andirivieni!’ (they were not missed), and Donizetti’s three acts were refitted into two, the interval coming between the composer’s second and third acts. [For this review, texts are referenced by their positions in Donizetti’s original three-act arrangement in an effort to avoid confusion for readers not fortunate enough to attend the Lynchburg performances.] Exemplified by Brian Roberts’s dulcetly-phrased account of the trumpet obbligato in Ernesto’s scene at the beginning of Act Two, the wind playing was laudably confident. The orchestra’s performance of the opera’s Sinfonia, as rollicking an introduction as any composer ever provided for an opera, set the frenetic mood of the performance after a shaky start, and Frost’s organic pacing sustained that momentum until the drama was resolved with hearty laughs and high notes. The conductor’s tempo for the Preludio at the start of Act Two ideally suited the music. Frost’s conducting and the orchestra’s playing dressed Donizetti’s music as dapperly as their colleagues’ endeavors attired the stage and its denizens.

As Carlino, Malatesta’s kinsman and notary of convenience, Albert Carter whined and wheezed his repetitions of ‘Et cetera’ to bumbling perfection. Cheryl Carter as Norina’s housemaid may not have sung a single note, but there was an aria’s worth of emoting in her facial expressions as she perused a page in Norina’s fanciful novel. Tony Quaranta as Don Pasquale’s seemingly much-abused and grotesquely underpaid maggiordomo was a show unto himself, not only chewing the scenery but helping to move it during scene transitions, too!

Veri amanti: Tenor Daniel Curran as Ernesto (left) and soprano Ariana Wyatt as Norina (right) in the Opera on the James production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, April 2016 [Photo © by KG Thienemann/ImageArtWork.com]

To his inaugural performance as Ernesto, one of Donizetti’s most beautifully-written tenor rôles and a brother to Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore, tenor Daniel Curran brought a refined, capably-projected voice and technique that qualified him equally for the part’s bel canto intricacies and lovesick ecstasies. At his entrance in Act One, it was apparent that Curran was an Ernesto to the Schipa, Valletti, and Kraus manner born, his excellent breath control permitting him to execute marvels of phrasing impossible for less-prepared singers. In the duet with Don Pasquale, his incredulous ‘Prender moglie!’ was spirited, and his singing of the cantabile ‘Sogno soave e casto de’ miei prim’anni, addio’ was masterful, the repeated top A♭s costing him minimal effort. His traversals of the allegro ‘Due parole ancor di volo’ and moderato ‘Mi fa il destin mendico, perdo colei che adoro’ were intelligently contrasted, and his top B♭s crowned his lines resplendently. In Ernesto’s plaintive scene at the start of Act Two, Curran delivered the recitative ‘Povero Ernesto! Dalla zio cacciato, da tutti abbandonato’ with plangency that never crossed the boundary into outright caricature. His voicing of the lovely larghetto aria ‘Cercherò lontana terra dove gemer sconosciuto’ was the epitome of poise, the top A♭s and B♭s again troubling him admirably little and serving as a warmup for a spot-on interpolated top D♭. Act Two’s quartetto finale drew from him fleet, animated singing typified by his unperturbed voicing of ‘Pria di partir, signore, vengo per dirvi addio.’ The Act Three serenata ‘Com’è gentil la notte a mezzo april!’ is perhaps Ernesto’s best-known music, and Curran sang it with an enviable effusion of lyricism and honeyed tone that retained its sweet viscosity to the top A♯s. United with his beloved Norina at last, albeit as a ruse to deceive his absurd, proud uncle, this Ernesto poured out a stream of golden melody in the sublime notturno ‘Tornami a dir che m’ami.’ With both his paramour and his inheritance restored, Ernesto soared in the opera’s final scene on Curran’s airy vocalism. Ernesto is the kind of rôle that can seem deceptively easy, and Curran’s was the kind of performance that can further this misconception. Just try to mimic his singing, however: many are the numbers of renowned tenors who have failed to sing Ernesto so well.

Don e Dottore: Baritones Steven Condy in the title rôle (left) and Gregory Gerbrandt as Dottor Malatesta (right) in the Opera on the James production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, April 2016 [Photo © by KG Thienemann/ImageArtWork.com]

A descendant of Figaro and Dandini in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, Donizetti’s Dottor Malatesta is a fantastic gift to lyric baritones with the technical wherewithal to sing the character’s music with the sparkle and machismo that the composer surely expected—baritones, that is, like Gregory Gerbrandt, whose Malatesta for Opera on the James would have been more rightly called Buonatesta. Making his entrance in Act One with an ‘È permesso?’ that dripped with exaggerated politeness, Gerbrandt’s Malatesta calmly seized command of his scene with Don Pasquale, culminating in an unhurried, persuasive performance of the larghetto cantabile aria ‘Bella siccome un angelo in terra pellegrino,’ another of Donizetti’s finest inspirations. Braving the high tessitura without strain, Gerbrandt gave every ornament and elegant turn of phrase dramatic purpose. Ending Act One with Malatesta’s duet with Norina was an innovative choice by Donizetti, but Gerbrandt’s piquant singing of ‘Voi sapete se d’Ernesto sono amico, e ben gli voglio’ revealed the dramatic flair that prompted the composer’s decision. In the Act Two terzetto with Norina and Don Pasquale, Gerbrandt approached the larghetto ‘Via, da brava’ with glinting comic attack, and his bravura technique easily passed the insanely demanding test of Malatesta’s lines in the bustling quartetto finale. Like the Duca di Mantova’s ‘La donna è mobile’ in Verdi’s Rigoletto and Calàf’s ‘Nessun dorma’ in Puccini’s Turandot, it is Malatesta’s duet with Don Pasquale in Act Three that audiences anxiously await, and Gerbrandt’s vigorous articulation of ‘Io direi...sentite un poco’ did not disappoint the Lynchburg listeners. His jubilant patter in the stretta’s laughing figurations and sonorous top F justified the duet’s popularity—and its encore—and made it the musical and comedic pinnacle of the performance. Complementing Curran’s Ernesto, Gerbrandt’s Malatesta was worthy of any of the world’s greatest stages—more than that, in fact, as he accompanied Ernesto’s serenata on the guitar with the finesse of Andrés Segovia!

Dal convento alla casa di riposo: Soprano Ariana Wyatt as Norina in the Opera on the James production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, April 2016 [Photo © by KG Thienemann/ImageArtWork.com]

It is encouraging to note that soprano Ariana Wyatt is a member of the Virginia Tech voice faculty because her portrayal of Norina—remarkably, her rôle début—was a lesson in the art of successfully mastering comic bel canto. In Norina’s Act One cavatina ‘Quel guardo il cavaliere in mezzo al cor trafisse,’ the pert, pretty singer cavorted through the coloratura flourishes to top C and D♭, and she exhibited her technical merit with winsome fulfillment of Donizetti’s request for an extended trill on F at the top of the stave. In the duet with Malatesa, this vixen preened and posed hilariously, sculpting ‘Pronta io son; purch’io non manchi all’amore del caro bene’ with a bonafide prima donna’s command of the repeated ascents to top B♭. In the manic terzetto with Don Pasquale and Malatesta, Wyatt tossed off the crazy fiorature, cresting on top B, as though she were merrily sowing seeds in a flower garden. The soprano’s lusty singing in the quartetto finale brought down the curtain on Act Two—here Act One—with a scurry of smirks and scowls and a fabulous interpolated top D. The emotional heart of Don Pasquale beats in the Act Three duet for Norina and her put-upon consort, in the course of which the feisty young lady takes the charade too far and slaps Don Pasquale, an action that, as Donizetti’s music unmistakably reveals, she immediately regrets: despite the audience’s roars of laughter, Wyatt played the moment appreciably ‘straight,’ her face still with the realization of her fun having descended into cruelty. Nevertheless, she sprinted through the vivace ‘Via, caro sposino, non farmi il tiranno’ as though Norina had not a care in the world except to show off her ripping top C. The sheer beauty of tone that Wyatt lavished on her singing of the notturno with Ernesto, ‘Tornami a dir che m’ami,’ was breathtaking, and she and Curran intertwined their voices with gorgeous results. The rondo finale, ‘La morale in tutto questo è assai facil di trovarsi,’ was dispatched with a fetching lightness, the roulades rolled out with blazing virtuosity. Wyatt was anything but a standard-issue soubrette Norina: reminding the listener of how the music ought to be sung, her portrayal suggested that virtually every other Norina since Beverly Sills’s last performance of the rôle has been a pretender.

Una preghiera per la libertà: Baritone Steven Condy in the title rôle in the Opera on the James production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, April 2016 [Photo © by KG Thienemann/ImageArtWork.com]

Assuming the larger-than-life persona of the gentleman of a certain age at the center of the opera’s hilarity, baritone Steven Condy depicted a Don Pasquale old enough to know better, so to speak, but still virile enough to charge ahead at full steam, amorous torpedoes be damned. From his near-breathless ‘Son nov’ore’ in the Act One Introduzione, Condy was the Don Pasquale for which one dares not hope: every note of the part was in the voice, and there was tonal beauty to balance the bluster. Condy proceeded through the thrilling vivace in Pasquale’s scene with Malatesta with the unstoppable charisma of a bravura bulldozer. His account of the cavatina ‘Ah! un foco insolito mi sento addosso’ radiated the boisterous elation of a not-quite-young man in love—or in love with the notion of being in love, at any rate. Informing his unfortunate nephew of his impending marriage in the duet with Ernesto, this Pasquale was not wholly heartless in evicting the younger man. After all, which newly-minted marriage needs a third wheel? In Donizetti’s Act Two terzetto with Norina and Malatesta, Condy’s voice boomed like thunder, and in ‘S’era infaccende: giunto però voi siete in punto’ and the pulse-quickening vivace ‘Son tradito, son tradito, son tradiro, beffeggiato, beffeggiato’ in the quartetto finale Condy unleashed a fury all the more imposing for being wholly ineffective. In the great duet with Norina, Condy hurled ‘Signorina, in tanta fretta, dove va vorrebbe dirmi?’ like a poorly-aimed javelin, and he shaped his reading of the recitative ‘Qualche nota di cuffie e di merletto che la signora qui lasciò per caso’ with deepening feeling. As with Norina’s reaction to the fateful slap, Condy opened Pasquale’s heart when singing of his despair and contemplation of finding solace in a watery death, offering emotions more profound than the laughter suggested that the audience grasped. Joining Gerbrandt as a grinning, most willing partner in misguided revenge in the duet with Malatesta, Condy launched ‘Cheti cheti immantinente’ into the theatre like a Roman candle, divertingly matching his partner’s bravura nimbleness and resonant top F. In the opera’s final scene, Condy’s rapid-fire transitions from prideful anger to relieved euphoria were hysterical. Rarely has a husband been so happily deprived of his wife! With every weapon necessary for a convincing Don Pasquale, including an excellent trill, in his arsenal, Condy laid siege to the part with a vengeance, and his triumph was absolute.

Don Pasquale has been in the repertories of a number of the world’s most prestigious opera houses in recent seasons, but not one of them could possibly have offered a performance of what can be argued to be Donizetti’s most perfect score that surpassed the beauty, ingenuity, and merrymaking of this Opera on the James production. It was along the banks of the James River that the first permanent English settlement in the eventual United States of America was established in 1607, and the river’s waters have been of unparalleled importance to the sustenance of the people and culture of the Commonwealth of Virginia since the first Native Americans called the region home. This performance of Don Pasquale proved that now along the verdant slopes of the mighty James has emerged one of America’s most adventurous and most winningly musical opera companies.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): La traviata—Amy Cofield Williamson (Violetta Valéry), Dinyar Vania (Alfredo Germont), Levi Hernandez (Giorgio Germont), Carla Dirlikov Canales (Flora Bervoix), Jason Nichols (Gastone), Tatiana MacMartin (Annina), Jack Chandler (Il dottore Grenvil), Tadd Sipes (Il marchese d’Obigny), Robb Zahm (Il barone Douphol), Zach Helms (Giuseppe), Hayden Keefer (Un commissionario); Opera Roanoke Chorus; Roanoke Symphony Orchestra; Scott Williamson, conductor and Stage Director [Aurelien Eulert, Chorus Master; Jimmy Ray Ward, Set Designer; Pedro Szalay, Choreographer; Dante Olivia Smith, Lighting Designer; Audrey Hamilton-Shelton, Costume Director; Beckie Kravetz, Wigs and Makeup; Joey Neighbors, Technical Director; Opera Roanoke, Shaftman Performance Hall, Jefferson Center, Roanoke, Virginia; Sunday, 10 April 2016]

It is said that familiarity breeds contempt, but the fact that an opera’s popularity in many cases equates with critical dismissal and connoisseurs’ disdain defies easy logic. There are of course acknowledged masterpieces with particular requirements that put them beyond the grasps of many opera companies: musicians’ unions’ caps on hours worked make scores of extended durations like Berlioz’s Les Troyens impractical, scoring like Messiaen’s writing for ondes Martenot in Saint François d’Assise precludes performances by virtually all standard-repertory-centric companies, and the necessity of selling tickets relegates some of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries’ finest scores to collecting dust on library shelves. Far removed from these extremes, the frequency with which Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata is performed in opera houses from Minsk to Montréal leaves no doubt about the place that the score occupies in audiences’ affections, but what can explain the continued critical contempt for an opera described by W. J. Henderson in The New York Times as long ago as 1892, on the occasion of a Metropolitan Opera revival featuring Adelina Patti as the consumptive protagonist, as ‘so hackneyed a work’? When La traviata premièred at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice on 6 March 1853, the opera’s plot could rightfully have been advertised as ‘ripped from the headlines.’ Marie Duplessis, the inspiration for the heroine of Verdi’s and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave’s sources, Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel and play La Dame aux camélias, had been dead for only six years. So fresh was the subject that the Venetian censors objected to the indiscretion of recreating Duplessis’s milieu upon the La Fenice stage, necessitating the relocation of Verdi’s and Piave’s Violetta Valéry to the Eighteenth Century, pre-Revolution courtesans having presumably been more palatable than contemporary ones. Objections of this sort no longer troubling efforts to bring La traviata to the stage and the appeal of Verdi’s music having long been acknowledged, perhaps the disconnect that exists between the opera and scholarly opinion that declares La traviata a work of sentimental excess results from critical ears never having heard the music performed with the dramatic sensitivity with which Verdi treated the opera’s subject. If this seems ridiculous considering the frequency with which La traviata is performed, so does the idea that the opera is anything other than a treasure of the repertory. Captivatingly staged in the Jefferson Center’s Shaftman Performance Hall, Opera Roanoke’s production of La traviata approached the opera not as a well-roasted chestnut sure to reap box office success but as an intimate, often wrenching exploration of the collisions of three lives. The power of Verdi’s music is undeniable, but, whereas audiences often shed tears for the dying Violetta in spite of the quality of what they see and hear, the Roanoke audience enjoyed a Traviata that broke the heart because it first made it swell with the joy of witnessing a performance that made Violetta’s life as engrossing as her death.

Many productions of La traviata seem to forget that it is an opera in which people are required to sing, cluttering the stage with pseudo-cinematic effects that distract both singers and audiences from the development of characters and the relationships among them. With all of its theatricality stripped away, La traviata is a disarmingly simple story: a parent’s good-intentioned but misguided intervention separates earnest lovers who are reunited only after it is too late. With the clean lines of Jimmy Ray Ward’s sets perceptively lit by Dante Olivia Smith’s lighting designs, Opera Roanoke’s production focused not on creating flashy technicolor tableaux but on placing Violetta and Germonts père and fils in settings in which their thoughts and feelings were as obvious to the audience as the words that they sang. Technical Director Joey Neighbors’s efforts ensured that the production sang as effectively as the voices. Costume Director Audrey Hamilton-Shelton put her Shakespearean credentials to good use with designs for La traviata that established finite settings but lent major and minor characters individuality. The betrousered Violetta of the critical exchanges with Giorgio Germont in Act Two was the epitome of fashionable country gentry, and the vibrant, primary-color attire for the opera’s public scenes—Act One and Flora’s ball in the second scene of Act Two—illustrated the social orders with which the protagonists are at odds. The authentically Spanish costumes for the gypsies and matadors ideally complemented the choreography for the dance episodes at Flora’s ball, brilliantly realized by Pedro Szalay, Artistic Director of Southwest Virginia Ballet. He and his troupe of fellow dancers—Sabrina Borneff, Olivia Bowers, Joey D’Alelio, Eric McIntyre, Maria Parnell, and Olivia Scott—moved with mesmerizing fluidity, but their pantomime doubling of Violetta and Alfredo, expressing in dance sentiments that are omnipresent but not enacted, was too much of a good thing: it was clever and often lovely to behold but unnecessarily lured the eyes away from the singers. Hamilton-Shelton’s and Szalay’s endeavors were enhanced by the wigs and makeup of renowned sculptor Beckie Kravetz, whose special understanding of facial contours and the physiological mechanism of singing yielded artful but unobtrusive creations. Placing the action in the entre-deux-guerres years, the production poignantly highlighted the timelessness of the opera’s central themes of love and loss.

Looking back to the era in which Dame Joan Sutherland’s Violetta was frequently guided by the conducting of her husband, Richard Bonynge, this legacy of Traviata‘spousal privilege’ often engendered performances of well-coordinated musicality. Though the Australian Maestro is a thoughtful musician and a brilliant conductor of ballet, Opera Roanoke’s Artistic Director Scott Williamson is a more natural inhabitant of the opera house podium. Here presiding over his wife’s interpretation of Violetta, Williamson looked deeply into the score and extracted details that are often and easily overlooked. Aided by the generally praiseworthy playing of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, Williamson’s pacing of the performance was shaped by commitment to fidelity to Verdi’s score and discernment of how best to support the cast’s collective effort to make this an uncommonly satisfying Traviata. There were moments of unsteadiness from the Symphony’s strings and a few stray pitches from the brasses. Likewise, coordination between stage and pit was occasionally compromised, but the conductor quickly righted wrongs and maintained momentum that gave the drama necessary cumulative sweep. The performance’s strengths consistently outweighed its minor weaknesses, and Williamson’s conducting provided a top-quality canvas upon which the opera’s scenes were painted.

One of the performance’s most reliable strengths was the choral singing. Led by Chorus Master Aurelien Eulert, the Opera Roanoke Chorus made a robust showing in Act One despite the relative sparsity of their numbers, the ladies singing especially strongly and looking stunning as Flappers at Violetta’s party. In Flora’s ball in the second scene of Act Two, the ladies were again on grand form in the gypsies’ chorus, ‘Noi siamo zingarelle venute da lontano.’ The singing of the gentlemen of the chorus was less impressive than that of their female counterparts, but they delivered a rousingly masculine account of the matadors’ number, ‘Di Madride [bizarrely changed to Mexico in the production’s supertitles, though references to Biscay and Andalucía were retained] noi siam mattadori.’ The choristers made ‘Oh, infamia orribile tu commettesti!’ at Flora’s ball an imposing statement of shocked disgust at Alfredo’s treatment of Violetta. As the offstage Carnevale revelers in Act Three, the chorus sang ‘Largo al quadrupede sir della festa’ lustily: unfortunately, hearing their vigorous singing was made difficult by over-emphatic tambourine clanging from the pit. Throughout the performance, the choral singing added an alluring layer of color to Opera Roanoke’s portrait of La traviata.

Also harkening back to earlier times in operatic history typified by the Bing era at the Metropolitan Opera, when a regular company of gifted, prepared singers enriched performances with strong singing of secondary rôles, Opera Roanoke’s Traviata benefited from an ensemble of artists whose capable performances provided engaging vignettes that intelligently supported the principals and lent the drama added depth and nuance. Soprano Tatiana MacMartin was an Annina whose concern for Violetta was palpable and expressed with solid, attractive tone. Baritones Jack Chandler, Tadd Sipes, and Robb Zahm sang and acted well as Dottor Grenvil, Marchese d’Obigny, and Barone Douphol, and tenor Zach Helms and bass Hayden Keefer made much of little in their impersonations of Giuseppe and the Commissionario. Tenor Jason Nichols’s Gastone introduced Alfredo in Act One with a vivid statement of ‘In Alfredo Germont, o signora, ecco un altro che molto v’onora’ and was heard with pleasure in his every line thereafter. As portrayed by mezzo-soprano Carla Dirlikov Canales, Flora was a suitably glamorous hostess, a society maven with a good heart who was a true friend to Violetta even when dutifully playing her part in the social maelstrom that threatened to drown the suffering heroine in its morally ambiguous waters. Moreover, this Flora sang as attractively as she looked, Canales’s voice glistening throughout the range of Flora’s music.

Padre e figlia adottiva: Soprano Amy Cofield Williamson as Violetta (left) and baritone Levi Hernandez as Germont (right) in Opera Roanoke’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata, April 2016 [Photo by Scott Williamson; used with permission]

Returning to Opera Roanoke after stealing the show as Dandini in the company’s production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola [reviewed here], baritone Levi Hernandez beguiled the Roanoke audience with a wholly different array of artistic abilities in La traviata. What his Giorgio Germont had in common with his Dandini was innate musicality that, in the context of Traviata, fed a drive to invite the audience into the most private recesses of the careworn father’s thoughts and motivations. Calling on Violetta in Act Two to entreat her to abandon Alfredo in order to restore respectability to the Germont name, Hernandez’s Giorgio was atypically compassionate, never bullying or browbeating his son’s delicate paramour. Hernandez sang ‘Pura siccome un angelo iddio mi die’ una figlia’ exquisitely, his deeply-felt manner reminiscent of Mario Zanasi’s singing in the well-known 1958 Covent Garden broadcast opposite Maria Callas’s Violetta and his burnished timbre and flickering vibrato recalling the voice of Giuseppe De Luca, the singer who incidentally created another of Hernandez’s best rôles, Sharpless in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. His account of ‘Piangi, o misera, o piangi!’ was affectionate rather than merely cajoling, and this Giorgio seemed almost embarrassed by his own harshness when the despondent Violetta asked him to embrace her as he would his own daughter. Following the father’s futile attempts at comforting his tempestuous son, the aria ‘Di Provenza il mar, il suol, chi dal cor ti cancellò,’ one of Verdi’s most difficult baritone arias, was resiliently sung but was the least persuasive part of Hernandez’s performance. The aria’s top G♭s taxed the singer, tending to go marginally flat, and his phrasing was idiosyncratic, bringing to mind the unusual verbal cadences of Pavel Lisitsian’s famous recording of the aria in Russian. As is still common practice, Germont’s cabaletta ‘No, non udrai rimproveri’ was cut. Reacting to Alfredo’s denunciation of Violetta at Flora’s ball, Hernandez articulated ‘Di sprezzo degno se stesso rende chi pur nell’ira la donna offende’ with such horror and disappointment that he seemed barely able to get the words out. Arriving at Violetta’s bedside in Act Three, Hernandez sang ‘La promessa adempio; a stringervi qual figlia vengo al seno, o generosa’ touchingly. Intriguingly, his guilt having plagued him, it was the elder Germont who in this performance seemed devastated by Violetta’s death. Hernandez was a Germont whose warm paternal instincts, expressed with singing of tremendous quality, made the character as tender a surrogate father for Violetta as he was a reproachful but ultimately caring progenitor for Alfredo.

In his portrayal of Alfredo, the younger Germont, tenor Dinyar Vania produced a stream of bronzed, hearty tone that destines him for heavier repertory. He cut a dashing figure upon his entrance in Act One and was fully credible as a youth impetuous enough to fall madly in love with a woman whom he has never formally met. His singing of the celebrated Brindisi, ‘Libiamo ne’ lieti calici,’ was exciting, but his stentorian singing became slightly wearying, the voice ultimately impressing more than the interpretation. Vania’s ‘Un dì felice, eterea, mi balenaste innante’ was utterly secure and nobly phrased but earthbound, but generalized ardor materialized in his farewelling with Violetta. At the beginning of Act Two, Vania declaimed the recitative ‘Lunge da lei per me non v’ha diletto!’ with dramatic force, and though there was more brute strength than poetry in his account of the aria ‘De’ miei bollenti spiriti’ his vocalism was undeniably exhilarating. Regrettably, Alfredo’s cabaletta ‘Oh mio rimorso! Oh infamia!’ was omitted: the swagger of the cabaletta would surely have suited Vania better than the suavity of the aria. In the scene at Flora’s ball, this Alfredo responded to Violetta’s warnings with the ill temper of a spoiled child. Not surprisingly, though, Vania was at his best when brashly denouncing Violetta in ‘Ogni suo aver tal femmina per amor mio sperdea,’ his voice ringing like the blows of a blacksmith’s hammer. Shamed by his father’s pained condemnation of his actions, Vania’s Alfredo withdrew into an unexpectedly inward reading of ‘Ah sì! Che feci! Ne sento orrore!’ Reunited with Violetta in Act Three, the tenor softened his approach for an aptly awestruck ‘O mia Violetta, oh gioia!’ and a ‘Parigi, o cara, noi lasceremo’ that radiated optimism. Vania’s was an Alfredo who seemed to anticipate and accept Violetta’s death, his voicing of ‘Oh, mio sospiro e palpito’ blunted by preparation for the inevitable. Vania sang extremely well but with a voice more suited by nature for Alvaro in La forza del destino than for Alfredo.

