FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Der Wanderer– Lieder—Roderick Williams, baritone; Iain Burnside, piano [Recorded in St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington, East Lothian, UK, 21 – 24 October 2015; Delphian Records DCD34170; 1 CD, 72:41; Available from Delphian Records (via downloadable catalogue), NAXOS Direct, Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Some time ago, a PBS interviewer asked singer-turned-actress Michelle Phillips during a live segment in a fundraising broadcast which attributes, in her opinion, distinguished 1960s pop sensation The Mamas and the Papas from other artists of their generation. Undaunted, Phillips replied with genuine candor, ‘We could sing.’ It seems laughably obvious that the success of a musical enterprise should depend upon the raw quality of its ‘product,’ but, in Classical Music as much as in any other genre, it is too often ignored that it is music, not hype, that burrows into a listener’s memory. In no repertory is this truer than in the Lieder of Franz Schubert, collectively as bounteous a trove of musical jewels as exists in Western music. Performers can barrage hearers with every sort of clever gimmick and well-meaning concept, but an insufficiently-planned, poorly-sung recital of Schubert Lieder is dead on arrival. Der Wanderer, this new Delphian Records disc of Schubert Lieder performed by baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Iain Burnside, perfectly illustrates this truth. No brash cover art distracts the eyes, no pseudo-academic revelations clutter the informative and thoroughly readable liner notes, no high-minded abstractions distort the songs’ contexts: the emphasis is wholly, solely, gloriously on the music. What characterizes Roderick Williams as one of today’s nulli secundus interpreters of Schubert Lieder? Simply put, he can sing, and, oh, how he sings on this disc!

Born in North London to a Welsh father and a Jamaican mother, Williams honed his craft at the Guildhall School of Music, where he made his operatic début as the sinister Tarquinius in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. From that auspicious start, his operatic career has blossomed to include repertory spanning virtually the entire history of the genre. As a concert singer and recitalist, Williams’s repertory, encompassing pieces and arrangements of his own composition, is no less expansive. Hilarious as Rossini’s Figaro and Belcore in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, suavely cosmopolitan as Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin, and moving as either Marcello or Schaunard in Puccini’s La bohème, he is a born creature of the stage, but the expertise that projects his histrionic acumen to the last row of an opera house is potently concentrated in the performance of Lieder. Whether singing to audiences of five thousand in Royal Albert Hall, five hundred in Wigmore Hall, or five gathered round a piano in some private space, his ability to establish an infrangible link with the empathy of every individual who hears him is wondrous.

Rare as Williams’s gifts are, it is all the more remarkable that he has found in Burnside a collaborator who shares and complements them. Celebrated as a BBC Radio 3 presenter in addition to his pianism, the Scotsman Burnside has been Williams’s companion on journeys through songs for baritone by Beethoven, Butterworth, Finzi, Ireland, Schönberg, Francis George Scott, and Hugh Wood. The partnership that they polished through those experiences suffuses their Schubert performances on this disc with prescience possible only after having meticulously studied music from both one’s own and one’s artistic partner’s perspectives. Hearing their interpretations of the Lieder on this disc, it is apparent that Williams and Burnside know one another’s music as comprehensively as their own, enabling an inviolable unity of purpose: when Williams and Burnside embark upon their trek through a Lied, they maneuver towards a common destination. Burnside’s technical prowess is never in doubt, but his is virtuosity as much of intuition as of dexterity.

Foremost in international esteem among the poets whose verses are heard in the Lieder on this disc is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a literary titan whose work has influenced and inspired composers uninterruptedly since the late Eighteenth Century. Especially in the last years of his life, the haughty Goethe was conspicuous in voicing his disapproval of musical settings of his texts. After two centuries, he would be wise to reconsider and thank Schubert and other composers for saving a number of his lesser-known works from oblivion in moldy, seldom-seen tomes. Were Goethe inclined to object to Schubert’s handling of his work in any of the four songs recorded here, hearing Williams’s and Burnside’s performances of them would surely soften his disapprobation. Composed in December 1822, ‘Willkommen und Abschied’ (D.767) is one of Schubert’s finest inspirations, and Williams sings it beautifully, his warm timbre providing the vowels with the lambency needed to disclose the subtle contrasts among the song’s moods. ‘Rastlose Liebe’ (D.138) is also performed by both Williams and Burnside with close attention to the nuances of the text, and their performance of ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’ (D.768) radiates affection for the music. ‘Der Musensohn’ (D.764) is another of Schubert’s most artfully-crafted and enjoyable Lieder, and Williams sings it here with wonderful spontaneity, both he and Burnside giving the impression of improvising the spirited Lied before the studio microphones.

Though now not enjoying as robust a reputation in literary circles as Goethe maintains, Friedrich von Schiller is familiar to opera lovers thanks to the frequency with which librettists and composers turned to his work for subjects suitable for the stage. In addition to Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, I masnadieri, Luisa Miller, and Don Carlo and Tchaikovsky’s Orleanskaja deva were all based upon texts by Schiller. Schubert’s ‘Der Pilgrim’ (D.794), dating from the time of his composition of Die schöne Müllerin, is a drama in miniature, its study of the disintegration of personal faith playing out on a scale at once intimate and universal. Williams enunciates the line ‘Nimmer, nimmer stand ich still’ with a touching sense of profound weariness overtaking the relentless pace of the poet’s descent into disillusionment. As in his singing of every Lied on this disc, however, it is the pure beauty of the voice that uplifts words and music.

The poets Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck, Johann Gabriel Seidl, Matthias Claudius, and Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg are virtually unknown to English-speaking readers in the Twenty-First Century, but their words fueled Schubert’s creation of sublime songs. Respectively utilizing texts by Lübeck and Seidl, ‘Der Wanderer’ (D.489) and ‘Der Wanderer an den Mond’ (D.870) tap very different veins of emotion despite their similar titles. To the former, Williams and Burnside bring a penetrating concentration that reveals layers of meaning neglected in many performances, prefacing the central section of the song with a pointed reading of the opening recitative that establishes the dramatic tone of the passage beginning with ‘Die Sonne dünkt mich hier so kalt.’ The performance of the folksong-like ‘Der Wanderer an den Mond’ on this disc is defined by the rapturous evocation of the major-key emergence of the moonlight, as ecstatically evocative here as Haydn’s depiction of first light in Die Schöpfung. In ‘An eine Quelle’ (D.530), Williams articulates Claudius’s text with his own kind of poetry, supported by Burnside’s equally poetic playing of Schubert’s coruscating music. Baritone and pianist give as appealing a performance of ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ (D.774), Schubert’s setting of words by zu Stolberg-Stolberg, as has ever been recorded: accentuating the contemplation of the passing of time, considered in a manner not unlike that of the Marschallin in Act One of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, the music’s mimicking of the water’s lapping at the narrator’s vessel here sounds astonishingly sensual.

If the name Johann Mayrhofer is little if any more familiar to modern eyes that those of other poets of his generation, it is significant in the annals of Schubert’s career as a composer of Lieder. Williams and Burnside begin their survey of a quintet of Schubert’s Mayrhofer settings with an unapologetically romantic reading of ‘Aus Heliopolis II’ (D.754). Noted Schubert interpreter Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau conjectured that the writer’s ‘An Franz’ dedication at the start of the poem, theorized by most scholars to refer to Franz von Schober, author of the libretto for Schubert’s opera Alfonso und Estrella, was actually meant for Schubert: as sung by Williams, the Lied makes a strong case for Schubert having merited the poet’s appreciation. Both ‘Am Strome’ (D.539) and ‘Auf der Donau’ (D.553) benefit from particularly fervent playing by Burnside, and Williams’s earnestly beautiful vocalism magnifies the many felicities of Mayrhofer’s words and Schubert’s music in ‘Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren’ (D.360). Supplementing the Mayrhofer Lied ‘Der Schiffer’ (D.536), sonorously done, is the like-titled ‘Der Schiffer’ (D.694), a setting of a different text penned by Friedrich von Schlegel. This, too, Williams and Burnside infuse with absolute sincerity, the singer’s voice interweaving with the tones produced by the pianist’s fingers to fabricate a beguiling musical tapestry.

At the center of Der Wanderer are the seven Rellstab-Lieder from the posthumously-issued Schwanengesang (D.957), the enigmatic collection of songs that Schubert may or may not have intended to be published and performed as a cycle in the fashion of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. Just as they form the centerpiece of this disc, these seven settings of texts by Lidwig Rellstab are also the nucleus of Schwanengesang. Burnside is alert to the large and small differences among the piano parts of the songs but also heightens appreciation of the links that unite them. In his hands, the Lieder possess the synergy of a grand concerto in which, in the context of this disc, Williams’s voice is the featured instrument. That instrument is on exquisite form in ‘Liebesbotschaft,’ caressing the composer’s melodic line with a lover’s tenderness. In the divergent strains of ‘Kriegers Ahnung,’ ‘Frühlingssehnsucht,’ and the sublime ‘Ständchen,’ Williams’s singing is unequivocally secure throughout the range of the music, extending from rounded, unforced tones below the stave to easy, ‘pinging’ top notes. Deftly met, too, are the demands of ‘Aufenthalt,’ ‘In der Ferne,’ and ‘Abschied.’ Not unexpectedly, Williams and Burnside impart more of the sentimental essence of Schwanengesang in their performances of the seven Rellstab-Lieder than many performances manage to do in traversals of all fourteen of the songs in the collection.

Both as an exploration of the theme implied by the disc’s title, Der Wanderer, and as a straightforward illustrative sampling of the composers singular mastery as a custodian of the Art of Song, this disc is as intelligently-conceived a recital of Schubert Lieder as has been recorded since the advent of digital technology. That alone makes Der Wanderer a desirable release, but it is the awe-inspiring display of musicianship that makes this disc unmissable. Der Wanderer also reaffirms that, whether employing vocal cords or piano keys, Roderick Williams and Iain Burnside can sing.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906 – 1975): Trio No. 1 in C minor for piano, violin, and cello, Op. 8; Trio No. 2 in E minor for piano, violin, and cello, Op. 67; Sonata in C major for viola and piano, Op. 147—Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay, violin (Opp. 8 and 67); Mats Lidström, cello (Opp. 8 and 67); Ada Meinich, viola (Op. 147) [Recorded in Potton Hall, Suffolk, UK, 17 – 20 September 2015; DECCA 478 9382; 1 CD, 71:47; Available from Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), iTunes, Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

As is stated in the introduction to the disc printed on the reverse inlay of this compelling DECCA recording of the composer’s C-minor and E-minor Piano Trios and late Viola Sonata, Nizhny Novgorod-born pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy is among the few musicians working today who knew Dmitri Shostakovich not as an encyclopedia entry or name printed on the covers of scores but as a living, breathing man and an active, experimenting artist. A child of the turmoil that gripped Russian during the first decades of the Twentieth Century, Shostakovich was an artist of contrasts, reflected in the strong thread of irony woven through his compositions. Though they experienced the bleak realities of life in the Soviet Union in different eras and from different perspectives, Ashkenazy possesses direct connections not only with Shostakovich but, perhaps equally importantly, with the cultural and political climates that shaped the composer’s endeavors, as well. The three works on this disc, centered in a slightly dry acoustic that facilitates clear representations of complex musical figurations, span virtually the entire chronology of Shostakovich’s career, but distinctions of ‘early,’ ‘middle,’ and ‘late’ are not easily—or helpfully—made. Rather, retracing the path of the composer’s stylistic evolution, the performances that Ashkenazy and his colleagues give on this disc reveal how consistent the quality of Shostakovich’s work remained throughout his life. Like Caruso’s recordings of verismo arias, Toscanini’s conducting of scores by Verdi and Puccini, and Rostropovich’s performances and recordings of music by Prokofiev, Ashkenazy’s performances of these pieces by Shostakovich document the fruits of an unique artistic relationship between composer and interpreter, here shared with new generations of both performers and listeners.

Originally christened as Poème, the single-movement Opus 8 Trio No. 1 in C minor for piano, violin, and cello was completed in 1923, whilst Shostakovich remained a student at Petrograd Conservatory, and is essentially a declaration of love masquerading as a novice’s exercise. Though conceived in a sole movement, the music undergoes many transformations as the Trio progresses, and each metamorphosis is wrought by these musicians with musical and dramatic sensitivity. Expertly led by Ashkenazky, German-Hungarian violinist Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay, concertmaster of the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Swedish cellist Mats Lidström follow every turn in the music, their playing exhibiting all of the benefits of thorough preparation and familiarity with the music without any of the shortcomings. Spontaneity bursts from their performance of the Trio, and their approach to the piece, though wholly professional, seeks neither to disguise nor to apologize for the work’s youthful foibles. For a virtually innumerable plethora of reasons, many composers destroy or suppress their early works, so it is especially fortuitous that Shostakovich permitted this souvenir of his adolescence to survive. As played by Ashkenazy, Visontay, and Lidström, the Trio is an attractive introduction to Shostakovich’s chamber music and an enjoyable piece in its own right.

Written and premièred in 1944, the Opus 67 Trio No. 2 in E minor for piano, violin, and cello resounds with the discordant, disjointed tumult of World War II. This score, still startling after more than seventy years, shows Shostakovich at the zenith of his powers as a creator of distinctive musical textures, a peak that he occupied from this juncture until the end of his life, even when plagued by the ill health that ravaged his final decade. From the first bars of the tormented, unnervingly dissonant Andante, Ashkenazy and Visontay execute their parts with seemingly indefatigable concentration, and Lidström copes splendidly with his part’s toilsome harmonics. The three musicians collectively and individually brave the demands of the hellish dance that shapes the Allegro con brio movement, and the unexaggerated emotional directness with which they play the Largo movement heightens the sensations of the sickening loss and desolation of war that haunt the music. Shostakovich dedicated the Trio to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky, Artistic Director of the Leningrad Philharmonic and one of Soviet-era Russia’s foremost intellects, whose untimely death at the age of forty-one devastated the composer. In his capacity at the helm of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Sollertinsky tirelessly espoused the music of Gustav Mahler, earning him the appreciation of the Bohemian composer’s widow Alma, and it may have been this exposure to Mahler’s symphonies that prompted Shostakovich to construct the Trio’s closing Allegretto movement upon the foundation of a frenetic Klezmer tune, a Totentanz that recurs in Shostakovich’s 1960 String Quartet No. 8 (Opus 110). The emotional impact of the Allegretto is overwhelming, but Ashkenazy, Visontay, and Lidström remain clear-headed in their traversal of the music. The tragedy perceived by the listener is all the more heartbreaking for being presented by the musicians with no agenda other playing the score as the composer intended it to be played.

Completed in July 1975, mere days before the composer’s death on 9 August 1975, the Opus 147 Sonata for viola and piano was premiered by Fyodor Druzhinin, violist of the Beethoven Quartet and the piece’s dedicatee, and pianist Mikhail Muntyan in October 1975. After four decades, the espousal of virtually every subsequent virtuoso violist has solidified the Viola Sonata’s standings as both one of the most popular works in the viola recital repertory and one of Shostakovich’s most admired works. Like many artists’ last endeavors, the Viola Sonata has been frequently scrutinized for manifestations of its composer’s recognition and acceptance of approaching death, but Shostakovich’s music is, as ever, pragmatic rather than overtly programmatic, his allusion to the memory of a celebrated predecessor assumed to be Beethoven perhaps providing a tacit acknowledgement of his keen awareness of his own mortality. Here partnering Norwegian violist Ada Meinich, Ashkenazy plays as attentively in the Sonata as in the Trios. Meinich conquers the difficult pizzicato writing in the opening Moderato movement, and she and Ashkenazy achieve dizzying heights of expressivity in the movement’s crushing development section. This engrossing zeal persists into the Allegretto movement, into which Shostakovich injected thematic material from his 1942 opera The Gambler. Meinich’s technique makes easy going of the music’s most daunting passages, and she and Ashkenazy accentuate the melodic fragments that the composer assembled in ways that often surprise. The closing Adagio movement quotes from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in homage to the great composer, but the voice that emerges is unquestionably Shostakovich’s. Ashkenazy and Meinich convincingly propose their own answers to the Sonata’s questions, but this work also poses queries that each individual listener must consider, here asked with surpassing beauty.

Having recently celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday, Vladimir Ashkenazy has reached the disheartening time in his career at which the numbers of the fellow artists with whom he has worked and from whom he has learned continually grow fewer. Rather than resting on his laurels, as he has every right to do, Ashkenazy continues to explore new repertory, revisit works upon which his reputation was built, and expand his legacy with new recordings and collaborations. This new DECCA recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trios and Viola Sonata allies the esteemed pianist with three accomplished colleagues in performances of music that surely holds special significance for him. These performances are sure to hold special significance for listeners fortunate enough to hear this disc.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827): Missa solemnis in D major, Opus 123—Laura Aikin, soprano; Bernarda Fink, alto; Johannes Chum, tenor; Ruben Drole, bass; Arnold Schoenberg Chor; Concentus Musicus Wien; Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during performances in Stephaniensaal, Graz, Austria, in conjunction with the styriarte Festival, 3 – 5 July 2015; Sony Classical 88985313592; 1 CD, 81:34; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In an era in which humanity hides behind handles and ideas are expressed with hashtags, the intrinsic, enduring value of Art and the sacrifices that artists make in furthering it can seem dangerously undermined, even futile. The technological distractions of the Twenty-First Century were not so much as envisioned when Emily Dickinson wrote that ‘The Soul should always stand ajar / That if the Heaven inquire / He will not be obliged to wait / Or shy of troubling Her.’ Regarded as awkwardly introverted and misanthropic during her fifty-five years on earth, Dickinson’s long-suppressed and misguidedly-edited poetry have with every new technological advance revealed her to have been a stunningly intuitive prophetess of the modern age. In a musical career spanning more than six decades, Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt demonstrated the prudence of Dickinson’s words. Throughout his career, in approaching the music of Ludwig van Beethoven Harnoncourt endeavored always both to open his own soul and to inspire the musicians with whom he worked to open their souls not only to the music itself but also to understanding its context and unexplored ways of performing it. Recorded during performances at the 2015 styriarte Festival that constituted Harnoncourt’s final appearance at the festival founded in 1985 to capitalize on the bond linking the conductor and his home city, this performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is the culmination of nearly three decades of experience and a lifetime of intensive study and preparation. Remarkably, though, this performance sounds not studied but eruditely extemporaneous.

Harnoncourt first conducted Beethoven’s colossal Missa solemnis in 1988, and he returned to the score infrequently but always with renewed dedication in the subsequent twenty-eight years of his life. The 2015 interview reprinted in the liner notes that accompany this Sony Classical recording highlights the very personal nature of Harnoncourt’s interaction with the score. There were instances in the conductor’s career in which his unique modus operandi yielded pedantry that deprived his performances of some pieces of qualities vital to their composers’ intentions. In the specific realm of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, however, Harnoncourt was mindful of the fact that every aspect of a performance of the work cannot be controlled by a conductor, no matter how complete his mastery of the score. In this performance, Harnoncourt’s scrutiny of every tempo [as author Monika Mertl asserts in her liner notes for this recording, Beethoven requested as many different tempi in the eighty or so minutes of his Missa solemnis as Mozart included in the 180 minutes of any of his da Ponte operas], dynamic marking, and detail of orchestration produces a reading that surprises, enlightens, and moves, every eccentricity—and, in comparison with other recorded performances, there are undeniable eccentricities—drawing the listener nearer to Beethoven; nearer, perhaps, than any human ears have been since the composer’s death in 1827.

Presiding over his Concentus Musicus Wien, the ensemble that he and his wife Alice founded in 1953, and the fifty-six voices of the Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Harnoncourt conducts a Missa solemnis notable not just for novelty but also for an abiding sense of emotional honesty that many performances of the score lack. Rarely on commercial recordings has the work’s significance as a musical point of intersection been more apparent. In the anguished cries for mercy in the opening Kyrie eleison, the churning first pages of Bach’s Matthäus-Passion echo through Beethoven’s music, and the monumental exultations of Händel’s Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus peal in the fugues of the Gloria and Credo. Mozart’s Große-Messe and Haydn’s Paukenmesse are present in Beethoven’s Sanctus and Agnus Dei, but so, too, are Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem, the Masses of Anton Bruckner, Act Three of Wagner’s Parsifal, Elgar’s The Kingdom, Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, and Britten’s War Requiem. Harnoncourt’s tempi, uniformly expansive [this performance runs for 81:34: representative performances conducted by the reliably unhurried Otto Klemperer (1965 EMI/Angel studio recording) and the mercurial Bruno Walter (1948 Carnegie Hall performance) have respective durations of 79:31 and 77:11], enable the musicians to neglect nothing and the listener to hear details of scoring obscured in almost all other recorded performances. In particular, the inventiveness and incredible difficulty of Beethoven’s writing for winds is poignantly revealed, and the expressive goals of the punishing, sometimes virtually instrumental use—abuse, some choristers might contend—of the chorus are stirringly realized.

As shepherded by Harnoncourt in this performance, the awestruck, almost hesitant supplication of the Kyrie gives way to the guarded but resilient optimism of the Gloria. In his shaping of the Credo, Harnoncourt builds momentum in what is often the least-interesting portion of the Missa, the fleeting, a cappella‘Et resurrexit’ emerging as bizarrely cathartic. Espousing the theory that the omission of an indication that the chorus should join in the fugue on ‘Pleni sunt coeli’ in the Sanctus was intentional, Harnoncourt here entrusts the passage to the soloists, who deliver it convincingly. Presumably played by Concentus Musicus Wien’s leader Erich Höbarth [this is not specified in the liner notes], the violin solo that meanders through the Benedictus and its exquisite Præludium at first seems disappointingly anemic, but it rapidly becomes clear that this is a well-considered component of Harnoncourt’s interpretation: in this mystical, mysterious Missa, the redeeming Holy Spirit is an elusive entity, an absolving force that must be sought, not merely invoked. The observance of Providential clemency in the Agnus Dei is here mournful, even remorseful, rather than celebratory, prefacing a Dona nobis pacem in which the longing for peace is shaped by weariness and desolation. Throughout the music’s dramatic shifts of mood, both the orchestra and the chorus rise fervently and with unflappable musicality to every climax. More than almost any other performance in the work’s discography, though, this is a Missa solemnis of introspection and contrition. The grandiose moments excite, but the moments of quiet contemplation transfix.

Harnoncourt was tremendously fortunate in Graz to have in American soprano Laura Aikin, Argentine mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink, Austrian tenor Johannes Chum, and Swiss-born bass-baritone Ruben Drole a quartet of soloists both willing to come to Missa solemnis with open minds and capable of fulfilling his and Beethoven’s demands. Chum launches the Kyrie handsomely, his slender tones projected with thrust sufficient to remain audible above the swells of orchestral sound. His phrasing is unfailingly elegant, and the suggestion of vulnerability in the voice makes his singing in the Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and Dona nobis pacem touchingly effective. Fink sings the alto lines superbly, her voice on wonderful form and her trademark nobility of utterance audible in every note that she sings. Aikin’s performance of the soprano part is so confident as to almost sound effortless, but this is not music that is conquered without toil. Nonetheless, Aikin possesses every necessary quality, providing a beacon of properly-weighted tone and perfect intonation for her colleagues in contrapuntal passages and rising without strain to a radiant top C in the Benedictus. In the exposed opening bars of the Agnus Dei, Drole’s lack of resonance in the bottom octave of the voice is more detrimental than elsewhere in the Missa, but he is an imaginative singer who draws strength from Harnoncourt’s vision of the mass’s final minutes as a desperate plea for concord rather than a jubilant paean to peace attained. It is with no malice towards singers, who are only human, after all, that it must be admitted that soloists are the principal drawbacks in many performances and recordings of Missa solemnis. Though only Aikin and Fink are genuinely outstanding individually, Harnoncourt’s styriarte soloists are an uncommonly successful consort whose singing impresses and gladdens in equal measures.

Few works in the choral repertory ask as much of performers and listeners as Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. Like the skeptical Verdi and the agnostic Brahms, Beethoven engaged in a complicated, sometimes clumsy dance with faith, the steps of which he never fully perfected. Like Mozart, though, the unconventionality of his musical efforts in liturgical forms offer irrefutable evidence of utter sincerity. In the case of his Missa solemnis, the specific tenets of what Beethoven believed are not as important as the manner in which he internalized those beliefs; the ways, that is, in which his personal faith bridged the divide between divinity and humanity. In all niches of his broad repertory, Harnoncourt’s performances were rarely without idiosyncrasies. His conducting of Verdi’s Aida was downright strange, for instance, the undeniably fascinating final recorded product sounding more like ambitious Grétry than red-blooded, Italianate Verdi Grand Opera. That the lifeblood of the performance of Missa solemnis on this disc emphatically does not flow from the familiar ‘echt-Beethoven’ vein tapped by Bernstein, Böhm, and Karajan does not diminish the potency of its plasma. There is no shortage of ‘different’ readings of Missa solemnis, but the vast majority of these fail to meaningfully deepen the listener’s comprehension of this magnificent work. Nikolaus Harnoncourt was a musician of strong convictions, and this Missa solemnis, billowing with meaning, is an affecting validation of his Job-like artistic ideology: to question is to discover, and to discover is to empower even the least-perceptive listener to commune with genius.

MIECZYSŁAW WEINBERG (1919 – 1996): Solo Sonatas for Violin Nos. 1 – 3 and DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906 - 1975): Three Fantastic Dances [transcribed for violin and piano by Harry Glickman]—Linus Roth, violin; José Gallardo, piano (Shostakovich) [Recorded in Jesus-Christus Kirche, Berlin-Dahlem, Germany (Weinberg), and Motormusic Studios, Mechelen, Belgium (Shostakovich), 29 April – 2 May 2015; Challenge Classics CC72688; 1 SACD, 74:22; Available from Challenge Records, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It is unlikely that any other events—or, more properly, series of events—in human history affected Art as cataclysmically or as enduringly as the Second World War and the Holocaust perpetrated upon the people of Europe during the 1940s. Solely in music, the fiscal and cultural values of the manuscripts, archival materials, instruments, and properties claimed by the war’s destruction cannot be quantified; nor can the enormity of the impact of that destruction on global creativity, an effect that still persists despite the rapid pace at which the ranks of WWII veterans and survivors are dwindling, be overstated. It is impossible to know what Mozarts and Chopins, Verdis and Mahlers, Brittens and Coplands rest beneath the soils and waters of Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, cut down by the artless monstrosity of inhumanity. Tragically, the disgustingly efficient killing machine of the Third Reich crushed within its cogs every member of the immediate family of Warsaw-born composer Mieczysław Weinberg, his parents and sister slaughtered at Trawniki after his flight to the Soviet Union. The anguish that he undoubtedly experienced in resolving to flee the land of his birth in 1939, without his family and mere weeks after graduating from conservatory, cannot have been far from his thoughts throughout his life. It is surprising to a degree that an artist’s soul could endure such damning realities, but Weinberg was part of the rightly-named ‘greatest generation,’ a global community of people who felt no less deeply than their counterparts at any time in human history but for whom survival was not a goal but a necessity. Weinberg’s quest for survival was a journey in music, and with this Challenge Classics recording of three of the composer’s most daring works violinist Linus Roth poignantly retraces an expanse of the artistic route that Weinberg followed from peril to peace.

It was to his friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich, cultivated during his wartime residency in modern Uzbekistan, that Weinberg owed much of the stability that freed him to respond to artistic stimuli, but it was by Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 rather than by Shostakovich’s influence that his life was spared and his official ‘rehabilitation’ secured. Nevertheless, his interaction with Shostakovich was a defining element of Weinberg’s career. Written in 1922, when the Saint Petersburg-born composer was a student toying with forms and modes of musical expression, Shostakovich’s Three Fantastic Dances, played by Roth and Argentine pianist José Gallardo in the arrangement for violin and piano by Harry Glickman, are precisely what they purport to be— fantastic, vibrantly youthful pieces, employed on this disc as delicious digestifs amidst the heavier fare of Weinberg’s Solo Sonatas. The dances are not insubstantial footnotes to the chronology of Shostakovich’s compositional career, however. The playful atmosphere of the first of the two Allegretto dances is immediately established by Gallardo, who is as ideal a partner for Roth here as in their Challenge Classics recordings of Weinberg’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano. The recorded balance and timbral harmony between the piano and the 1703 ‘Dancla’ Stradivarius violin played by Roth are optimal in each of the three dances. In the second of the dances, Roth and Gallardo pace Shostakovich’s Andantino perfectly, their playing extracting every nuance from the deceptively one-dimensional music. The intuitive energy with which violinist and pianist perform the second Allegretto lends the Three Fantastic Dances a measure of the symmetry of a Baroque concerto. This is some of Shostakovich’s most approachable music, but approachability should not suggest simplicity. There are greater depths of emotion in the Three Fantastic Dances than many musicians bother to seek, and Roth and Gallardo probe deeply into these fetching pieces.

The first of Weinberg’s Solo Violin Sonatas, his Opus 82, was composed in 1964, its genesis falling in the prolific period that also witnessed the completions of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies and the Tenth String Quartet. Though generally not overtly programmatic in the manner of the music of a composer like Berlioz, Weinberg’s works frequently had as catalysts for their creation events of wide-ranging importance in his life. It is easy to ascribe to music for a single instrument characteristics of introversion and self-scrutiny, and it is impossible to overlook in the context of Weinberg’s Solo Sonatas the isolation that the composer must have felt in his adopted country, even with a wife and family and friends like Shostakovich. This numbing solitude, almost a self-imposed emotional exile, resonates in the first Sonata’s opening Adagio - Allegro - Adagio segment. There are never lacks of drama and drive in Roth’s playing, but from the start of each Sonata he is sensitive to the threads of lyricism woven into the scores. The subtle enchantment of the Andante movement flows mesmerizingly from Roth’s bow, and he excels in his handling of the rhythmic figurations of the Allegretto that follows. The contrasts of the Lento and closing Presto - Adagio sections are revealed not merely by clear differentiations of the tempi but also, more tellingly, by plying the innate power of the music’s light and shadows. It is virtually impossible to believe that the first of Weinberg’s Solo Sonatas is a product of the year in which popular music was dominated by the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ the Animals’ ‘The House of the Rising Sun,’ and Manfred Mann’s ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy,’ but Roth’s playing of each of the Sonatas is attentive to the music’s topical implications both within and beyond Weinberg’s oeuvre.

Three years after the completion of the first Solo Sonata, Weinberg returned to the format in his Solo Violin Sonata No. 2 (Opus 95). The complexities of the first Sonata are intensified in the second, and Roth’s virtuosity is redoubled in his playing of it. The Monody that opens the Sonata receives from the violinist a display of extraordinary musicality, his gift for isolating moments of lyrical beauty amongst even the most strident sounds communicating the unexpected melodic intricacies of Weinberg’s music. The passions of the Andantino grazioso are fully explored without being exaggerated, and Roth’s playing of the Presto agitato combines youthful vitality with interpretive maturity. As in his performances of the inner movements of the first Sonata, the Andantino non tanto and Allegretto leggiero in the second Sonata are shaped by awareness of the temperamental atmospheres in addition to their tempi. The delicacy that Roth’s playing of the Lento affetuoso exudes gives way to the frantic, almost violent frisson of the Vivace marcato. There are many violinists whose techniques enable them to survive the demands of Weinberg’s second Solo Sonata, but this is music that must be understood, not merely controlled. The finest aspect of his performance of the Sonata on this disc is its prodigious aural evidence that Roth has not only acquired an unique comprehension of this score but has also developed true affection for it.

The through-composed Solo Violin Sonata No. 3 (Opus 126) followed its older siblings into the world a dozen years after the completion of Sonata No. 2, and its unwieldy proportions, dementedly difficult writing, and bleak but chameleonic sound world make the third Sonata one of the most forbidding of Weinberg’s works and a piece that is virtually sui generis in the violin repertory. The expressive potency of his performance of the third Sonata reiterates that Roth is likewise a singular talent. Here, he makes sense of the volatility of the music’s abrupt changes of spirit, delving beneath the surface of the Sonata to uncover the spellbinding narrative that Weinberg hid in plain sight among the explosions of notes. As recounted by Roth, the Sonata’s tale has discernible protagonists and antagonists whose destinies are decided by the battles between melody and harmony. The misery and desolation of Weinberg’s youth formed the foundation upon which the Sonata was built, but Roth’s performance discloses the hope and humanity that give the music meaning just as they led Weinberg to a new life.

For both violinists and listeners, even those with special appreciation for Twentieth-Century music, Mieczysław Weinberg’s Sonatas for solo violin are not easy going. This is music in which unspeakable atrocities are confronted unflinchingly, music in which one man sought answers to questions that ravage all of mankind. Perhaps these are questions with which each man must contend on his own, but few men can contend with Weinberg’s music as authoritatively as Linus Roth does in his performances of the three Sonatas for solo violin. This is not solely music making: what Roth achieves on this disc is the recreation of a solitary voice, now made intelligible to every pair of ears willing to listen.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Aida—Kristin Lewis (Aida), Andrea Bocelli (Radamès), Veronica Simeoni (Amneris), Ambrogio Maestri (Amonasro), Carlo Colombara (Ramfis), Giorgio Giuseppini (Il re d’Egitto), Maria Katzarava (Una sacerdotessa), Juan José de León (Un messaggero); Coro ed Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino; Zubin Mehta, conductor [Recorded at the Opera di Firenze, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Florence, Italy, 11 – 15 April 2015; DECCA 483 0075; 2 CDs, 145:54 Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, fnac (France), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

When delays spawned by the ill-timed start of the Franco-Prussian War were circumvented and Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida finally received its première at Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House on 24 December 1871, it was apparent that Italy had at last produced a grand opera to challenge the epic-scaled French scores of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromenthal Halévy. Combining extraordinarily demanding rôles for each of the common Fächer and tremendous choral tableaux with episodic dances and grandiose scenic effects, Aida gave the Italian repertory a wholly worthy companion to Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Robert le diable and Halévy’s La Juive. Aida is indisputably grand opera at its grandest, but it is also representative of Verdi at his most Verdian: amidst the opera’s spectacular tumult, emerging from the reeds along the banks of the Nile and the spoils of conquest there is the acute intimacy of human relationships. Though Aida is, like Les Huguenots, populated by exalted personages, the interactions among Aida, Amneris, Radamès, and Amonasro are the tribulations of ordinary people in extremis, not merely political collisions among states. Not even the greatest artist can fully transform Meyerbeer’s Marguerite de Valois from an archetype into a woman like any other, but the soprano who heeds the dictates of Verdi’s score can hardly fail to sense and project the humanity that makes Aida one of opera’s most persuasive protagonists. There is no question that this new DECCA Aida owes its existence to its Radamès, but the recording, benefiting from Maggio Musicale Fiorentino’s decades-long familiarity with the music of Verdi, offers a genuine ensemble in the principal rôles, making this an Aida not of impersonal exclamations but of earnest conversations. Especially with today’s paucity of Verdi voices, a perfect Aida is as elusive as an ideal Così fan tutte or Parsifal, but even this Aida’s imperfections often make valid points about the music and the characters who sing it.