It has often been observed that, at first glance, it seems that Violetta as she appears in each of the opera’s three acts was composed for a different type of voice: a lyric coloratura in Act One, a more dramatic voice in Act Two, and a straightforward lyric soprano in Act Three. Certainly, the rôle has been memorably sung by a wider array of voices than any of Verdi’s other heroines, ranging from lyrics like Caballé and Freni to larger voices like those of Sutherland and the Falcon-esque Callas. Opera Roanoke’s Violetta, soprano Amy Cofield Williamson, was a crossroads at which lyricism and drama intersected. Enunciating ‘Flora, amici, la notte che resta’ with spirit, Williamson delivered her part in the Brindisi, ‘Tra voi saprò dividere il tempo mio giocondo’ with gusto. In Violetta’s scene with Alfredo, the soprano delivered ‘Ah, se ciò è ver, fuggitemi’ with intensity, and her voicing of ‘È strano! è strano!’ was probing. Williamson made the aria ‘Ah, fors’è lui che l’anima’ a profoundly personal reverie, her calm, confident vocalism driven by the text, facilitated by her expert diction. Her trill in the aria’s cadenza was superb. The contrast of the utterance of ‘Follie! Delirio vano è questo!’ that followed could hardly have been greater, Violetta’s gaiety returning as the vocal line climbed higher. Williamson’s performance of the cabaletta ‘Sempre libera degg’io folleggiare di gioia in gioia’ was all the more enjoyable for being unforced. The scale of her singing matched that of her account of the preceding aria, her top Cs bright and certain of intonation and the long-held interpolated E♭ in alt slightly effortful but decidedly worth the risk. In the magnificent Act Two scene with Germont, the soprano’s interjection of ‘Ah! comprendo’ after learning of Alfredo’s sister was piercing, this Violetta already sensing what would be asked of her. The quiet fortitude of Williamson’s voicing of ‘Non sapete quale affetto’ led to a heartbreaking performance of ‘Ah! Dite alla giovine sì bella e pura,’ the voice reduced to a thread of concentrated, arrestingly beautiful sound. Then, the emotional landslide of ‘Morrò! La mia memoria non fia ch’ei maledica’ swept over Violetta and Germont with unstinting force, propelled by Williamson’s emotive singing. The first of Violetta’s great arching melodies, ‘Amami, Alfredo, amami quant’io t’amo,’ drew from the soprano an outpouring of opulent tone. At Flora’s ball, Williamson’s Violetta intoned ‘Invitato a qui seguirmi’ with disquieting foreboding, and her understated reaction to Alfredo’s cruelty was indicative of the sincerity of her love for him. With her ravishing singing of the second of Violetta’s exalted melodies, ‘Alfredo, Alfredo, di questo core non puoi comprendere tutto l’amore,’ Williamson proved herself to be markedly superior to many sopranos who sing the rôle today. Even in the context of Flora’s ball, this was an unmistakably introverted passage, a statement meant for Alfredo alone, and the hushed tranquility of Williamson’s singing was far more moving than many sopranos’ near-hysterical caterwauling. Act Three of La traviata is a formidable test for any soprano, and Williamson further distinguished herself with singing of prodigious but never exaggerated expressivity. ‘Addio del passato bei sogni ridenti,’ reduced to one verse, was here a gravely private reflection, Williamson’s top A a tone of epic beauty. In the ecstatic duet with Alfredo, ‘Parigi, o caro, noi lasceremo,’ this Violetta seemed to believe for a moment that escape from her tragic circumstances was possible before the reality of her condition asserted itself in an expansively-phrased ‘Ah! Gran Dio! Morir sì giovine, io che penato ho tanto!’ The simplicity with which Williamson sang both ‘Prendi, quest’è l’immagine de’ miei passati giorni’ and ‘Se una pudica vergine, degli anni suoi sul fiore’ was affecting, and the skill of her acting made the moment of Violetta’s death agonizing, her body going limp in Alfredo’s arms just as it seemed that she was poised to soar back to health. As a vocalist and an actress, Williamson provided the Roanoke audience with a warm, womanly Violetta that absorbingly honored Duplessis, Dumas, Piave, and, above all, Verdi.

In many productions, La traviata seems like a puzzle with pieces that do not fit. One is either asked to accept stagings that conform with directors’ concepts of the opera rather than Verdi’s or compelled to endure singing that falls short of the preeminence that the score merits. Opera Roanoke’s production of La traviata assembled the puzzle with both elegance and eloquence, letting the opera speak—no, sing—for itself. What La traviata needs are not multi-million-dollar productions and casts of singers with names more illustrious than their talents that transform the opera into a circus act with vocal obbligato. La traviata needs a Violetta whose heart, soul, and throat embrace Verdi’s music, an Alfredo who loves her, and a Germont whose moral foundation is shaken by his encounter with a ‘fallen woman’ with a spirit purer than those of the most lauded paragons of virtue. With these crucial characterizations at its core, Opera Roanoke’s Traviata was an invigorating glimpse of the sterling emotional potential of opera, now so badly tarnished.

[1] RUGGERO LEONCAVALLO (1857 – 1919): Pagliacci—Jeff Gwaltney (Canio), Elizabeth Caballero (Nedda), Giovanni Guagliardo (Tonio), Alexey Lavrov (Silvio), Jason Karn (Beppe)

[2] SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873 – 1943): Aleko (Алеко) [AMERICAN PREMIÈRE PRODUCTION]—Alexey Lavrov (Aleko), Elizabeth Caballero (Zemfira), Kevin Thompson (Zemfira’s Father), Irina Mishura (Old Gypsy), Jason Karn (Young Gypsy); Opera Carolina Chorus; Charlotte Symphony Orchestra; James Meena, conductor [Michael Capasso, Director; Michael Baumgarten, Lighting Design; Martha Ruskai, Wig and Makeup Designs; Kara Wooten, Fight Coordinator; AT Jones and Sons, Inc., Costume Designs; Opera Carolina, Belk Theater, Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Charlotte, North Carolina; Thursday, 14 April 2016]

Whether among artists, works, performances, or productions, many relationships in the Performing Arts are founded upon far more tenuous connections than those between Ruggero Leoncavallo’s frequently-performed 1892 verismo potboiler Pagliacci and Sergei Rachmaninov’s prize-winning but considerably less-familiar Aleko of the same year. With stories of ill-fated marriages and infidelities in communities with social strata that isolate them from broader humanity, both operas depict environments in which intellectual, spiritual, and sensual oppression explode in life-altering—and life-ending—series of events. Recalling Metropolitan Opera productions in the first half of the Twentieth Century that paired unlikely bedfellows like Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Richard Strauss’s Salome, Opera Carolina’s production of Pagliacci and Aleko celebrated the thematic links between the scores without attempting to force the music into manufactured stylistic bonds. Perhaps the boldest innovation of Opera Carolina’s efforts was the astute but unaffected scrutiny of how homologous situations are portrayed by vastly different cultures. Though both scores were first performed in the same year, its setting and, to an extent, Rachmaninov’s music give Aleko the provenance of an earlier work, and performing Aleko as the first half of the evening handily increased appreciation of the competing evolution and devolution of societal attitudes towards morality and violence. As is almost always the case with Opera Carolina performances, however, one could simply bask in the profusion of beautiful sounds that poured from both stage and pit. These are the relationships, those among voices and instruments, that make operatic evenings in Charlotte so memorable.

Thoughtfully directed by Michael Capasso with close attention to both the similarities and the differences between the scores, Opera Carolina’s production—the first fully-staged presentation of Rachmaninov’s opera in the United States—went a step further than most productions of the traditional pairing of Pagliacci and Cavalleria rusticana by essentially uniting Leoncavallo’s and Rachmaninov’s scores as unexpectedly symmetrical halves of a single entity, much in the manner of Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, originally performed as a double bill with his Trouble in Tahiti, in its final, three-act form absorbing the earlier work. Rather than stand-alone works punctuated by Intermezzi, Pagliacci and Aleko therefore became acts in a continuous drama, separated by an interval but clearly invested with common musical and dramatic impetus. That the concept was successful was confirmed by the cumulative momentum that was generated in the opening bars of Rachmaninov’s music and maintained until the playing of the final chords of Leoncavallo’s score. Enhanced by richly evocative costume designs by Baltimore-based AT Jones and Sons, Inc. and lighting designs of the acumen expected from Michael Baumgarten, the sharply-contrasted but wholly complementary stagings of Aleko and Pagliacci spotlit the potent common ground upon which these gripping operas tread.

It is easy to make too much of the fact that Rachmaninov composed Aleko as an exercise for his matriculation from Moscow’s famed Conservatory and thus to dismiss or misunderstand the opera solely as a student work. That the opera is the work of a student cannot be denied, but Aleko is no product of dry academia. It is interesting to note that Tchaikovsky was in the audience for the première of Aleko at the Moscow Conservatory on 19 May 1892: he is certain to have noticed the prominent influence of his Yevgeny Onegin and Pikovaya dama, both sharing with Aleko roots in the work of Alexander Pushkin, in Rachmaninov’s music. Though not fully bearing the imprint of Rachmaninov’s singular mature style, Aleko makes extraordinary demands on principals, choristers, orchestra, and conductor, and Opera Carolina’s performance met these demands with universal finesse. In the opera’s Introduction, the company’s General Director and Principal Conductor James Meena revealed anew why he is such an integral component of Opera Carolina’s success, bolstering the cast’s work with momentous but always supportive conducting that displayed attention both to details of individual scenes and to the construction of each opera—and the presentation of both operas—as a whole.

From the opening bars of the Gypsies’ chorus, ‘Как вольность весел наш ночлет и мирный сон под небесами, между колесами телег, полузавешанных коврами,’ the Opera Carolina Chorus proved that their singing of Russian text is in no way inferior to their red-blooded declamations of Italian and German in recent productions of Turandot and Fidelio. The narratives of this and all of the choral interjections in Aleko were handled expertly, making the structure of the free-willed society into which Aleko has been adopted apparent to the audience.

Heard at Opera Carolina for the first time in this production, bass Kevin Thompson recounted the Old Gypsy’s Tale, ‘Волшебной силой песнопенья в туманной памяти моей вдруг оживляются виденья то светлых, то печальных дней,’ with gravitas and solid, impactful tone that rushed through the theatre like a bracing wind from the steppes. In the Moderato espressivo section, he braved the repeated Cs at the top of the stave and the galvanizing top E♭ without the slightest hint of stress, and his timbre when singing Russian vowels combined the resonance of George London with the tonal orotundity of Mark Reizen. Mourning the murdered Zemfira in the opera’s final scene, Thompson plunged below the stave to the kind of primal sound that one associates with Russian Orthodox monastic chanting. With recent political developments in North Carolina prominent in nationwide discourse, it was impossible not to attribute to Thompson’s muscular declamation of the line stating that the gypsies make no cruel laws an artistic plea for acceptance and understanding. The only regret inspired by Thompson’s singing was that Leoncavallo did not provide the bass with a suitable rôle in Pagliacci.

Муж и жена: Baritone Alexey Lavrov as Aleko (left) and soprano Elizabeth Caballero as Zemfira (right) in Opera Carolina’s production of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Aleko, April 2016 [Photo by jonsilla.com, © by Opera Carolina]

In Aleko’s scene with chorus, ‘Да как же ты не поспешил тотчас вослед неблагодарной и хищнику и ей, коварной, кинжала в сердце не вонзил,’ strikingly handsome young baritone Alexey Lavrov scaled the heights of his music’s high tessitura with every appearance of comfort. Singing and acting with conviction throughout the performance, he was an Aleko whose alienation within the gypsy fraternity was palpable and whose musicality throughout the compass of the part was unimpeachable.

Fronting the respective women’s and men’s dances, Marina Shanefelter and Alexandr Buryak offered splendid approximations of authentic folk dances from the Caucasus region, temporarily transporting the Charlotte audience some miles to the northwest to the venues of Folkmoot, North Carolina’s annual international dance festival. Their invigorating dancing was followed by the chorus’s riveting singing of the gypsies’ ‘Огни погашены.’

In the brief but impassioned duettino for the Young Gypsy and Zemfira, tenor Jason Karn and Opera Carolina débutante soprano Elizabeth Caballero sang fantastically, Karn infusing ‘Еще одно, одно лобзанье!’ with ardor and soaring to top C with panache and vocal abandon. In Zemfira’s cradle scene, Caballero voiced ‘Старый муж, грозный муж, режь меня, жги меня: я тверда, не боюсь ни ножа, ни огня’ arrestingly, negotiating the repeated top B♭s with apt freedom. Reflecting on his loss of his wife’s love, Lavrov sang Aleko’s cavatina, ‘Бесь табор спит. Луна над ним полночной красотою блещет,’ with an exemplary adherence to a bel canto line even in the music’s most exacting passages. The young baritone’s vocal security suffused his performance of the cavatina with suavity, lending credibility to his portrayal of Aleko as a virile man still viable as a combatant in the battle for Zemfira’s affection.

Meena lavished near-Wagnerian grandeur on his conducting of the Intermezzo, matched by the orchestra’s sumptuous playing. Then, singing from the wings, Karn intoned the Young Gypsy’s Romance, ‘Взгляни: под отдаленным сводом гуляет вольная луна,’ handsomely, effortlessly projecting the extended top A and and a beautiful B♭. Joined by Zemfira in the frenzied duet ‘Пора, мой милый, пора,’ Karn’s and Caballero’s voices intertwined with blistering amatory tension broken only by the slashing of Aleko’s blade. Defying her husband to the end, Caballero’s Zemfira died hurling bitter reproaches with her final breath. The gypsies’ plaintive ‘О чем шумят?’ and ‘Мы робки и добры душой,’ eloquently sung by the chorus, suggested that Zemfira’s adulterous spirit, an inherited trait, rendered her as much an outcast within her own community as Aleko: her death at her husband’s hand was the fulfillment of the destiny of which her adopted father sang when recounting the dolorous tale of his own jilting by Zemfira’s mother. The care expended on this production of Aleko was confirmed by the casting of an artist of the calibre of Russian mezzo-soprano Irina Mishura in the small but pivotal rôle of the Gypsy Woman, whose lines Mishura sang with resilient authority. Lavrov’s voicing of Aleko’s final lament of again finding himself alone, unloved and unwanted, the character bathed in soft light as he gazed sadly out into the house, surrounded by people but insurmountably separated from them, was heartbreaking. He lived but was in spirit no less dead than the victims of his jealousy at his feet.

Ecco la commedia: Baritone Giovanni Guagliardo as Tonio (left) and soprano Elizabeth Caballero as Nedda (right) in Opera Carolina’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, April 2016 [Photo by jonsilla.com, © by Opera Carolina]

In Pagliacci’s celebrated Prologo, the Charlotte audience made the acquaintance of the chameleonic, dangerous Tonio of Italian baritone Giovanni Guagliardo, a singer born into the tradition of Apollo Granforte, Aldo Protti, Tito Gobbi, and Ettore Bastianini. Voicing ‘Si può? Si può? Signore! Signori!’ with mock chivalry, Guagliardo started the performance auspiciously, his singing of ‘Un nido di memorie in fondo a l’anima cantava un giorno’ pulsating with artistic wonder. In the melodically fecund Andante cantabile, ‘E voi, piuttosto che le nostre povere gabbane d’istrioni,’ the baritone’s voice glowed. His rise to the traditional top G was strained, and he wisely omitted the A♭, also an interpolation: Leoncavallo’s wisdom should more often prevail, excluding these notes that bring so many singers to grief unnecessarily. Throughout Pagliacci, though, Guagliardo’s singing was an asset, the character’s jealous viciousness emerging with the power of Verdi’s Iago’s manipulation of Otello as the catalyst for the unstoppable chain reaction that ultimately leads to tragedy.

Welcoming Canio and his Commedia dell’arte troupe to the unspecified provincial town in which the opera’s drama, here transplanted into the 1950s, plays out, the chorus sang ‘Son qua!’ excitingly and received in reply from tenor Jeff Gwaltney’s flinty Canio an equally pulse-quickening statement of ‘Itene al diavolo,’ his top G♯ a thrilling tone. The contrast with fellow tenor Jason Karn’s Beppe facilitated distinguishing the characters’ utterances, but Karn’s voice was more substantial than those of many of his rivals in Beppe’s music. He voiced ‘To! To! birichino’ energetically and with obvious humor. Gwaltney’s account of Canio’s ‘Un grande spettacolo a ventitrè ore’ was a captivating sales pitch for his company’s show, but here and in the duration of the performance the voice was often weak when strength counted most. Guagliardo’s menacing delivery of Tonio’s ‘La pagherai! brigante!’ was wonderful and established a mood of disquiet before Canio’s Adagio molto con grande espressione ‘Un tal gioco, credetemi,’ which Gwaltney phrased with emotion and crowned with a steady top A. Giving telling dramatic significance to Nedda’s ‘Confusa io son,’ Caballero was from the start a figure who was clearly out of place among the rough-hewn Canio and Tonio. Dissolving the atmosphere of Canio’s reverie, Gwaltney fired off the reprise of ‘A ventitrè ore’ with steely resolve. The choristers ended the scene with a grand reading of the Chorus of the Bells, rousingly pealing out the distinctive rhythms of the Andantino grazioso ‘Don Din Don.’

With her electric singing of the Andante con moto ‘Qual fiamma avea nel guardo,’ Caballero announced herself as a Nedda in the now-little-remembered tradition of Clara Petrella and Aureliana Beltrami. The Ballatella, ‘Hui! Hui!...Stridono lassù liberamente lanciati a vol,’ a number that defeats many otherwise well-qualified singers, held no terrors for Caballero, her trills and long-held top A♯ disclosing the benefits of a solid bel canto technique in verismo music. In the chilling duet with Tonio, Caballero’s Nedda attempted to maintain a light touch, her vocalism in ‘Sei là? credea che te ne fossi andato!’ buoyant but infused with expressive depth. Trying to woo Nedda with even less skill for it than Beckmesser in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg possesses, Guagliardo exhibited admirable restraint in ‘È colpa del tuo canto,’ but there was genuine feeling—and a genuine line—in his delivery of the Cantabile sostenuto ‘So ben che difforme, contorto son io.’ Caballero’s Nedda quashed Tonio’s advances with fury in a voicing of the Sostenuto assai ‘Hai tempo a ridirmelo stassera, se brami!’ that bristled with scorn and horror. This was all the more visceral as the soprano’s beautiful face registered pity for her would-be suitor before his violence hardened her heart. The scene also yielded a bit of practical advice for any Tonio who encounters her Nedda in future: Caballero wields a whip with the unerring aim of Annie Oakley.

In the magnificent duet for Nedda and Silvio, Caballero was reunited with Lavrov, now singing Leoncavallo’s music as opulently as he interpreted Rachmaninov’s difficult music for Aleko. Caballero’s deliberate enunciation of ‘Silvio! a quest’ora che imprudenza!’ quaked with fear, but her trepidation was calmed by the plangent vocalism of her Silvio. Lavrov phrased the Andantino amoroso ‘Decidi il mio destin’ with moving simplicity, his top notes unfailingly on their marks but organically integrated into the vocal line. In Silvio’s arms, Nedda was transformed from a frumpy, barefoot housewife into a vibrantly erotic creature yearning to be an object of desire rather than possession. Caballero and Lavrov combined their voices hypnotically: in this performance, the couple failing to notice Tonio spying on their lovemaking was wholly credible, particularly as Guagliardo was careful to lurk and eventually guide Canio to the scene of the lovers’ rendezvous without creating a commotion. The score leaves no doubt that Leoncavallo sympathized with Nedda’s and Silvio’s illicit love: singing their duet so mesmerizingly, Caballero and Silvio engaged the audience’s hearts, too.

Ridi, Pagliaccio: Tenor Jeff Gwaltney as Canio in Opera Carolina’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, April 2016 [Photo by jonsilla.com, © by Opera Carolina]

Beginning with a pained but poetic articulation of the recitative ‘Recitar! Mentre presso dal delirio non so più quel che dico e quel che faccio,’ Gwaltney approached Canio’s oft-abused Adagio arioso ‘Vesti la giubba e la faccia infarina’ with dignity befitting a dedicated thespian. Eschewing the bawling, shouting, and face-pulling that push many tenors’ performances of the scene into the realm of parody, Gwaltney phrased ‘Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amere infranto!’ with musical and dramatic integrity, preserving the flow of the melodic line even in his ascents to the top As, which were projected with greater ease than his earlier excursions into the upper register. Still, there was a measure of caution apparent in his singing. Perhaps the season’s pernicious allergies were hounding him. Nevertheless, he gave a fine performance of one of opera’s most familiar scenes.

Like its cousin in Aleko, Pagliacci’s Intermezzo was played superbly by the Charlotte Symphony, and Meena’s mastery of the endangered art of rubato was put to use in his pacing of the restatement in the Intermezzo of the lyrical theme from the opera’s Prologue. In both Aleko and Pagliacci, the Symphony’s playing was exemplary, exceeding even the ensemble’s own high standards in previous Opera Carolina productions. The musicians’ performances of both scores in Thursday evening’s double bill were distinguished by lushly Romantic but controlled string figurations, virtually blemish-free brass playing, and rhythmic vitality that wrung every iota of dramatic sagacity from Meena’s well-considered, propulsive tempi.

In Leoncavallo’s Act Two, the choristers again set the stage for the drama to come, articulating ‘Presto! Presto affrettiamoci’ with unstinting immediacy and anticipation. Launching her troupe’s light-hearted commedia, Caballero’s Nedda purred and posed delightfully in Colombina’s ‘Pagliaccio, mio marito a tarda nottoe sol ritornerà,’ and Karns crooned Arlecchino’s serenata, ‘O Colombina, il tenero fido Arlecchin è a te vicin,’ elastically. In the scena comica between Colombina and Taddeo, Guagliardo bawled ‘Dei, come è bella!’ with the grace of a stampeding herd of oxen. Caballero was the embodiment of overripe feminine charm in the Tempo di Gavotta, ‘Guarda, amor mio, che splendida cenetta preparai,’ sweetly flirting with Arlecchino in her guise as Colombina. Even before he uttered his first words, it was evident that Canio was not in character as Pagliaccio: his anger exacerbated by frequent draughts from his flask, Canio’s rage was in search of an outlet. Gwaltney roared the Andante mosso ‘Vo’ il nome de l’amante tuo,’ but there was intense sadness beneath the damning ire in his well-sung ‘No! Pagliaccio non son,’ his top A♭s firm and on pitch. Gwaltney’s finest singing of the evening was in the Cantabile ‘Sperai, tanto il delirio accecato m’aveva,’ which the tenor negotiated with vigor despite ducking the written top B♭. His burly bullying was answered by Caballero’s fearless top Bs when refusing to reveal Silvio’s identity. Gwaltney pronounced Canio’s ‘La commedia è finita’ not so much to the audience as to himself, succinctly drawing a parallel with Aleko in the sense that even in his murderous savagery he loved his wife. The most profound tragedy of this Pagliacci was that Canio’s brutality was not the product of a moment of demented choler but the sole culmination of a troubled relationship perceptible to a mind bent by jealousy.

Opera Carolina productions often succeed in provoking through without ignoring musical values, and the company’s double bill of Aleko and Pagliacci further expanded the practical efficacy of using opera as a tool to excavate the foundations upon which contemporary artistic and social trends are fabricated. The compelling truth at the heart of this performance of Aleko and Pagliacci was that violence is perpetrated not only by weapons but also, often more destructively, by words and emotions. By casting the production’s foremost vocal powerhouses, Elizabeth Caballero and Alexey Lavrov, as both Rachmaninov’s Zemfira and Aleko and Leoncavallo’s Nedda and Silvio, Opera Carolina accentuated the poignancy with which universal sentiments are refracted through the wondrous prism of music.

Finzione non più: Tenor Jeff Gwaltney as Canio (left) and soprano Elizabeth Caballero as Nedda (right) in Opera Carolina’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, April 2016 [Photo by jonsilla.com, © by Opera Carolina]

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Der fliegende Holländer, WWV 63—Wayne Tigges (Der Holländer), Christina Pier (Senta), Peter Volpe (Daland), Corey Bix (Erik), Rachelle Pike (Mary), David Blalock (Der Steuermann Dalands); Virginia Opera Chorus; Richmond Symphony Orchestra; Adam Turner, conductor and Chorus Master [Sara Widzer, Director; James Noone, Set Designer; Erik Teague, Costume Designer; Mark McCullough, Lighting Designer; James McGough, Wig and Makeup Designer; Felicity Stiverson, Choreographer; Virginia Opera, Richmond CenterStage, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Arts Center, Richmond, Virginia; Sunday, 17 April 2016]

When Der fliegende Holländer premièred at Dresden’s Semperoper on 2 January 1843, Richard Wagner’s thirtieth birthday was slightly less than six months in future. Though already long in the musical tooth by the standards of Mozart and Mendelssohn, Wagner was hardly a novice, his career as a composer for the stage already encompassing several aborted operas and the completed scores Die Feen, never performed during the composer’s lifetime; Das Liebesverbot, suppressed after its first performance in 1836; and Rienzi, the sprawling tale of a Fourteenth-Century Roman tribune. Likely the opera composer about whom the most scholarly tomes and less-learned chronicles have been written, Wagner did much to cultivate his own mythology, lore that has expanded exponentially in the 133 years since the composer’s death in 1883. Whether by the composer’s or others’ designs, a tenet of the Wagner Legend is the notion that the composer of Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal emerged like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully in command of his genre-changing genius. Said by the composer to have been inspired, at least in part, by a tempestuous sea voyage from Latvia to England, the culmination of a perilous flight from creditors during which his first wife Minna suffered a miscarriage, Der fliegende Holländer was adapted primarily from an episode in Heinrich Heine’s satirical novel Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski. Sketched by Wagner as early as Spring 1840, the opera was pitched to Léon Pillet, Director of the Opéra de Paris, to whom it is alleged that the nearly-destitute composer sold the scenario for 500 francs in order to raise much-needed funds. Even with nothing so convenient as a bill of sale surviving to substantiate the Opéra’s transaction with Wagner, who hoped that Paris might witness the première of a Fliegende Holländeren français, it can hardly be coincidence that Pierre-Louis Dietsch’s Le vaisseau fantôme, a setting of a libretto by Paul Foucher and Bénédict-Henri Révoil that closely followed Wagner’s proposed drama, was premièred at the Opéra in 1842. What needs no proof beyond what the ears can perceive is that Wagner’s style evolved momentously between the completion of Rienzi in November 1840 and his composition of the bulk of Der fliegende Holländer in Summer 1841. For Wagner and for German opera in general, Der fliegende Holländer was a point of no return. Anchored in Richmond’s historic Carpenter Theatre at Dominion Arts Center, Virginia Opera’s production of Der fliegende Holländer was a point of departure for a spellbinding journey through the score in which, in the sense of his development of the history-altering Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner became Wagner.