As suggested, the playing and singing of the Coro ed Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino are the solid foundations upon which this Aida rises. The choristers’ singing is unfailingly energetic, too much so in a few passages of ragged ensemble, and mostly effective regardless of occasionally sounding artificially recessed. Problems of balance often intrude into the sonic landscapes of this recording, with singers often sounding as though they were recorded in separate acoustics. In the trio for Aida, Amneris, and Radamès in Act One, for instance, each voice seems to occupy a different sonic space, lessening the impact of this first confrontation between the two women whose actions instigate the opera’s tragedy. Still, the choral singers acquit themselves admirably, and their work is supplemented by the orchestra’s vibrant playing. Here, too, there are sporadic misadventures, accentuated by the recorded ambiance. In particular, there are strange sounds from the percussion, one of the most perplexing of which is an unnecessarily cacophonous clang at the end of the Act Four scene for Amneris and Radamès. The oboe and clarinet phrases in ‘O patria mia’ are lovingly rendered, and the wind playing is exemplary throughout the performance. The strings are thoroughly professional without being uniformly exceptional, their parts executed with easy proficiency that does not preclude a few instances of thinness on high, likely exacerbated by the recording. The choristers’ and instrumentalists’ efforts are marginally undermined, but the advantages of their acquaintance with Verdi’s music is never impeded.

Mumbai-born maestro Zubin Mehta’s history with Verdi’s Aida is as extensive as any relationship between conductor and score in opera today. It was on the podium for a 1965 performance of Aida featuring Gabriella Tucci, Franco Corelli, Rita Gorr, and Anselmo Colzani that Mehta débuted at the Metropolitan Opera, and his MET Aidas in the seven subsequent performances in the 1965 – 1966 Season over which he presided were Martina Arroyo and Leontyne Price. ​Mehta’s first studio recording of Aida, a product of the mid-1960s, had among its cast Birgit Nilsson as Aida and Corelli as Radamès. Perhaps the presence of these vocal titans accounts for some of the marked differences between that Aida and this DECCA recording. The bristling dramatic thrust of the earlier recording, lifting the performance out of the studio despite singing from Nilsson that is never entirely idiomatic, is notably missing from this new recording. Mehta’s tempi are not exclusively slow, but many pages of the score here sound lethargic. Whether a conductor has at his disposal singers like Giulietta Simionato and Mario del Monaco or more earthbound vocalists, when a scene like that for Amneris and Radamès in Act Four—one of the most thrilling, tautly-constructed scenes in opera—fails to take flight something is wrong. Mehta’s instincts in general and in this performance are too musical to permit absolute failure, but there are enough shortcomings here to question the preparation that preceded the making of this recording. Comparing this Aida to Mehta’s HMV studio recording and broadcasts of other performances of the opera that he has conducted, it is difficult to believe that, as is stated in the liner notes, all of the musical forces were assembled in Florence under the conductor’s supervision for five days in April 2015. With a conductor of Mehta’s proven faculties in Verdi repertory at the helm, how can such a lifeless Aida have issued from circumstances conducive—if they were as they are asserted to have been—to fast-paced musical momentum?

Aside from its American Aida, only the Messaggero and Sacerdotessa in this Aida are not native-born Italians, yet theirs is some of the best singing heard on these discs. Texas native tenor Juan José de León brings bright, focused tone to the Messaggero’s fateful news of the Ethiopians’ advance towards Egyptian territory. Bel canto repertory is his usual habitat, but the verbal acuity that serves him so well in Donizetti rôles is no less valuable in Verdi’s music. Mexican-born soprano Maria Katzarava, the unforgettable Leonore in Opera Carolina’s 2015 production of Beethoven’s Fidelio [reviewed here], voices the Sacerdotessa’s exotically melodic ‘Possente, possente Fthà’ marvelously, the garnet timbre of her voice and her unaffected diction striking precisely the right chord of reverent mystery. Her muted repetition of ‘Immenso, immenso Fthà’ in the opera’s final scene is equally ethereal. How many singers who have recorded the priestess’s music can assuredly be said to equal Katzarava as a Sacerdotessa eminently qualified to sing Aida?

So prevalent has dry, wobbly singing of Aida’s bass rôles become that it might be supposed that Verdi’s score explicitly requests desiccated, unsteady vocalism. This Aida reaps the rewards of the participation of two basses who defy the trend by singing strongly and solidly. It was during an ill-fated 2010 performance of Don Carlos that Giorgio Giuseppini débuted at the Metropolitan Opera as another of Verdi’s troubled kings, Filippo II, substituting for an indisposed Ferruccio Furlanetto. A well-travelled Ramfis, Giuseppini sings il re d’Egitto in this performance, making his best stab at igniting a dramatic conflagration with a flinty account of ‘Su! del Nilo al sacro lido.’ Giuseppini’s vocalism is not opulent like Italo Tajo’s and Plinio Clabassi’s, but it is fantastic to encounter a Pharaoh who does not sound as old and weather-worn as the pyramids at Giza. Carlo Colombara is a veteran Ramfis whose experience lends his portrayal of the implacable character a slashing histrionic edge. Beginning with his firm articulation of ‘Sì: corre voce che l’Etiope ardisca’ in the opera’s first scene, Colombara establishes Ramfis’s significance in the drama. He declaims ‘Gloria ai Numi! Ognun rammenti ch’essi reggono gli eventi’ with authority, and his singing of ‘Ascolta, o Re: tu pure, giovine eroe, saggio consiglio, ascolta’ exudes ruthlessness. In both the scene with Amneris at the start of Act Three and the Judgment Scene in Act Four, Colombara’s Ramfis is a towering presence, a man who delights in his ability to subjugate even the mightiest in his society with his dispensation of unanswerable moral superiority. Colombara’s performance is not subtle, but neither is the character he depicts. Like Giuseppini, he impresses as much with what his singing lacks as with what it possesses.

Aida’s father Amonasro is one of the most difficult of Verdi’s baritone rôles. Lacking the opportunities for character development through vocal display that Verdi granted most of his baritone leads, an Amonasro must toil diligently within the relatively brief span of his part to expose the psychological depth with which the composer and his librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, infused the captive Ethiopian king. Much is revealed about Amonasro by his first utterance in the opera, ‘Non mi tradir!’: reunited with his daughter after a separation of unknown duration, his first words to her are not a tender paternal greeting but an exhortation to maintain the secrecy of his true rank. In this Aida, baritone Ambrogio Maestri is a scrupulously musical Amonasro who works hard to eschew the unseemly barking and bellowing that are too often substituted for singing the part. Best known outside of his native Italy for comic rôles, Maestri also has extensive credentials in dramatic parts. In this performance, he follows an impactful statement of his opening ‘Non mi tradir!’ with a reading of ‘Suo padre... Anch’io pugnai... Vinti noi fummo e morte invan cercai’ that radiates thwarted sovereignty. In the pivotal Act Three scene with his daughter, a gentler facet of Maestri’s Amonasro is manifested in his voicing of ‘A te grave cagione mi adduce, Aida,’ but the stony-hearted monarch returns in ‘Non fia che tardi — in armi ora si desta il popol nostro — tutto pronto è già.’ Verdi’s directive con impeto selvaggio in the passage beginning with ‘Su, dunque! sorgete Egizie coorti, col fuoco struggete le nostre città’ is meticulously observed, and the vengeful glee of Amonasro’s interjection of ‘Di Nápata le gole! Ivi saranno i miei...’ after Aida cajoles the unwitting Radamès into betraying the Egyptians’ battle plan explodes from the baritone’s throat. Maestri consistently sings well, his command of the music’s tessitura exposing no deficiencies in the voice’s support. The baritone’s Amonasro ultimately is not as imposing as Warren’s, as frightening as Gobbi’s, or as inherently noble as Taddei’s, but his performance is assertive, bold, and legitimately Italianate. Most importantly, Maestri is the rare Amonasro who sings as well as he snarls—better, in fact.

If Amonasro’s music frequently induces muscular shouting, Verdi’s music for the Egyptian warrior Radamès no less frequently receives from tenors one-dimensional wailing and whining. Though he studied with Corelli, one of the Twentieth Century’s most celebrated exponents of Radamès, the rôle is not a natural fit for Andrea Bocelli’s lyric instrument, but many tenors with vocal endowments more modest than the part’s spinto requirements have successfully sung Radamès. From the start of his stentorian recitative ‘Se quel guerriero io fossi! se il mio sogno si avverasse!’ in Act One, Bocelli’s crystalline Italian diction is splendid, and he is punctilious in refraining from forcing his voice in the famous aria ‘Celeste Aida.’ Following Corelli’s lead, he executes the arduous diminuendo on the aria’s climactic top B♭, likely profiting from discreet electronic assistance. In the aria and the scene with Amneris and Aida that follows, his voice rings out heroically, the close recording of periodically highlighting slight breathiness. In the grand public scenes in Acts One and Two, Bocelli sings Radamès’s lines in ensembles robustly. In his entrance in the passionate duet with Aida in Act Three, the tenor voices ‘Pur ti riveggo, mia dolce Aida’ with roiling ardor, and he phrases ‘Sovra una terra estrania teco fuggir dovrei!’ amorously. Like most tenors, Bocelli clearly relishes the exposed top As on ‘Sacerdote, io resto a te’ at the act’s end, hurling the notes out with abandon. In the incredible scene with Amneris in Act Four, Bocelli sings ‘Di mie discolpe i giudici mai non udran l’accento’ perceptively, his Radamès’s defiance of the arrogant princess stinging but not devoid of compassion. Facing his condemnation with resolve, this Radamès articulates ‘La fatal pietra sovra me si chiuse... Ecco la tomba mia’ with a stirring blend of courage and sorrow. His agitation as he realizes that Aida has concealed herself in the tomb with him is indicative of the enormity of his affection for her, and Bocelli and his Aida sing ‘O terra, addio; addio valle di pianti’ not as an elegy but as a paean to their liberating love. That Bocelli is a Radamès who would be overwhelmed by attempting to project the music into the vast spaces of the Arena di Verona, the Metropolitan Opera, or Teatro alla Scala is undeniable, but the seating capacity of the Khedivial Opera House in which Aida was first performed was approximately 850. In that setting, singing as he sings on this recording, he might have been unexpectedly convincing. There are moments of vocal discomfort in this performance, but Bocelli’s painstaking commitments to both music and text are irreproachable.

Like Azucena in Il trovatore, Amneris is a rôle that demands almost superhuman reserves of vocal and dramatic stamina. Like Amonasro, she has no showpiece aria in which to refine her persona, but her music is the kaleidoscopic raw material from which the picturesque mosaic of Aida is assembled. Assuming her place in the lineage of Bruna Castagna, Ebe Stignani, Giulietta Simionato, Fedora Barbieri, and Fiorenza Cossotto, Roman mezzo-soprano Veronica Simeoni here depicts an emotional but curiously subdued Amneris whose edge of ferocity is blunted by the singer’s cautious avoidance of chest register. The cumulative potency of Simeoni’s singing in the Act One scene with Radamès and Aida, launched promisingly with an aptly haughty reading of ‘Quale insolita fiamma nel tuo sguardo,’ is compromised by an account of ‘Trema, o rea schiava, ah! trema ch’io nel tuo cor discenda!’ with a disfiguring dearth of venom. Like Bocelli, the mezzo-soprano performs her lines in the large ensembles with finely-judged tone and excellent diction. In the puzzling scene with her slaves at the beginning of Act Two, Simeoni is the rare Amneris who makes something provocatively sensual of the sinuous statements of ‘Vieni, amor mio, mi inebria... Fammi beato il cor!’ Joined by her rival for Radamès’s love, this Amneris’s furious irony in ‘Fu la sorte dell’armi a’ tuoi funesta, povera Aida!’ is surprisingly innocuous, the singer’s tones just uneven enough to impair her histrionic intentions. Finding Radamès inadvertently colluding with Amonasro in Act Three, Simeoni’s cry of ‘Traditor!’ conveys the princess’s shock and despair. As she ponders at the start of Act Four how to rescue Radamès from the wrath of Ramfis and his coven of priests, this Amneris caresses the melodic line of ‘L’aborrita rivale a me sfuggia’ as though she is aware on some level that this is as near as she will come to holding the remorseful but unapologetic object of her desire in her arms. Endeavoring one last time to bend him to her will in ‘Già i Sacerdoti adunansi arbitri del tuo fato,’ Simeoni’s Amneris is vanquished by Radamès’ determination to unfalteringly face his sentence but not before detonating a pair of spot-on top B♭s. In the formidable Scena del Giudizio, Simeoni sings ‘Numi, pietà del mio straziato core’ athletically, and she ends the scene with a sonorous top A. The firepower of the music that came before notwithstanding, this Amneris is most moving in the hushed, guilt-ridden pleas for absolution in the opera’s final scene. Simeoni here clearly understands and reacts to Amneris’s emotions, and her singing pulses with sincerity. Simeoni’s voice has great potential, but in the performance on these discs she is not yet a fully-developed Amneris in the tradition of her Italian forebears. As her stage experience in the rôle grows, Amneris will likely come to more completely inhabit her voice and her heart.

Documenting a portrayal with which she has conquered many of Europe’s most prestigious stages, including those of the Wiener Staatsoper, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and the Arena di Verona, where staging Verdi’s Egyptian epic is as much a sport as an art, Arkansas-born, Vienna-based soprano Kristin Lewis is a conflicted, often beautifully-sung Aida who comes frustratingly close to unmitigated success in this mercilessly demanding rôle. The DECCA catalogue documents the Aidas of Renata Tebaldi, Leontyne Price, and the idiosyncratic but plausible Maria Chiara, in addition to excerpts featuring the Aida of Birgit Nilsson. Visually, Lewis is the equal of the most glamorous, fetchingly beautiful Aidas in the opera’s history, but in the context of this recording she is not yet a totally satisfying Aida. When first heard in Act One, her ‘Ohimè! di guerra fremere l’atroce grido io sento’ sounds as though the voice emanates from a different, less-flattering acoustic than that in which her colleagues’ voices are centered. Having weathered the indignities of the Egyptians’ raucous readying for battle, Lewis’s Aida begins ‘Ritorna vincitor!… E dal mio labbro uscì l’empia parola!’ with the bitter taste of her countrymen’s blood flooding her senses, barely capable of repeating the hated words calling for her enemies’ victory. With her entreaty of ‘Numi, pietà — del mio soffrir,’ the soprano’s vocal demeanor softens markedly, and the text pours out on a stream of golden tone. Throughout the performance, Lewis’s singing is most attractive when the voice is not under pressure, but Aida is not a rôle in which carefree moments prevail.

An illustrative example of what Lewis brings to the part is Aida’s Act Two scene with Amneris. Meeting her adversary in a duel of wits, Aida struggles to retain her grasp on whatever upper hand decorum affords her. Mindful of this, Lewis delivers ‘Ah! pietà!... che più mi resta? Un deserto è la mia vita’ with touching simplicity, saving her cunning for answering Amneris’s insinuations and veiled threats. Later, she handles the crests of the Scena trionfale with aplomb. Aida faces her greatest tests in Act Three, in which Verdi asks her to negotiate the very different vocal obstacles of a demanding aria—the aria by her performance of which many listeners unfairly assess an Aida—and duets with Amonasro and Radamès. Lewis uses the text of the recitative ‘Qui Radamès verrà... Che vorrà dirmi?’ as a springboard via which she rockets into ‘O patria mia.’ Her heartfelt, mezza voce performance of the aria, capped with a secure, superbly-sustained top C, grants the number the introspective core Verdi surely intended it to have. Aida’s amazement at her father’s intrusion into her reveries is meaningfully expressed, and Lewis then returns every volley lobbed at her by Maestri in the scene with Amonasro, furnishing some ecstatic top notes. The soprano’s efforts at spotlighting the contrasts between ‘Un giorno solo di si dolce incanto... Un’ora di tal gaudio... e poi morir!’ and ‘Padre, a costoro schiava io non sono’ yield spellbinding results. Deceiving Radamès at her father’s bidding, Lewis’s Aida is appalled by her own duplicity as she sings ‘Fuggiam gli ardori inospiti di queste lande ignude’ to her paramour. The terror of their discovery by Amneris and Ramfis shudders through the soprano’s enunciation of ‘La mia rivale!’ at the act’s end.