Whether presented using Wagner’s intended through-composed structure or the more familiar three-act form and set in Scotland, Norway, or a real or imagined alternate locale, Der fliegende Holländer poses difficult questions that production teams must endeavor to answer. Offering the company’s second interpretation of the opera, Virginia Opera’s Fliegende Holländer revived a production by acclaimed director and designer Francesca Zambello that was created for The Glimmerglass Festival and later mounted by Hawaii Opera Theatre. Directed for Virginia Opera by Sara Widzer, the insights of Zambello’s concept were sharpened to razor’s-edge intensity, giving the relationships among characters—and the characters themselves—specificity that enhanced their inherent symbolism despite an over-reliance on imagery involving ropes, also a component of Zambello’s Metropolitan Opera production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and blocking that often seemed tentative and uncomfortable for the singers. Nevertheless, Senta thus became a determined, even humorous woman experiencing a sexual catharsis, as well as a manifestation of the archetypical ‘Eternal Feminine,’ the literal and spiritual vessel of the Holländer’s redemption. What Senta emphatically is not is a Brünnhilde without battle armor, and Widzer’s direction facilitated the development of a youthful, idealistic Senta with her own unique identities within the contexts of the performance and the Wagner canon. Erik Teague’s costume designs served the drama well but were less kind to the bodies that wore them. Jim McGough’s wigs and makeup were more successful at flattering both composer and cast, and Felicity Stiverson’s choreography infused the production with an organic range of motions to which the dancers—Dominique Buffington, Marcia Burns, Katie Henly, Maurio Hines, Kevin Jones, Nicole Lorah, Elliot Peterson, and Stiverson herself—mostly responded with unaffected movement. Though Richmond is a two-hour drive inland from the Atlantic, the achievements of set designer James Noone and lighting designer and implementer Mark McCullough and Serena Wong convincingly brought the sea to the stage, the relentless churning of the surf that resounds in Wagner’s music depicted in the production with an immediacy that heightened the drama’s emotional impact.

The musical challenges of Der fliegende Holländer are at least as terrifying as the opera’s scenic elements, and Virginia Opera’s production scaled the dangerous precipices of Wagner’s score on the sure footing of conductor and chorus master Adam Turner. At the helm of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra for the Richmond performances, Turner paced a traversal of the score in which gravitas occasionally outweighed momentum. Senta’s Ballade was slightly lugubrious, but there were notable benefits to the conductor’s approach. Allowed to expand without rushing, phrases often revealed beauties that remain hidden in speedier performances, and the singers were given the breadth and support that they needed to refine their characterizations. Turner’s conducting of the Ouvertüre ​had a depth that recalled the Wagner performances of Hans Knappertsbusch and Sir Reginald Goodall, the young maestro’s contrasted handling of the Allegro con brio, Andante, and Molto espressivo sections ideally balancing rhythmic tautness with unabashed Romanticism. The indebtedness of Wagner’s ensemble writing to Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber was especially apparent, and it was astonishing to note how closely the marvelous duet for Senta and the Holländer is related to the scene for newly-reunited father and daughter in Act One of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. The Richmond Symphony’s playing was little short of spectacular, the horns earning special praise for their near-perfect executions of their parts. Turner’s training of the Virginia Opera Chorus yielded choral singing that set a high standard with the first ‘Hojohe! Hallojo!’​ and maintained it throughout the performance, the quality of both voices and vocalism displayed by the tenors’ unbothered rise to top G in their opening phrase. Though falling victim to more rope-trick business and being asked to pop up and down in their chairs like citizens of a prairie dog town, the ladies were most impressive in ‘Summ’ und brumm’, du gutes Rädchen’ in the scene with Senta and Mary. Gentlemen and ladies sang powerfully in ‘Steuermann, laß die Wacht!’ and ‘Mein! Seht doch an!’ The foremost misjudgment of the afternoon was the garish over-amplification of the offstage singing of the Holländer’s crew. Presumably, the intended effect was an ethereal disembodiment of the voices, but it was overloud, ugly, and detrimental to enjoyment of the choristers’ expert work. This production of Der fliegende Holländer is Turner’s maiden voyage as a conductor of Wagner repertory, and the thoughtfulness and thorough preparation of this freshman outing suggest that he has exceptional promise as a Wagnerian.

It was wonderful to encounter in native New Zealander mezzo-soprano Rachelle Pike a Mary who was a foil for Senta who did not require the assistance of ear trumpets and walking canes. Age is one of opera’s confounding variables, but why so many productions dictate that Mary must sound like a crone is mystifying. Mary is no Ortrud, Venus, Brangäne, or Fricka, but she is a more significant presence in Der fliegende Holländer than many productions permit her to be. With her vibrant voicing of ‘Ei! Fleißig, fleißig! Wie sie spinnen will Jede sich den Schatz gewinnen,’ Pike enriched the scene at the start of Act Two—part of Act One in Virginia Opera’s production, which divided the opera into two acts, with the interval after Senta’s duet with the Holländer—with sounds that could be truly enjoyed, not merely endured. Her reading of ‘Das Schiffsvolk kommt mit leerem Magen’ was a taskmistress’s order that demanded obedience. Pike made Mary’s fear of the consequences of Senta’s obsession with the Holländer’s predicament palpable, her firm, musical singing far more effectively conveying the character’s panic than other singers’ shrewish wailing. Whatever a rôle’s duration, good singing always counts for much, and Virginia Opera had in Pike an uncommonly well-sung Mary. Whether she was intentionally costumed and posed whilst Daland introduced Senta to the Holländer to strongly resemble Whistler’s mother is a secret that this Holländer will take to Davy Jones’s Locker.

North Carolina-born tenor David Blalock was a Steuermann whose secure, sonorous singing reminded the listener that voices as beautiful as those of Ernst Haefliger, Anton Dermota, Fritz Wunderlich, and George Shirley were once heard in the rôle, both in opera houses and on disc. Blalock’s performance was a wonderful return to this tradition, his refined but robust vocalism seeming as capable of meeting the demands of Erik’s music as it was of making easy going of the Steuermann’s lines. In Act One, Blalock sang ‘Ho! Kapitän!’ with good-natured zeal, his G at the top of the stave easy and ringing. He phrased the Steuermann’s Lied, ‘Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer,’ with boyish charm, his golden top B♭ like a lover’s sigh. Later, his voicing of ‘’Sist nichts, ’sist nichts!’ and ‘Fürwahr! Tragst’s hin den armen Knaben!’ was delightfully confident. Like Pike’s Mary, Blalock’s Steuermann was a tremendous boon, a performance of leading-man quality in a rôle that in recent years has rarely received such treatment.

Wagner’s music for Erik, the conformist yokel who earnestly woos Senta and is a symbolic representative of the oppressive society from which she longs to escape, asked nothing of tenor Corey Bix that was not well within the scope of his capabilities. The tessitura that Erik faces is evident immediately upon his entrance, the first note that he sings being a top A, and Bix shrank from none of the rigors of ‘Senta! Willst du mich verderben?’ or the energetic duet with Senta, ‘Bleib’, Senta! Bleib’ nur einen Augenblick.’ In what is generally Act Three, Bix fired ‘Was mußt’ ich hören!’ like a warning shot from his hunting rifle, and the tenor’s performance of Erik’s Kavatine, ‘Willst jenes Tag’s du dich nicht mehr entsinnen,’ was distinguished by nimble negotiations of the turns and top B♭. Still, it was not difficult to discern why Senta so readily abandoned her dalliance with Erik in order to surrender to her fascination with the enigmatic Holländer: would any self-respecting lady with an adventurous imagination ally herself with a man whose every word is shouted at her? This is as much Wagner’s fault as the tenor’s, of course, but other singers—the young Sándor Kónya, for one—have deployed greater finesse in their performances of Erik’s music. Crucially, though, few of today’s Eriks sing the rôle as ably as Bix breathed life into his foursquare lines in Richmond.

Bass Peter Volpe’s sonorous, refreshingly uncomplicated Daland, as much a descendant of Rossini’s money-hungry Don Basilio as of Mozart’s Osmin and Beethoven’s Rocco, proffered in Virginia Opera’s Fliegende Holländer the levity that was surely a vital aspect of Wagner’s vision. The character’s untroubled spirit emanated from Volpe’s singing of ‘Kein Zweifel! Sieben Meilen fort trieb uns der Sturm von sich’ren Port’ and ‘He! Holla! Steuermann!’ His appetite for material gain whetted in the Duett with the Holländer, this Daland declaimed ‘Wie wunderbar! Soll deinem Wort ich glauben?’ with the exuberance of a card shark holding a winning hand. Glimpses of a more serious facet of Daland’s brassy demeanor flickered through Volpe’s singing of the aria ‘Mögst du, mein Kind, den fremden Mann willkommen heißen,’ his voice glowing more brightly than the cask of riches laid before him by the Holländer. His function in the brief Terzett with Senta and Holländer amounted to little more than anchoring a few chords, but Volpe did even that with panache. Ending the opera with Senta asphyxiating herself—a final use of the rope motif and here one with an unsavory hint of autoeroticism—was one of the production’s rare disfiguring misfires, but having Daland gently caress Senta’s lifeless hand as the curtain descended, the first and ultimately sole gesture of genuine affection between father and daughter in the performance, was surprisingly moving. Volpe’s voice was audible throughout the range of the music, and this Daland’s cheery disposition—no careworn old sea dog, this fellow!—shone as luminously when he was silent as when he sang.

American soprano Christina Pier, a winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious National Council Auditions and a student of the acclaimed Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani, herself an unexpectedly effective heroine in performances of Der fliegende Holländer sung in Italian, proved a Senta with nothing to fear from comparisons with the great Sentas of previous generations. Unlike many of her colleagues who now sing the rôle, Pier possesses a voice of dimensions equal to Senta’s music, her upper register focused and utterly reliable but also skillfully integrated with the bottom octave of the voice. Moreover, Pier is an expressive artist who communicates more than words, pitches, and rhythms. Singing ‘Was hast du Kunde mir gegeben’ inwardly, Pier was from the start a Senta trapped between fantasy and dreary reality. Battling a slow tempo, Pier conjured an atmosphere of near-ecstatic concentration in the Ballade, ‘Jo ho hoe! Traft ihr das Schiff.’ In the piece’s Più lento section, ‘Doch kann dem bleichen Manne Erlösung einstens noch werden,’ her voice radiated girlish purity, the profusion of Gs at the top of the stave mastered unflinchingly. The soprano’s Senta grew ever more agitated and justifiably frustrated in the Duett with Erik, but her singing of the Lento ‘Fühlst du den Schmerz, den tiefen Gram, mit dem herab auf mich er sieht?’ was shaped by a beautifully-extended bel canto line. Her patience finally failed her in the Allegro con fuoco section, ‘Er sucht mich auf,’ and she lashed at the guileless Erik with a mighty top A. The dramatic temperature of Senta’s pivotal Duett with the Holländer was elevated markedly by Pier’s incandescent voicing of ‘Versank ich jetzt in wunderbares Träumen,’ the ecstatic top Bs igniting the dark surroundings like Saint Elmo’s fire. Confronted by conventionality one last time, this Senta was passive, even indifferent in the brief Duett with Erik preceding his Kavatine. Observed with Erik by the Holländer, who mistakes her rejection of the huntsman for tenderness, Pier explained Senta’s actions with a scorching performance of ‘Halt’ ein! Von dannen sollst du nimmer flieh’n!’ Forever joining her fate with that of the Holländer, Senta has her own Liebestod in miniature, and Pier sang ‘Preis’ deinen Engel und sein Gebot!’ with astounding singularity of purpose and phenomenal top As and B. The scarcity of dramatic voices among today’s singers is often—and justifiably—lamented, especially by earnest Wagnerians, but Sentas of the quality that Pier accomplished in Richmond are neither more nor less plentiful now than when Kirsten Flagstad sang Senta in Covent Garden’s 1937 Coronation Season or when Astrid Varnay interpreted her at the MET in 1950 and 1951 and at Bayreuth in 1955, 1956, and 1959. Singing such as Pier’s is always a precious commodity. That she was not as convincing dramatically as she was dominant musically was the result of a staging that needlessly highlighted her minor weaknesses rather than exploiting her considerable strengths, but Virginia Opera can rightly boast of having offered audiences a sensational, once-in-a-generation Senta.

Having heard bass-baritone Wayne Tigges’s smug, slyly menacing Assur in Waahington Concert Opera’s November 2015 performance of Rossini’s Semiramide [reviewed here], it was difficult to believe that the same artist sang the Holländer in Richmond. It was the same imposing, sinewy voice, of course, but the snarling mettle of the singer’s Assur here metamorphosed into an engrossing vulnerability. From the first hushed notes of his Act One aria ‘Die Frist ist um,’ this Holländer was plainly a broken man but very much a man, not a phantom. The thunderous power of Tigges’ voice was unleashed in the Allegro molto agitato section, ‘Wie oft in Meeres tiefsten Schlund stürtz’ ich voll Sehnsucht mich hinab: doch ach! den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht,’ the bass-baritone weathering the repeated ascents to top E♭ with the dependability of the tide. In the wake of such vocal muscularity, the heartrending sadness of Tigges’ articulation of the Maestoso ‘Dich frage ich, gepries’ner Engel Gottes’ was stunning and all the more profound. The sheer exhaustion of the Holländer’s beleaguered spirit weighted the singer’s heartfelt delivery of ‘Weit komm’ ich her: verwehrt bei Sturm und Wetter ihr mir den Ankerplatz?’ In the Duett with Daland, Tigges voiced ‘Durch Sturm und bösen Wind verschlagen’ with guarded elation, his hope returning with the prospect of winning Senta’s hand. Meeting the cause of his renewed optimism, he sang ‘Wie aus der Ferne längst vergangner Zeiten spricht dieses Mädchens Bild zu mir’ in the Duett with Senta with touching amazement, recognizing in the naïve young woman before him traits unknown even to a soul forced to endlessly wander the earth. In the Duett’s Molto più section, Tigges uttered ‘Du bist ein Engel!’ with grave beauty of tone, giving voice to the Holländer’s anticipation of his long-awaited rebirth. Finding Senta in Erik’s arms in the penultimate scene, the magnitude of Tigges’s singing of ‘Verloren! Ach! verloren!’ was transfixing not because of the character’s capacity for violence but owing to the bitterness of his despair. Revealing the Holländer’s true identity, which only Senta had truly grasped, Tigges flung out the text of ‘Erhahre das Geschick, vor dem ich dich bewahr’!’ breathtakingly. Tigges had at his disposal the full measure of brute force that the scale of the Holländer’s music necessitates, but his performance was most remarkable for the poignantly suffering man that he created beneath the Holländer’s ghastly persona. It is unusual that a Holländer impresses as much with beauty as with brawn, but, like Hans Hotter, Friedrich Schorr, and Josef Metternich before him, Tigges’s portrayal of the Holländer was guided by the humanity with which Wagner imbued this most emotionally ephemeral of his heroes.

Der fliegende Holländer was a milestone in Wagner’s career and in the progress of German opera from the work of Baroque master Reinhard Keiser to the scores of modern composers like Hans Werner Henze and Aribert Reimann. In the pages of Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner not only paved the way for his later masterpieces but also provided a tangible connection between Teutonic styles old and new. As it was when the company first staged the opera in 1996, this production of Der fliegende Holländer is likewise a milestone in Virginia Opera’s continuing dedication to bringing world-class opera to the Old Dominion. Sunday’s performance was a celebration of collaborative music making that reaffirmed that even in the metaphysical realm of Wagner’s operas voices eclipse vanities.

Heil, Holländer: Bass-baritone Wayne Tigges as Der Holländer in Virginia Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, April 2016 [Photo by Lucid Frame Productions, © by Virginia Opera]

BRIAN ASAWA

1 October 1966 – 18 April 2016

There is no aspect of writing about the Performing Arts that I find more difficult than memorializing artists of importance to me, especially when I am fortunate enough to value them as much for their humanity off the stage as for their musical accomplishments. The news of the passing of renowned countertenor Brian Asawa at the age of forty-nine is therefore as unnerving as it was unexpected. One of the most gifted singers in his Fach whose passion for furthering the art of countertenor singing and nurturing the burgeoning careers of young artists recently led him into the arena of artist management, Asawa’s vocalism was virtually inseparable from his personality. To hear him sing was to know his soul, and to know his soul was to cherish his artistry, whether or not countertenors occupy a place of affection in one’s own heart.

In 1991, Asawa was the first countertenor to garner an Adler Fellowship to San Francisco Opera’s prestigious Merola Opera Program and to win the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. His fellow Merola participants in 1991 included artists of the calibre of Robert Breault, William Burden, Steven Condy, Earle Patriarco, and Daniel Sumegi, and he shared the laurels in the MET National Council Auditions with such luminaries as Elizabeth Futral, Paul Groves, and Kenneth Tarver. Following triumphant débuts with San Francisco Opera and the Mozart Bicentennial celebration at Lincoln Center, he received a career grant from the Richard Tucker Music Foundation and became the first countertenor to take the top prize in Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition. Asawa made his formal MET début on 18 February 1994, providing the silvery Voice of Apollo in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice. The following year, he recorded a performance of the rôle of Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream under Sir Colin Davis’s baton that has never been surpassed. Asawa returned to the MET in 1999 and 2000 for eight performances of Tolomeo in Händel’s Giulio Cesare.

In the course of his career, Asawa appeared in many of the world’s greatest opera houses, carving new paths along the trail blazed by Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin, but the cavernous spaces of opera houses were too impersonal for the poetic intimacy of his artistry. Espousing repertory spanning almost half a millennium, ranging from the typical countertenor territory of Elizabethan lute songs to Ned Rorem’s Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century art songs, Asawa’s recordings expanded the horizons of what countertenor voices can do. In addition to his Oberon on the Philips label, his Farnace in the DECCA recording of Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto is a performance of astonishing musical and histrionic power, one in which he sometimes outshone the high-wattage singing of Cecilia Bartoli and Natalie Dessay.

Asawa could be prickly, but the affection that his colleagues have for him is evidence of the inexhaustible commitment that he had for whatever task he undertook. In his funeral oration for Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Grillparzer wrote that until the moment of his death the great composer ‘preserved a human heart for all men, a father's heart for his own people, the whole world.’ The musical children who treasured his paternal heart and the artistry that it enshrined understood that Asawa’s was a spirit that was easily wounded, not from weakness but from strength of integrity and perceptiveness.

I had the pleasure of making Asawa’s acquaintance during the planning of his most recent recording, Spirits of the Air, a beautiful disc on which he collaborated with mezzo-soprano Diana Tash in performances of music by Marco da Gagliano, Monteverdi, Purcell, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Händel. I found a message still in my inbox in which, in the context of an exchange about the disc’s repertory, he wrote to me, ‘Thank you for loving this music enough to support us coloring outside [of] the lines.’ This is precisely the sentiment that explains why Asawa was an artist of great significance: he loved music enough to follow wherever it led.

Daisy Belle Bradley Newsome
3 November 1920 – 1 May 2016

My grandmother was not a world-renowned singer, a prima ballerina, or a celebrated painter, but there is no question that Daisy Belle Bradley Newsome was a great artist. In the rôles of daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, and friend, her virtuosity was remarkable, as unforgettable in its way as Callas’s Norma and Fonteyn’s Giselle. She spoke her mind and expressed her opinions, but she loved and accepted unconditionally, and she personified the qualities that lend the heroines of Mozart, the protagonists of Austen, and the sentiments of Dickinson their enduring value and appeal.

In an age in which individuality is prized far above loyalty, even after fifteen years of widowhood she proudly signed herself as Mrs. Robert Newsome, a tribute to the husband of sixty-three years whose memory she cherished. She always carried a purse not as a vehicle for makeup or a mobile phone but because someone might need a Kleenex or a comb—or food might need to be smuggled out of a restaurant. She knew her part in every production, whether a son’s wedding or grocery shopping, and played it with grace and contentment that rooted her character not in complacency but in unwavering faith and commitment to family.

It was in her mastery of the art of living fully but humbly that my grandmother excelled most astoundingly. Wherever she resided, she never pretended to be anything but a child of rural Virginia who was said to have been named after her beloved Daddy’s favorite cow. Her siblings called her Belle, and that is what she was: a true Southern belle of the kind now irreversibly endangered, a lady who wore hats and gloves to church and always knew what to say and when and how to say it. I am immeasurably blessed to have had in my life four grandparents who were afraid of neither living nor dying, their honor in the former nobly transitioned into uncompromised dignity in the latter.

In the nine-and-a-half decades of her life, my grandmother likely never attended the opera or ballet or bought a recording of a symphony or string quartet, but she lived what so many artists can only feign, making music, motion, and beauty of everyday things too simple to be taught and too monumental to be imitated.

PIER FRANCESCO CAVALLI (1602 – 1676): Sospiri d’amore– Venetian Opera Duets and Arias, 1644 – 1666—Giulia Semenzato, soprano; Raffaele Pe, countertenor; La Venexiana; Claudio Cavina, conductor [Recorded in Teatro alle Vigne, Lodi, Italy, in December 2015; Glossa GCD 920940; 1 CD, 60:07; Available from Glossa, ClassicsOnlineHD, jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

Collaborations among artists are the most structurally substantial cornerstones upon which Classical Music is built. Whether contributing to the creation or the performance of music, artistic relationships define the pasts, presents, and futures of all genres of Classical Music, the exchanges of ideas spurred by the creative impulses producing both great masterpieces of Western music and legendary performances of them. Händel and Senesino, Mozart and Da Ponte, Rossini and Colbran, Bellini and Romani, and Verdi and Boito are the sorts of artistic unions that have yielded history-altering works, but no less vital to the development of musical traditions are the collaborations among fellow musicians. As the Bible suggests and Abraham Lincoln reminded, houses divided against themselves cannot stand: from a musical perspective, how long can any musical ensemble whose members do not have at least a respectful rapport endure? United in celebration of the musical genius of Pier Francesco Cavalli, soprano Giulia Semenzato and countertenor Raffaele Pe construct during the sixty minutes of Sospiri d’amore an edifice as gratifyingly solid as the still-strong marvels of ancient Rome. The combatants in this musical Colosseo, situated by Glossa’s engineering in a ingratiatingly natural acoustic, are more delicate than Rome’s legendary gladiators and fearsome beasts, but opening one’s ears and heart to their contests reveals that the musical weapons that they wield are just as penetrating as polished blades and gnashing teeth.

Under the direction of Claudio Cavina, himself a much-admired altus, the musicians of La Venexiana fully embrace the spirit of collaboration that exists between Semenzato and Pe. Though details of his career are more documented than those of many of his contemporaries, Cavalli’s musical world nonetheless remains enigmatic in some crucial ways. Born in the commune of Crema in the Italian region of Lombardia on 14 February 1602, Cavalli received from Jacopo Peri, Claudio Monteverdi, and a handful of other, less-familiar innovators the first fruits of a concerted effort at achieving through song a renaissance of stylized Hellenic drama. From these fruits, Cavalli extracted an essence that was distilled into opera in the form in which it passed through the hands of guardians like Agostino Steffani into the company of geniuses of the ilk of Georg Friedrich Händel and thus into every subsequent generation of composers, performers, and observers. Cavalli is no less significant to the development of opera than Monteverdi, Händel, Gluck, Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner; more so, in fact, for without Cavalli’s clear differentiations of recitatives, ariosos, arias, and ensembles, the roads to Tamerlano, Così fan tutte, Falstaff, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg would have been considerably more difficult to navigate. Questions about instrumentation and the precise constitution of the continuo in Cavalli’s operas likely will never be answered with certainty or finality, but the solutions proposed on this disc by La Venexiana’s players—Efix Puleo and Daniela Godio on violin, Luca Moretti on viola, Antonio Papetti on cello, Alberto Lo Gatto on violone, Chiara Granata on triple harp, Gabriele Palomba and Diego Cantalupi on theorbo, and Luca Oberti on harpsichord—compellingly evoke the grandeur of Cavalli’s mature style whilst also ideally preserving the emotional intimacy of his finest music. Cavina’s alert, wonderfully ‘vocal’ pacing and the entrancing battery of sounds produced by the musicians combine in each selection—each of the cleverly-contrasted but complementary sighs, that is—on Sospiri d’amore to create an atmosphere in which the singers are not forced to resort to over-emoting in order to convey the nuances of the text to the listener. Cavalli’s voice here emerges as clearly as those of his modern-day interpreters, and he is sounding astonishingly fresh and modern these 340 years after his earthly voice fell silent.

Establishing himself as a presence as vital to Glossa’s catalogue of recordings of vocal music as Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi were to the efforts of EMI/Angel and DECCA/London in the 1950s, Raffaele Pe follows his superb performance as the Evangelista on Glossa’s recording of Gaetano Veneziano’s Passione secondo Giovanni [reviewed here] with passionate, poignant accounts of music by Cavalli on Sospiri d’amore. From the first bar of ‘Corone ed honori’ from the 1653 opera Il Ciro, Pe’s wholly organic affinity for this repertory is apparent. Admirably sure of intonation throughout the full range of his music on this disc, from ruby-hued tones in chest resonance to refulgently full-throated falsetto, Pe’s confident handling of Cavalli’s vocal lines yields exquisite results, the immediacy of his singing revealing to the modern listener the communicative power that exerted such a profound influence both on Cavalli’s contemporaries and on future generations of composers. Similarly, ‘Io misero fui Rege’ from Scipione Affricano (1664) receives from Pe a performance of unstinting commitment to music and text, the singer’s exemplary diction, reliant upon clear but unexaggerated elocution of vowels, highlighting the skill with which Cavalli replicated the natural cadences of speech. Whether in the opera house, on the concert stage, or in the recording studio, Pe is an artist who sings to rather than at the listener, transforming every alert observer of a performance into a participant, and the textual clarity, emotional directness, and tonal beauty with which he sings Cavalli’s music on this disc marginalizes the distance between the Seventeenth and Twenty-First Centuries. Pe here reminds the listener that singers whose work equates period-appropriate performance standards with pedantry disserve themselves, composers, poets, and audiences.

Soprano Giulia Semenzato proves in her singing of three of Cavalli’s most inspired arias to be an interpreter of the composer’s music fully worthy of partnering Pe. In her traversals of the markedly different ‘Lassa, che fò’ and ‘Vanne intrepido o mio bene’ from the too-seldom-performed Statira, principessa di Persia (1656—a full century before the birth of Mozart, it is worth noting, despite the rapid pace at which Cavalli’s vocal writing propels opera out of the Seventeenth Century and into the Eighteenth), Semenzato’s phrasing is as well-considered as her tones are focused and confidently projected. The first of the two numbers from Statira exemplifies the skill with which Cavalli could instigate a psychological avalanche without burying a character beneath blizzards of unnecessary notes and emotive wailing. Like her countertenor colleague, Semenzato’s singing exudes comfort with the idiom, and the soprano meets no challenges that overextend her resources. As sung by Semenzato, ‘Alpi gelate’ from Pompeo Magno (1666) is as potent as a soliloquy by any of Shakespeare’s great heroines, the vocal line scaling extraordinary heights of expression. With engagements at many of Europe’s leading opera houses, including La Scala, to her credit, the soprano is a musical storyteller whose artistry belies her youth. Like Pe’s singing, her way with Cavalli’s music illustrates her flair for enlivening music that many singers foolishly dismiss as antiquated.

Pe’s and Semenzato’s accounts of their arias are wonderful, but the duets are the lifeblood of Sospiri d’amore. Even expert singers with seemingly compatible sensibilities do not always prove to be well-matched duet partners. No concerns about the cooperation between Semenzato and Pe and the symbiosis that they achieve deter from enjoyment of this disc. The subtle but animated mingling of voices in ‘O luci belle’ from Eritrea (1652) at once discloses the communicative impact that this duo’s endeavors are capable of deploying. The singers’ contrasted timbres facilitate exploration of the dramatic impetus at the heart of each duet, not least in ‘Qui cadè al tuo piè’ from Orimonte (1650), in which the interaction between the voices propels both thematic development and deepening feelings. Semenzato and Pe create fully human characters, not dulcet-voiced ciphers.

It was as Delio in Spoleto Festival USA’s 2015 modern première production of Cavalli’s 1652 score Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona that Pe confirmed his stature as one of the fledgling millennium’s most thoughtful and accomplished young countertenors, his portrayal of the libidinous young man combining sensitive singing of star quality with heroic machismo—frequently frustrated, albeit—in the best tradition of Mario del Monaco and Franco Corelli. Melding their voices like sunlight and stained glass, he and Semenzato conjure in the studio much of the magic in their singing of ‘Né meste più’ that he and soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli created upon the Charleston stage. Cavalli’s unsurpassed gift for enveloping even inimical sentiments in music of unmistakable sensuality elevates ‘L’aspetto feroce’ from Muzio Scevola (1665) and ‘D’Amor non si quereli’ from Ormindo (1644) into the company of the celebrated ‘Pur ti miro, pur ti godo’ in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, the text and, less certainly, the music of which are now commonly attributed to a 1641 Bologna staging of Benedetto Ferrari’s Il pastor regio. [The operatic Poppea having been first crowned in 1643, some scholars theorize that the opera’s closing duet was composed by Cavalli, but no concrete evidence to substantiate (or refute) this has thus far been discovered.] Certainly, Semenzato and Pe sing both numbers with the flexibility, technical accomplishment, and unabashed opulence that Monteverdi’s—or, in this context, Ferrari’s—Poppea and Nerone demand.

The dialogue for Clori and Lidio from L’Egisto (1643), ‘Hor che l’Aurora,’ is a splendid example of a form that Cavalli perfected, fusing the allegorical discourses among archetypes of the sort found more than a half-century later in Händel’s Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno with starkly real circumstances of people of flesh and blood. The gap separating Cavalli’s Clori and Lidio from Mozart’s Pamina and Tamino, Beethoven’s Leonore and Florestan, Verdi’s Aida and Radamès, Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Siegfried, and Puccini’s Minnie and Johnson is startlingly narrow, the later composers having crafted their own individual styles of giving life to characters’ high-stakes conversations from the raw materials of Cavalli’s dialogues. Semenzato and Pe enact the dialogue for Clori and Lidio with intelligently-phrased intensity that uncannily preserves and transcends the formality of the music’s construction. Their singing of ‘Io chiudo nel core’ from Il rapimento di Elena (1659) indeed seems to emanate directly from the hearts of both artists, the concentrated passion of their singing surpassed only by its unspoiled beauty. The slightly mysterious aura of Ormindo’s ‘Sì, sì, che questa notte’ is an ideal setting for Semenzato’s and Pe’s understated brilliance: using Cavalli’s pointed melodic lines as their canvas, they spread the colors of their voices over a ravishing musical panorama of the jagged, jarring topography of humanity.

In today’s complicated, sometimes disheartening Classical recording industry, a disc’s success often depends upon its ability to justify its existence. In these performances by Giulia Semenzato and Raffaele Pe, any piece on Sospiri d’amore can be cited as an irrefutable raison d’être for this absorbing disc, but the prevailing triumph of Sospiri d’amore is the wondrous, often deeply moving synergy among singers, musicians, and music that, owing to performances of this quality, is as alive today as when it was first performed more than three centuries ago.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Schwanengesang, D.957— [1] with Goethe Lieder by Schubert and Lieder by Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949); Hermann Prey, baritone; Walter Klien, piano (Schwanengesang); Karl Engel, piano (Goethe and Strauss Lieder) [Recorded in Sofiensaal, Vienna, Austria, 13 – 15 April 1963 (Schwanengesang) and DECCA Studios, West Hampstead, London, UK, 4 – 7 June 1963 (Strauss Lieder) and 14 – 18 February 1964 (Goethe Lieder); DECCA 480 8171; 1 CD, 78:52; Available from Amazon (USA – mp3 only), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers] and [2] with four miscellaneous Schubert Lieder; James Rutherford, baritone; Eugene Asti, piano [Recorded in Potton Hall, Saxmundham, Suffolk, UK, in January 2015; BIS Records BIS-2180; 1 SACD, 69:48; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

At least since the inceptions of artistic endeavors and observers’ responses to them, there has been an insatiable interest, sometimes well-intentioned and at other times unjustifiably perverse, in perusing, contemplating, and analyzing artists’ final works. Since the advent of Freudian psychology, this interest has been intensified into an often misguided desire to interpret artists’ last creations as symbolism-laden, portentous metaphysical statements about life, death, and the people and places encountered along the way. It is beyond dispute that the death of Franz Schubert on 19 November 1828, before he reached his thirty-second birthday, was a blow to music of no less impact than the similarly early demises of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and Chopin, but what stories do his last compositions tell? A generation ago, it might have been suggested that, except as a composer of Lieder, Schubert’s youthful promise was never fully realized: his chamber music, liturgical works, and writing for piano remained in the shadows of Beethoven and Haydn, his operas were unsuccessful, and his most ambitious undertaking as a symphonist was left unfinished. These shortsighted assessments now mostly abandoned, Schubert is recognized as the genius that his music confirms that he was. With this recognition inevitably comes the impetus to scrutinize the collection of the late Lieder published in 1829 as Schwanengesang (D.957) for the cryptic confidences of an artist aware of his own imminent extinction. In a sense, Schubert is as apt a prototype for the Artist as Melancholic Loner paradigm as Tchaikovsky: the sentimental arcs of the Austrian’s earlier, bonafide Lieder cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, give modern psychoanalysts sufficient fodder for tomes of Traumdeutung. Settings of texts by Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Rellstab, and Johann Gabriel Seidl rather than a single poet’s verses as was the case in Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, the Lieder that comprise Schwanengesang were almost certainly not intended to constitute a cycle in the traditional manner, instead likely falling victim to a publisher’s action that was equal parts simple convenience and Romanticized marketing ploy. Hearing these songs performed by baritones of different generations and nationalities, Hermann Prey on DECCA and James Rutherford on BIS, offers fascinating insights into the complex but often over-complicated microcosms of Schwanengesang. Where these very different performances, recorded a half-century apart, intersect is in their participants’ commendable refusals to indulge in anachronistic emotional dissection of Schubert’s music; there and in the joy of hearing the composer’s songs sung so capably and meaningfully. Put down your pens, armchair psychologists, and merely listen for a while!

Born in Berlin in 1929, Prey was the rare singer who was from the start of his career a Lieder interpreter of the first order. As voice aficionados opine, there are great natural instruments and great singers, but few are the great artists whose work encompasses both important voices and the skills to use them properly. Portraying the eponymous protagonist of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia in the opera house, performing Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem on the concert stage, or singing Lieder in the recital hall, Prey was a great artist in whose singing voice and technique achieved equal levels of reliable excellence. Making its first appearance on compact disc in DECCA/Universal’s Most Wanted Recitals! series, Prey’s 1963 reading of Schwanengesang, recorded in Vienna’s storied Sofiensaal, is one of the most worthy recipients of Víctor Suzán Reed’s near-miraculous remastering. Among many studio recordings, including performances of Schwanengesang accompanied by Philippe Bianconi on Denon, Leonard Hokanson on Deutsche Grammophon, and Gerald Moore on Philips, none comes closer to faithfully reproducing on disc the rounded beauty and haunting overtones of Prey’s voice as it sounded in the theatre. [I heard him as Der Musiklehrer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos near the end of his career, when, past the age of sixty, he mastered every note and word of the part with an ease that singers half his age—myself included—should have envied.] In such an aural setting, the many virtues and the few vices of this disc are stunningly apparent.

Without strong-arming the music in a conscious effort to metamorphose the songs into a younger sibling for Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, Prey and pianist Walter Klien, a renowned interpreter of Schubert’s piano music, build a Schwanengesang with a cumulative narrative that is considerably more effectively linear—or cyclical, as it were—than many readings that force the issue manage to engender. Recorded here in his mid-thirties, it is not surprising that Prey was on superb vocal form. Though he vocalizes splendidly, this is noticeably a young man’s Schwanengesang, in the course of which somber emotions, presumably foreign to a man in the early prime of his life, sometimes prompt over-singing. Prey was too sensitive and sensible an artist to wholly abandon musicality, but there are passages in which he seems to be purposefully emulating singers with larger voices. This introduces a suggestion that Prey, not yet having fully discerned how to be Prey, was fashioning his performance after the model of a singer like Hans Hotter. In the fourteen canonical Lieder of Schwanengesang [Prey and Klien embrace tradition by closing with ‘Die Taubenpost’ but exclude ‘Herbst,’ adopted by Rutherford and Asti as a part of the de facto cycle], Klien’s straightforward pianism, animated and subtly nuanced, provides Prey with generally beneficial support. The very different tests of the first three songs of Schwanengesang, ‘Liebesbotschaft,’ ‘Kriegers Ahnung,’ and ‘Frühlingssehnsucht,’ are negotiated with boundless vocal fortitude, the tremendous quality of Prey’s voice immediately apparent. For those acquainted with the baritone’s later work, especially his subsequent recordings of Schwanengesang, the too-emphatic approach, disjointed phrasing, and straying intonation that intrude into Prey’s singing in these songs may be surprising, but these undoubtedly are the follies of youth, not of indifferent artistry. Prey voices the familiar ‘Ständchen’ elegantly, and the sinewy sturdiness of the voice is an obvious strength in ‘Aufenthalt,’ here sung with greater power than poetry. There are glimpses of vulnerability in his account of ‘In der Ferne,’ the words sagaciously pointed. The performances of both ‘Abschied’ and ‘Der Atlas’ are characterized by firm, resonant singing that sporadically overwhelms the intricacies of Schubert’s vocal lines.

The Prey familiar from his later, probing performances of Winterreise emerges in his singing of ‘Ihr Bild.’ Here, the true artist’s verbal acuity and keen intelligence outweigh the young singer’s inclination to focus primarily on vocalizing impressively. In ‘Das Fischermädchen,’ too, Prey adheres to a dedication to extracting meaning from the manner in which Schubert manipulated text within the cadences of his music. Very different musically and dramatically, ‘Die Stadt’ and ‘Am Meer’ are sung with intensity that highlights the kinship between the songs. The same can be said of Prey’s handling of ‘Der Doppelgänger’ and ‘Die Taubenpost.’ The first of these, one of Schubert’s most unnervingly sublime inspirations, receives from Prey a performance of startling vehemence, the narrator’s confusion transformed into the singer’s vivid discontent. For this singer, ‘Die Taubenpost’ is less dismaying than disquieting, the song’s sentiments viewed through the prism of a young man’s worldview rather than that of a weary wanderer. Boldly, intermittently bruisingly sung, this Schwanengesang is not a concerted leave-taking but an extended act of resistance.

Slightly less than a year after recording Schwanengesang in Vienna, Prey joined with pianist Karl Engel in London to record several of Schubert’s Lieder with texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The passing of a year did not measurably alter the young baritone’s gifts as a Lieder interpreter, but the ruddy health of the voice is perhaps even more astonishing in his singing of these seven songs than in the previous year’s Schwanengesang. Prey’s singing of ‘Heidenröslein’ (D.257), ‘An die Entfernte’ (D.765), and ‘Rastlose Liebe’ (D.138) radiates confidence and imagination, thereafter perpetuated but cleverly adapted to the differing requirements of ‘Erster Verlust’ (D.226) and ‘An Schwager Kronos’ (D.369). Listeners in search of examples of the verbal and musical acumen that made Prey one of the most effective Papagenos in the two-century performance history of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte can find a pair of them in ‘Schäfers Klagelied’ (D.121) and ‘Willkommen und Abschied’ (D.767) on this disc.

Committed to vinyl in London in 1963, with Engel at the keyboard, the three Lieder by Richard Strauss on this disc also here make their CD début, and they are especially welcome, as even now performances of Strauss Lieder by lower voices are less frequent than the continuing popularity and artistic merit of Strauss’s song literature dictate that they should be. Prey sings ‘Ich trage meine Minne’ (Op. 32, No. 1) commandingly, basking in the composer’s late-Romantic idiom. ‘Befreit’ (Op. 39, No. 4), one of Strauss’s most familiar songs and a mainstay of virtually every soprano’s recital repertory, is imaginatively phrased by the baritone, the challenging range of the vocal line troubling him little. Prey’s singing of the spirited ‘Bruder Liederlich’ (Op. 41b, No. 4) has the broad good humor and playfulness of an university glee club’s singing of bawdy madrigals. Singing early or late Schubert or Strauss, this artist offers performances in which even their imperfections captivate. That Prey was one of the most important Lieder singers of the Twentieth Century can hardly be questioned, but it is wonderful to have this empirical verification of the legitimacy of his lionization.

Since taking the top prize in Seattle Opera’s first International Wagner Competition in 2006, the Norwich-born Rutherford has expanded his Wagnerian credentials with acclaimed portrayals of Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde, Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and, most recently, Wotan in Der Ring des Nibelungen. Like Prey, whose Metropolitan Opera début was in the lighter Wagner rôle of Wolfram in Tannhäuser in 1960 and whose Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger was a much-loved component of MET and Bayreuth productions, the British baritone is as comfortable in recital as in opera and concert. Also like Prey, he and his Schwanengesang pianist, Eugene Asti, bring to their musical partnership credentials that qualify them individually and jointly as proven dynamos of Lieder repertory, this ideally-produced BIS recording celebrating fifteen years of collaboration on Schubert Lieder. Having recorded Schubert’s pseudo-cycle when he was nearly a decade older than Prey was at the time of the DECCA recording, Rutherford brings to his performance a greater depth of pessimism, the narrative voice that emerges from his energetic but eloquent interactions with Asti’s accompaniment weighted and worn by unfulfilled longing. Rutherford’s voice is heavier and darker than Prey’s, but his is the lighter Schwanengesang, one in which events occur and are faced rather than confronted and defied. The performance of the opening ‘Liebesbotschaft’ sets the tone for the cycle as a whole: the pianist’s crystalline execution of rhythmic figurations enhances the singer’s realizations of Schubert’s remarkably intuitive amalgamations of words and music. Ironically, Rutherford, with a more robust timbre than Prey had at his disposal, delves further into the delicate recesses of the music, the size of the voice only rarely impeding his examination of small details of the songs. He sings ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ sonorously, the soul of Wotan flickering to life in the Lied’s expressive gravity. ‘Frühlingssehnsucht’ and ‘Ständchen’ are molded by baritone and pianist with musical and emotional elasticity, Rutherford wielding a degree of flexibility admirable for a singer of his Fach. The bristling force of this pair’s traversal of ‘Aufenthalt’ never damages the song’s underlying gentleness. As it is performed here, the inclusion of ‘Herbst’ (D.945) is an organic extension of the spiritual voyage without which Schwanengesang seems reduced. Rutherford mines the disparities between ‘In der Ferne’ and ‘Abschied’ for their psychological consequence and refines this raw ore into a brilliant ingot of priceless beauty. Though the voice is occasionally unwieldy and unfocused, virtually unavoidable aspects of scaling a larger voice to the dimensions of ‘smaller’ music, Rutherford’s pitch is laudably certain.

Propelled by Asti’s resilient playing, this is a performance of ‘Der Atlas’ in which the singer sounds as though bearing the weight of the world upon his shoulders should be but a minor burden. The pain of ‘Ihr Bild’ emanates from the grim colorations of Rutherford’s tones without upsetting the balance of his vocal registers. By uniformly transposing the Lieder that comprise Schwanengesang down by a minor third, Rutherford and Asti preserve the relationships among the songs’ keys as originally conceived by Schubert, whether or not they were composed with any conscious associations. This strategy sometimes makes the tessitura of Schwanengesang more challenging for the baritone than it could otherwise be, but Rutherford copes heroically. His voicing of ‘Das Fischermädchen’ is distinguished by glimmers of optimism that ripple along the surface of the line. The feelings that flood the baritone’s voice in ‘Die Stadt’ and ‘Am Meer’ are explored but not exaggerated. Whereas Prey’s interpretation of ‘Der Doppelgänger’ was shaped by an almost violent fervor, the urgency of Rutherford’s reading is drawn from a crushingly inward recognition of failure. ‘Die Taubenpost’ is likely the last Lied that Schubert completed, and it is here performed with a touching sense of finality. Beyond its superlative musical qualities, this disc makes one of the most convincing cases yet recorded for regarding and performing Schwanengesang as a cycle, the seeds of complementary ideas blossoming in the warmth of Rutherford’s and Asti’s nurturing.

Rutherford and Asti supplement their Schwanengesang with performances of four paragons from Schubert’s extensive Lieder catalogue. The baritone works earnestly to evince a measure of freshness in the familiar ‘Die Forelle’ (D.550), and his diaphanous management of the song’s distinctive rhythms is delightful. Asti’s playing infuses ‘Auf der Bruck’ (D.853) and ‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus’ (D.583) with musical integrity that is anything but common, and Rutherford’s vocalism soars on the zephyr of his accompanist’s exertions. ‘An die Musik’ (D.547) is an ideal summation of the prevailing sensibilities of this disc: reveling in their collaboration, Rutherford and Asti deliver a grand ode to Schubert’s music.

Those who look to Schwanengesang for answers about what made Schubert’s genius unique often ask the wrong questions. Fascinating as facets of the creative process invariably are, the circumstances that engendered the composition of the Lieder later assembled and published as Schwanengesang are surely less important that the songs themselves. Is a presentiment of death at the heart of the songs? Was Schwanengesang, in part or in whole, Schubert’s deliberate farewell to the Art of Song? Though they are products of very different eras in the history of recorded Classical Music, these performances of Schwanengesang concentrate not on ephemeral concerns but on tangible musical standards. Their toils separated by fifty-two years, Hermann Prey and James Rutherford exhibit why Schubert’s swan song still sings so magically to those ears willing to hear it on its own terms.

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Götterdämmerung, WWV 86D—Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde), Daniel Brenna (Siegfried), Melissa Citro (Gutrune), Ryan McKinny (Gunther), Eric Halfvarson (Hagen), Gordon Hawkins (Alberich), Jamie Barton (Waltraute, Zweite Norn), Lindsay Ammann (Erste Norn), Marcy Stonikas (Dritte Norn), Jacqueline Echols (Woglinde), Catherine Martin (Wellgunde), Renée Tatum (Floßhilde); Washington National Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Philippe Auguin, conductor [Francesca Zambello, Director; Michael Yeargan, Set Designer; Catherine Zuber, Costume Designer; Mark McCullough, Lighting Designer; S. Katy Tucker and Jan Hartley, Projection Designers; Denni Sayers, Movement Director; Washington National Opera, Opera House, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., USA; Sunday, 22 May 2016]

When in the wee hours of 18 August 1876, the curtain fell on the world première of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, inaugurating the composer’s custom-built Bayreuther Festspielhaus with the first complete performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen, much of the world slumbered in blissful ignorance of the extraordinary ways in which the course of operatic history had been altered. Like the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 that upset the flow of the Mississippi River, Wagner’s Ring was a seismic jolt to the composition and performance of opera, the aftershocks of which remain perspective-permuting in the Twenty-First Century. Especially among Teutonic composers, it became necessary in the final quarter of the Nineteenth Century to declare an allegiance, either espousing or rejecting the lessons of Wagner’s concept of music drama. Upon listening closely to their music, however, one often finds that Wagner’s detractors were as strongly influenced by his work as his disciples: flattery may be the highest form of compliment, but concerted reactionary efforts are perhaps a truer gauge of the consequence of an artistic entity. Whether composers of subsequent generations revered or reviled Wagner, their endeavors were shaped by his example. The characters and situations in Götterdämmerung continue to assume new identities and diverse forms in works for the stage. Siegfried at odds with his social surroundings is a direct ancestor of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Berg’s Wozzeck, Britten’s Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, Martinů’s Manolios, Glass’s Galileo and Gandhi, and Adès’s Prospero, just as Brünnhilde as the instrument of redemption is the spiritual godmother of Strauss’s Färberin, Puccini’s Liù, Berg’s Gräfin Geschwitz, and Poulenc’s Madame Lidoine. The necessity of meeting the opera’s Herculean musical demands notwithstanding, a wholly successful performance of Götterdämmerung is distinguished from a merely proficient one by the intelligibility with which Wagner’s characters and their fates stimulate the audience’s emotions. The culmination of a decade of preparation, the Götterdämmerung that closed the third and final of Washington National Opera’s Rings was a performance in which more than four hours of music seemed like only a few minutes. Mere proficiency in this score is dismayingly rare, but Götterdämmerungs such as this one, an afternoon that found every participant at her or his best, are justifiably legendary.

Staging Wagner’s Ring is an opera company’s Denali, Everest, K2, and Kilimanjaro condensed into one epic, four-part undertaking. Thankfully, Wagner’s confounding tetralogy claims fewer lives than the icy slopes of its geological counterparts, but its heights are similarly treacherous—and, in a practical sense, it pulverizes lungs as mercilessly as those peaks’ oxygen-depleted atmospheres. As Bayreuth productions by Wagner progeny and Metropolitan Opera outings supervised by Herbert von Karajan and Robert Lepage attest, controversy is as traditional a component of Der Ring as the Valkyries’ much-parodied horned helmets. Acclaimed director Francesca Zambello is a Wagnerian of proven vision and resourcefulness whose gift for peeling away layers of accumulated grime—and the grunge of controversy—in order to reveal scores’ purest essences has never been more eloquently evident than in this Götterdämmerung. Refined through outings of the constituent operas in San Francisco and Washington, Zambello’s Ring is emblematic of the ways in which the technological marvels of the modern age can be used to highlight the timelessness of Wagner’s musical and dramatic conceits, here heightened by an ecological subtext that movingly examines the disastrous ways in which human greed destroys not only lives but the earth that sustains them. Sharpened by Michael Yeargan’s abstract but starkly beautiful set designs, Mark McCullough’s often ingenious lighting designs, and the alternately menacing and mesmerizing projections by S. Katy Tucker and Jan Hartley, the focus of Zambello’s examination of Götterdämmerung’s emotional foundation was centered on the multitude of ramifications of betrayal. The Norns are betrayed by their fraying cables, Gunther by his own lust for prestige, Hagen by his utter inability to fathom true heroism, the Rhinemaidens by the sickening ruin of their riparian home, and Gutrune by her desperate need for love. Like Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Brünnhilde betrays both Siegfried and herself by revealing his vulnerability to Hagen. Her concept furthered by Catherine Zuber’s vibrant, evocative costumes, Anne Ford-Coates’s hair and makeup designs, and Denni Sayers’s movement direction, which combined to give each character credible specificity, Zambello germinated the seeds of coexisting humanity and conservationism that Wagner deposited into the rich soil of Götterdämmerung. In this production, the opera was not so much a tale of metaphysical redemption as of physical renewal, its defining images being those of the Gibichung women tossing refuse extricated from the waters of the Rhine and, even more significantly, their men’s guns onto Siegfried’s funeral pyre and a radiant young girl, a reborn Erda, planting a sapling as Brünnhilde disappears into the flames. Like Leonard Foglia’s production of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, Zambello’s Götterdämmerung utilized Kennedy Center’s technical wizardry not to mire the composer’s score in the quicksand of invented effects but to free it to exert its own magic.

Near Capitol Hill, nicht auf dem Grünen Hügel: (from left to right) Director Francesca Zambello, soprano Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde), and conductor Philippe Auguin during curtain calls for Washington National Opera’s performance of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, 22 May 2016 [Photo by the author]

From the first notes of the Vorspiel, it was apparent that the musicians of the Washington National Opera Orchestra were prepared, practiced, and poised to offer an account of Wagner’s score that would rival the best Ring performances of established Wagner centers from Bayreuth and Vienna to New York and Seattle. How proud WNO’s late Music Director Emeritus Heinz Fricke would have been of the sounds that emerged from the pit during the course of this Götterdämmerung! Under the baton of the company’s current Music Director, French conductor Philippe Auguin, the performance, virtually ideal of pacing and precision, possessed the sense of occasion that a performance of Götterdämmerung must have: it is a long score, after all, and, without compelling, consistent momentum, sounds it. Meticulously heeding Wagner’s dynamic markings, Auguin led the orchestra in an exhilarating display of their instruments’ capabilities, the playing consistently equal to that of the best orchestras in the world and often markedly superior to the work of most opera house orchestras. The brasses and woodwinds were incredible, and the percussion jolted the body like electricity in moments of greatest intensity. When the harps emerged from the din, it was with dramatically-charged purity of sound. The Norns, Waltraute, and the Rhinemaidens offered genuine narratives, but Auguin’s conducting of their scenes was so nuanced as to make these pages of the score seem newly written. The clarity and linear thrust of Auguin’s approach brought to mind the underrated Wagner conducting of the Belgian André Cluytens, and the WNO Orchestra fully realized his every intention. Götterdämmerung demands nothing less than it received from Auguin and the WNO musicians, but hearing the score brought to life with such wealths of emotion and virtuosity was nothing short of revelatory.