Relieved of the necessity of battling for survival, Aida embraces the inner peace that has eluded her throughout the opera by pledging to meet death at Radamès’s side in the subterranean crypt to which Ramfis’s dogged justice dooms him. The sound of Lewis’s voicing of ‘Presago il core della tua condanna’ is that of a spirit on the precipice between life and death, the tortures of the former dissolving into the blessed oblivion of the latter. The delicacy of Lewis’s phrasing in ‘O terra, addio; addio valle di pianti’ offsets Bocelli’s tendency to blare above the stave, her sparkling top B♭s soaring above the gossamer orchestral textures. Like Wagner’s Senta and Isolde, this Aida seems more transfigured than overcome by death: it is a transition rather than a termination. Still barely past thirty, Lewis is a very young Aida, a relative novice—albeit already a practiced one—in a rôle in which many sopranos of prior generations did not reach their primes until at least a decade later. When Leontyne Price bade the Metropolitan Opera adieu with a performance of Aida in January 1985, five weeks before her fifty-eighth birthday, she remained capable of portraying Aida dazzlingly, musically and dramatically. With such an iron grasp on the part at this juncture in her career, Lewis has the skills necessary to blossom from this auspicious performance into the sort of Aida for which opera lovers long.

After declining the financially-lucrative offer to conduct the Cairo première of Aida, Verdi wrote to a friend, ‘It seems to me that art looked at in this way is no longer art, but a trade, a party of pleasure, a hunt, anything that can be run after, to which it is desired to give, if not success, at least notoriety at any price.’¹ How prescient he was! Much as opera as a commodity seems an invention of the last half-century, Verdi was conscious more than a century ago of the hazards that hype posed to opera. There are those among today’s opera aficionados who will dismiss this DECCA Aida as a business venture rather than an artistic endeavor because of one member of its cast. It is regrettable that, almost 145 years after Aida was first performed, Verdi’s wisdom will likely be reaffirmed by closed minds unwilling to acknowledge that even very popular ‘crossover artists’ are capable of enjoyable, thoughtfully-conceived ‘serious’ singing. Perhaps the target market for this Aida is not the ranks of connoisseurs who cling to their decades-old Aidas, but the listener who truly loves Verdi will find among definite weaknesses in this recording many virtues that expunge any suspicions of pursuit of ‘notoriety at any price.’

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¹ Giuseppe Verdi to Milan-based critic Filippo Filippi (1830 – 1887), 9 December 1871

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492—Thomas Hampson (Conte d’Almaviva), Sonya Yoncheva (Contessa d’Almaviva), Luca Pisaroni (Figaro), Christiane Karg (Susanna), Angela Brower (Cherubino), Anne Sofie von Otter (Marcellina), Maurizio Muraro (Bartolo), Rolando Villazón (Basilio), Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (Don Curzio), Philippe Sly (Antonio), Regula Mühlemann (Barbarina); Vocalensemble Rastatt; Chamber Orchestra of Europe; Jory Vinikour, fortepiano continuo; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor [Recorded in conjunction with concert performances in Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, Germany, in July 2015; Deutsche Grammophon479 5945; 3 CDs, 173:34; Available from Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

What a time this is for those listeners who love the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! On the heels of a rollicking account of Die Entführung aus dem Serail from Le Cercle de l’Harmonie and Jérémie Rhorer and with traversals of La clemenza di Tito from cpo, Zaide from Signum Classics, and Don Giovanni from Sony Classical on the horizon comes Deutsche Grammophon’s thought-provoking new recording of Le nozze di Figaro, the fourth installment in conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s and tenor Rolando Villazón’s venture to record Mozart’s seven mature operas, spanning the decade from 1781’s Idomeneo, re di Creta to 1791’s Die Zauberflöte and La clemenza di Tito. Recorded during two concert performances and a rehearsal in July 2015 and expertly engineered by Tonmeister Rainer Maillard and Assistant Engineer Douglas Ward to both uphold Deutsche Grammophon’s legendary standards of sonic excellence and preserve enjoyable aspects of the live-performance atmosphere, most notably the audience’s blissful laughter, this account of Le nozze di Figaro unites Mozartean veterans with newcomers in a musical setting that fuses elements of period-appropriate practices with the extraordinary legacy of the opera’s 229-year history. This emphatically is not a dainty, tempest-in-a-teacup performance, however: Mozart’s, librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s, and playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s drama surges from these discs, every sigh, smile, and stress vividly, lovingly brought to life.

Written in 1778, Beaumarchais’s comedy La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro was the central work in a triptych that sent shock waves of seismic intensity through late-Eighteenth-Century intellectual circles, its convoluted sagas of wily servants sparring with despotic aristocrats garnering disapproval in seats of power throughout Europe. Though banned throughout Hapsburg lands by imperial decree owing not to its barbed social satire but to its copious sexual innuendo, Lorenzo da Ponte miraculously procured authorization from Joseph II’s court to adapt La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro for the operatic stage. The resulting libretto, the first of three of the poet’s texts that Mozart would eventually set, is a marvel of humor and humanity—precisely the sort of material that appealed strongly to Mozart’s cosmopolitan sensibilities.

Recently named James Levine’s successor as Music Director of The Metropolitan Opera, making him only the third holder of that title after Levine and Rafael Kubelík, the Québécois Nézet-Séguin, barely out of his thirties, confirms with his stewardship of this recording of Le nozze di Figaro that he is both a Mozartean of once-in-a-generation significance and a fully-qualified heir to Levine and Kubelík—and, looking further back into the annals of MET history, Gustav Mahler. The young conductor’s instinct for getting to the heart of each scene provides this performance with prodigious cumulative momentum, and Nézet-Séguin is among the few conductors to have presided over a recording of Le nozze di Figaro who never loses his way in the opera’s magnificent ensembles. Tempi are quick: Otto Klemperer’s studio recording of a similarly inclusive edition of Nozze di Figaro runs sixteen minutes longer than this performance, but only in a handful of numbers do Nézet-Séguin’s speeds feel slightly rushed. Even in these instances, the impact of the music is strengthened by the effervescence of the conductor’s approach. For instance, Cherubino’s Act One aria ‘Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio’ is taken at such a clip that the singer can barely get the notes out. Get the notes out she does, though, and the rapidity of Nézet-Séguin’s tempo is justified by the dramatic efficacy that the aria gains from the breathless vivacity of the musical performance matching the ethos of the text. Nevertheless, the score’s lyric episodes, especially the Contessa’s ‘Porgi, amor’ and ‘Dove sono i bei momenti,’ are handled with sensitivity and pathos. At its most individual, Nézet-Séguin’s conducting of this Nozze di Figaro is never pedantic or precious: every motion of his baton is motivated by his personal response to Mozart’s score and dedicated to kindling a lucid, cogent performance that takes advantage of his cast’s considerable strengths.

As unexpected as Nézet-Séguin’s mercurial tempi to ears accustomed to ponderous Mozart performances will be this recording's orchestral soundscape, which, contrary to recent trends in Mozart performances, is wholly without the slightest hint of a period instrument except for the aptly piquant sounds of Jory Vinikour’s fantastically witty but never obtrusive fortepiano continuo, practically an anonymous character in the opera who propels the drama without meddling in its resolution. Some listeners may never accept keyboard continuo extending beyond secco recitatives in Mozart’s operas, but in an era before the rise of podium-centric conducting in the modern sense can a composer and musician as ebullient as Mozart really be thought to have sat idly at the keyboard during arias and ensembles, awaiting the next stretch of secco recitative? Questions of historicity aside, Vinikour’s quicksilver but infallibly tasteful playing is one of the foremost delights of this Nozze di Figaro, one that the boundlessly inventive Mozart is certain to have appreciated.

As in the previous DGG recordings of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, Nézet-Séguin’s leadership spurs the Chamber Orchestra of Europe musicians to aspire to and succeed in matching the standards that Karl Böhm set with Staatskapelle Dresden in the 1970s. The orchestra’s instruments are modern, but the players who wield them have clearly absorbed many of the past half-century’s innovations in the field of period-appropriate practices. Like Böhm’s, Nézet-Séguin’s manner of preparing Le nozze di Figaro leaves traditions to conductors who prefer to borrow interpretations of Mozart’s music from others rather than devising their own. To this end, he and the COE musicians seek answers to questions about how to translate the notes into meaningful sounds in the score, trusting Mozart to have provided every clue needed to solve the opera’s riddles.

Like their COE colleagues, the Vocalensemble Rastatt singers draw the animation of their performance from the music that Mozart entrusted to them, their singing of ‘Giovani liete, fiori spargete’ in Act One and the ladies’ dulcet ‘Ricevete, o padroncina’ in Act Three embodying the prevailing spirit of Nézet-Séguin’s leadership. The singers are thoroughly convincing as townspeople eager to enjoy a good party and perhaps a bit of intrigue without sounding as though they were recruited at a small-town barn dance. Performing Le nozze di Figaro is not unlike managing arrivals and departures at a busy airport. In this performance, both Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s instrumentalists and Vocalensemble Rastatt’s choristers touch down smoothly, the air traffic control of Nézet-Séguin’s conducting steering them clear of every peril.

The junior member of a superlative ensemble cast, Swiss soprano Regula Mühlemann portrays Barbarina with a voice and a persona as fresh as newly-fallen autumn snow on the Matterhorn. In the vivacious girl’s Act Three scenes with the residents of Castello d’Almaviva and Cherubino, Mühlemann’s singing is perfectly-proportioned, and she voices the melancholic Act Four cavatina ‘L’ho perduta, me meschina!’ hypnotically. If she continues on this path, one followed in recent memory by Dames Margaret Price and Kiri Te Kanawa, there are surely memorable depictions of Susanna and/or the Contessa ahead of her.

As the grumbling gardener Antonio, Susanna’s uncle, Canadian bass-baritone Philippe Sly is nothing short of ideal, the voice firm, attractive, and flexible and the quick vibrato intensifying the dramatic bite of the character’s frustrated sputtering. The brevity of the rôle is the only deficiency: Mozart would undoubtedly have composed an aria for Sly’s Antonio. In the Act Three scene in which Marcellina’s hastily-produced marriage contract with Figaro is negated by the revelation that the clever fellow is none other than her conveniently mislaid son, French tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt is a frenetically fussy Don Curzio whose pompous pontificating on the legitimacy of Marcellina’s contractual claim on Figaro is wonderfully over the top. Encountering an artist of Villazón’s stature in a small rôle like Basilio is unexpected, but how special the results of this experiment prove to be! Most importantly, Villazón does not over-sing: his every note falls readily into its appointed space in the drama. He sings lightly, the words on the breath, in the Act One trio with Susanna and the Conte, and his aria in Act Three, ‘In quegli anni in cui val poco,’ is drolly but handsomely sung, the tenor’s ebullient personality sparkling in the aria’s tempo de menuetto section. He, Fouchécourt, and Sly might profit lavishly from moonlighting as an operatic comedy troupe.

As the male partner in the reluctant couple whose machinations, exploited by their aristocratic patron, feed the maelstrom that affects the drama’s course, bass-baritone Maurizio Muraro portrays Bartolo as a pompous conniver who only half believes his own orations. His razor-sharp diction compensates for occasional tonal unsteadiness, his verve in recitatives and ensembles supported by consummate musicality. Muraro sings the Act One aria ‘La vendetta, oh, la vendetta’ wonderfully: this Bartolo clearly remembers the lesson that he was taught by Basilio’s ‘La calunnia è un venticello’ in Il barbiere di Siviglia! The effects of an extensive career encompassing an uncommonly broad repertory on the voice of Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter cannot be ignored, but she gamely uses this to her advantage in her portrayal of Marcellina, Bartolo’s partner in crime and, as it turns out, more intimate activities. Sounding as proud as an affronted queen in her Act One scene with Susanna, von Otter sings her half of the duettino ‘Via, resti servita’ divertingly, savoring every mean-spirited syllable. Marcellina’s lines in the ActTwo finale are effortlessly dispatched, and von Otter wields her natural flair for unexaggerated comedy in the Act Three scene in which it is discovered that, rather than his contract-quoting betrothed, she is in fact Figaro’s mother, a development by which no one seems more shocked than she. Marcellina’s aria in Act Four, ‘Il capro e la capretta,’ is often excluded from both staged performances and recordings of the opera, but von Otter here sings it captivatingly, rolling through its divisions with the virtuosity that made her a force with which to reckon in Händel repertory. In the recorded history of Le nozze di Figaro, Marcellina has often been ignored, and in some of the instances in which she has been noticed it would have been preferable for her to have remained ignored. Von Otter cannot be ignored, and more’s the better: no Marcellina on disc has made the character’s rapid-fire transformation of a lover’s affection into a mother’s doting funnier.

Singing the lovesick Cherubino with polished, pristine tone and tasteful ornamentation, American mezzo-soprano Angela Brower brings the rather foolish lad to life without either condescending to or overdoing efforts at conveying masculinity. Like Richard Strauss’s Octavian and Komponist, Mozart’s Cherubino was conceived as a soprano rôle, and Brower negotiates the tessitura with ease, maintaining an enchanting lightness even in moments of greatest dramatic duress. As mentioned previously, the tempo for the Act One aria ‘Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio’ pushes Brower, but she pushes back, the frenzied excitement of the music reflected in her libidinous-frat-boy vocal acting. The control that she exhibits in sustaining the bel canto line in Cherubino’s Act Two arietta ‘Voi che sapete che cosa è amor’ adds psychological depth to Brower’s characterization, suggesting that he is capable at least occasionally of reasoning from a perspective above his belt. Her vocalism in the duettino with Susanna, ‘Aprite, presto, aprite,’ glistens, and she radiates adolescent awkwardness when interacting with Barbarina. Cherubino’s young heart palpitates for the Contessa, but there are so many enticing ladies of all ages and stations at the Conte’s court: how is a boy to devote himself to only one of them? Perhaps the root of the Conte’s dislike of Cherubino is his recognition of a kindred spirit and competitor in an environment with room for only a single ravenous philanderer. Brower’s Cherubino is a pawn in everyone’s games, but how attractive she makes being used sound!

In many performances of Le nozze di Figaro, the title character is little more than a grown-up but not altogether matured Cherubino, an amiable fellow who bumbles along with the mischief afoot in his master’s household. In this performance, the Figaro of bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni never misses an opportunity to make a play for the upper hand: the fact that he so seldom succeeds is indicative of the cunning of his adversaries. He and Susanna start Act One with a nimble performance of their first duettino, Pisaroni singing ‘Cinque... dieci... venti... trenta’ merrily, and the more sinister implications of the duettino ‘Se a caso madama la notte ti chiama’ are limned without vocal heaviness. Pisaroni’s delivery of the cavatina ‘Se vuol ballare, signor contino’ is good-natured, but the seriousness of his intention to tangle with the philandering Conte is unmistakable. He brings down the curtain on Act One with a voicing of the aria ‘Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso’ that brims with wry insinuation. Inventing the story of Figaro jumping from the Contessa’s window and upsetting Antonio’s prized flowerpot with quick-witted spontaneity, Pisaroni’s Figaro sails through the ActTwo finale by the seat of his trousers, even his best-crafted lies falling flat. Honesty may not be the best policy for his character, but the bass-baritone’s singing never fails him. In the Act Three scene with Marcellina, Bartolo, the Conte, and Don Curzio, Figaro finally finds himself at the top of the heap, the wily Conte flummoxed by the discovery of Figaro’s parentage, and Pisaroni’s voice booms with relieved pride. Nevertheless, uncertainty takes hold anew in the Act Three finale, and the shadows return in the singer’s vocal coloring. Figaro’s recitative and aria in Act Four, ‘Tutto è disposto... Oh Susanna, Susanna, quanta pena mi costi!’ and ‘Aprite un po’ quegli occhi,’ are sung as capably by Pisaroni as by the finest Figaros on disc, and he magnifies the importance of Figaro’s every word in the opera’s finale. From the gruff bottom to a ringing top F, Pisaroni has every note in Figaro’s range at the ready, and he portrays a dashing valet who serves sarcasm without sacrificing sterling singing.

This recording documents American baritone Thomas Hampson’s third interpretation of Conte d’Almaviva for a major label. His intellectual comprehension of the Conte’s motivations, already well-honed at the time of his first recording of the part in 1990, has broadened in the years of his acquaintance with the music, but the voice as recorded in 2015 sounds astonishingly untouched by the intervening years. Ever a resourceful artist, Hampson’s Conte was from the start an ‘old soul’ portrayal, one in which an unquenchable carnal hunger does not wholly obscure an inalienable nobility. In this performance, his Conte blusters slightly more than in past, enhancing the notion that the Conte is a man of a certain age whose position is now a greater attraction than his person. In the Act One trio with Susanna and Basilio, ‘Cosa sento! Tosto andate,’ Hampson sings strongly, his timbre warming when he addresses Susanna. In the Act Two trio with the Contessa and Susanna and the act’s subsequent finale, though, the character’s mounting frustration and fury metamorphose the silvery tones of Act One into steel-edged weapons. The Act Three duettino with Susanna, ‘Crudel! Perchè finora farmi languir così,’ is distinguished by a momentary return to the gentle melancholy of Act One: can it be that the lusty Conte actually loves Susanna, at least on some level? Essentially thrown to the wind in many performances, the recitative ‘Hai già vinta la causa!’ and aria ‘Vedrò mentr’io sospiro’ are magnetically sung by Hampson, who then voices the Conte’s parts in the brilliant sextet and the Act Three finale with boundless charisma. After the hubbub of Act Four, Hampson takes the lead in bringing about the opera’s moving dénouement. Aided by Nézet-Séguin, who sets exactly the right tempo for the passage, Hampson voices ‘Contessa, perdono’ simply but poignantly, his tones centered and ideally weighted. Hopelessly impenetrable would be the heart that did not react magnanimously to such a plea. An essential component of Mozart’s genius was his peerless ability to create morally-ambiguous characters who are alluring even when at their most repulsive. As sung by Hampson in this performance, the Conte’s words and actions are often reprehensible, but the man never is. It is silly when his first two commercial recordings of the Conte were so accomplished to suggest, as the colloquialism goes, that the third time is the charm, but there is no denying that Hampson remains a thoughtful, commanding Conte who charms.