Encountered in the primordial environment of the opera’s opening scene, here placed amidst a jumble of gargantuan power cables in the bowels of American infrastructure, the Norns were in this production neither coldly symbolic nor shrewish harbingers of universal cataclysm. Like the Rheintöchter in the opening pages of Das Rheingold (and later in Götterdämmerung, as well), there was a gratifying sense of girlishness in the earnestness with which the Norns performed their fateful work, but there was no mistaking the prescience and significance of their utterances, particularly when they were voiced so strongly. As the Erste Norn, contralto Lindsay Ammann—the strikingly thoughtful and sonorously-sung Suzuki in North Carolina Opera’s Autumn 2015 Madama Butterfly—introduced herself with a statement of ‘Welch Lieht leuchtet dort?’ that resounded through the auditorium. She was joined by the Zweite Norn of acclaimed mezzo-soprano and 2015 Richard Tucker Award recipient Jamie Barton, her singing of ‘Dämmert der Tag schon auf?’ meriting comparison with the Wagner singing of Oralia Domínguez and Lili Chookasian. When to their company was added the voice of soprano Marcy Stonikas, to be heard as Turandot in Atlanta Opera’s 2016 – 2017 Season, in the Dritte Norn’s ‘Loges Heer lodert feurig um den Fels,’ the trinity claimed a rightful place at the core of the drama. Stonikas wielded a formidable top G, but all three ladies were completely and reliably in control of the tessitura of their music. Individually and collectively, Ammann, Barton, and Stonikas were rare Norns whose forebodings were as entrancingly attractive as they were dramatically portentous.

Auf den Seilen: (from left to right) Soprano Marcy Stonikas, contralto Lindsay Ammann, and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as Die Nornen in Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, May 2016 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Auguin led the orchestra in sinuous, unabashedly erotic accounts of the Sonnenaufgang and Voller Tag, Wagner’s depictions of sunrise and ‘complete day,’ that were an aptly impassioned introduction to the momentous dawn duet and the powerhouse vocal actors who sang it. Fresh from a triumphant portrayal of the title rôle in the Metropolitan Opera’s incarnation of the much-lauded Patrice Chéreau production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the final performance of which was only two weeks ago [her first Washington Brünnhilde was sung in the third Cycle’s Die Walküre on 18 May], Swedish soprano Nina Stemme enriched Washington National Opera’s Götterdämmerung with a Brünnhilde of deftly-contrasted strength and subtlety, her interpretation of the Valkyrie still coming to terms with womanhood by turns galvanizing and deeply touching. When this Brünnhilde sang ‘Zu neuen Taten, teuer Helde,’ her excitement was both amorous and palpably psychological. Her ‘O heilige Götter!’ was monumental, and Stemme’s expansive, seemingly indefatigable voice made easy going of the repeated top A♭s and rising line to top B♭s. Her glorious top C at the duet’s end was neither forced nor frantic: she simply had the note and launched it into the auditorium with security, certain intonation, and amplitude that Donner at his most tempestuous could only envy. Having earned praise for his MET début as Alwa in Alban Berg’s Lulu earlier this season, American tenor Daniel Brenna was an able partner for Stemme, his Siegfried matching her Brünnhilde with firm tone, excellent pitch, and engaging youthfulness. Singing ‘Mehr gabst du Wunderfrau, als ich zu wahren weiss’ with abandon, Brenna immediately revealed his Siegfried to be a good-natured, fun-loving man-child who was as awed as he was enticed by his conquest. Giving Brünnhilde Alberich’s ring as a token of his devotion, Brenna’s Siegfried phrased ‘Lass’ ich, Liebste, dich hier in der Lohe heiliger Hut’ with iron-cored tenderness. As sung by Stemme and Brenna, Brünnhilde and Siegfried were believable lovers rather than two-dimensional marionettes being manipulated by the unseen hands of destiny.

Stewarding the transition to Act One, Auguin paced Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt slowly but with close attention to the story that it tells, not just masking a scene change but genuinely following the progress of Siegfried’s journey. When the curtain rose on the act’s first scene, the Gibichung Hall that emerged was a sleek Bauhaus edifice of steel and glass, its angular lines and garish animal prints in conflict with the landscape that it forcibly dominated. In the person of tall, handsome bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, the same could be said of Gunther: he seemed restless and uncomfortable among the trappings of his forebears’ accomplishments. As he voiced ‘Nun hör, Hagen, sage mir, Held,’ though, the singer’s comfort in the rôle’s music was absolute, and McKinny traversed the full range of his part without an iota of stress not required by the drama. One of America’s most admired and experienced Wagnerians, bass Eric Halfvarson was envious evil personified as Hagen, one of the nastiest characters in opera, but he gave Wagner’s music its due even when snarling malevolently. Halfvarson sang—ja, actually sang—‘Dieh echt gennanten acht’ ich zu neiden mich du!’ and ‘Siegfried, der Wälsungen Sproß: der ist der stärkste Held’ chillingly, little challenged by the top Fs. Lithe, seductive, and as beautiful as a platinum-locked Yvonne De Carlo, soprano Melissa Citro was a Gutrune who sang as alluringly as she looked. Her ‘Welche Tat schuf er so tapfer, daß als herrlichster Held er genannt?’ was the shy query of a demure young woman starved of affection. The inhabitants of Die Halle der Gibichungen am Rhein are grave liabilities in many performances of Götterdämmerung, but Washington National Opera populated the ancestral home with a current generation of top quality.

Der Bösewicht und seine Opfer: Bass-baritone Eric Halfvarson as Hagen (left) and soprano Melissa Citro as Gutrune (right) as Gutrune in Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, May 2016 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

In Scene Two, Hagen’s rousing ‘Heil! Heil! Siegfried, teurer Held!’ was dispatched with ringing insinuation by Halfvarson and answered by a fresh-toned ‘Wer ist Gibichs Sohn?’ from Brenna’s endearingly befuddled Siegfried, those garish animal prints proving too great a temptation for the inquisitive young hero’s curiosity. McKinny’s stirringly masculine singing of Gunther’s ‘Begrüße froh, o Held, die Halle meines Vaters’ lent his welcoming of Siegfried sincerity that was eerily undermined by Halfvarson’s reptilian delivery of Hagen’s pointed ‘Doch des Nibelungenhortes nennt die Märe dich Herrn?’ There was nothing duplicitous in Citro’s elated enunciation of Gutrune’s ‘Willkommen, Gast, in Gibichs Haus!’ or her character’s attraction to the assertively virile Siegfried. Having fallen victim to Hagen’s poison and rashly proposed to Gutrune, Siegfried all too eagerly swore a blood oath with Gunther, the tenor’s voice gleaming in his broadly-phrased articulation of ‘Blühenden Lebens labendes Blut träufelt ich in den Trank.’ Brenna and McKinny sang ‘Treue trink’ ich dem Freund!’ thrillingly, their voices combining like lightning and thunder. Siegfried and Gunther having set off on their quest to fraudulently win Brünnhilde for the Gibichung’s bride, Halfvarson transformed Hagen’s watch into a monologue of startling dramatic potency, declaiming ‘Hier sitz’ ich zur Wacht, wahre den Hof’ with secure, oily tone and the intensity of a Shakespearean villain.

Auguin shaped the orchestral interlude that ushered in the seminal third scene with vehemence that uncannily exposed the poignant sadness, anxiety, and bitterness that suffuse the music. Stemme wove a fragile thread of uncertainty into her voicing of Brünnhilde’s ‘Altgewohntes Geräusch raunt meinem Ohr die Ferne,’ her descent to C4 like an expression of doubt and fear of which she was ashamed. Greeting her sister Waltraute, Stemme’s Brünnhilde was suddenly, tellingly metamorphosed from the battle-worn Valkyrie stripped of her dignity into a woman brimming with optimism and new life. Trading the Norn’s industrial garb for Waltraute’s aerial warrior’s attire, Jamie Barton voiced ‘Brünnhilde! Schwester! Schläfst oder wachst du?’ with hesitant trepidation, her lovely top G igniting the atmosphere atop Brünnhilde’s rock as illuminatingly as Loge’s fire. Obviously greatly affected by their reunion, the sisters questioned one another meaningfully, Stemme’s quicksilver ‘Kommst du zu mir? Bist du so kühn, magst ohne Grauen Brünnhild’ bieten den Gruß?’ followed by Barton’s pained ‘Teilen den Taumel, der dich Törin erfaßt?’​ ​and ‘Höre mit Sinn, was ich dir Sage!’ The mezzo-soprano’s climactic top G again filled the auditorium with glowing sound. That neither sister was unfailingly audible when her music took her to the bottom of the stave was clearly more Wagner’s doing than the singers’ or conductor’s. Brünnhilde’s ‘Welch banger Träume Mären meldest du Traurige mir!’ inspired Stemme to an outpouring of golden tone that seemed to burst from the hearts of both the character and the artist portraying her. Brünnhilde’s unwavering fidelity to Siegfried was expressed by a ringing top A, scorned by Waltraute with a contemptuous ‘Wehe! Wehe! Weh dir, Schwester! Walhalls Göttern Weh!’ in which Barton unleashed her own resplendent top A♭ and A.​ ​The raw emotion of Brünnhilde’s dismissal of her sister erupted in Stemme’s volcanic singing of ‘Blitzend Gewölk, vom Wild getragen, stürme dahin,’ the words hurled out with the stinging ferocity of the fallen Valkyrie’s perceived injury.

Greeting the Tarnhelm-clad figure ​she​ both rightly and wrongly identifie​d​ as the returning Siegfried with a tremendous top A and B♭, Stemme’s Brünnhilde cowered in fear as she grasped that the form before her was not that of Siegfried as she knew him. Horror propelled Stemme’s performance of ‘Verrat! – Wer drang zu mir?’ As Brünnhilde’s domestic bliss unraveled, the soprano’s singing took on an element of indignant defiance, her upper register used like a weapon against Notung’s blows. Impersonating Gunther without resorting to schoolyard mimicry or silly attempts at changing the voice, Brenna traversed Siegfried’s ‘Brünnhild’! Ein Freier kam, den dein Feuer nicht geschreckt’ with burgeoning anger and frustration, his sparring with Brünnhilde prompting particularly forceful singing and aptly chauvinistic behavior. Stemme capped ‘Wotan! Ergrimmter, grausamer Gott!’ with a mighty top A bettered only by her top B in ‘Stärker als Stahl macht mich der Ring: nie—raubst du ihn mir!’ Here and throughout the performance, Stemme sang with astounding tonal sheen and dramatic intensity. Watching her Brünnhilde struggle against Siegfried’s rough handling, it was virtually impossible to believe that she was braving the vocal tortures of Strauss’s Elektra as recently as two weeks ago. If this is how one sings Brünnhilde almost immediately after singing another of the most repertory’s most difficult rôles for soprano, all Brünnhildes should study Stemme’s example.

Der Tatort: (from left to right) Bass-baritone Ryan McKinny as Gunther, bass Eric Halfvarson as Hagen, and tenor Daniel Brenna as Siegfried in Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, May 2016 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

After a playing of the Vorspiel to Act Two that crackled with growing tension and accompanied a disquietingly amusing scene in which the channel-surfing Hagen attempted to initiate contact with Gutrune that was anything but brotherly, baritone Gordon Hawkins literally arose from the abyss to intone Alberich’s ‘Schläfst du, Hagen, mein Sohn?’ Each repetition of the phrase grew more sinister, and Halfvarson growled Hagen’s reply, ‘Ich höre dich, schlimmer Albe,’ drowsily but with venomous irony. With a son of such moral emptiness, Alberich’s treachery was easily enacted, but Hawkins’s performance exuded complementary malfeasance and musicality. Driving ‘Den goldnen Ring, den Reif gilt’s zu erringen!’ into Hagen’s psyche like a dagger’s blade, this Alberich was a conniver, not a mindless thug whose sole train of thought was bound for violence. Hawkins delivered ‘Sei treu, Hagen, mein Sohn! Trauter Helde!—Sei treu! Sei treu!—Treu!’ with tone that both evoked the decay of death and grippingly conveyed the eternal magnetism of revenge. A Hagen such as Halfvarson could only have been the son of an Alberich such as Hawkins, whose vocalism was all the more effective as the sound of corruption and iniquity because it was so appealing.

Joining his false bride and brother-in-law, Brenna’s Siegfried bounded through the act’s second scene with the vigor of a rutting stag, singing ‘Hoiho, Hagen! Müder Mann! Siehst du mich kommen?’ brashly. The subterfuge of Halfvarson’s ‘Hei! Siegfried! Geschwinder Helde!’ was unmistakable, but the scene’s musical laurels ultimately belonged to Citro’s Gutrune, the soprano’s voice ringing out gorgeously in ‘Freia grüße dich zu aller Frauen Ehre!’ and ‘Siegfried! Mächtigster Mann!’ Her top As sliced through orchestral textures like laser beams. The subsequent scene was dominated by Halfvarson, who declaimed Hagen’s summoning of the vassals, ‘Hoiho! Hoihohoho! Ihr Gibichsmannen, machet euch auf,’ hair-raisingly, and his management of the droning Cs at the top of stave and trills in his exchanges with the chorus was masterful. Trained by Steve Gathman, the gentlemen of the Washington National Opera Chorus sang magnificently, hurtling ‘Was tost das Horn?’ into the house. The tenors undauntedly conquered the grueling range of their music, including the top C that Wagner demonically demanded of them.

In the act’s final scene, one of the most riveting scenes in the Ring, the choristers earned admiration anew for their roof-raising performance of ‘Heil dir, Gunther! Heil dir und deiner Braut! Willkommen!’ Providing soaring accounts of ‘Brünnhild’, die hehrste Frau, bring’ ich euch her zum Rhein’ and ‘Gegrüßt sei, teurer Held; gegrüßt, holde Schwester,’ McKinny confirmed how markedly a superlative Gunther can increase enjoyment of a performance of Götterdämmerung. After Brünnhilde’s distraught entrance, Brenna’s articulation of Siegfried’s ‘Was müht Brünnhildes Blick?’ was the model of brawny simple-mindedness, and Halfvarson’s emphatic singing ensured that Hagen’s critically important ‘Jetzt merket klug, was die Frau euch klagt!’ found its target, foreshadowing the tragedy that would befall Siegfried. The urgency with which Stemme communicated Brünnhilde’s anger and despair, epitomized by her exclamation of ‘Nahmst du von mir den Ring, durch den ihr dir vermählt,’ was dazzling. Neither the concentrated expressivity of ‘Ha! Dieser war es, der mir den Ring entriß’ nor the trills on ‘Er zwang mir Lust und Liebe ab’ disconcerted this Brünnhilde, and, appalled by Brenna’s insouciant voicing of Siegfried’s ‘Achtest du so der eignen Ehre,’ Stemme lobbed ‘Du listiger Held, sieh, wie du lügst! Wie auf dein Schwert du schlecht dich berufst!’ like a spear aimed at the wayward man’s heart. Brünnhilde’s repetition of Siegfried’s ‘Helle Wehr! Heilige Waffe! Hilf meinem ewigen Eide!’ took Stemme to a fantastic top B♭, which seemed to trigger the bewildered zeal of Brenna’s singing of ‘Gunther, wehr deinem Weibe, das schamlos Schande dir lügt!’ Left to contemplate the events set in motion by Hagen’s chicanery, Brünnhilde and Gunther reluctantly but unequivocally endorsed the Nibelung’s plot to murder Siegfried in ostensible retribution for his wrong-doing. The sheer enormity of Stemme’s top B♭ in ‘Welches Unholds List liegt hier verhohlen?’ erased any doubts of the totality of Brünnhilde’s complicity in the scheme to punish Siegfried’s infidelity. Reveling in the impending realization of his ambitions, Halfvarson’s Hagen could barely contain his glee in ‘Vertraue mir, betrogne Frau! Wer dich verriet, das räche ich.’ The invigorating masculinity that McKinny brought to ‘O Schmach! O Schande! Wehe mir, dem jammervollsten Manne!’ transcended the self-pity that renders many Gunthers spineless snivelers, further refining the baritone’s interpretation of the much-maligned rôle. Closely collaborating with Auguin, this trio of committed artists brought the curtain down on Act Two with a furious display of exceptional singing and fiery but unexaggerated acting.

Der letzte Kuss: Soprano Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde, center left) and tenor Daniel Brenna (Siegfried, center right) during curtain calls for Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, 22 May 2016 [Photo by the author]

In the opening scene of Act Three, the Rheintöchter toiled to counteract the pollution that crippled their habitat, the majestic river reduced by human carelessness to a toxic trickle that no longer responded to the warming rays of the sun. Singing ‘Frau Sonne sendet lichte Strahlen’ with exquisite, well-blended tones, the ladies moved with the sinuous agility of their aqueous home. Glamorous soprano Jacqueline Echols, North Carolina Opera’s cosmopolitan Musetta in Puccini’s La bohème and heartbreaking Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, offered a clarion voicing of Woglinde’s ‘Ich höre sein Horn,’ seconded by mezzo-soprano Catherine Martin’s elegant singing of Wellgunde’s ‘Der Helde naht.’ Reprising a part for which she has garnered acclaim in MET Rings, mezzo-soprano Renée Tatum chanted Floßhilde’s ‘Laßt uns beraten!’ engrossingly. The Siegfried who resisted the charms and ignored the wisdom of such Rheintöchter was a true fool, and Brenna portrayed him with utterly unaffected sincerity and spry sexuality, his sunny crooning of ‘Ein Albe führte mich irr, daß ich die Fährte verlor’ having the charisma of unspoiled adolescence.

The relative peace of the Rhine’s sullied banks disturbed by the sounds of hunting horns and Halfvarson’s bellowing ‘Hoiho,’ Brenna responded with his own trumpeted ‘Hoiho! Hoiho! Hoihe!’ The exposed top C with which Wagner punctuated Siegfried’s cries was, like the character’s seldom-heard top C in Act Two, an unnecessary risk that Brenna did not take, and the wisdom of his choice was verified by the reserve of strength that he maintained until the last note of his part. He relayed his tales from Siegfried’s adventure-seeking life before Götterdämmerung with ardor in his finely-phrased ‘Mime hieß ein mürrischer Zwerg.’ Brenna’s Siegfried met his end as he grasped his life, unapologetically and with naïve confidence. Though his singing of ‘Brünnhilde, heilige Braut! Wach auf! Öffne dein Auge!’ was not as accomplished, musically or dramatically, as all that came before it, the tenor made Siegfried’s death bizarrely spontaneous, eliciting an unexpectedly vivid emotional response from the audience. Perhaps Auguin and the orchestra were captivated by the hero’s harrowing passing, too: their adrenalized but somber performance of the Trauermusik threatened to unseat Kennedy Center from its foundations and send the enthralled audience on a fluvial journey of their own.

At the start of the third scene, Citro proved to be a rare Gutrune capable of truly commanding the stage, her depiction of the character’s debilitating doubt and apprehension rippling through her splendidly-sung ‘War das sein Horn?’ Halfvarson’s blaring of Hagen’s ‘Der bleiche Held, nicht blast er es mehr’ goaded Citro to an explosive vocalization of ‘Siegfried—Siegfried eschlagen!’ that was capped with a brilliant top C♭. Hagen’s ‘Ja den! Ich hab’ ihn erschlagen’ and Brünnhilde’s ‘Schweigt eures Jammers jauchzenden Schwall’ were polarized statements of claimed victory and swelling truculence. The blood of both the man that she knew as her husband and her brother now staining Hagen’s hands, the breadth of Gutrune’s sorrow and rage cascaded from Citro’s singing of ‘Verfluchter Hagen, daß du das Gift mir rietest.’ One of Zambello’s boldest and most inspired innovations was the reconciliation between Gutrune and Brünnhilde: each seeming to accept the legitimacy of the other’s grief, Gutrune carried out the grim preparation of Siegfried’s funeral pyre before ceding the privilege of following him into a hero’s death to Brünnhilde. The image of Gutrune and Brünnhilde embracing in a final gesture of understanding and mutual comforting was hauntingly beautiful.

After battling page after page of the most vocally and psychologically demanding music in opera, Brünnhilde faces in Act Three’s fifth and final scene music which not only resolves both Götterdämmerung and Der Ring des Nibelungen as a whole but also crowns a tripartite explication of humanity through the eyes of a single woman. That her immolation was the apotheosis of Stemme’s portrayal of Brünnhilde was apparent from the first notes of her unfaltering ‘Starke Scheite schichtet mir dort am Rande der Rheins zuhauf!’ Throughout the scene, her voice, on inimitably assured form from her opening phrase in the dawn duet, was distilled into a sound of penetrating purity. If a passage was sung loudly, it was because its sentiments must reach the vaunted halls of Walhalla. If a top note was accentuated, it was because the word that it carried demanded to be heard. The soprano’s steely ‘Wie Sonne lauter strahlt mir sein Licht’ gave way to a tranquilly cathartic ‘Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!’ in which Stemme in those few notes burned through the haze that hangs over Götterdämmerung. The flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre flickered in her singing of ‘Mein Erbe nun nehm’ ich zu eigen,’ and there was a surprising gentleness in her ‘Fliegt heim, ihr Raben,’ the loving daughter sensitive to the import of this final acknowledgement of her father’s presence. At last reclaiming Brünnhilde’s identity as the fearless Valkyrie, Stemme unfurled the full might of her voice in ‘Grane, mein Roß, sei mir gegrüßt,’ her top B♭s and Bs perfectly supported and projected with a staggering absence of effort. Never has a soprano made singing the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde seem easy, but Stemme’s performance, blending elements of Flagstad’s femininity, Traubel’s grandeur, Harshaw’s dependability, Varnay’s dedication, Mödl’s intelligence, Nilsson’s unflappability, and Jones’s indomitability, was distinguished by a serenity that heralded her not merely as a remarkable Brünnhilde but, for this listener, as a definitive one.

The ardor with which the perceived paucity of truly great singers is lamented might erroneously lure the casual observer into believing that the first sixteen years of the Twenty-First Century have delivered opera into a wasteland in which occasional encounters with mediocrity are construed as oases of genius. For an operaphile who has not yet reached the age of forty, it can be wearying to hear only that there are now no Flagstads, Melchiors, or Hotters. It is difficult to imagine that any of the Wagnerian adventurers who spent Sunday afternoon together at Kennedy Center listened to the breathtaking Götterdämmerung wrought by Washington National Opera with longing for singers of the past occupying their thoughts. No, there were no Flagstads, Melchiors, or Hotters, but Francesca Zambello and Philippe Auguin presided over a production and a performance in which great voices wielded by imaginative artists set Kennedy Center’s Opera House ablaze with a Götterdämmerung that sprang to life upon the stage but achieved immortality in the hearts and memories of those who witnessed it.

Bella Butterfly: Uruguayan soprano María José Siri, scheduled to open Teatro alla Scala’s 2016 – 2017 Season in the title rôle of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on 7 December 2016 [Photo © by David Puig]

The American attorney and author John Luther Long wrote of the pair of lovers in his 1898 short story ‘Madame Butterfly’ that ‘when you know what Cho-Cho-San’s smile was like,—and her hand—and its touch,—you will wonder how Pinkerton resisted her. However, he only laughed at her,—goodnaturedly always,—and said no.’ Long was describing the American sailor’s refusal of his demure, devoted bride’s request that her relations be permitted to visit her in her new home, symbolically Americanized by the addition of locks to the traditional Japanese screens in order, as Luther wrote, ‘to keep out those who are out, and in those who are in.’ It is the disarming tenderness of her smile and the exquisite limpidity of her touch, qualities as crucial to the effectiveness of librettists Luigi Illica’s and Giuseppe Giacosa’s heroine upon the operatic stage as to that of Long’s delicate geisha upon the page, that are missing from so many portrayals of Cio-Cio-San in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. When the 2016 – 2017 Teatro alla Scala season opens on 7 December 2016, with a performance of Puccini’s adaptation of Long’s tale of tragic devotion and betrayal in Nagasaki featuring soprano María José Siri as the opera’s delicate but determined heroine, the sweet-spirited girl’s feminine qualities will be entrusted to one of today’s most capable singing actresses. Continuing the grand tradition of Toti Dal Monte and Margaret Sheridan, very different but unforgettable interpreters of Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly’s century-long history at La Scala, the stunning beautiful Siri will collaborate with conductor Riccardo Chailly to reacquaint Milan audiences with Cio-Cio-San as Puccini first brought her to life in song.

Born in Uruguay but now living in Italy, Siri brings to her rôle début as Cio-Cio-San credentials spanning a broad repertory, her especially notable success in Verdi repertory extending from thrilling performances of the treacherous music for Odabella in Attila to the title rôle in Aida, a part in which she has garnered acclaim at La Scala and the Arena di Verona, as well as in Russia, Brazil, and her native Uruguay. In the Puccini canon, her Manon Lescaut, Mimì in La bohème, and Tosca are already much-admired characterizations, and her portrayal of the grueling protagonist of Suor Angelica, heard in Copenhagen in 2014 and reprised in a production that opened today, 28 May 2016, at Naples’s famed Teatro di San Carlo, is poised to become one of the current generation’s most complete realizations of this challenging part. Nevertheless, Siri is alert to the unique demands of Cio-Cio-San. ‘I have been preparing to face this character for quite some time,’ the soprano recently stated, reflecting on the musical and dramatic requirements of Puccini’s music. ‘I’m particularly happy because I [have] never sung with Riccardo Chailly, and I had never sung Madama Butterfly before when the Maestro, who is a great interpreter of Puccini, heard me and chose me for the rôle. I’m also happy to be singing the critical edition of the opera, becoming part of Chailly’s project for La Scala, [which] intends to present Puccini’s operas in their original versions,’ she said. Soon after opening the La Scala season in Madama Butterfly, Siri reunites with Maestro Chailly in Berlin in January 2017, when she will sing the soprano solos in Verdi’s Messa da Requiem with the Berliner Philharmoniker, and, if her first Cio-Cio-San were not daunting enough, she sings her first Norma in Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece at the 52^nd Macerata Opera Festival, opening in the historic Arena Sferisterio on 23 July 2016.