Bavarian soprano Christiane Karg provides this Nozze di Figaro with a Susanna who is at once both at the center of the drama and slightly removed from it. Intermittently sounding like a countess in training, this is a Susanna who follows her heart only after analyzing every situation with her formidable intellect. In her Act One scenes with Figaro, Karg is the personification of pre-wedding excitement, her rejoinders to her husband-to-be reverberating with joviality. Then, the socially savvy Susanna emerges in the scene with Marcellina, Karg’s singing in the duettino ‘Via, resti servita’ matching the overtones of von Otter’s lines with her own pointed aspersions. Sizing up her opponents in the trio with the Conte and Basilio, she is alternately coy and caustic, careful to maintain her integrity without figuratively biting the hand that feeds her. Karg’s account of the Act Two aria ‘Venite, inginocchiatevi’ shimmers with girlish jauntiness that only partially conceals more somber thoughts. In the terrific trio with the Conte and Contessa, the first of Susanna’s pair of top Cs disappears into the sonic hullabaloo, but the second appears, comet-like, above the ensemble. Karg complements Brower’s elan in the duettino with Cherubino, ‘Aprite, presto, aprite,’ the two of them conspiring like Hänsel and Gretel on the brink of being caught by their mother with berry-stained lips. Her vocalism in the Act Two finale gleams, and, like Hampson, she allows hints of genuine affection to surface in the Act Three duettino with the Conte. Karg leads the sextet with the determination of a musical Joan of Arc escorting her countrymen into battle, but the smiling mischief returns in the celebrated duettino with the Contessa and the madcap Act Three finale. Susanna’s recitative ‘Giunse alfin il momento’ and exquisite F-major aria ‘Deh vieni, non tardar, o gioia bella’ are the musical apogee of Act Four, and Karg delivers the former with communicative thrust and sings the latter with composure and expressivity. She seconds the Contessa beautifully in the opera’s finale. Karg’s Susanna is an especially suitable match for Pisaroni’s Figaro as she also has every note of her part in the voice. Many sopranos make the mistake of thinking that they must venture to give Susanna a palpable dramatic profile in order to establish her stature in the drama, but Mozart did that for them. Karg understands that what is required to realize Susanna’s full dramatic potential is to faithfully sing her music. This Karg does, often dazzlingly, and she thereby easily earns inclusion alongside Maria Cebotari, Bidù Sayão, Irmgard Seefried, Edith Mathis, and Lucia Popp among the superior Susannas on disc.

Amidst the helter-skelter goings-on of this emotionally-charged Nozze di Figaro, the poised, imperturbable, sumptuously-voiced Contessa of Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva is profoundly touching and frequently surprising. The voluptuousness of her timbre prompts recollection of the fact that the Contessa is a rôle sung with merit in previous generations by Elisabeth Rethberg, Marcella Pobbe, and Renata Tebaldi, conscientious, capable Mozarteans whose voices were of markedly grander proportions than those of most of the singers now favored for Mozart performances. Yoncheva’s is not by any measure an enormous voice, but it is an instrument quite unlike the ‘blonde’ voices most often heard in the rôle. The Contessa’s E♭-major cavatina that begins Act Two, ‘Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro,’ situated without so much as one line of prefacing recitative, is one of the most treacherous entrances in opera, the long melodic lines unforgivingly exposed. Yoncheva needs nowhere to hide, singing the piece rapturously but with restraint and moving seamlessly through the full range of the music. In the trio with Susanna and the Conte that follows, ‘Susanna, or via, sortite,’ the soprano’s distinctive timbre makes her utterances stand out, and her voice is never lost in the boisterous ensembles that end Acts Two and Three. Yoncheva sings the recitative ‘E Susanna non vien!’ in Act Three with an immediacy that evinces the ironic anguish of a Contessa, once so eager to reinvent herself, who longs to again be uncomplicated Rosina. The C-major aria ‘Dove sono i bei momenti’ is one of Mozart’s most sublime inspirations, an interlude like Ottavia’s ‘Addio Roma, addio patria, amici addio’ in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and Almirena’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ in Händel’s Rinaldo in which time stands still as undiluted emotions gush from the music. Yoncheva’s performance of the aria is magical, her chocolate-hued voice flowing through the music like lava. Her lines in the duettino with Susanna, ‘Che soave zeffiretto,’ are sung with an incandescence in which music and words are virtually indistinguishable. Responding to the Conte’s entreaty for absolution in the Act Four finale, Yoncheva’s Contessa grants his request with a thread of tone that expands into a deluge of emotion in ‘Più dolce io sono, e dico di sì.’ Rather than trying to adhere to other singers’ conceptions of the Contessa, Yoncheva makes the rôle her own, coming to Nozze di Figaro with experience in parts including Monteverdi’s Poppea, Gounod’s Juliette, and Verdi’s Desdemona but without external sources’ misleading theories about how she ought to sound. In truth, the only indications of how a rôle should be sung by which a singer should be guided, whether singing the rôle for the first or the fiftieth time, whether on stage or in studio, are those provided by the composer. In the performance on these discs, it is apparent that Yoncheva learned the Contessa’s music under Mozart’s tutelage as bequeathed to posterity in his score. With such a teacher, how could she do anything but sing as personally and gorgeously as she does here?

More than two-and-a-half centuries after its première, Le nozze di Figaro remains one of the most popular operas in the international repertory. Especially in the past fifty years, the score has proved immune to almost every conceivable directorial abuse. The music has survived poor singing, egotistical conducting, and wrongheaded efforts at adjusting the parameters of ‘stylish’ performance standards and increasing the opera’s ‘relevance’ for modern audiences. Regardless of these obstacles, the adage that asserts that the proof is in the pudding is as applicable in the opera house as in the kitchen. Why, then, does Le nozze di Figaro still challenge, amuse, and move? There is ample proof ripe for the hearing in this recording, which in terms of singing, conducting, and unwavering fidelity to the composer’s genius is a concoction fit for the most gluttonous Mozart appetites.

It was said by the first Chancellor of unified Germany Otto von Bismarck—and repeated but not, as has sometimes been suggested, originated by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in Evita—that ‘politics is the art of the possible.’ In this era of imperiled public funding for the Performing Arts, aging audiences, and short attention spans, what, then, is opera? Just as it was when the genre-initiating scores of Jacopo Peri and Claudio Monteverdi were first performed in the late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, opera is the art of the beyond possible—neither the impossible nor Ivor Novello’s ‘land of Might-Have-Been,’ that is, but what can be. Harnessing the power of what opera can be and what opera can mean to a community is central to the mission of Berkshire Opera Festival, an initiative that aims to build upon the momentum established by Berkshire Theatre Group since its inception in 2010 by bringing world-class but accessible and affordable opera to the Berkshire region of Western Massachusetts. With programming including recitals and an Opera Talk presented by eminent connoisseuse and industry insider Cori Ellison, the 2016 Festival culminates in late August and September with BOF’s inaugural mainstage opera production, a staging of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly conducted and directed by BOF Artistic and General Directors and Co-Founders Brian Garman and Jonathon Loy.

In advance of the performances of Madama Butterfly, BOF’s objectives will be furthered by a pair of intriguing recitals, both of which will introduce singers from the Madama Butterfly cast, as well as special guests. On Wednesday, 10 August, the Festival will present Breaking Down Barriers: Songs by Female Composers of Puccini’s Time in Ventfort Hall Mansion in Lenox. Featuring passionate performances of Art Song repertory composed by unjustly-neglected veriste of Puccini’s generation, this performance will confirm that the creation of red-blooded Italian melodies is not solely a gentleman’s undertaking. A week later, on Tuesday, 16 August, Puccini’s own under-explored Art Songs seize the spotlight in The “Unknown Puccini”: A Recital of Songs by Puccini, performed at First Congregational Church in Stockbridge. With General Admission tickets priced at only $30, these budget-friendly recitals offer Manhattan-quality musical adventures that do not demand that attendees be Wall Street trust-fund babies. Tickets for both recitals can be purchased online or by phoning 413.213.6622.

Imaginatively brought to life by a team of talented, experienced artists including scenic designer Stephen K. Dobay and costume designer Charles Caine, BOF’s production of Madama Butterfly brings an ensemble worthy of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, where the opera had its bafflingly unsuccessful première in 1904, to the stage of Pittsfield’s beautiful and historic Colonial Theatre. The Cio-Cio San of celebrated Moldovan soprano Inna Los will fall victim to the charisma of the Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of tenor Jason Slayden, and the couple’s drama will play out under the benevolent watch of the Sharpless of baritone Weston Hurt. Mezzo-soprano Sarah Larsen will portray Cio-Cio San’s devoted maid Suzuki, and the meddlesome marriage broker Goro will benefit from the electric stage presence of tenor Eduardo Valdes, a Metropolitan Opera stalwart with nearly 600 MET performances to his credit. Bass-baritone John Cheek will pronounce Lo zio Bonzo’s thunderous denunciation of his delicate niece, and baritone Benjamin C. Taylor will woo her as the wily Yamadori. Mezzo-soprano Katherine Maysek will depict Pinkerton’s ‘vera sposa americana’ Kate, and to Pittsfield native baritone John Demler Il commissario imperiale’s utterances will be entrusted. Performances are scheduled for 27 and 30 August and 2 September, and tickets range in price from $20 to $98. An evening of top-quality, heartbreaking Italian opera in Pittsfield can be savored for the cost of dinner at the neighborhood trattoria! Tickets for Madama Butterfly can be purchased online or by phoning 413.997.4444.

One of the greatest challenges facing opera companies, particularly American opera companies, is the necessity of attracting new audiences to ensure the genre’s continued success without alienating the aficionados whose dedication has carried opera through the dark days of economic recessions and waning governmental support. With the myriad of instant-gratification distractions of today’s digital-media environment, a critical component of recruiting the next generation of opera lovers is overcoming the lingering stigma of opera’s perceived elitism. Talk is cheap, but, without compromising the integrity of performances and productions, opera can be, too. Committed to bringing opera that is ‘of the people, for the people, and by the people’ in the best Lincolnsian sense to Western Massachusetts, Berkshire Opera Festival is a paramount model of opera as the art of what can be.

Nagasaki in the Berkshires: The Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, venue for Berkshire Opera Festival’s 2016 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly [Photo by the author]

PADRE ANTONIO SOLER (1729 – 1783): Six Concerti for Two Keyboards—Philippe LeRoy and Jory Vinikour, harpsichords [Recorded at the Scoring Stage, Skywalker Sound, Nicasio, California, USA, 2 – 5 April 2015; Delos DE 3491; 1 CD, 74:15; Available from Delos, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

In nature, it is theorized that, on average, the proverbial tip of an iceberg visible to observers represents no more than twenty percent of the floe’s total volume. The same statistic could be used to accurately describe the ratio of familiar music in the Classical repertory to the overwhelming wealth of compositions that remain largely unknown. Even now, when new technologies enable Twenty-First-Century listeners to explore musical backroads and byways that previous incarnations of recording technology could not travel, there are for every Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms innumerable companies of composers living and dead whose music is substantially or wholly ignored. In truth, a well-meaning inclination to proclaim every piece recovered from neglect a rediscovered masterpiece is no more beneficial than dismissing unheard music as deserving its obscurity, but one of the inscrutable marvels of art is the rare but potent ability of artists to perform a work or a whole repertory in a way that not only figuratively clears the cobwebs but also literally redefines the ways in which the music is interpreted, performed, presented, and received. This is what Maria Callas and Magda Olivero achieved in bel canto and verismo repertories, what Marie-Claire Alain did for her brother Jehan’s music for organ, and what Arthur Grumiaux did for Händel’s forgotten violin sonatas. This, too, is what internationally-acclaimed harpsichordists Philippe LeRoy and Jory Vinikour accomplish with this new Delos recording of the Six Concerti for Two Keyboards of Antoni Soler i Ramos. This music is not unknown, but hearing this disc, in the context of which producer and recording engineer David Bowles centers the music in an acoustical space of stunning, almost clinical clarity, may prompt the listener to believe that this is his first contact with these Concerti. A performance of music for harpsichord is expected to dazzle with virtuosity, and there is no shortage of nimbly-executed deluges of notes here, but the stylistic acuity and aesthetic sophistication are the attributes that mark this as a pioneering disc. The notes are but the tip of this musical iceberg: as played by LeRoy and Vinikour, the true merit of this music shimmers beneath the surface.

The uncertainty that undermines complete understanding of these Concerti’s provenance is as frustrating as an instance in which so much is known or can with relative credibility be conjectured can be. The Concerti were not published until the sixth and seventh decades of the Twentieth Century, and the dedication inscribed on Soler’s manuscript—para la diversion del Ssmo. Infante de España Dn. Gabriel de Bourbón—only confirms the composer’s association with the Spanish royal family documented by history. Known events and intersections in the lives of Soler and the Concerti’s dedicatee Gabriel de Borbón (1752 – 1788), the tenth of King Carlos III’s thirteen children, date the composition of the Concerti to circa 1770, when the precocious Infante remained under Soler’s tutelage, and only the demands of the music exceeding the capabilities of the instruments known to have been in the Borbón collection during the second half of the Eighteenth Century advocates for the Concerti having been intended for harpsichords rather than organs, on which they have often been performed and recorded since their publication. Whether, like Bach’s famed Notenbüchlein for his wife Anna Magdalena, the Concerti were conceived primarily for the edification and entertainment of Soler’s patron as their dedication suggests or for public exhibition of the adolescent prince’s talent remains—and is likely to continue to remain—undetermined.

What is apparent from the first bars of the Andante movement of Concerto No. 1 in C major is that Soler’s music might have been composed to showcase the assets of LeRoy’s and Vinikour’s unique artistic partnership. The harpsichordists’ individual styles are very different, the Frenchman LeRoy approaching his music with understated intensity and the Chicago-born Vinikour employing a more outwardly flamboyant but no less introspective manner. LeRoy plays in Rabelaisian poetry and Vinikour in Hawthornean prose, but the musical narratives that they fashion are uncannily compatible. Both the graceful Andante and the effervescent Minué draw from LeRoy and Vinikour playing in which refinement and technical flair are ideally merged. The imagination that both gentlemen display in handling the variations in each of the Concerti’s Minué movements is one of the disc’s greatest virtues, the novelty of their phrasing consistently enticing the listener to eagerly await the music’s next unexpected subtlety. The slyly sentimental Concerto No. 2 in A minor opens with a dulcet Andante that gains from LeRoy’s and Vinikour’s sensitive touch the lilt of a troubadour’s canso. The sparks struck by the harpsichordists’ exchanges in the subsequent Allegro movement ignite a rhythmic bonfire that elucidates the inventiveness of Soler’s part writing. The Tempo de Minué is executed with such precise synchronicity that it seems impossible that human fingers are responsible for the performance, but what is heard here is mastery, not mechanism.

LeRoy and Vinikour allow none of the slower-paced movements among the Concerti to drag or lose momentum, and their performance of the Andantino in Concerto No. 3 in G major embodies the strategy that sustains the high level of their endeavors in all of the Concerti. Imposing nothing upon the music, they ask questions of no one other than Soler and themselves, and the answers that they incorporate into their playing are all the more persuasive for not being ostentatiously purported to be definitive. Here, too, the musicians’ performance of the Minué is characterized by tightly-sprung but unforced rhythmic accuracy. The emotional profile of the Affettuoso - Andante non largo movement with which Concerto No. 4 in F major begins is powerfully projected by LeRoy’s and Vinikour’s unaffected phrasing, Soler’s melodic lines allowed to breathe and nuanced harmonies given space in which to cast their spells without either aspect being unduly emphasized. Again, their playing of the Minué is lovingly ebullient.

The Cantabile that launches Concerto No. 5 in A major, the most conventionally expressive of the Concerti, is music of palpable sincerity that would not sound out of place in Haydn’s and the young Mozart’s keyboard sonatas. The pensive camaraderie between LeRoy and Vinikour yields its richest effects in this music, their hypnotic interweaving of melodic strands extracting every joule of timbral warmth from John Phillips’s gelid-toned Florentine-inspired harpsichords. Even the fifth Concerto’s Minué looks inward more noticeably than any of its brethren, and these musicians follow where it leads, lending every ornament a distinct purpose within the movement’s broader landscape. The fascinating structure of Concerto No. 6 in D major develops from its inaugural Allegro - Andante - Allegro - Andante movement, the alternating moods of which are put to striking dramatic use by LeRoy and Vinikour. The unfettered joy of their tandem guidance of thematic development in the Concerto’s Minué produces seven-and-a-half of the most pleasurable minutes on the disc.