To learn more about María José Siri’s exciting career and upcoming engagements, please visit her website. Tickets for the remaining Naples performances of Suor Angelica, paired with Enrique Granados’s Goyescas, and the Macerata Norma are on sale now, and tickets for Madama Butterfly at La Scala will be available from 11 October 2016.

Soprano del Sur: Uruguayan soprano María José Siri, scheduled to open Teatro alla Scala’s 2016 – 2017 Season in the title rôle of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on 7 December 2016 [Photo © by Victor Santiago]

ROBERT NATHANIEL DETT (1882 – 1943): The Ordering of Moses—Latonia Moore (Miriam), Ronnita Nicole Miller (The Voice of Israel), Rodrick Dixon (Moses), Donnie Ray Albert (The Voice of God, The Word); May Festival Chorus; Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; James Conlon, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in concert in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall, New York City, USA, during the Spring for Music Festival on 9 May 2014; Bridge Records BRIDGE 9462; 1 CD, 48:32; Available from Bridge Records, Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Judged before ever producing a single note based upon age, appearance, ethnicity, faith, sexual preference, weight, and countless other spoken and unspoken prejudicial criteria, the discrimination that today’s musicians are charged with overcoming is perhaps less in frequency of occurrence than that endured by previous generations of artists but is surely not reduced in ferocity. It is said that music is the universal language, but far too many people in far too many communities throughout the world are denied the wonders of exposure to and tutelage in the dialects of Classical Music because of factors having nothing to do with their capacities for absorbing, enjoying, and practicing musical conversations. Even now, when new and rejuvenated media platforms facilitate the dispersion of cultural endeavors on a global scale, opportunities are not so bountiful as to ensure dependable, satisfying work for every aspiring artist, but neither are significant musicians so prevalent as to warrant thinning their ranks by excluding individuals because of who they are (or are not) rather than what they can (or cannot) do. That in 2016, when composers from every recess of merited and unmerited obscurity have joined the ranks of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms in the playbills of the world’s concert halls, the Canadian-born Robert Nathaniel Dett remains a little-known presence among the respected composers of the first half of the Twentieth Century is a travesty for which there is no polite explanation. Recorded in performance at Carnegie Hall during the Spring for Music Festival on 9 May 2014, and preserved in sound of great immediacy and depth—nothing less than the music deserves—by WQXR and Bridge Records, Dett’s The Ordering of Moses compellingly inventories this neglected master’s prodigious gifts. What some listeners might be inclined to dismiss as a curiosity is here performed with the ardor devoted to traversals of acknowledged masterpieces. Hearing is believing, conventional wisdom would have it, and to hear this performance of The Ordering of Moses is to believe that talent can and must always prevail over prejudice.

Dett’s musical language in his 1932 oratorio The Ordering of Moses is a complex synthesis of original idioms and accents borrowed from composers ranging from Schumann and Brahms to Bruckner and Nadia Boulanger, with whom Dett studied in Paris. For the work of a composer born in Canada and resident throughout much of his career in the United States, where his professional attachments included a stint as Music Director at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, The Ordering of Moses is surprisingly untouched by the broad grasp of the English choral tradition: there are occasional hints of the Elgar of Caractacus, but Dett’s voice is prevailingly cosmopolitan and Continental, more influenced by Dvořák and Debussy than by music of the Commonwealth. It was by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra that The Ordering of Moses was premièred at the 1937 May Festival, during which NBC’s broadcast of the first performance was famously interrupted without comment, perhaps in reaction to objections to nationwide broadcast of music by a prominent Black composer. [In the Carnegie Hall performance and WQXR broadcast that yielded this recording, archival broadcast tapes from 1937 were employed to recreate the atmosphere of the first performance, including NBC’s introduction of the work as the product of a ‘Negro’ composer and the abrupt termination of the broadcast. Dedicated to communicating the cumulative impact of Dett’s score, the CD release does not include these supplements.] Nearly eight decades after the oratorio’s first performance, the current generation of Cincinnati Symphony musicians play the score with great skill, the music’s passages of Mahlerian gravitas executed with vigor that does not overwhelm the moments of more inward contemplation. All sections of the orchestra are manned with capable technicians whose work discloses not only a high level of musicality but also the rare art of truly listening to one another.​ Whether Sir Eugene Goossens, who conducted that auspicious first performance of The Ordering of Moses, wielded as complete an understanding of Dett’s music as American conductor James Conlon exhibits in this performance can be debated, but the strength that the score gains from Conlon’s leadership is undeniable. Long a champion of undervalued American composers and their music, Conlon makes no attempts to apologize for or gloss over the minimal defects of Dett’s music, foremost among which is an over-reliance on dynamic extremes to impart dramatic magnitude. Conlon’s tempi consistently enable the performers to dispatch their parts with accuracy and enthusiasm. Many conductors could learn from Conlon’s approach: permitted to make its points on its own terms, Dett’s music reveals its glories with verve that confirms not only its stageworthiness but the senselessness of the neglect to which its composer has been subjected in the seventy-three years since his premature death.

​​Prepared by Robert Porco, the 150 ladies and gentlemen of the May Festival Chorus sing Dett’s music with zeal that matches the momentousness of the words and the power of the composer’s responses to them. From the first bars of ‘By reason of their bondage,’ the choir’s animated singing keenly exudes both the singers’ commitment to the score and their attention to every nuance of the composer’s part writing. The piquant rhythms and cadences of jazz emerge in isolated phrases, but the presiding ethos is that of the great oratorios of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Händel’s Judas Maccabaeus, Haydn’s Die Schöpfung, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Liszt’s Christus. The choristers’ animated performance lends ‘And from a burning bush, flaming, God spake unto Moses’ and ‘Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land’ the momentum that the story needs. The unaffected sincerity with which ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah, let us praise Jehovah,’ ‘Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power,’ and ‘He is King of kings; He is Lord of lords’​ are sung transforms the chorus from a body of observers into a true community participating in the oratorio’s action. As recorded, there are slight deficiencies in the balances among voices that affect the choral singing at top volume, but the raw aural and emotional impact of 150 voices resonantly uplifted in song is phenomenally thrilling.

Too numerous to count are the works and performances of them that the participation of a quartet of soloists of the quality of the four singers assembled for this performance of The Ordering of Moses would lift from the mundane to the magnificent. Many a Beethoven Ninth and Mahler Eighth could be rescued from banality by singing such as mezzo-soprano Ronnita Nicole Miller accomplishes in her embodiment of The Voice of Israel. Commendably even-toned throughout the range required by her music, Miller’s voice is lushly beautiful, her singing of ‘O Lord, behold my affliction’ a stretch of firm, focused vocalism in the tradition of Marian Anderson and Carol Brice. It is the haunting voice of Brazilian contralto Maura Moreira that Miller’s singing in this performance most readily brings to mind, however. Already heard in numerous leading rôles in European opera houses and as a granite-voiced Norn in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at the Metropolitan Opera, Miller is a singer of tremendous potential whose superlative singing in The Ordering of Moses is but the proverbial tip of her artistic iceberg.

Endowed with a voice of imposing, Wagnerian grandeur, baritone Donnie Ray Albert is an ideal choice for delivering the consequential utterances of The Word and The Voice of God. Declaiming God’s ‘Who hath made a man dumb, or who hath made his mouth speak?’ with the force of breakers crashing upon the shore, Albert is an apt musical conduit for Providence, his timbre conveying an irrefutable authority that both awes and soothes. He articulates The Word’s ‘And when Moses smote the water’ and ‘Then did the women of Israel gather with timbrels and dances’ with wonderful diction, his elocution giving each syllable of the text an indelible purpose within the narrative. Among the soloists, Albert suffers most from the composer’s use of volume as a storytelling device, the voice occasionally forced uncomfortably in pursuit of the grandiloquence sought by Dett. Albert is a shrewd singer, though, and his sonorous vocalism provides this performance of The Ordering of Moses with a foundation as unshakable as Jebel Musa.

​When soprano Latonia Moore débuted at the Metropolitan Opera in the title rôle of Verdi’s Aida in a 2012 Saturday matinée broadcast performance savored by opera lovers throughout the world, the emergence of a major new American voice was rightly heralded. When Moore returned to the MET stage in 2016 to continue the legacy of Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo as Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, the soprano revealed her vocal production and technique to be even more refined than when heard in 2012. In some ways, her portrayal of Moses’s sister Miriam in The Ordering of Moses is the best of these New York outings. Moore voices ‘Come, let us praise Jehovah’ and ‘O praise ye, Praise ye Jehovah, Praise His holy name!’ with the bel canto integration of vocal registers that distinguishes her Verdi singing. Exclaiming the ‘Song of the Sea’ (the Hebrew שירת הים), sometimes cited as one of the earliest scriptural celebrations of the Exodus, Moore sings ‘The horse and his rider He hath thrown into the sea!’ exhilaratingly, and the pious sincerity that shapes her readings of ‘And He hath become my salvation!’ and ‘My fathers’ God, and I will exalt Him’ is arresting. In the final ‘Jehovah shall reign forever and ever!’ with Moses, Moore is taxed by the range of the part, but she holds nothing back, soaring to the final high note with the power of a Brünnhilde conquering the last scene of Siegfried. An entrancingly melodic prophetess, this Miriam certainly possesses the ‘tuneful voice’ attributed to her in Thomas Morell’s libretto for Händel’s Joshua!

The rôle of Moses is heroic on the scale of Händel’s Samson and Elgar’s Gerontius and demands vocal and dramatic charisma that he receives in spades from tenor Rodrick Dixon. In a practical sense, Moses was one of humanity’s greatest salesmen, ‘pitching’ an intangible product to an oppressed people desperate for deliverance. Such an endeavor requires steely resolve and sensitivity in equal measures, and it is this balance that Dixon’s singing displays. The self-doubt that plagues Moses as he sings ‘Lord! Who am I to go unto Pharaoh’ finds an ideal outlet in the lyricism of Dixon’s singing, and the absolute confidence with which the tenor voices ‘I will praise Jehovah,’ ‘Sing ye to Jehovah,’ and ‘O praise ye, Praise Jehovah, Praise His holy name!’ credibly establishes his Moses as the iron-willed but humble instrument of the Israelites’ liberation. His accounts of the increasingly profound ‘I will sing unto Jehovah, for He hath triumphed gloriously,’ ‘Jehovah is my strength and my song,’ and ‘This is my God, and I will praise Him!’ mark him as an expressive artist of the first order. Dixon’s incandescent vocalism makes ‘Thou, Lord, in Thy loving kindness hast led the people, whom Thou hast redeemed!’ a statement of both deeply personal and universal faith. Fearlessly joining with with Moore’s Miriam, Dixon’s Moses voices ‘Jehovah shall reign forever and ever!’ with ringing fortitude, the siblings crowning the oratorio with an effusion in unison that could have been borrowed from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier and Maddalena de Coigny. Like any epic hero of the stage, Dett’s Moses needs an interpreter whose individual gifts equip him to find the vulnerability beneath the vanity that is a component of a paragon’s psyche and in Dixon has precisely that.

The institutional stupidity that barred the doors of many of America’s musical temples to generations of artists of color may now be largely eradicated, but the juggernaut of hard-earned equality still fails to progress into every niche of the Performing Arts. When compositions in Classical veins by popular white songwriters like Sir Paul McCartney and Roger Waters are encouraged, financed, performed, and praised, where are the commissions for Lieder cycles, operas, and oratorios from today’s brilliant songsmiths of color, musical poets like Andra Day, John Legend, and Janelle Monáe? When the world’s theatres reverberate with the sounds of music by white composers whose names are unfamiliar to all but the most punctilious scholars, why do the thoughtfully-crafted scores of Charles Lucien Lambert, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Rudolph Dunbar, and William Grant Still lay in silence? With this recorded performance that movingly pays homage to both its composer and its exalted subject, Robert Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses roars out of the silence. May its voice lead other products of suppressed genius into the light.

[1] BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913 – 1976): Young Apollo, Op. 16; Lachrymae, Op. 48a; Prelude and Fugue, Op. 29; Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31—Allan Clayton, tenor; Richard Watkins, French horn; Máté Szücs, viola; Lorenzo Soulès, piano; Aldeburgh Strings; Markus Däunert, director [Recorded at Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk, UK, 20 – 22 October 2012 (Lachrymae, Prelude and Fugue), 24 – 25 November 2013 (Serenade), and 4 April 2015 (Young Apollo); Linn Records CKD 478; 1 CD, 55:02; Available from Linn Records, ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759), THOMAS ARNE (1710 – 1778), WILLIAM BOYCE (1711 – 1779), and JOHN CHRISTOPHER SMITH (1712 – 1795): Where’re You Walk– Handel’s Favourite Tenor [A programme of music composed for or sung by John Beard (circa 1715 – 1791)]—Allan Clayton, tenor; Mary Bevan, soprano; The Choir of Classical Opera; The Orchestra of Classical Opera; Ian Page, conductor [Recorded in All Saints Church, Tooting, London, UK, 15 – 18 September 2015; Signum Classics SIGCD457; 1 CD, 68:59; Available from Signum Classics, ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It may seem counterintuitive, daft, or even provocative to suggest that the foremost thrill of the human voice is its innate propensity for disaster, but is the mountain climber exhilarated more by how far up he manages to go or by how far down it is to the doldrums of mundane, earthbound life? A perverse component of the mystique of Maria Callas is the realization of proximity to failure: listening carefully to her ‘live’ recordings reveals that the precarious, barely-sustained notes on high were often more vociferously cheered than the full, easy ones, the conqueror rewarded. It is the prospect of a performance going wrong that establishes the perspective that promotes enjoyment of all that goes right. In the haze of brilliantly-combusting imperfection, singers who quietly plot their own paths to self-sufficient artistic grace are often, exasperatingly, in peril of disappearing into the shadows. A good-humored, unpretentiously handsome gentleman who has intimated that he would just as happily be a match-saving footballer, English tenor Allan Clayton is no Ivory Tower-dwelling, platitude-spouting Artist. With a trophy-earning striker’s balance of natural ability and unwavering discipline, he possesses a Champions League-worthy voice and an uncanny ability to find the goal despite every conceivable complication on the pitch—and with imperturbably certain pitch! Philosophy suggests that the profusion of ugliness in this world is necessary in order to give meaning to the recognition of beauty, and the same conceit can be extended to music. With this pair of very different but remarkably compatible discs, their content separated by two of the most decisive centuries in the history of Western music, Allan Clayton eschews the notion of pontificating on why he is among today’s finest singers and simply sings in accordance with his gifts. Whether tackling the penalty kicks of Benjamin Britten’s angular writing in the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings or the roll and cut reverses of arias from the great operas and oratorios of Georg Friedrich Händel’s tenure in London, Clayton restores to the vocal recital disc a focus on the singer’s voice rather than his ego. That a particular excitement of voices is their variability is what makes a singer like Allan Clayton so special: fantastically reliable, each successive phrase of his singing impresses anew. If full appreciation of the contrast of a singer like Clayton with the ranks of more ordinary troubadours means that profusions of mediocre discs must be endured, what a minuscule price this is to pay for these superb Linn and Signum Classics recordings.

Setting the stage for Clayton’s performance of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, the Linn disc, distinguished by the sonic quality for which the label is rightly celebrated, opens with beautiful performances of Britten’s Young Apollo (Opus 16), Lachrymae (Opus 48a), and Prelude and Fugue (Opus 29). Interestingly, Britten suppressed the score of Young Apollo after its 1939 première by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation forces for which it was commissioned, and the piece, inspired by John Keats’s unfinished epic poem ‘Hyperion,’ was not performed again until 1979, three years after the composer’s death. As performed here by Aldeburgh Strings and pianist Lorenzo Soulès, whose adroit handling of the prickly writing for the keyboard is commendably unaffected, it is difficult to imagine that Britten would object to the piece’s reinstatement to the repertory.

Director and concertmaster Markus Däunert leads the Aldeburgh musicians in comfortably navigating the harmonic channels of Lachrymae, a series of variations on the principal theme of John Dowland’s song ‘If my complaints could passions move’ in which the familiar melody of Dowland’s ‘Flow my tears’ is also sampled. Lachrymae was written in 1950 for viola virtuoso William Primrose and revised in 1975 for violist Cecil Aronowitz, at which time the original piano part was reimagined for string orchestra, producing the version performed on this disc. Máté Szücs, principal violist of the Berliner Philharmoniker, proves an excellent exponent of the piece in this performance, drawing from his instrument tones that recall the glowing-amber timbre of the Guarneri viola preferred by Primrose throughout much of his career. Here, too, Däunert and the Aldeburgh Strings musicians follow the composer’s meanderings expertly, the sinuous textures of the music sometimes reminiscent of the ethereal writing for strings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The melancholy that colors Dowland’s songs is subtly evinced by Szücs’s noble phrasing and soothed by Däunert’s insightfully-gauged support.

Composed in 1943, the Opus 29 Prelude and Fugue for strings in eighteen parts is an aptly unsettled bridge between the other works on the disc and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, the composition of which it immediately followed. The Prelude is played with the gravitas that the music demands, each musician clearly attentive to the importance of her or his part to the Prelude’s shifting tonalities and the crucial violin solo lines beautifully realized by Däunert. Performance of a fugue with an unique part for each of the eighteen instruments, a device familiar from the polyphonic masterpieces of Thomas Tallis, requires extensive resources of concentration, rhythmic precision, and uninhibited cooperation. This performance displays an abundance of these resources, the Aldeburgh Strings producing detailed, engaging vignettes that unite in a complex but marvelously coherent musical mosaic. Throughout this traversal of the Fugue, the inventiveness of Britten’s contrapuntal writing is evident. Though not as widely-known as his Simple Symphony and Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for similar forces, the Opus 29 Prelude and Fugue constitute one of Britten’s most accomplished works, a distinction made audible in the performance on this disc.

It is no coincidence that horn soloist Richard Watkins occupies the Dennis Brain Chair on the faculty of the Royal Academy of Music. Continuing the legacy of Brain, at whose suggestion the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings was composed in 1943, whilst Britten convalesced from a serious bout with measles and concurrently toiled on the libretto for his opera Peter Grimes, and Barry Tuckwell, with whom Britten recorded the Serenade two decades after its première, Watkins acquits himself impeccably in this performance of the Serenade. His easy command of the horn’s infamously tricky natural harmonics, exploited to chilling effect by Britten, is nothing short of remarkable, but the technical mastery of his playing never overwhelms its innate expressivity. Especially in the Serenade’s Prologue and Epilogue, entrusted solely to the horn, Watkins rises to the challenges of Britten’s music spectacularly, producing a stream of even, accurately-pitched tones that fully expose the genius of the composer’s writing for the instrument.

Not surprisingly, the vocal part in the Serenade was written for and first performed by Sir Peter Pears, Britten’s partner in life and music and the muse for whom the composer created a succession of the finest tenor rôles in Twentieth-Century opera. With his opening phrase in ‘Pastoral,’ his elocution of Charles Cotton’s text shaped by an audible sensitivity to Britten’s use of consonants as rhythmic markers, Clayton establishes himself as a triumphantly worthy successor to Pears. The serenity with which the younger tenor delivers the line ‘The shadows now so long do grow’ ideally complements the yearning discord lurking within the music. Lord Tennyson’s words in ‘Nocturne’ are articulated with equal comprehension, the contrasting open and closed vowels in the lines ‘O love, they die in yon rich sky, / They faint on fill or field or river’ enunciated with clarity that enhances the gnawing harmonic complexity of Britten’s setting. With a haunting text by William Blake, ‘Elegy’ is among its composer’s most poignant inspirations, its vocal line so meticulously sculpted for Pears’s sinewy voice that even speaking the words in time to the music seems to recreate the graceful whirr of his singing. Clayton’s voice is both more beautiful and more secure throughout the range than Pears’s, but the forthrightness with which he limns the distress of lines like ‘O rose, thou art sick’ recalls Pears’s interpretive perspicuity.

The anonymous text drawn from the Lyke-Wake Dirge melds with Britten’s music in ‘Dirge’ with a sensual desolation that gains pathos from the sincerity with which Clayton sings ‘If even thou gavest hosen and shoon.’ Like all of its companion movements in the Serenade, ‘Hymn’ receives from tenor and musicians a reading of unflappable musicality and intelligence, their seamless collaboration yielding extraordinary dividends. Here, too, Clayton’s use of text, in this instance by Ben Jonson, heightens the impact of the composer’s harmonies, so carefully crafted to complement the nuances of the words, not least in the passage beginning with ‘Earth, let not thy envious shade.’ Tapping the vein of melody in John Keats’s verse, ‘Sonnet’ inspires singer and musicians to starkly persuasive, startlingly lucid music making, the sting of the lines ‘Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards, / And seal the hushèd / Casket of my Soul’ surging from the disc. In the Serenade and in Britten’s music in general, the foremost pleasures are almost always found in the dialogues among artists instigated by the intimacy of even his most expansively-constructed scores. Forcing nothing, Clayton and his colleagues here converse with the camaraderie of beloved friends. Is this not the truest essence of what music is meant to achieve?

Likely born in 1716 or 1717, only a few years after the death of the heirless Queen Anne ended the Stuart dynasty and settled the English crown on the heads of the German-speaking Electors of Hannover, the tenor John Beard was not only one of the most renowned singers of the Eighteenth Century but was also one of the few lower-voiced singers who managed to snatch leading, heroic rôles in operas and oratorios from the gilded throats of castrati. That he earned the respect and endorsement of a man as particular as Georg Friedrich Händel is indicative of the tremendous quality of Beard’s voice and the integrity of his artistry. As a gentleman of the Commonwealth might suggest, though, the proof of Beard’s importance to Eighteenth-Century British music is in the pudding, and the music composed for or adopted by Beard constitutes a deliciously rich concoction. After hearing the selections on this Signum Classics disc, it is perplexing to note that programmatic exploration of repertory associated with Beard has heretofore been rare. Not merely owing to its subject is this disc unusual, however: here, too, Allan Clayton offers singing of a caliber that both discloses his own skills and highlights the accomplishments of the composers whose music he sings. How might one better pay homage to a legendary artist of the past than by performing music that formed his artistic identity with fresh insights and imagination?

Neither Thomas Arne nor William Boyce is as appreciated by Twenty-First-Century listeners as his talents and fame in Eighteenth-Century Britain merit, but Beard was more generous with his gifts than modern-day observers are with their attention. Anyone who has heard the familiar strains of the chorus of ‘Rule, Britannia’ in a film or television score has encountered Arne’s music, perhaps unknowingly, and the composer’s Artaxerxes was one of the most successful English operas of the Eighteenth Century, its notoriety having been so great that it was during a performance of the Metastasio-derived Artaxerxes that rioters chose to destructively object to an ill-timed elimination of discounted tickets. The air ‘Thou, like the glorious sun’ is indicative of the quality of the score, and the performance that it receives is indicative of the quality of Clayton’s singing on this disc. Every note of the music and syllable of the text are given their due, and Clayton phrases with a poet’s feeling for words. The Sinfonia prefacing Part Two of Boyce’s masterful 1742 oratorio Solomon introduces a sequence of beautifully-written numbers that give credence to the reputation that the composer enjoyed among his contemporaries. Clayton sings both the recitative ‘My fair’s a garden of delight’ and the air ‘Softly rise, o southern breeze’ contemplatively but with unmistakable histrionic thrust. The superbly-trained voices of the Choir of Classical Opera deliver ‘Ye southern breezes gently blow’ rousingly, the balance among parts absolutely ideal and the words cleanly articulated.

Born in the Bavarian town of Ansbach, John Christopher Smith followed his father to London and into service to Händel, for whom he was copyist and, after the older composer’s blindness prevented him from leading public performances of his own music, conductor until Händel’s death in 1759. Though not on par with the quality of his employer’s scores, Smith’s surviving works reveal charm and well-crafted vocal writing and instrumentation that bear the stamp of Händel’s influence. In the delightful air ‘Hark how the hounds and horn’ from Smith’s 1755 opera The Fairies, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Clayton sings with the boyish playfulness of Puck, the aristocratic elegance of Theseus, and the romantic ardor of Demetrius and Lysander. Smith asks nothing of the tenor that he cannot supply with panache, and his buoyant rhythmic accuracy conveys all the enchantment of the text and the opera’s plot.

Taking full advantage of the unfailingly period-appropriate but never pedantic support of the Orchestra of Classical Opera and conductor Ian Page, the selections by Händel constitute a fascinating explication of the working relationship between the master composer and one of his most trusted interpreters. Clayton provides precisely the jubilant spirit and musical exuberance that the delightful air ‘Tune your harps to cheerful strains’ from Esther requires, and his Italian diction proves no less vibrant than his native tongue in his impeccably stylish performance of the aria ‘Sol nel mezzo risona del core’ from the too-seldom-performed Il pastor fido.

The winningly dovetailed seriousness of purpose and youthful energy that made their recent account of Mozart’s Il re pastore one of the finest opera recordings of recent years distinguish the Classical Opera personnel’s dramatically-charged playing of the Sinfonia that opens Act Two of Ariodante. Following Page’s lead, Clayton voices the daunting aria ‘Tu vivi, e punito’ thrillingly, his bravura technique as impressive as his handling of more introverted music. The recitative ‘M’inganna, me n’avveggo’ and aria ‘Un momento di contento’ from Alcina could hardly make a greater contrast, and the tenor’s poised vocalism fills the long-breathed lines of ‘Un momento di contento’ exquisitely, the simple beauty of his timbre highlighting the communicative power of Händel’s genius. No less noteworthy is Clayton’s singing of ‘Vedi l’ape che ingegnosa’ from Berenice. In this aria, too, his affinity for musical storytelling is wonderfully apparent.