It seems wholly logical that, on some level, music is inherently Existential. As John Donne might have opined, neither any musician nor any piece of music is an island upon the shores of which no external influences intrude. Examined from any conceivable perspective, music is defined by collaborations, by the bonds that form and evolve among music, performers, and audiences. In essence, this disc is two uninhibitedly communicative artists’ earnestly personal solution for one of music’s great, Sartre-esque enigmas. In this music and in their awe-inspiring arsenals of musical skills, Philippe LeRoy and Jory Vinikour are equals. Could he hear this recording of his Six Concerti for Two Keyboards, Padre Soler would surely also welcome them as equals with the pious altruism for which his contemporaries praised him.

Author’s Note: In addition to reviewing this recording of Soler’s Six Concerti for Two Keyboards, I had the great privilege of writing the liner notes for this release. I was in no way involved with the planning, preparation, making, or marketing of the disc, however, and therefore assess it without bias.

DANIELA DESSÌ
14 May 1957 – 20 August 2016

As I have written in past, one of the most difficult tasks that an opera-loving writer faces is that of struggling with inadequate words to say farewell to admired artists, especially when those artists are taken from this world when there was so much more that their work might have given us. The unexpected passing of Italian soprano Daniela Dessì, who only recently announced a break from performing due to illness but anticipated returning to the stage for a gala concert in October 2016, is an occasion upon which celebration of all that audiences received from her is tempered by contemplation of the riches of which hateful disease now deprives aficionados of authentic Italian singing. Beautiful, intelligent, warm-hearted on and off the stage, and tirelessly dedicated to preserving the art of song, Dessì was a glistening jewel in a diadem that has become badly tarnished in the years since the voices of Magda Olivero, Anita Cerquetti, and Renata Tebaldi were silenced.

Born in Genova, Dessì was a singer whose extraordinarily expansive repertory was born not of circumstance and happenstance but of artistic curiosity and genuine interest in the history of opera since its modern emergence in the late Sixteenth Century. Acclaimed in rôles ranging from the title schemer in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and Sesto in Händel’s Giulio Cesare to Bellini’s Norma and Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Maria Stuarda, Dessì exhibited rare mastery of virtually the entire spectrum of Giuseppe Verdi’s writing for soprano from her first beautifully-vocalized performances of the composer’s Messa da Requiem. In his New York Times review of her 1995 Metropolitan Opera début as Nedda in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, a rôle that she recorded impressively during Philadelphia concerts under Riccardo Muti’s direction, noted critic Alex Ross assessed her performance as possessing ‘secure, well-projected high notes, lustrous tone quality at lower volumes, a subtle expressive sense.’ These traits made her portrayals of Verdi’s heroines unforgettable. Related but discernibly unique were the aspects of nobility that characterized her Elvira in Ernani, Leonora in Il trovatore, Elisabetta in Don Carlo, and Aida. Her Alice Ford displayed a perfect balance between joviality and decorum. Whether negotiating the intricacies of Elena’s ‘Mercè, dilette amiche’ in I vespri siciliani or braving Amelia’s long vocal lines in Simon Boccanegra, Dessì’s Verdi singing was principally noteworthy for the unmistakable command of and affection for the composer’s music.

As memorable as her bel canto and Verdi performances were, it was as an interpreter of Giacomo Puccini’s soprano heroines that Dessì shone most brightly. She was a Mimì in La bohème whose joy was as profound as her sorrow, and she was a Tosca whose spirit soared to heights as great as those reached by her voice. Often singing opposite her husband, tenor Fabio Armiliato, her Minnie in La fanciulla del West embodied the indomitable essence of the American West but as a thinking, feeling, suffering woman rather than an archetype. She rekindled the sacred fire that burned in the performances of Rosina Storchio, Geraldine Farrar, Margaret Sheridan, Licia Albanese, and Maria Callas in her own interpretation of Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly. To hear her sing ‘Che tua madre dovrà’ was to understand the psychological depth of Puccini’s depiction of a young girl transformed into a shrewd woman by pain and motherhood. Every moment of vocal strain was incorporated into a portrait of grace and grit, one that brought John Luther Long’s resilient heroine to life on the crests of Puccini’s music.

When Geraldine Farrar sang Cio-Cio San in the Metropolitan Opera première of Madama Butterfly in 1907, Henry Krehbiel wrote of her in the New York Tribune that ‘she sounds the note of deep pathos in both action and song convincingly.’ Could he have heard Daniela Dessì in any of the rôles in which her vocal prowess and penetrating imagination were fully engaged, he would surely have lauded her in similar terms. Dessì was an artist whose foremost goal was communication, not perfection. That she continued to share her gifts with audiences even as her body was ravaged by illness confirms that singing was for her a source of life rather than a means of making a living. There can be no redress for the performances that she now will never give us, but there must be tremendous gratitude for all that Daniela Dessì taught us about music that we cherish.

Gli uccelli sono volati troppo presto: Soprano Daniela Dessì as Nedda (left) and baritone Mariusz Kwiecień as Silvio (right) in Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at The Metropolitan Opera, 2004 [Photo by Ken Howard, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835) and GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Allegro io son– Bel canto Arias—Lawrence Brownlee, tenor; Viktorija Miškūnaitė, soprano (Puritani selections); Liudas Mikalauskas, bass (Puritani and Fille du régiment selections); Andrius Apšega, baritone (Puritani selection); Kaunas State Choir; Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra; Constantine Orbelian, conductor [Recorded at Kaunas Philharmonic, Kaunas, Lithuania, in April 2016; Delos DE 3517; 1 CD, 62:15; Available from Delos, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

The late thespian Sir Alec Guinness once suggested that a superb tenor voice should sound like ‘a silver trumpet muffled in silk.’ These are very pretty words, to be sure, and a legitimate observation by the owner of one of the great voices of the spoken theatre, but what does the description truly mean? Without resorting to proposing that a listener ponder how a silver trumpet muffled in silk might actually sound, how is Guinness’s assessment translated into discernible qualities that the ear unbothered by poetic conceits can perceive? Supported with ideal grace and enthusiasm by the expertly-scaled singing and playing of the Kaunas State Choir and Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra and the alert, stylish conducting of Constantine Orbelian, tenor Lawrence Brownlee provides with the eleven selections on Allegro io son a definitive—and, in the context of Guinness’s lovely but enigmatic observation, revealingly defining—exhibition of the silken trumpeting of a superb, polished-silver tenor voice. Even amidst the musical brilliance of Allegro io son, which is all the more enjoyable for being so vividly recorded and handsomely presented by Delos, it is the undeviating directness of Brownlee’s approach to this demanding music that distinguishes this disc. Sincerity is not a trait that is often encountered in opera, on or off the stage, but honest, unforced connection with the music and the characters that it portrays is the heart of Allegro io son. Is an uncomplicated joy in singing perhaps the silk with which Guinness stated that the finest voices are adorned?

One of America’s most acclaimed singers, Brownlee is an artist who has legitimately earned every honor bestowed upon him, not the least among which is the prestigious Richard Tucker Award. Lauded for interpretations of rôles ranging from Rossini’s dashing leading men to the legendary jazz saxophonist and composer title character in Daniel Schnyder’s Charlie Parker’s Yardbird, premièred by Opera Philadelphia in 2015, Brownlee is a performer whose wholly organic operatic portrayals are allied with the utmost technical refinement. Whereas some singers develop idiosyncrasies as their careers progress, Brownlee has thus far honed his skills without sacrificing any of the visceral immediacy of his singing, each new experience broadening his view but never distorting his focus. The tenor’s renown owes much to his breathtaking flair for executing Rossinian fiorature, but the expansive melodic lines of Vincenzo Bellini and the dramatic bel canto of Gaetano Donizetti are equally apt outlets for Brownlee’s prodigious gifts. Avoiding the forcing that compromises many singers’ endeavors in this repertory, Brownlee’s singing on Allegro io son possesses an evenness spanning the full range that, though perhaps easier to control in the recording studio than in the theatre, cannot be faked. As with the sincerity of his expression, the authenticity of his vocalism is remarkable, especially as it is employed in the performances on this disc. Brownlee practices what many pedagogues and fellow tenors can only preach.

It is fitting that the Bellini selections on Allegro io son are drawn from the composer’s final opera, I puritani, in performances of which Brownlee has proved in recent seasons to be a stakes-raising exponent of the rôle of Arturo, created in the opera’s 1835 première by Giovanni Battista Rubini. The fearsome tessitura and stratospheric range of the part lift it beyond the reach of most modern tenors even with downward transpositions and omissions, but Brownlee’s performances of Arturo for Washington Concert Opera, The Metropolitan Opera, and other companies have been notable not only for the appearance of ease with which he sings the music, evidence of his award-worthy acting skills [anyone lulled by his singing into doubting the difficulty of Brownlee’s repertory is encouraged to sing along—at pitch—with any of the selections on this disc to dispel these illusions], but also his astounding projection of the part’s infamous F₅. Brownlee here sings Arturo’s de facto entrance aria—not so designated by Bellini in the score—from Act One, ‘A te, o cara, amor talora.’ Complemented by capable, often lovely deliveries of Elvira’s, Giorgio’s, and Valton’s lines by soprano Viktorija Miškūnaitė, baritone Andrius Apšega, and bass Liudas Mikalauskas, he sculpts the arching melody with superb breath control and rises ecstatically to a bright, steady top C♯. Then, rather than awing with an account of ‘Credeasi, misera’ with the aforementioned F₅, he prefers beguiling with the more subtle charms of ‘Son salvo, alfin son salvo.’ Miškūnaitė sings Elvira’s offstage passage ‘A una fronte afflitto e solo’ hauntingly, and Brownlee answers with vocalism of impeccable poise and lustrous tone. Astounding is the panache with which he manages to sound genuinely heroic whilst also placing vowels squarely on the breath as true bel canto demands.

This disc takes its title from Beppe’s popular aria from the Italian version of Donizetti’s otherwise little-remembered one-act gem Rita, ‘Allegro io son, come un fringuel.’ The rapid-fire triplets with which the composer conjured the opera’s Spanish setting hold no terrors for Brownlee, and Donizetti’s trills are dutifully attempted, the second more successfully than the first. Completely successful are Brownlee’s ascents to the top Bs and C♯. From Act Four of La favorite come Fernand’s recitative ‘La maîtresse du roi!’ and aria ‘Ange si pur, que dans un songe.’ The tenor’s French diction is exemplary, slightly more natural, in fact, than his excellent command of Italian, and the anguish expressed by the character as he reflects on his idealized passion having been shattered simmers in Brownlee’s unexaggerated singing. The beautifully-sustained top C is integrated into the line rather than disrupting it. Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal is one of Donizetti’s most daunting and therefore least-performed works, and the title character’s sprawling aria that ends the opera’s second act, ‘Seul sur la terre,’ tests Brownlee’s abilities. Reminiscent of the music that prefaces the heroine’s first scene in Lucia di Lammermoor, evocative passages for harp—beautifully played by the Kaunas harpist—introduce an exquisite principal theme that straddles the tenor’s passaggio. Brownlee conquers the aria unflinchingly, resourcefully exploiting his tones’ glistening patina rather than pushing the voice. The trio of top Cs and climactic top D♭ ring excitingly, costing Brownlee nothing in terms of toil that he is not eminently capable of paying. Luciano Pavarotti famously likened the tenor voice to a bank account into which God, nature, or whatever force to which one attributes vocal endowments deposits a finite number of top Cs. Singers’ upper registers are often casualties of the natural aging of voices, but Brownlee is the exceptionally rare singer whose technique seems adept at regularly replenishing his cache of high notes.

There have been few singers as uniquely qualified to sing Ernesto in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale as Brownlee since the days of Tito Schipa and Cesare Valletti. Not even Alfredo Kraus sang Ernesto’s music so winsomely, and Brownlee has the advantage in comparison with the most noteworthy of his fellow Ernestos among today’s tenors of having a warmer, more appealingly youthful timbre. On this disc, Brownlee makes Ernesto’s Act Two recitative ‘Povero Ernesto! dallo zio cacciato, da tutti abbandonato,’ music that can too easily sound inane, truly touching. Matching the artful phrasing of the obbligato trumpet, Brownlee voices the larghetto aria ‘Cercherò lontana terra dove gemen sconosciuto’ ravishingly, the disinherited lad’s despair for once eliciting sympathy rather than derision. The moderato cabaletta ‘E se fia che ad altro oggetto’ receives from this Ernesto a rollicking reading bolstered by a newly-tapped vein of confidence: no note ever recorded exudes confidence more exhilaratingly than the interpolated top D♭ with which Brownlee ends the cabaletta. Aided by the chorus and the atmospheric sounds of the guitar and tambourine, his account of Ernesto’s Act Three serenade ‘Com'è gentil la notte a mezzo april’ is no less alluring. It may be an element of a ruse in its proper context in Don Pasquale, but the only Norinas whose hearts would not flutter in response to such a serenade would be either deaf or dead ones.

There are greater depths of expression in Donizetti’s music for Nemorino in L'elisir d'amore than many tenors bother to seek in their performances of the rôle. Content to garner laughs with a wide-eyed bumpkin’s antics, they leave to audiences’ imaginations the aspects of the guileless young man’s character that ultimately endear him to the sophisticated Adina. In his performance on this disc of the Act One aria ‘Quanto è bella, quanto è cara,’ Brownlee divulges to the listener that poetic wonder is not the exclusive right of those who are able to read poetry. The ebullience of a boyish affection is there in spades, but subtler emotions are also at play. This is also true of Brownlee’s singing of the ubiquitous Act Two aria ‘Una furtiva lagrima negli occhi suoi spuntò.’ There are so many dreadful recorded performances of Nemorino’s arias that one almost cringes to see them included in a disc’s track list, but Brownlee here offers performances of them that anyone who loves this music—or who appreciates singing in general—will want to hear again and again.

In November 2016, Brownlee brings his widely-praised portrayal of the lovesick Tonio in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment, already savored by audiences in Cincinnati, New York, and throughout the operatically-inclined world, to Washington National Opera. Like his Italian cousin Nemorino, the Tyrolean Tonio is frequently depicted as an affable but essentially dimwitted fellow. To be sure, his Act One aria ‘Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête’ is not the most intellectually stimulating piece ever composed, musically or textually, but its infectious elation is irresistible. Here, too, having no need to fret over the music’s technical requirements, Brownlee looks more closely into Tonio’s heart than many of the tenors who sing the rôle. He interacts merrily but meaningfully with Mikalauskas’s Caporal, the voice pouring out with uncontainable glee. In Brownlee’s handling, there is far more to the cabaletta ‘Pour mon âme, quel destin’ than its eagerly-awaited string of nine top Cs. Each of those Cs rockets from Brownlee’s throat with infallible intonation, soaring as if to say, ‘Is this not how youngsters in love express themselves?’ Nevertheless, the man who so eloquently pleads his case to the intractable but not unmoved Marquise in the Act Two aria ‘Pour me rapprocher de Marie’ cannot be a backwoods yokel whose head is filled with cows and Edelweiss, and Brownlee unfurls the aria’s melodic line like a delicate ribbon. The interpolated top C♯ with which he crowns the aria is a tone of great plangency, a cry from Tonio’s wounded soul aimed squarely at the heart of the Marquise. In these performances, Brownlee’s upper register is unfailingly secure and vibrant, but his bel canto is defined by much more than effective high notes. The silver trumpet is vital, the requisite canto, but the silk is the bel without which singing is only stylized noise.

Recital discs often disclose more about singers’ egos than about their voices or artistries. In the insular setting of the recital disc, there are no needs for dramatic continuity or interactions with colleagues with which to be concerned. In too many instances, this freedom of sorts engenders sloppiness and showmanship of the most deplorable order. The singer in possession of an extraordinary voice can be forgiven for occasionally indulging the impulse to display it, but does a singer’s responsibility to composers dissipate when the project at hand is an aria recital rather than a recording of a complete opera? His singing of the selections on this disc, as insightfully-chosen a repertory as any singer has ever recorded, affirms that for Lawrence Brownlee the answer is obviously, emphatically No. These performances radiate unbreakable respect for Bellini and Donizetti and unshakable trust in the power of their music to, when sung as they intended it to be sung, convey complex emotions with universal simplicity. The tenor Marcello Giordano has been quoted as saying that ‘the tenor voice should be like sunshine.’ Sometimes sweet, sometimes scorching, Lawrence Brownlee’s voice is on Allegro io son always like silver gleaming through silk; a voice that generates its own sunshine.