If there is a more euphonious recorded performance of music from the Eighteenth Century than Clayton’s account with radiant-voiced soprano Mary Bevan of the duet ‘As steals the morn upon the night’ from Händel’s 1740 John Milton-inspired ode L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, there are no words adequate to describe it. In reality, mere words are sorry company for Clayton’s and Bevan’s singing, as well. There is an almost erotic tension in the serpentine intertwining of their voices, and the singers effortlessly match flawless intonation with unobtrusive vibrato. In the recitative ‘Let but that spirit’ and air ‘Thus when the sun from’s wat’ry bed’ from Samson and the recitative ‘’Tis well, my friends’ and air ‘Call forth thy pow’rs, my soul, and dare’ from Judas Maccabaeus, Clayton’s tones ring out magnificently, his commands of dynamics and tonal shading enlivening every bar of the music. The same is true of his performance—and, make no mistake, it is a wholly thought-out performance, not a strictly-for-the-microphone studio run-through—of the air ‘Hide thou thy hated beams, O sun, in clouds,’ the stirring accompagnato ‘A father, off’ring up his only child,’ and the grandiloquent air ‘Waft her, angels, through the skies’ from Jephtha. The many wonders of these pieces and the sublime air and chorus ‘Happy pair’ from Alexander’s Feast pour forth from Clayton and his Classical Opera colleagues with boundless finesse.

Jupiter’s ‘Where’re you walk’ from Händel’s Semele is surely the best-qualified candidate for the dubious distinction of being the Baroque aria for tenor as hackneyed as the Duca di Mantova’s ‘La donna è mobile’ from Verdi’s Rigoletto and Calàf’s ‘Nessun dorma’ from Puccini’s Turandot. Like those later tunes, it has been sung by virtually every tenor of the past three centuries, regardless of familiarity with the requisite style. Beard sang Jupiter in Semele’s 1744 première, but the rôle might have been tailor-made for Clayton. As the younger tenor sings it on this disc, the aria is wholly the amorous, hypnotic number that Händel clearly intended it to be, an oasis amidst Semele’s calamities, conflicts, and conniving. Framing the air with a pointed reading of the recitative ‘See, she appears,’ Clayton devotes an appealing lightness to the familiar music. Throughout this recital, Clayton honors traditions by looking beyond them, honoring Beard by singing music familiar to him with precisely the commitment and adroitness that surely endeared the illustrious tenor to Händel.

In the three centuries since the birth of John Beard, Britain has produced a number of fine tenors, among whom Gervase Elwes, Heddle Nash, Alexander Young, Richard Lewis, John Mitchinson, Stuart Burrows, Ian Partridge, and Anthony Rolfe-Johnson have been some of the most renowned. The rightly-lamented Rolfe-Johnson finds in Allan Clayton’s lustrous, lyrical vocalism a legitimate heir, but these discs confirm that, artistically, Clayton is his own man. Nearly fifty years ago, Mama Cass Elliot entreated us to ‘make your own kind of music,’ to find our own ways even among the too-trodden ways of the past. How much there is to enjoy in these recorded products of Allan Clayton having taken that advice to heart!

Man with a Händel on Britten: Tenor Allan Clayton [Photo by Laura Harling, © by Allan Clayton/Maestro Arts]

RUGGERO LEONCAVALLO (1857 – 1919): Zazà—Ermonela Jaho (Zazà), Riccardo Massi (Milio Dufresne), Stephen Gaertner (Cascart), Patricia Bardon (Anaide), David Stout (Bussy), Nicky Spence (Courtois), Kathryn Rudge (Natalia), Simon Thorpe (Duclou), Fflur Wyn (Floriana), Julia Ferri (Toto), Christopher Turner (Augusto), Helen Neeves (Signora Dufresne), Edward Goater (Marco), Robert Anthony Gardiner (Un signore), Eleanor Minney (Claretta), Rebecca Lodge (Simona); BBC Singers; BBC Symphony Orchestra; Maurizio Benini, conductor [Recorded at BBC Maida Vale Studios, London, UK, in November 2015; Opera Rara ORC 55; 2 CDs, 136:01; Available from Opera Rara and major music retailers]

So often are opera lovers cautioned that the plots of the works that they love must be taken with a grain of salt that the true aficionado’s diet must be dangerously suffused with sodium. Whether a score’s drama is one of Roman emperors, legendary warriors, or more ordinary personages, opera is the realm of idealism set to music. The denizens of operatic plots rarely behave as their counterparts off the stage might be expected to do: perhaps their actions are larger for having absorbed the vicarious ambitions of their portrayers and observers. For all of its verismo vestments, Ruggero Leoncavallo’s seldom-heard Zazà is clothed in unabashedly Romantic hues that would be embarrassingly garish if viewed outside of the opera house. The tale of a vaudeville chanteuse’s vain seduction and eventual selfless rejection of a married man melds the realms of the Moulin Rouge and the Palais Garnier, but the opera’s plot is marginally too starry-eyed to be swallowed without the seasoning of that proverbial dose of salt. The histrionic shortcomings of the heroine and her circle notwithstanding, Zazà has been done few favors by the handful of indifferently-produced recordings of the score despite admirable performances of the title rôle by Mafalda Favero, Clara Petrella, Lynne Strow-Piccolo, and Lisa Houben. What Zazà needs is star treatment, and that is what the opera receives in spades from Opera Rara in this expertly-prepared studio performance, recorded in advance of a critically-acclaimed concert outing at the Barbican. Here extending the focus of the label’s celebrated endeavors to the very end of the Nineteenth Century, Zazà having premièred at Milan’s Teatro Lirico on 10 November 1900, the principal question raised by this release is whether Opera Rara can deal as authoritatively with verismo as with bel canto. The answer, this recording proves, is a resounding Sì!

Guided by the propulsive, idiomatic conducting of Maurizio Benini, the musicians of the BBC Symphony Orchestra play Leoncavallo’s episodic score with brio that qualifies them as honorary Italians regardless of the flags under which they were born. The opera’s orchestration is clever and colorful if never especially inventive, though the use of the offstage banda to create the contrasting back- and front-of-house perspectives of Zazà’s milieu is witty and managed by Benini with panache and by the banda personnel with raucous brilliance. Motivic writing is not as prominent in Zazà as in many post-Wagner works originating on any side of the Alps, but Benini’s attentiveness to the most minute details of thematic material ensures that subtleties of characterization can be enacted by the singers without exaggeration. The conductor looks to the score for guidance on setting tempi that serve both drama and cast, and his clear-sighted pacing of the performance minimizes the doldrums of Leoncavallo’s workaday passages.

Emerging from the ranks of the BBC Singers, whose vocalism enlivens every scene in which Leoncavallo employed choristers, mezzo-sopranos Rebecca Lodge as Simona and Eleanor Minney as Claretta, soprano Helen Neeves as Signora Dufresne, Milio’s wife, and tenor Edward Goater as the Dufresne family butler Marco epitomize the exalted measure of excellence to which the choir adheres. Throughout the performance, the choristers are individually and collectively credible in every guise in which the composer presents them.

Opera Rara releases have reliably utilized first-rate talent in supporting rôles, and this Zazà is among the label’s greatest successes in this regard. The boyishly handsome tenor Nicky Spence has never sounded better on disc than as the put-upon impresario Courtois in this performance of Zazà—quite a feat considering his impressive discography! Whenever the character appears, Spence’s evergreen voice infuses Leoncavallo’s conversational music with golden-toned life. Baritones Simon Thorpe as the put-upon stage manager Duclou and David Stout as the journalist Bussy further raise the vocal standards of the recording, and their strong work is seconded by the accomplished singing of tenors Christopher Turner as the writer Augusto and Robert Anthony Gardiner as the unnamed Signore.

The characterful vignettes created by the ladies of the supporting cast are no less vibrant than those engendered by their male colleagues. Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge provides great pleasure with her impersonation of Zazà’s maid Natalia, the indefatigable energy of her singing heightening the character’s significance. Irish mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon, consummate mistress of a wide repertory spanning from unforgettable portrayals of Händel’s travesti heroes to rewarding ventures into Twenty-First-Century music, is captivating as Zazà’s perennially-inebriated mother Anaide. Even in a relatively small rôle, how an artist of Bardon’s stature can shine! As Floriana, Zazà’s rival on stage and in love, soprano Fflur Wyn is the oft-thwarted seconda donna to the life, her bright timbre, crisp diction, and take-no-prisoners vocalism unmistakably conveying the character’s vexation. Heeding the examples of her singing teammates, Julia Ferri portrays the speaking rôle of Totò, Milio’s daughter Antonietta, without artifice, enunciating her lines clearly and animatedly.

In reviewing a 2005 Alice Tully Hall concert performance of Zazà by Teatro Grattacielo, New York Times critic Bernard Holland praised the ‘strong, cultured baritone’ that Stephen Gaertner wielded in his interpretation of Zazà’s once-and-future lover Cascart. A decade later, that assessment applies even more fully to the singer’s Cascart for Opera Rara. Gaertner is a connoisseur’s baritone, one whose performances offer tantalizing glimpses of bygone eras in which singers like John Charles Thomas, Lawrence Tibbett, and Leonard Warren were emblematic of the magnificence of American baritone singing. In this portrayal of Cascart, a rôle created by Mario Sammarco, who originated the rôle of Carlo Gérard in Andrea Chénier for Umberto Giordano four years before the première of Zazà, and first sung at the Metropolitan Opera by Pasquale Amato, Gaertner sings with the unapologetic machismo of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, the true swagger of a nightclub star sure of his value and virility. From the beginning of his scene with Zazà in Act One, there is obvious tenderness in his approach to the part, however, and Gaertner woos and pleads without crooning. In Act Two, the sheer sonic impact of his singing of ‘Buona Zazà del mio buon tempo ascolta’ is arresting, but the character’s gentleness towards Zazà is again evident in the humor with which Gaertner’s Cascart goads her with ‘E s’anco ti spossare? saresti... una borghese!’ When the baritone sings ‘Zazà, piccola zingara, schiava d’un folle amore’ in Act Four, the extent to which Cascart’s destiny is intertwined with Zazà’s is palpable, and the sincerity of Gaertner’s delivery is moving. With a singer of Gaertner’s abilities in the rôle, Cascart’s part in the drama is all the more pivotal, and the misfortune of Zazà’s love for Milio is intensified by her neglect of a man so devoted to her.

Production Manager Kim Panter and her Opera Rara colleagues are owed considerable gratitude for adding one of today’s finest tenors to the label’s roster of compelling artists. Here performing Leoncavallo’s music for Zazà’s initially reluctant but ultimately fervent paramour Milio Dufresne with laudably firm, focused tone that meaningfully conveys the tension of complicated love, Italian tenor Riccardo Massi makes his Opera Rara début in a rôle to which his talents are ideally suited. With acclaimed portrayals of rôles as challenging as Alvaro and Radamès in Verdi’s La forza del destino and Aida and Cavaradossi and Calàf in Puccini’s Tosca and Turandot to his credit, Massi is an elegant singer with a voice reminiscent in its blend of strength and sweetness of that of his countryman Giovanni Malipiero. When Milio makes his first entrance in Act One, the performance as a whole gains momentum, and Massi voices ‘È un riso gentile quall’alba d’aprile’ with the Italianate fervor that the music desperately needs and has received on disc only from the slightly over-parted Giuseppe Campora. In the subsequent scene with Zazà, Milio’s burgeoning love simmers in Massi’s resonant vocalism until it can be restrained no longer: bursting forth like flood waters pulverizing a dam, his words of affection pour from the tenor’s throat, resonant but refined. In Act Two, Massi invests both ‘Mia Zazà, mio bene! Ragiona dunque; che follie son queste?’ and ‘Zazà, Zazà, non ti attristare’ with subtle inflections drawn from the text, giving Milio greater depth than Leoncavallo achieved in words or music. Milio’s aria in Act Three, ‘Oh mio piccolo tavolo ingombrato siccome ingombro è di sgomenti il cuore,’ its sentiments not unlike those of the heroine’s ‘Adieu, notre petite table’ in Act Two of Massenet’s Manon, is scaled by Massi as a genuinely inward meditation, the character’s desperate uncertainty magnified by the insurmountable solidity of the tenor’s singing. The emotional obstacle course of Act Four never disrupts the meticulously-maintained balance of Massi’s performance. The expressive immediacy of his articulations of ‘Zazà, tu mi rimproveri d’aver ti troppo amata?’ and ‘Ed ora io mi domando come, vicino a te, potei scordar la dolce mia buona creatura!’ reveals the essence of his artistry: there is beauty in even the ugliest moments of life. In tinging his performance with haunting morbidezza without resorting to Gigli-esque sobs and cheap effects, Massi makes Milio less a conceited prig than a man swept along by an illicit affection, his timbre burnished and his intonation absolutely secure throughout the range. How could a man who sings so well not be forgiven?

Breathing life into the too-easily-caricatured title rôle, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho allies glistening, well-controlled vocalism with ardent but polished emoting that often proves revelatory. Building upon a career firmly rooted in Opera Rara’s familiar bel canto territory, Jaho waded into the tempestuous waters of verismo with a heartrending portrayal of Puccini’s Suor Angelica at Covent Garden, and she is scheduled to bring her shattering Cio-Cio-San to Kennedy Center in Washington National Opera’s 2016 – 2017 Season. It is hardly coincidental that, four years after Leoncavallo’s opera was first performed, the first Zazà, Rosina Storchio, was also Puccini’s first Cio-Cio-San or that Geraldine Farrar was the first to sing both rôles at the Metropolitan Opera. Though a temperamental cabaret singer to the marrow of her bones, Jaho’s Zazà is most fully an open-hearted, deeply-feeling woman. Facing a bevy of distractions in Act One, Jaho’s Zazà fires ‘Ogni seme di bene in te si strugge, e diventa l’amore una parola!’ at Cascart with unmistakable meaning, and the soprano’s singing in the exasperated but dutiful daughter’s scene with her worrisome mother is a model of barely-concealed ennui. Then, singing ‘Io son diversa da voi – Non ardisco dirvelo, e pur d’un sogno mi beava!’ to Milio, she is transformed from the haughty creature of the stage into a disquietingly vulnerable woman hopelessly in love in spite of herself. Limning the progress of that love’s development in Act Two, Jaho voices ‘Amor mio, che farà non più vicina a te, la tua Zazà, la tua piccina’ expressively, her luminous upper register projected excitingly without forcing. Joining with her mother and Cascart, this Zazà dispatches ‘Ah, ah, ah! Che quadretto!’ charmingly, her irony as bewitching as her flirtation. Her exclamation of ‘Bisogna ch’ei scelga – O me o l’altra... Via!’ has the conviction of Tosca, the diva’s soul bared in a single phrase. Unexpectedly learning in Act Three that her lover is not only married but also father to a precious daughter, Zazà undergoes another metamorphosis, heartbreakingly depicted by Jaho in the scene with Milio’s daughter Totò. Here, singing ‘È finita!... Ammogliato... e un angelo ha per figlia!’ with mesmerizing simplicity that brings to mind Maria Callas’s singing in scenes like those with Norma’s and Cio-Cio-San’s children, the exuberant, fiery lover becomes the tragic heroine determined to act for the greater good. Confronting Milio in Act Four, the pain that courses through Jaho’s stark readings of ‘M’ami troppo? Mai quanto basta!... Ti par tedioso l’amor mio?’ and ‘Ebbene, si, so tutto! Che hai moglie... che mi fuggi!’ is tempered by an omnipresent acceptance of the inevitability of safeguarding the bond between father and child. Jaho sings ‘Che ho fatto? Egli parte! Egli va? Non torna indietro...’ with unbreakable determination, will triumphing over desire. Leoncavallo lunges at the jugular with Zazà’s final utterance of ‘Milio! torna! Milio... È all’angolo... È sparito! È non ritorna più... mai più! Tutto è finito,’ but Jaho prefers music to mania. Like Massi, she finds the light in the darkness of her character’s circumstances. How Zazà’s story ends is one of opera’s mysteries, but how her life is changed by a sole encounter with a young girl is made startlingly real—that verismo, at last!—by this uncommonly intuitive soprano.

Even in a performance as wonderful as this one, the reasons for Zazà’s neglect are apparent. The composer most often associated with Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, remarked that, with the extraordinary success of his early opera Cavalleria rusticana, he was, in terms of renown, crowned before he was king. A similar assessment might justifiably be applied to Leoncavallo, whose Pagliacci ushered him into immortality in 1892, whilst his compositional skills and individual style were still developing. The difference is that several of Mascagni’s post-Cavalleria rusticana scores—L’amico Fritz, Guglielmo Ratcliff, and Il piccolo Marat, for instance—are confident, tightly-constructed, masterful works of a quality that Leoncavallo’s Zazà cannot claim as her own. Compared with Pagliacci and even Leoncavallo’s infrequently-performed but meritorious La bohème, premièred a year after the first performance of Puccini’s Bohème, Zazà amounts to an enjoyable journey without a clear destination: unlike the finest verismo scores, that is, it is attractive music that never really goes anywhere. Zazà is a heroine of a different mettle than Nedda, Mimì, and Musetta, however, and Ermonela Jaho succeeds in the context of this recording better than Leoncavallo managed to do at making her a three-dimensional woman of genuine emotions. Finally heard in the top-quality sound that the score deserves, the heart missing from previous recordings beats powerfully in this one. In short, hold the salt: all of the ingredients needed to savor Opera Rara’s Zazà are present in this performance in precisely the right proportions.

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Parisina d’Este—Mariella Devia (Parisina), Dalmacio Gonzales (Ugo), Giorgio Zancanaro (Azzo), Dimitri Kavrakos (Ernesto), Tiziana Tramonti (Imelda); Orchestra e Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino; Bruno Bartoletti, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in performance at the Teatro della Pergola, Florence, Italy, on 20 May 1990; Bongiovanni GB 2569/70-2; 2 CDs, 159:56; Available from Bongiovanni, NAXOS Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

As befuddling as why some singers achieve worldwide recognition whilst equally-qualified colleagues toil in relative obscurity is the question of why the caprices of fate consign exceptional singers to neglect by record labels. With few aspects of opera in the Twenty-First Century as lamented as the perceived decline of genuine bel canto in the exalted tradition of Giulia Grisi, María Malibran, and Giuditta Pasta, the paucity of commercial recordings featuring Chiusavecchia-born soprano Mariella Devia is as baffling as it is frustrating. In generations past, it was Turkish soprano Leyla Gencer, another celebrated scion of the royal house of bel canto, who reigned as Queen of the Pirates, ignored by major labels but adored by aficionados, who eagerly collected private recordings of her performances. Now, Gencer’s crown has passed to Devia, whose commercial discography is inexplicably sparse: aside from studio recordings of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Linda di Chamounix and professionally-produced ‘live’ recordings on hard-to-find labels, aural preservation of the excitement that Devia has generated in her bel canto outings is woefully inadequate. Even an event as significant as Devia’s triumphant return to New York as Elisabetta opposite Stephen Costello’s absurdly-maligned portrayal of the title rôle in Opera Orchestra of New York’s 2014 concert performance of Roberto Devereux was not recorded for broadcast or commercial release! In the age of Gencer, the major labels had Callas, Sutherland, Scotto, Sills, and Caballé, of course, but for whose benefit has Devia been overlooked? Every new release bearing Devia’s name among the cast is cause for anxious anticipation, and Bongiovanni’s release of this performance of Donizetti’s 1833 Parisina d’Este, recorded in the same theatre, Florence’s Teatro della Pergola, in which the opera was premièred, is a welcome addition to the recorded legacy of one of the most important artists in the history of bel canto.

Alas, despite considerable assets, Bongiovanni’s new release of what sounds like a decently-captured, minimally-remastered in-house recording of a performance from the 1990 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino production of Parisina is not the caliber of tribute that Devia’s singular gifts deserve. Mostly free from audience noise aside from curtailed applause, the usual bronchial intrusions, and a spectacularly ill-timed nasal noise of indeterminate origin that upsets the delicate atmosphere of the heroine’s first entrance, the sound quality does not impede enjoyment of the performance, but the distortion and peaking that result from the boxy, claustrophobic acoustic are unkind to the voices, especially the raison d’être prima donna. Under the well-schooled baton of Bruno Bartoletti, a veteran of the Maggio Musicale orchestra who was in his penultimate season as the Artistic Director of Maggio Musicale at the time of this performance, Donizetti’s music is performed with an apt dose of the verve that the conductor reliably brought to early Verdi repertory during his five-decade tenure with Lyric Opera of Chicago. Bartoletti’s tempi for arias and cabalettas are uniformly appropriate, and he paces ensembles with obvious instinct for Donizetti’s modes of scene construction.

Their work not reproduced in anything approaching high-fidelity sound, the Maggio Musicale choral and orchestral forces are precisely what an informed listener might expect them to be: enthusiastic, committed, and slightly provincial. [It should be noted that standards have increased exponentially in the years since this performance of Parisina was recorded. Today, the Florentine musicians often match and sometimes exceed the levels of excellence expected of their Milanese and Venetian counterparts.] As clamoring courtiers, boisterous soldiers, refined ladies-in-waiting, and offstage boatmen, the choristers sing vigorously. That individual voices are frequently distinguishable among the ensemble is perhaps more a circumstance of stage blocking and positioning of the recording device than of problems with training and balance. The instrumentation of Parisina cannot have failed to delight Donizetti’s illustrious tutor Johann Simon Mayr, and the Maggio Musicale musicians play their parts with the authentic Italian gusto that the score demands.

Portraying Parisina’s lady-in-waiting Imelda, soprano Tiziana Tramonti is heard here near the beginning of a career that has subsequently taken her to many of the world’s most familiar opera houses in leading rôles. Her duties in Parisina are confined to scenes with her mistress in all three of the opera’s acts, but Tramonti sings capably throughout the performance, spiritedly supporting Devia and making her mark as a singer of great promise.

The supple, sonorous voice of Greek bass Dimitri Kavrakos flows through Donizetti’s music for Duke Azzo’s minister and Ugo’s adopted father Ernesto like the sparkling waters of the Aegean. In his Act One scenes first with Azzo and then with Ugo, Kavrakos convincingly plays the parts of courtier and concerned father, sensitive to the insecurities of both his employer and his foster son. Kavrakos’s voice anchors the finale primo handsomely, his lower register retaining its impact even in ensembles. Kavrakos lends great immediacy to Ernesto’s utterances in the Act Two scene with Ugo, powerfully depicting the character’s distress with tones that blend beauty with granitic strength. Furthering the grand impression made in the Act One finale, the bass delivers Ernesto’s lines in the finale secondo with unwavering authority. Like Devia, Kavrakos is too-little-represented on commercial recordings: the quality of his performance in this Parisina makes the meager chronicling of his considerable bel canto credentials all the more regrettable.

In the ranks of important Italian baritones of the Twentieth Century, Giorgio Zancanaro merits inclusion alongside Pasquale Amato, Giuseppe De Luca, Tito Gobbi, Giuseppe Taddei, and Ettore Bastianini. A native of Verona, Zancanaro came to singing relatively late in life, without formal training and following a stint as a police officer, but his polished-brass timbre, well-integrated vocal registers, and easy upper extension were apparent from the start of his career. As a Verdi baritone, he had few wholly-qualified peers during the peak years of his career, and his singing as Azzo in this performance of Parisina reveals that his mastery of Verdi repertory was founded upon a solid bel canto technique. His singing of Azzo’s Act One cavatina ‘Per veder su quel bel viso’ and cabaletta ‘Dall’Eridano si stende’ exudes aristocracy and ducal entitlement, and both the resplendent tone and magnificent top notes typical of Zancanaro’s best work abound. In the finale primo and the Act Two duet with Parisina, the baritone is a worthy partner for Devia, his vivid vocal acting lighting the soprano’s histrionic fuse. The indecision that grips Azzo in the finale secondo is obliterated by his merciless vengeance in Act Three, and Zancanaro rises to every challenge of the part, thundering thrillingly in the Act Three finale. That Zancanaro’s Azzo is less memorable than his Conte di Luna, Rigoletto, and Rodrigo di Posa is attributable to Donizetti, his librettist Felice Romani, and even Lord Byron, from whose 1816 poem of the same name the opera’s plot was derived, but this is a splendidly-sung performance of challenging music.

The punishing rôle of Ugo, the heroine’s exiled lover and, as is ultimately revealed, the unwitting son—by his first wife, thankfully—of her husband, was first portrayed by Gilbert Duprez, celebrated as the first tenor to consistently produce C₅ with chest resonance. Recordings of different performances and/or different recordings of this performance from the 1990 Maggio Musicale production of Parisina have long been available from non-commercial sources, some of which cite Italian tenor Dano Raffanti as the portrayer of Ugo. Raffanti was listed for the rôle in the 1990 Annuario EDT dell'Opera Lirica in Italia, and, while it is possible that Raffanti sang the part in some performances, the Ugo heard on these discs is unquestionably Catalan tenor Dalmacio Gonzales (né Dalmau González Albiol). Unfortunately, the bright-voiced Gonzales has the dubious distinction of suffering most from the recording’s ambiance—or, more accurately, the lack thereof. So reliably distant in the soundscape are his contributions to the performance that it could almost be alleged that the recordist endeavored to slight him, and assessing his efforts beyond confirming that he sings when Ugo is asked by Donizetti to sing is difficult. [In most available editions, Jerome Pruett endures a similar indignity in recordings of the legendary 1974 Opera Orchestra of New York Parisina with Monserrat Caballé. Is there some cosmic curse on the rôle, a sort of Duprez’s revenge?] The ears must strain to fully appreciate Gonzales’s performance, but the expenditure of effort is generously repaid. The tenor’s accounts of the impetuous Ugo’s Act One cavatina ‘Io l’amai fin da quell’ora’ and cabaletta ‘Per le cure, per le pene’ are fantastic, his slender, sinewy voice soaring through Donizetti’s daunting vocal lines and cresting on clarion, mostly secure top notes of which Duprez would have been proud. In the duet with Parisina, ‘Ma girne in bando ancora,’ and the finale primo, Gonzales’s Ugo proves to be an engaging lover, the tenor’s timbre contrasting markedly but blending appealingly with Devia’s. Both his aria ‘Io sentii tremar la mano’ and the cavatina ‘Questo amor doveva in terra’ in Act Two are sung stylishly and expressively, and Ugo’s desperate part in the finale secondo is enacted with dramatic intensity. A pioneer in the lineage of tenori di grazia that produced Juan Diego Flórez, Lawrence Brownlee, Javier Camarena, and Andrew Owens, Gonzales is here heard at the zenith of his powers, the continual struggle to hear him notwithstanding.