CHARLES-FRANÇOIS GOUNOD (1813 – 1893): Cinq-Mars—Mathias Vidal (Le Marquis de Cinq-Mars), Véronique Gens (La Princesse Marie de Gonzague), Tassis Christoyannis (Le Conseiller de Thou), Andrew Foster-Williams (Le Père Joseph), André Heyboer (Le Vicomte de Fontrailles), Norma Nahoun (Marion Delorme), Marie Lenormand (Ninon de L’Enclos, Un berger), Jacques-Greg Belobo (Le Roi, Le Chancelier), Andrew Lepri Meyer (De Montmort, L’Ambassadeur), Matthias Ettmayr (De Montrésor, Eustache), Wolfgang Klose (De Brienne); Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks; Münchner Rundfunkorchester; Ulf Schirmer, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in concert in the Prinzregententheater, Munich, Germany, on 25 January 2015; Ediciones Singulares ES 1024; 2 CDs, 138:17; Available from NAXOS Direct, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

If it were possible to establish a means of communication between the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries, perhaps no one would be more surprised than the composer himself to learn that in today’s musical circles Charles Gounod’s reputation rests almost solely upon the popularity of his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette. From the well-received first production of Sapho in 1851 until the unsuccessful première of Le tribut de Zamora in 1881, Gounod was a dominant figure in French opera, enriching the repertory with scores as lovely but largely ignored as La colombe, La reine de Saba, and Mireille. With many new operas now devoid of anything that might be mistaken for a memorable melody, the crime for which Gounod’s reputation has been doomed to derogation can be reasonably identified as tunefulness in the first degree. Even at the height of Gounod’s fame, dissenting voices alleged that the melodies of Faust and Roméo et Juliette, though undeniably pretty, failed to parallel the literary significance of Goethe’s and Shakespeare’s scenarios, but what accounts for the reversal of fortune whereby a pair of scores maligned for euphonious vapidity are now the two of his operas to be accepted into the international repertory? Superbly recorded in concert by Ediciones Singulares in Munich in January 2015, this performance of Gounod’s Cinq-Mars offers a new perspective on Gounod’s frequently misunderstood and misrepresented artistry, vastly different from the Romantic vistas of Faust and Roméo et Juliette. If melodic beauty and bounty are indeed damnable offenses, Gounod could hope for nothing other than condemnation, but this recording of Cinq-Mars makes an eloquent argument for commuting the composer’s sentence to one of eternal enjoyment in the world’s opera houses.

Premièred at Paris’s storied Opéra-Comique on 5 April 1877, Cinq-Mars is Gounod’s setting of Alfred de Vigny’s fictionalized episodes from the life of the Seventeenth-Century courtesan Marion Delorme, familiar as the title heroine of a play by Victor Hugo and operas by Giovanni Bottesini and Amilcare Ponchielli—familiar, that is, if an observer is aware of Hugo’s drama and Bottesini’s and Ponchielli’s operas. The opera’s largely disappointing first production was conducted by Charles Lamoureaux, who also planned and presided over the first performances in France of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde. There are few vestiges in Cinq-Mars of Wagner, whose Der Ring des Nibelungen was performed in full for the first time eight months before the première of Gounod’s opera, but the ears also search in vain for the unabashed lyricism of Faust and Roméo et Juliette. His imagination undoubtedly stoked by events from the history of his own country, Gounod composed a score for Cinq-Mars that is in some ways unlike any of his other extant operas. If Wagner is largely absent from the music, the grandeur of Beethoven and kinetic energy of Boieldieu are present, and the set pieces recall Meyerbeer and Halévy. The spirit of Verdi drifts northward over the Alps, as well, the Council Chamber Scene in Simon Boccanegra finding cousins in the elaborate ensembles in Gounod’s score, and with its idealistic tenor hero, put-upon soprano heroine, and menacing low-voiced representative of political intrigue, Cinq-Mars anticipates Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. The historical setting of Seventeenth-Century France inspired Gounod to create music that is aptly opulent without ever being pompous. Though unlikely to ever garner the widespread exposure of Faust, Cinq-Mars is a stirring, tautly-constructed work that, experienced via a performance of the quality of this one, expands the appreciation of Gounod’s theatrical flair.

A pupil of György Ligeti, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Horst Stein and once an assistant to Lorin Maazel, German conductor Ulf Schirmer has proved through performances and recordings to be an insightful, often enthralling exponent of the operas of Richard Strauss and repertory of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Here leading the excellent Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Münchner Rundfunkorchester, of which ensemble his tenure as Principal Conductor is scheduled to expire at the end of the 2016 – 2017 Season, Schirmer approaches Cinq-Mars with beneficial Teutonic discipline that does not inhibit the Gallic refinement of Gounod’s music. The conductor shrinks from neither extremes of dynamics nor forging ahead according to the dictates of the score, but his tempi do not rush the soloists, choristers, or musicians. The dramatic sweep of the opera is evident even in its most lyrical passages, and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester’s strong, stylish playing, not least of the well-crafted Prélude, reflects the considerable advantages of the musicians’ long-established relationship with Schirmer. The choral singing, prepared by Stellario Fagone under the direction of chorus mistress Eva Pons, further enhances the resoundingly positive impression made by Schirmer’s conducting. If there is a ‘Gounod school’ of conducting fostered by decades of communal acquaintance with Faust and Roméo et Juliette, successfully pacing a performance of Cinq-Mars often violates its teachings. The methodology that Schirmer employs in this performance of Cinq-Mars is very simple: follow where the score leads. The score leads Schirmer to the realization of a compelling account of this fascinating music.

The ensemble of vocalists assembled for supporting rôles in this performance of Cinq-Mars should provide every listener who complains about today’s alleged lack of truly capable singers with encouraging proof to the contrary. Cameroon-born bass Jacques-Greg Belobo as Le Roi and Le Chancelier, American tenor Andrew Lepri Meyer as De Montmort and L’Ambassadeur, German bass Matthias Ettmayr as De Montrésor and Eustache, and German bass-baritone Wolfgang Klose as De Brienne all sing handsomely, and their French diction is uniformly respectable. Moreover, whether singing ten notes or ten pages, they fashion vivid character studies from the music that Gounod gave them. The presence of French mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand as Ninon de L’Enclos and Un berger is as successful an instance of luxury casting as has graced any recording. Lenormamd shines without pretentiously making star turns of her appearances. A well-schooled, alluring instrument, her voice is used with feline grace: no matter what obstacles Gounod placed in her path, she unfailingly lands on her musical feet.

Following an opening scene in which the choristers’ singing of ‘A la cour vous allez paraître’ earns admiration for its animation and meticulously-balanced ensemble, the opera’s titular protagonist and his devoted friend de Thou, sung by French tenor Mathias Vidal and Greek baritone Tassis Christoyannis, propel the action of Act One and introduce themselves in a charismatic, perhaps slightly overlong duet, ‘Henri, vous nous parliez là d’une voix légère.’ Both gentlemen sing shrewdly, the baritone’s depiction of de Thou’s initial hesitation and concern giving way to hearty, effortlessly-vocalized camaraderie. Here and throughout the performance, Vidal proves an aptly noble figure, Cinq-Mars’s actions dictated by both conscience and decorum. Christoyannis’s de Thou is in many ways his foil, but the baritone’s attractive, inviolably secure vocalism lends his every utterance an inherent dignity that renders the character a particularly efficacious second to Cinq-Mars. Their conversation is framed by another stirring performance by the chorus, their singing of ‘Allez, par la nuit claire’ a delectable evocation of the untroubled night of which they sing.

As he portrays Gounod’s saturnine Père Joseph in this performance of Cinq-Mars with a voice of thunderous authority, it is no surprise that British bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams was thrillingly potent as Donner and Gunther in Opera North’s recent traversals of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. His characterization of Père Joseph is positively reptilian: one can virtually see the sadistic smirk of this cassocked crocodile. His manipulative, suggestive interjections in Act One are ever so polite, his cautious avoidance of showing his hand in the nation-making card game between his employer, Cardinal de Richelieu, and King Louis XIII cloaked in feigned deference to the royal prerogative: the blood ultimately on this Père Joseph’s hands glows almost as ruddily as l’Éminence rouge himself. From his first notes in this performance, it is apparent that Foster-Williams’s voice is an instrument groomed for greatness, one in which the great Verdi baritone rôles meet Wagner’s Holländer and Wotan. The inky smoothness of his singing of Père Joseph’s music is unnerving, the beauty and steadiness of his voice making the character’s malevolence all the more chilling.

In Marie’s recitative ‘Par quel trouble profond suis-je ici ramenée’ and moody cavatine ‘Nuit resplendissante et silencieuse,’ soprano Véronique Gens, one of France’s most beguiling and hardest-working singers, encounters music that might have been composed especially for the purpose of exploiting her musical and histrionic strengths. The linguistic clarity of Gens’s declamation of the recitative is invigorating, but it is the poise of her singing of the cavatine, its G₅ effortlessly projected, that captivates. With a wealth of experience in French Baroque music to her credit, Gens is uniquely qualified to approach Marie’s music with complete cognizance of its historical and artistic contexts, and she puts that qualification to meaningful use with a characterization of the conflicted pawn in factional maneuvering that throbs with feeling without violating the circumspect demeanor of a grand lady of Seventeenth-Century French society.

Act One concludes with a duet for Cinq-Mars and Marie, ‘Ah! vous m’avez pardonné ma folie,’ that is one of the score’s most frustrating numbers. Though very capably written for the voices, the music sounds comfortable rather than impassioned. Vidal and Gens sing commandingly, however, elevating the emotional temperature of the scene. Like his duet partner, Vidal is no stranger to Baroque repertory, and he shares Gens’s innate sense for maintaining vocal posture appropriate to the scale of the music. The foundations of Rameau, Dauvergne, and Gluck support the opulent structures of Gounod’s music, and the familiarity with French idioms of previous generations that Gens and Vidal wield gives their singing of Marie’s and Cinq-Mars’s scenes an element of legitimacy that palpably communicates the characters’ emotions; more powerfully, in truth, than Gounod’s music manages to do on its own in some passages.

The chorus and scene that begin Act Two. ‘A Marion, reine des belles,’ are performed incisively, and baritone André Heyboer gives a masterful account of Fontrailles’s chanson ‘On ne verra plus dans Paris tant de plumes ni de moustaches,’ his voice flowing through the music like the serpentine currents of the Seine. As performed here, Mélodrame that follows has the narrative thrust of radio drama, and the choristers bring energizing focus to ‘Ah! monsieur le grand écuyer, permettez que l’on vous salue.’ Vidal sings Cinq-Mars’s cavatine ‘Marie, ah! c’est la fin de notre longue attente’ romantically, his articulation of ‘Quand vous m’avez dit un jour’ shaped by the singer’s meticulous attention to both note and word values. In their trio, ‘Cet homme encore! Parlez,’ Gens’s Marie, Vidal’s Cinq-Mars, and Foster-Williams’s Père Joseph generate dramatic sparks that bring to mind the frenzied atmosphere of the final trio in Faust, the unison top B for the lovers rousingly projected as a counterattack against Père Joseph’s growling musical assault.

The chorus and Heyboer’s sonorous Fontrailles set the mood for Act Two’s second tableau with their intense ‘Ninon, dites-nous, je vous en supplie,’ introducing the fiery Ninon with perfectly-controlled but appropriately imploring ensemble. Sparkling like a priceless jewel against the dark backdrop of the drama is the Marion of French soprano Norma Nahoun, whose singing of the air ‘Bergers, qui le voulez connaître’ ignites the music with fearless handling of the its bravura flourishes to top A and B. The garnet-toned Lenormand phrases Le Berger’s sonnet ‘De vox traits, mon âme est navrée’ with the finesse expected of but so seldom heard from native speakers of French. Nahoun and the chorus deliver ‘Parmi les fougères’ with charm that contrasts markedly with the music that follows. The Conjuration that brings down the curtain on Act Two, ‘Viendra-t-il? Il viendra, Messieurs,’ is the most original scene in the score and one of Gounod’s most effective creations for the stage. The influence of Weber and Berlioz is apparent, but the musical language is exclusively Gounod’s. It is a language in which Schirmer and the cast of this performance of Cinq-Mars are fluent, and they collectively convey the genius of the Conjuration with extraordinary cogency.

It is to the chorus that Gounod entrusted launching Act Three, and the singers here repay him with a bristling account of ‘La fanfare éveillée, sous la haute feuillée,’ their work again a model of intelligently-managed balances and communicativeness. The trio for Marie, Cinq-Mars, and de Thou, ‘Madame, c’est le lieu du rendez-vous,’ receives from Gens, Vidal, and Christoyannis a performance of pulse-quickening immediacy, their vocalism glowing with the electricity of the text. The subsequent Mélodrame provides a tense transition to the brooding ambience of the next scene. Foster-Williams intones Père Joseph’s air ‘Tu t’en vas confiant dans ta folle entreprise’ with accents borrowed from the mouth of hell and sounds that satisfy like the bliss of heaven. His stark singing of ‘Dans une trame invisible’ is a tour de force, the words hurled like javelins: rarely on disc or on stage does operatic villainy sound so sinfully, almost erotically bewitching. Joining Gens in the duet ‘Demeurez ici, Madame; il faut m’entendre,’ Foster-Williams reaffirms that his dramatic sensibilities are as impressive as his voice. He and Gens engage in musical combat with the unstinting force of Shakespeare’s Iago and Desdemona. The soprano’s tones occasionally harden when the voice comes under pressure, but her musicality—one of the foremost wonders of the operatic world—carries her safely through every challenge. Like Act Two’s Conjuration, the Hallali-Chœur that ends Act Three, ‘Hallali! chasse superbe, le cerf est couché sur l’herbe,’ is an innovative number that anticipates later works like Magnard’s Guercœur and even Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. Whereas the grand public scenes in Faust and Roméo et Juliette are constructed of layers of lyrical melody, the Hallali-Chœur is an imposingly bleak edifice upon which vignettes of lyric beauty are carved. Schirmer’s instinct for spotlighting the moments of dulcet expressivity without obscuring the boldness of Gounod’s writing is put to telling use. In this performance, the act ends zealously, singers and orchestra holding nothing back in the execution of their parts.

Initiated with an aura of contemplation in ‘Ami, je faisais un beau rêve,’ Act Four moves quickly to its and the opera’s tragic dénouement. Vidal sings Cinq-Mars’s cavatine ‘C’est en vain que je veux pour jamais vous bannir’ beautifully, his imaginative phrasing highlighting nuances of both music and text. Occasionally, a voice with a stronger core—Alain Vanzo might have been an ideal Cinq-Mars, for instance—would likely make slightly greater impact in the music, but Vidal is a committed artist whose comfort with the style and tessitura of his music complements the assurance of his handling of his native language. Significantly, too, his seductively sweet-toned voice is evenly produced from bottom to top. In the duo with Marie, ‘Ah! qu’ai-je dit? Se peut-il que j’oublie,’ Vidal and Gens caress their lines, descending into great depths of emotion in their unaffected depiction of their characters’ desperate straits. Christoyannis adds his voice to theirs in ‘Amis, venez, plus de tristesse,’ and his singing resounds with contrasting steel and subtlety. Cinq-Mars and de Thou face Père Joseph one last time as they prepare for execution in the opera’s final scene. The cruel sentiments with which Gounod suffused ‘Messieurs, appelez à vous votre courage’ are heightened by the crackling voltage of Vidal’s, Christoyannis’s, and Foster-Williams’s vocal acting. Gens’s cry of despair as Cinq-Mars and de Thou unhesitatingly meet their deaths epitomizes the ethos of this performance: every sound serves the drama, and the drama is drawn organically from the music.

Performance in concert form is a perfect medium for displaying the abundant merits of Cinq-Mars—and, as this wonderful Ediciones Singulares release attests, for recording the opera. Without the need for elaborate scenic effects and costumes, resources can be devoted to engaging artists of the caliber that Gounod’s score deserves. Cinq-Mars is a work that is by no means an inferior sibling to Faust and Roméo et Juliette, but a decent Faust or Roméo et Juliette can be assembled from less-than-top-quality parts. Enrico Caruso famously quipped that Verdi’s Il trovatore requires neither more nor less than the world’s four greatest singers. Cinq-Mars’s demands are not quite so incredible, but the opera’s success depends upon what it receives in this performance: knowledgeable conducting, dedicated music making, and first-rate singing. Many are the forgotten scores that could be delightfully resurrected by the quartet of Mathias Vidal, Véronique Gens, Tassis Christoyannis, and Andrew Foster-Williams. It is Gounod’s excellent fortune that they espoused his Cinq-Mars.