This recording of Parisina documents Mariella Devia’s artistry nearly two decades into her international career, a career still very much in progress: now traversing her sixty-ninth year, her schedule for the second half of 2016 and 2017 includes performances of the title rôles in Bellini’s Norma and Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, two of the most perilous parts in the bel canto repertory. Her professional début in Treviso in 1973 introduced her to the public in a rôle that was to be a cornerstone of her repertory, the eponymous protagonist of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. [Incidentally, in the same year in which she headlined Maggio Musicale’s production of Parisina, Devia sang in a now-legendary RAI Roma concert broadcast performance of Lucia opposite the Edgardo of Alfredo Kraus in which the score was performed without cuts and in the composer’s original, generally higher-than-traditional keys. A superb-quality recording of the broadcast is available on CD (catalogue number CA1671) from Australian retailer Celestial Audio.] At her first entrance in Act One, it is obvious that Devia was in excellent voice for this performance, but there is a surprisingly prominent suggestion of caution in her singing. Fidelity to Donizetti’s score only partially accounts for the relative paucity of the soprano’s trademark sopracuti. Still, her singing of Parisina’s Act One cavatina ‘Forse un destin che intendere’ and cabaletta ‘V’era un dì quando l’alma’ is undeniably exhilarating, the inimitable voice moving through the music with only a slight hint of sluggishness. Charges that Devia is primarily a vocal phenomenon are not wholly unfounded. She is not unfailingly an animated performer, but she is at her peak as a singing actress in the duet with Ugo and Act One finale in this performance, singing and emoting with equal aplomb. Devia approaches the Act Two scene with Imelda as a springboard for her beguiling voicing of the romanza ‘Sogno talor in correre.’ As reminiscent of Verdi’s energetic music for Macbeth and his dastardly Lady as of the duet for the titular heroine and her brother Enrico in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Parisina’s duet with Azzo unites Devia and Zancanaro in a glorious masterclass in the now-elusive art of bel canto. The quartet ‘Per sempre, per sempre, sotterra sepolto’ is arguably the finest music in the score, and Devia’s vocalism highlights its quality. The soprano is at her ravishing best in Parisina’s Act Three rondò, ‘Ciel, sei tu che il tal momento,’ the spot-on intonation and limpid tone above the stave spiraling intoxicatingly through Donizetti’s ascending lines. Disappointingly imperfect, this Parisina is nonetheless a gratifying addition to Devia’s gallery of recorded Donizetti portraits.

The success of many of Parisina’s companions in the Donizetti and broader bel canto repertories depends upon their leading ladies, and few leading ladies in recent years have borne the weight of bel canto performances more successfully than Mariella Devia. The discouragingly [and bewilderingly] lukewarm critical reception for Opera Orchestra of New York's May 2016 concert performance of the opera featuring Angela Meade, Aaron Blake, and Yunpeng Wang suggested that Parisina remains a difficult sell for modern audiences. That Mariella Devia sold it to the Florentine audience in 1990 is manifest in every phrase of her singing on this pair of discs. Her salesmanship deserves a better marketplace than this recording provides, but devotees of the Queens of the Pirates gratefully take what they can get.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Die schöne Müllerin, D.795 (Opus 25)—Robert Murray, tenor; Andrew West, piano [Recorded in Britten Studio, Snape Maltings, Suffolk, UK, 6 – 9 October 2014; Stone Records 5060192780628; 1 CD, 64:14; Available from Amazon (UK), Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

There is something inexpressibly exhilarating about standing before an audience, whether in the palpitating atmosphere of the recital hall or the unnerving virtual environment of the recording studio, with only a piano and melody guiding one’s precarious steps along the precipice. Like Bellini’s somnambulistic Amina as she toddles high above her bucolic village, the Lieder singer has no safety net, no parachute, no cabled harness steadying his gait. In the most magical instances, however, the Art of Song is conjured like the iridescent bridge that conveys Wotan and his companions to Walhalla. Such instances are why the notion of positioning singers before the horns of phonographs was conceived more than a century ago and why the Classical recording industry remains an embattled but vitally necessary pillar of today’s culture. Perhaps it is true that, as some observers allege, fewer recordings of genuine merit come to market now than in previous generations, but a recording like this performance of Franz Schubert’s seminal 1824 masterwork Die schöne Müllerin always justifies the wait. One of the earliest Lieder cycles in the modern sense, Die schöne Müllerin remains popular with singers of every Fach, but few of them have recorded a Schöne Müllerin as spellbinding as this one. This performance lures the listener into a fascinating microcosm, sometimes claustrophobic in its intimacy, that derives inspiration from music and words and inspires the hearer to abandon predispositions and prejudgments gleaned from other recordings and devote complete attention to these remarkable Lieder as though encountering Schöne Müllerin for the first time.

Considering that the poems by Wilhelm Müller that inspired and provide the texts for Die schöne Müllerin were published in 1820, only four years before the first publication of the Lieder cycle, and that Schubert was occupied during the period in which the bulk of the songs were written, from May to September 1823, by the composition of his large-scale opera Fierrabras, the cycle’s gestation was surprisingly brief. Melodic fecundity and interpretive depth were seemingly as readily available to Schubert as they were to Mozart, and both qualities imbue every bar of Die schöne Müllerin. The nuances of Müller’s verses are given avenues of expression by Schubert’s music that would never be possible in even the most intelligent recitation, the poetry of the music highlighting the musicality of the words. The extent to which Schubert identified personally with the cycle’s sentimental journey from exuberant youthful optimism to bleak despondency precipitated by unreciprocated love continues to be debated by biographers and musicologists. There are far more questions than answers about details of the composer’s amorous pursuits, but the psychological depth with which he amplified Müller’s words suggests at the very least a profound connection with the subject matter. That connection is perpetuated in this performance, in the context of which both singer and pianist are no less committed to communicating the subtleties of Die schöne Müllerin than Schubert was when he fused Müller’s texts with his music.

Whether the music at hand is the work of Sammartini, Schubert, or Schönberg, any performance benefits from the participation of gifted, dedicated musicians, and this performance of Die schöne Müllerin is defined by the keenly intelligent handling of Schubert’s music by tenor Robert Murray. A noteworthy master of a varied repertory who was especially delightful—and atypically glamorously-voiced— as the charismatically romantic Frederic in the 2015 English National Opera production of the Gilbert and Sullivan gem The Pirates of Penzance, Murray is not unknown to aficionados of beautiful tenor singing. Both his attractive, evenly-produced natural instrument and his talents for subtle, insightful interpretation merit preservation on recordings, his portrayal of Marzio in Classical Opera’s Signum Classics recording of Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto [reviewed here] having shone amidst high-wattage performances, and his singing on this disc is as strong a raison d’être for this handsomely-produced Stone Records account of Die schöne Müllerin as is the quality of Schubert’s music.

No man is an island in Lieder repertory, however, and Murray’s partner in this Schöne Müllerin, pianist Andrew West, is an artist of equal accomplishment and perspicacity. A member of the faculty of the prestigious Royal Academy of Music and a panelist on the jury of the 2014 Kathleen Ferrier Competition, in the 2003 edition of which Murray was a prizewinner, West is a collaborative musician of the first order. Equally acclaimed as a soloist and a partner to other musicians and singers, West is no mere accompanist in this performance of Die schöne Müllerin. Building upon years of cooperation, his fingers are as integral a part of the interpretation of Schubert’s music on this disc as Murray’s vocal cords.

As Murray and West approach the cycle in this performance, the first four Lieder form an engrossing portal into both the narrator’s physical surroundings and his emotional state. Murray sings ‘Das Wandern’ with boyish charm, his rhythmic buoyancy, perfectly complemented by West’s playing, conveying the bounce in the youth’s step as he explores the world before him. The depth of understanding between singer and pianist is especially evident in ‘Wohin?’ and ‘Halt!’ Here and in ‘Danksagung an den Bach,’ tonal richness from both musicians adds a dimension of dramatic excitement to the cycle’s progress. Murray does not hesitate to provide full-on, open-throated, operatic tone when the emotional ethos of music and text warrant it, and some of the most unforgettable moments in this Schöne Müllerin come when Murray and West flee the polite salon and allow the songs play out as though their action were being brought to life in the opera house. That this is achieved with any of the cycle’s inherent introspection bring sacrificed is a particular success of this performance.

‘Am Feierabend’ and ‘Der Neugierige’ launch another sequence that escorts the listener ever further into the recesses of burgeoning inner torment and its outward manifestations. Murray sings these and ‘Ungeduld’ with penetrating insightfulness, using his bright vowels and crisp consonants to illuminate the text in a way that renders the words’ significance unmistakable. His is an account of ‘Morgengruß’ that radiates simplicity and faith in new beginnings, but West’s handling of the piano part elucidates the uncertainty that lurks beyond the music’s deceptively orderly façade. The very different moods of ‘Des Müllers Blumen,’ ‘Tränenregen,’ and ‘Mein!’ are traversed by Murray and West with unaffected eloquence, and the pianist’s probing use of Schubert’s harmonies as expressive devices in ‘Pause’ melds with the tenor’s intuitive management of phrasing in the bittersweet melodic lines of ‘Mit dem grünen Lautenbande.’ Where many performances begin to drag, this one soars, gaining momentum with each Lied and escalating tension by finding within each song its function within the broader scope of the cycle.

The visceral energy of West’s playing in ‘Der Jäger’ enhances the idiomatic sparkle of Murray’s diction, the words charged with the same electricity that races through the music. Throughout this Schöne Müllerin, Murray articulates the text with the flair of a native speaker of German and the sagacity of one who has devoted considerable time to studying the literal and figurative meanings of the words. There is never an indication of lugubriousness in ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ or ‘Die liebe Farbe,’ both of which are sung and played with ideal tempi, dynamics, and balance between voice and piano. The expressive heavy lifting in this performance is entrusted to the words: rather than attempting to force a comprehension of the cycle upon the listener, this Schöne Müllerin invites participation, the kaleidoscopic incandescence of Murray’s vocalism providing ethereal perspectives that enable the listener to form his own unique interpretation of the music’s message. The sheer attractiveness of tone lavished on ‘Die böse Farbe’ and ‘Trockne Blumen’ is tremendous, making the songs satisfying solely as pure music, but there is always a reason for beauty in this performance: things which cannot be spoken without harshness must be sung especially beautifully.

Widely viewed as the narrator’s paean to the relief from his despair found in death in the waters of the brook, ‘Der Müller und der Bach’ is in this performance not without a discernible vein of pragmatism. The bleakness and inevitability of the poet’s perception of fate gain from the unexaggerated forthrightness of Murray’s singing an element of serenity that offers a glimmer of redemptive hope in the face of self-annihilation. This sense of magnanimity that permeates Murray’s and West’s reading of ‘Der Müller und der Bach’ is expanded in ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ into an examination not of the unforgiving finality of death but of its transcendence of earthbound cares; to borrow a conceit from Shakespeare, its shaking off of mortal coils. The brook flows on, and so, too, does the cycle of anticipation, fulfillment or disappointment, and renewal.

Some singers focus so doggedly on devising identifiably unique interpretations of a work like Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin that they seemingly overlook the most basic tenet of any performance of the cycle: singing. Whether one takes the metaphysical dimension of Die schöne Müllerin at face value or ascribes to it relevance of cosmic proportions, the fact remains that these Lieder are first and foremost music. Ernst Haefliger and Erik Werba were sensitive to this distinction forty years ago, and Robert Murray and Andrew West exhibit this to today’s listeners with sensitivity and sophistication. Played with virtuosity, sung with beauty and fearlessness, and interpreted with wit and discernment, this is a Die schöne Müllerin in which Müller’s words and Schubert’s music sound astonishingly new.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Die Entführung aus dem Serail, K. 384—Jane Archibald (Konstanze), Norman Reinhardt (Belmonte), Mischa Schelomianski (Osmin), David Portillo (Pedrillo), Rachele Gilmore (Blonde), Christoph Quest (Bassa Selim); Ensemble Aedes; Le Cercle de l’Harmonie; Jérémie Rhorer, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 21 September 2015; Alpha Classics 242; 2 CDs, 120:55; Available from NAXOS Direct (USA), Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

When spurred in 1781 by an irreconcilable row with his Salzburg-based employer to abandon the town of his birth and seek his fortune in the Hapsburg capital, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart found Vienna a city as much in the musical clutches of Italians as it had been when Antonio Vivaldi took his last breaths there forty years earlier. Muzio Clementi dominated Viennese keyboards, Antonio Salieri was director of the imperial Italian opera and would in seven years’ time become imperial Kapellmeister, and Metastasio remained the court’s favored librettist. Into this environment was infused the enlightening influence of Emperor Joseph II, who had been Holy Roman Emperor since the death of his father in 1765 but did not assume total control of the Hapsburg realms until the passing of his mother, Maria Theresa, in November 1780. Whilst still sharing the throne with his formidable Mutter, Joseph II initiated a groundbreaking, five-year project (1778 – 1783) intended to advance opera in German as a viable rival for the Italian opere serie that held sway in Viennese theatres. The phenomenal success of Joseph II's Nationalsingspiel initiative was the twenty-six-year-old Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, premièred in Vienna’s Burgtheater on 16 July 1782. The inaugural performances of Entführung having taken in more money than Mozart earned for a year’s toil at Salzburg’s archiepiscopal court, it might seem that composer’s financial security was serendipitously assured, but his windfall amounted to only slightly more than a third of the box office receipts for the opera’s first two performances. What Entführung established beyond dispute, however, was that Mozart was a composer whose musical brilliance and uncanny insights into the human condition were potent in any language.

It is sometimes erroneously suggested—or, more dangerously, assumed—that Die Entführung aus dem Serail was Mozart’s first foray into composing opera auf Deutsch, but his career prior to his relocation to Vienna included the composition of the 1768 Singspiel Bastien und Bastienne, extensive (and overtly operatic) incidental music for the drama Thamos, König in Ägypten, and Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe, a 1780 reworking of his 1775 opera La finta giardiniera with a German text. It was his presentation of the score of his unfinished 1779 Singspiel Zaide to Nationalsingspiel director Johann Gottlieb Stephanie der Jüngere that solidified the commission for Die Entführung aus dem Serail, but assertions that Zaide, which Mozart initially entitled Das Serail, was essentially a ‘trial run’ for Entführung are also inaccurate. [A forthcoming recording by Classical Opera and an excellent cast, scheduled for release by Signum Classics in September 2016, is certain to fully reveal Zaide's merits.] Mozart put Zaide aside in order to compose Idomeneo, which premièred in Munich on 29 January 1781, six months to the day before the young composer received the Entführung libretto—frequently dismissed by later observers and acknowledged by Mozart himself as one of the weakest that he set to music—from Stephanie. The text may have disappointed Mozart, but the colorful, by modern standards not-quite-tactful tale of rescued lovers and collisions between oriental and occidental cultures stimulated his imagination, motivating the composition of a score that continues to challenge performers and enchant audiences.

Conducted with seemingly inexhaustible verve by Jérémie Rhorer, whose pacing of this performance, recorded in performance in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in September 2015, places him in the company of Josef Krips, Karl Böhm, and Sir Colin Davis among conductors with natural affinities for handling this deceptively uncomplicated score, the musicians of period-instrument ensemble Le Cercle de l’Harmonie and singers of Ensemble Aedes maintain unparalleled presences in this performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, clanging and clamoring raucously but shortchanging none of the too-often-unheralded brilliance of Mozart’s music. Not surprisingly, the percussionists jingle and jangle merrily, taking advantage of every opportunity given to them by Mozart’s Turkish-inspired writing, but their enthusiasm never spills over into playing loudly merely for the sake of creating a good-natured din. There is a clear purpose to every drumbeat and tinkling of the triangle, purpose discerned from rather than in spite of Mozart’s instructions. Not least in the introduction to Konstanze’s aria ‘Martern aller Arten,’ the woodwind playing is extraordinary, the balances among instruments and unassailable intonation remarkable for a live performance. Rhorer’s tempi and Mozart’s robust orchestrations make daunting demands on the strings, and the Le Cercle de l’Harmonie players respond to every challenge with vigor and virtuosity. The choristers exude high spirits in their ideally-blended singing of the Janissaries’ choruses. Rhorer is an experienced Mozartean, but, intuitively serving his cast and the twenty-something composer, his is an effervescently youthful Entführung.

Presiding over his seraglio with fleet-tongued authority, Berlin-born thespian Christoph Quest’s Bassa Selim is a winsomely straightforward tyrant who is slow to anger but ferociously menacing when his pride is offended. Quest’s diction is appropriately patrician without being ridiculously stilted, and his avoidance of distorting syllables even when raging enables comprehension of every word of his part. When he realizes that the game is up and that he has been outwitted, Quest’s Selim is gracious in defeat—a trait from which scores of today’s authority figures from Addis Ababa to Zagreb could learn much. Many actors have made a star turn of Selim, but Quest creates a legitimate character who lurks in the shadows of the drama even when his voice is silent.

In the 234 years since the première of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, there cannot have been a more beautifully-sung and thoughtfully-acted Pedrillo than Texas-born tenor David Portillo. Delivering every line of his dialogue with sure timing, he makes Pedrillo a lovable figure before singing a note, but his greatest strengths are revealed when he joins Belmonte and Osmin in the Act One trio, ‘Marsch, marsch, marsch!’ Portillo is a born comedian whose musicality matches his skillful use of text, and in his Act Two aria ‘Frisch zum Kampfe!’ he is the rare Pedrillo not brought to grief by the top As and B. Pedrillo’s rollicking duet with Osmin, ‘Vivat, Bacchus,’ is one of the score’s highlights, and Portillo’s uninhibited, golden-toned singing makes this and the quartet with Konstanze, Belmonte, and Blonde, ‘Ach Belmonte! Ach mein Leben,’ exhibitions of gloriously-sustained bel canto. The young tenor voices the Act Three romance ‘In Mohrenland gefangen war ein Mädel hübsch und fein’ with feeling and superb phrasing, and his lines in the penultimate scene’s vaudeville, ‘Nie werd’ ich deine Huld verkennen,’ stand out. Already an artist of refinement, Portillo possesses a voice of superlative quality and the technical security to nurture it properly. As he sings Pedrillo here, it is an invaluable pleasure to hear a true tenore di grazia in a rôle in which grace is too often a pitifully scarce commodity.

Nearly as dulcetly charismatic as Portillo’s Pedrillo is the Blonde of American soprano Rachele Gilmore. Like her colleague and her character’s beloved, she faces every obstacle in her music unhesitatingly, plunging below the stave as intrepidly—though not always as effectively—as she vaults into the vocal stratosphere. In the latter realm are the zeniths of Blonde’s Act Two aria ‘Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln,’ in which Gilmore ascends to the trio of E₆s as though doing so were as easy as speaking. The fun-loving Blonde is at her minxish best in her duet with Osmin, ‘Ich gehe, doch rate ich dir,’ and Gilmore and her Osmin sing the number delightfully, relishing their characters’ barbed banter without turning their sparring into a yelling competition. The soprano’s sunny jaunt through the aria ‘Welche Wonne, welche Lust’ is as frothy as fresh meringue, and she sings pertly in the quartet and the vaudeville. In dialogue, Gilmore is often genuinely funny. Vocally, only a handful of slightly off-center notes betray nerves or technical pitfalls, but she is a hard-working, no-holds-barred Blonde who earns her laughs and ovations.

In recent years, Osmins have often been the weak links in performances of Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Calling for an extensive range, agility, and comedic abandon, the rôle is as difficult to cast as the more sober Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte. The part of Selim’s grumpy overseer does not sound like a wholly natural fit for Russian bass Mischa Schelomianski, but he conquers the music, singing rather than barking and proving all the more amusing for approaching the rôle with a measure of restraint. It is only just a measure, though, and he grumbles and gripes hilariously in the Act One Lied, ‘Wer ein Liebchen hat gefunden,’ and the subsequent duet with the inconveniently intruding Belmonte. The bass’s sturdy intonation and excellent breath control are decided assets in his singing of the aria ‘Solche hergelaufne Laffen.’ He hurls vitriol at Belmonte and Pedrillo with deadpan insouciance in ‘Marsch, marsch, marsch!’ In Act Two, Schelomianski is a suitable partner for Gilmore in the duet with Blonde, ‘Ich gehe, doch rate ich dir,’ and for Portillo in the scintillating ‘Vivat, Bacchus!’ Osmin’s Act Three aria ‘O! wie will ich triumphieren!’ is the pinnacle of the rôle and one of the finest comic arias for the bass voice in the repertory. Schelomianski reaches the aria’s D₂s without substantial effort (and also without sufficient volume), but his negotiations of the roulades, almost a parody of Händel’s writing for his bass villains, are imprecise. He bawls nastily in the vaudeville: the servant is not as dignified a loser as the master. Schelomianski does not rival Gottlob Frick and Kurt Moll as an exponent of Osmin’s music, but his is a satisfying performance that is anything but a weak link in this Entführing.

A rising star in the operatic firmament whose Houston Grand Opera portrayals of Cassio in Verdi’s Otello and Ferrando in Mozart’s Così fan tutte thrilled audiences, American tenor Norman Reinhardt is here a stylish, polished Belmonte whose earnestness is expressed in clear tones and long-breathed lines. Immediately establishing his character’s determination to find and free his adored Konstanze, Reinhardt sings his Act One aria ‘Hier soll ich dich denn sehen, Konstanze!’ resolutely, divulging no vulnerabilities in the music’s range or expansive lines. This Belmonte’s frustration boils in the duet with Osmin, but the brief recitative ‘Konstanze! dich wiederzusehen!’ and aria ‘O wie ängstlich, o wie feurig,’ strongly but sweetly sung, coruscate with anticipation and renewed purpose. Happily reunited with Pedrillo but further thwarted by the unrelentingly obstructive Osmin, Reinhardt’s Belmonte brings unflagging concentration to their trio, ‘Marsch, marsch, marsch!’ The Act Two aria ‘Wenn der Freude Tränen fließen’ receives from the tenor a performance of consummate stylishness, and his vocalism in the quartet is ardent and handsome. Reinhardt, who will sing the fearsomely difficult rôle of Rodrigo di Dhu in Rossini’s La donna del lago opposite Cecilia Bartoli’s Elena and Vivica Genaux’s Malcolm at the 2017 Salzburg Whitsun Festival, performs Belmonte’s frequently-omitted Act Three bravura aria ‘Ich baue ganz auf deine Stärke’ with gusto and confident command of the divisions. He unleashes a current of focused, flowing tone in the duet with Konstanze, ‘Welch ein Geschick!’ There are passages throughout the rôle, particularly in Act One, in which greater vocal heft would be welcome, but Reinhardt avoids forcing the voice in climaxes, wisely relying upon projection rather than volume to carry the sound over the orchestra. This is a Belmonte in the tradition of George Shirley and Stuart Burrows, and Reinhardt’s debonair singing whets the appetite for his future appearances on disc.

Not surprisingly for a rôle virtually composed to order for soprano Caterina Cavalieri, Salieri’s star pupil and one of the most admired singers in Vienna, and bearing the name of the woman who became his wife nineteen days after the première of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Mozart lavished an astounding array of musical riches on Konstanze. In Acts One and Two essentially a tragic heroine in the lineage of Händel’s Rodelinda, Hasse’s Ipermestra, and Jommelli’s Armida, Konstanze is transformed in Act Three into a rejuvenated young woman ready for romantic adventure. In this performance by Canadian soprano Jane Archibald, the transition is obvious, the glinting steel in the voice in the scenes before Konstanze’s reunion with Belmonte tempered by vocal velvet that her swain’s attention replenishes. In her Act One aria, ‘Ach, ich liebte, war so glücklich,’ Konstanze expresses herself in arching phrases that test but never defeat the singer’s breath control. Archibald launches the recitative ‘Welcher Wechsel herrscht in meiner Seele’ in Act Two with dramatic thrust that contrasts markedly with the time-suspending desolation that shapes her singing of the aria ‘Traurigkeit ward mir zum Lose.’ The timbres of Archibald’s and Gilmore’s voices are similar enough to make vocal colorations crucial as a means of discerning which lady is singing, and, though Archibald’s palette is limited in the extremities to which her music often takes her, she is attentive to adapting the silvery patina of her sound to the moods of the words. Many singers, including Maria Callas, have deemed ‘Martern aller Arten’ the most difficult aria ever composed for the soprano voice, and this assessment is not without justification. In this one aria, the soprano is asked to span the entire range required of the Kaiserin in all of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, extending to D₆, and to execute fiorature akin to those braved by the Königin der Nacht in Die Zauberflöte and Strauss’s Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos. There is far more to Konstanze than this aria, but it is often the gauge by which a Konstanze’s success is judged. By this criterion, Archibald’s performance is impeccable, her singing of ‘Martern aller Arten’ stunningly assured. Konstanze’s lines in the quartet are voiced with resilience, and Archibald partners Reinhardt and their colleagues hypnotically in the duet with Belmonte and the vaudeville in Act Three. Konstanze is a rôle that has unexpectedly fared quite well on disc. A wiry voice like that of Erika Köth tapped unanticipated reserves of solidity, and a radiantly beautiful voice like that of Arleen Augér produced power without being pushed. Archibald displays in this performance that she is eminently capable of singing both beautifully and boldly, and she is a satisfyingly complete Konstanze.

What makes this Alpha Classics recording of Die Entührung aus dem Serail such a special release is the uncommon distinction and consistency of its casting. As performances at the Metropolitan Opera in the 2015 – 2016 Season confirmed, Entführung is an opera with singular requirements that are not easily met even by very accomplished singers. Intelligently guided by Rhorer and bolstered by masterful orchestral playing and choral singing, this Die Entführung aus dem Serail takes flight on streams of Mozart singing of a caliber seldom heard since the storied days of Schwarzkopf, Streich, Wunderlich, and Haefliger.