​The English playwright, abolitionist, and reform-minded philanthropist Hannah More, a copy of whose 1777 drama Percy was catalogued as part of Mozart’s estate at the time of his death in 1791, wrote in a 1775 letter to one of her sisters that ‘going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.’ Pondering More’s sentiment, every child of a conscientious mother can likely imagine said mother planting her hands on her hips and saying, with precisely the appropriate interrogatory tone, ‘What exactly did she mean by that?’ What, indeed? To be sure, opera is an utterly unique, intoxicating organism, one capable of astonishing feats of metamorphosis, but can it really be characterized as a Dostoevskian synthesis of crime and consequences? Few opera lovers have been fortunate enough to wholly avoid performances that might be described as crimes against the operatic muse, but offending interpreters of Giordano’s Andrea Chénier and Maddalena de Coigny and Poulenc’s Carmélites have yet to actually be guillotined in retribution for their on-stage transgressions. Perhaps, then, the wages of opera’s sins are emotional rather than punitive: granted the privilege of witnessing trespasses of operatic proportions enacted in song, one’s penance is spiritual rather than physical. Hearing the heartfelt oaths of Rossini’s Arsace, the death throes of Bellini’s Romeo and Giulietta, the vengeful utterances of Verdi’s Odabella, and the ecstatic proclamations of Richard Strauss’s Freihild resound in Lisner Auditorium on the campus of The George Washington University in Washington Concert Opera performances of Semiramide, I Capuleti ed i Montecchi, Attila, and Guntram, going to the opera engenders sensations too euphoric to be denied or forgotten. If these escapades truly are sinful, Washington Concert Opera performances have for thirty years been inveigling seductresses, Delilahs and Jezebels adorned with musical jewels that have sparkled dazzlingly in the sometimes-calamitous atmosphere of the American capital. Celebrating their beloved institution’s thirtieth anniversary with a gala concert on 18 September 2016, featuring soprano Angela Meade, mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, tenor Michele Angelini, and other guests performing music that pays homage to the company’s legacy, today’s stewards of Washington Concert Opera—Executive Director Caryn Kerstetter Reeves, Artistic Director Antony Walker, Board of Directors President Melissa Rhea, and Chief Operating Officer Adrianne Eby—usher in a new era in WCO’s odyssey with an affectionate musical appraisal of the past. Enjoying such a performance hardly seems like punishment, Miss More, but, if this be sinful, vice sounds positively irresistible.

Founded by conductor Stephen Crout and Arts administrator Peter Russell, Washington Concert Opera’s journey began in 1986 with a performance of Georges Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles that featured Hei-Kyung Hong as Leïla, the late Jerry Hadley as Nadir, and Gaétan Laperrière as Zurga. From that start, the organization’s mission has been admirably consistent: bring opera in concert form to metropolitan Washington with the highest standards of musicality—standards that, in practical terms, cannot always be achieved or maintained in fully-staged productions. In subsequent years, WCO performances have often filled voids in the repertories of America’s opera companies, giving neglected scores opportunities to reveal their glories to attentive audiences. Rarely heard in North America, Bellini’s Il pirata, Donizetti’s La favorite (in its original French), Massenet’s Esclarmonde, Mercadante’s Il giuramento, Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero, Strauss’s Guntram, and Verdi’s Il corsaro have all benefited from Washington Concert Opera’s attention, ambitiously furthering the objective of spotlighting works that languish in the shadows of better-known operas.

Central to the​ realization of this core component of WCO’s artistic goal is the casting of performances with singers who possess the qualities that the rôles at hand require. Not even the best intentions make a soprano without both an ironclad bravura technique and an unflappable command of legato a Giulietta, Imogene, or Elisabetta who is effective as Bellini and Donizetti intended them to be. Complementing choral singing that has grown more confident with each successive performance and the playing of an orchestra that boasts of personnel like Gita Ladd, whose cello sings as poignantly as any voice, a defining glory of WCO performances throughout the past thirty years has been the engagement of singers not only near-ideally qualified for their assignments but unmistakably dedicated to both their own success and that of the performances in which they participated. In many cases, this has bestowed upon audiences the additional boons of providing opportunities to hear young voices of tremendous promise, admired singers in rôles they are unlikely to perform elsewhere, and great artists focused solely upon the music before them. With a roster of alumni including Stephanie Blythe, Lawrence Brownlee, Michael Fabiano, Renée Fleming, Elizabeth Futral, Denyce Graves, Ben Heppner, Sumi Jo, Jennifer Larmore, Kate Lindsey, Alessandra Marc, James Morris, Marjorie Owens, David Portillo, Jessica Pratt, Patricia Racette, John Relyea, Robert Dean Smith, James Valenti, Deborah Voigt, and Tamara Wilson, ​WCO performances have exemplified the high levels of excellence that can be reached by casting newcomers alongside seasoned veterans.

Revisiting several of the most memorable evenings in WCO’s history, three exhilarating visitors to the Lisner Auditorium stage shared their singular insights about what makes Washington Concert Opera as special for artists as it is for audiences.

The next generation of bel canto: Soprano Nicole Cabell
[Photo by Devon Cass, © by Nicole Cabell/CAMI]

​One of today’s most beautiful singers in every sense of that distinction, soprano Nicole Cabell débuted with Washington Concert Opera as Medora in the company’s ​March ​2014 performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il corsaro and returned as Giulietta in WCO’s ​September ​20​14​ traversal of Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi. In both performances, her singing radiated unforced emotional honesty and absolute preparedness, but neither of these admirable qualities made quite so indelible an impression as the natural beauty of her voice. One sometimes hears prize-winning voices and wonders what competition adjudicators heard that is not apparent to less-critical ears, but Cabell’s singing of Verdi’s and Bellini’s music more than justified her recognition as a Cardiff Singer of the World victor. From her perspective, however, this gifted singer’s WCO performances were shaped not by her own vocalism but by teamwork of a sort that is not always possible in today’s increasingly cinematic productions, maelstroms in which singers can be pushed and pulled in directions that distract them from the music and from one another. ‘Washington Concert Opera is one of the best companies I’ve had the pleasure of performing with,’ Cabell remarked, ‘not only for the amazing talent standing beside me [on stage] but also for the commitment to music above all.’ It is this commitment, she asserted, that defines WCO, both on and off the stage. ‘Music and voices take center stage with WCO, which is refreshing in an era of visual distraction,’ she offered.

Her WCO performances partnered Cabell with some of her most talented compatriots among America’s young generation of opera singers, and she cited this as another revered aspect of these engagements. ‘Blending my voice with the great instruments of Tamara Wilson, Michael Fabiano, and Kate Lindsey, amongst others, ranks in the top experiences of my singing career,’ Cabell enthused. Performances such as WCO’s Corsaro and Capuleti do not materialize with singers in a vacuum, of course, and Cabell is refreshingly clear-sighted about the rôle that cooperation among voices and the podium that has been fostered throughout WCO’s history, especially during Antony Walker’s fifteen-year tenure as Artistic Director, plays in performances’ success. ‘Working with Maestro Walker has been a consistent pleasure in that he truly is a singer’s conductor and knows so much about bel canto music,’ Cabell said.

Figlia d’un antico feudo: Soprano Nicole Cabell as Giulietta in San Francisco Opera’s 2012 production of Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi
[Photo by Cory Weaver, © by San Francisco Opera]

In Cabell’s estimation, the unique circumstances of Washington Concert Opera’s endeavors provide audiences with experiences that are equally unique. ‘The combination of great music and golden-age singing is guaranteed when you attend a performance at WCO,’ she intimated. Washington Concert Opera’s three-decade performance annals confirm the veracity of her assessment, reminding listeners that top-quality singing overcomes many obstacles that stand between a little-known score and widespread appreciation. Of course, the singing in any performance is even more assuredly ‘golden’ when Cabell is among its cast.

Bella donna di bel canto: Soprano Brenda Harris
[Photo by Lisa Kohler, © by Brenda Harris]

Elisabetta in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux and Odabella in Verdi’s Attila are treacherous shoals upon which many vocal vessels have foundered. These rôles are a musical Graveyard of the Atlantic in which many voices have sunk, but the singing of soprano Brenda Harris is an artistic Cape Hatteras, a buffer protecting dramatic bel canto from bruising indifference and a beacon guiding performances into safe harbors. One of the world’s most versatile singers, she is a delicate Cleopatra and Violetta who is also a powerhouse Elektra and Turandot. In Washington Concert Opera performances, she has been a source of excitement recalling the sui generis Leyla Gencer, a bel canto singer with the heart of a verista. Her Elisabettas in Roberto Devereux and Maria Stuarda and Odabella were wounded lionesses, their roars never completely hiding touching vulnerability.

Like Cabell, Harris rejoices in the camaraderie that results from the frenetic pace at which Washington Concert Opera performances are forged. ‘Because we don’t have staging, the rehearsal period with WCO is shorter than [with] a “normal” opera [company],’ she commented. ‘That could be perceived as a negative, but I find it exhilarating! Maestro Walker is very character-oriented and helps everyone find a “musical characterization” during the rehearsal process.’ To Walker’s guiding force Harris attributes the creative spark that ignites WCO performances. ‘Again, because we’re not staged, this is very important,’ she added. ‘It’s a happy environment, and everyone seems to work together under his direction.’

Buona regina: Soprano Brenda Harris as Elisabetta in Minnesota Opera’s 2010 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux
[Photo by Michael Daniel, © by Minnesota Opera]

Reflecting on her most vivid memories of her appearances with WCO, Harris immediately honed in on her performance of one of the most demanding of Donizetti’s operas. ‘For sure, it has to be Roberto Devereux!’ she exclaimed. WCO’s 2004 performance of Roberto Devereux featured Walker presiding over Tracey Welborn as Roberto, Harris as Elisabetta, Elizabeth Bishop as Sara, and William Stone as Nottingham. ‘I had never sung the rôle [or the] opera before, and it was an absolute joy,’ Harris explained. ‘Antony was an amazing collaborator and seemed a bel canto expert! After the performance, we asked him how many other bel canto operas he’d done, and he admitted it was his first. I couldn’t believe it! He was a natural.’ Only an artist of Harris’s caliber would cite singing music as punishing as that for the vengeful but ultimately humbled Elisabetta as a treasured experience. ‘The [opera’s] final scene was a dramatic joy for me,’ she continued. ‘[Walker] took a tempo that I feared because it had great depth and authority, and it turned out to be brilliant. I’ve sung the opera in staged productions since, but I will always remember that first one with Maestro Walker and WCO!​’ This is a sentiment surely common to everyone who was fortunate enough to hear the performance, not least Harris’s riveting traversal of Elisabetta’s ‘Quel sangue versato al cielo s’innalza.’

With acclaimed performances throughout the United States to her credit, Harris is especially cognizant of WCO’s significance among America’s opera companies. ‘​Washington Concert Opera [provides] great opportunities to hear works that aren’t so often done, in a venue that is every bit as exciting as a fully-staged production,’ she opined. ‘The musical bar is set high, and Maestro Walker is an extremely artistic and sympathetic interpreter of these works!’ Ruminating on her appearances in WCO performances and the rôle that the company​ plays in uplifting opera in America, Harris summarized Washington Concert Opera’s ventures with words that every opera lover longs to hear: ‘You won't be disappointed!’​

Washington’s other First Lady: Soprano Nelly Miricioiu
[Photo © 2009 by Hans Hijmering]

​A​mong the important singers whose efforts have influenced the course of opera’s four-century journey, few have brought to their performances personal histories as compelling as that of soprano ​Nelly Miricioiu​​. Born in Romania, she and her family were victims of the widespread persecution perpetrated by the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, but music was a vital element of her liberation from the stifling political milieu of her fatherland. Established in the United Kingdom via a sequence of high-level personal intercession and political maneuvering worthy of a scenario by Dame Iris Murdoch, Miricioiu became a bonafide prima donna in the very best sense, an enchanting singing actress with a timbre sometimes eerily reminiscent of Maria Callas but always entirely her own. Few audiences have been as fortunate as Washington Concert Opera patrons in savoring Miricioiu’s finest singing, and the diva is keenly aware of the nurturing influence of her remarkable relationship with WCO.

Miricioiu cherishes memories of working with Stephen Crout, who conducted her earliest appearance with Washington Concert Opera, but she is also abundantly positive about the broader contexts of WCO’s repertory, planning, and presentation. ​‘I recall all my performances with Washington Concert Opera with both pleasure and admiration for the company’s unique musical achievements and its dedicated, knowledgeable, and appreciative audiences and supporters,’ Miricioiu said. ‘I say unique because I only know of one or two similar small companies bringing such high-quality concert opera performances to the public.’ She believes that the impact of WCO’s initiatives extends far beyond the ranks of those who fill Lisner Auditorium on Sunday evenings for the company’s performances. ‘I feel [that this] adds greatly to Washington's musical life,’ she stated. ‘Washington Concert Opera is a great example of what can be achieved by dedicated members and supporters, [adding] to the life of a great city such as Washington, enriching both its cultural and artistic lives just as my own association with the company has also been enriched.’

Femme fatale: Soprano Nelly Miricioiu in the title rôle of Australian Opera's 1996 production of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia
[Photo © by Opera Australia]

​One of the foremost interpreters of Bellini’s and Donizetti’s heroines in recent memory, Miricioiu is an artist whose career, like Harris’s, has defied the demoralizing decline of true bel canto. Bellini’s Il pirata has been heard at New York’s Metropolitan Opera as few as nine times, all in the 2002 – 2003 Season, and Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia was performed at the MET only once, as long ago as 1904, when the opera was received by the press with hostility despite the presence of Enrico Caruso as Gennaro. WCO performances featuring Miricioiu made enormous strides in granting these beautiful scores the exposure they deserve, supplementing rare performances by American Opera Society and Opera Orchestra of New York. ‘I have very fond memories of appearing with Washington Concert Opera for the first time in 1990, when I had the opportunity to début the title rôle of Lucrezia Borgia by Donizetti, in a performance that I happily recall with pride in it being so wonderfully received by the audience,’ Miricioiu observed. From the perspectives of both those on the stage and those in the the audience, Washington Concert Opera’s performances are a forum in which risks are helpfully encouraged, earnestness is applauded, and brilliance is extolled.

In today’s do-or-die pecuniary conditions for the Performing Arts, the fiscal necessity of filling seats makes following the maxim of ‘Ars gratia artis’ virtually impossible for most Arts institutions. In this second decade of the Twenty-First Century, perhaps this gets at the essence of Hannah More’s two-centuries-old anecdote: an inherent punishment to which those who indulge in the sin of opera, whether by producing or partaking of it, are subjected is financial burden. In the company’s history, there have been dark days for Washington Concert Opera, but esteeming Art and the people who make and consume it more highly than dollars and endowments has given WCO an advantage that, in recent years, has markedly brightened the horizon. When one enters Lisner Auditorium on the evening of a WCO performance, there is a palpable sense not of pretension or haughtiness but of people who genuinely love opera putting on a show for kindred spirits—a sin, perhaps, but a magnificently communal one! This is the foundation upon which opera’s future must be built.

Nelly Miricioiu put it best: ‘Congratulations,’ Washington Concert Opera, ‘for your forthcoming Thirtieth Anniversary concert, and [wishing you] every success into the future!’

JOHAN BOTHA
19 August 1965 – 8 September 2016

When Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg received its first production in the United States during The Metropolitan Opera’s 1886 – 1887 Season, it was written in the pages of The New York Times that the Walther von Stolzing of German tenor Albert Stritt ‘was picturesque and broadly handled, and he treated the music with artistic judgment and richness of vocal expression’ and that ‘he sang his prize song with great vigor and awoke the enthusiasm of the audience.’ One of the foremost lessons that can be gleaned from the performance history ofDie Meistersinger is that vocal beauty and stamina, qualities that a wholly successful Walther must possess, rarely inhabit the same bodies. Walthers with voices of lyrical beauty are sometimes swept away by Wagner’s orchestral deluges, and more stentorian singers are apt to make Walther’s impassioned Preislied a martial salute to Walhalla rather than a paean to burgeoning love. In the 416 performances of Die Meistersinger heard at the MET since 1886, Walther’s demanding music was sung on seventeen memorable occasions by Johan Botha, one of the few tenors heard since the ends of the eras of Leo Slezak, Max Lorenz, Set Svanholm, Sándor Kónya, Jess Thomas, and James King for whom Walther was natural, comfortable vocal territory. A man with an imposing physique, Botha brought straightforward dramatic sincerity to his characterizations, portraying the men he became on stage as their creators envisioned them. Though his carefully-wrought and fastidiously-maintained technique enabled him to effortlessly project his voice to the most distant seats in large opera houses, the attribute of his voice that was most arresting was its sweetness. Botha finessed music that other singers force, and his passing at the age of fifty-one, another artist felled by the monstrous effects of cancer, is a tremendous loss both to those who knew him and to those who appreciate the art of song. He is survived by his wife and sons.

A native of South Africa, Botha débuted at The Metropolitan Opera as Canio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in 1997, only eight years after his professional début as Max in Weber’s Der Freischütz in his homeland. It was his interpretation of the caddish Lieutenant Pinkerton in Opéra Bastille’s 1993 production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly that heralded Botha’s arrival in the international opera community. Two years later, Botha was a delightfully fresh-voiced Rodolfo in Covent Garden’s revival of Puccini’s La bohème. He went on to sing several of his finest rôles at the Royal Opera House, garnering praise from British audiences and critics for his performances as Cavaradossi and Calàf in Puccini’s Tosca and Turandot, the Kaiser and Apollo in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten and Daphne, Radamès in Verdi’s Aida, and Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. His repertory at the Wiener Staatsoper, by which company he was awarded the coveted distinction of Kammersänger, included these parts in addition to the title rôles in Wagner’s Parsifal, Verdi’s Don Carlos and Otello, and Giordano’s Andrea Chénier; Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio; Arrigo in Verdi’s I vespri siciliani; Erik and Siegmund in Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Die Walküre; Ein Sänger, Bacchus, and Stimme eines Jünglings in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Die Frau ohne Schatten; and Turiddu and Canio in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.

Many of the rôles that featured prominently in Botha’s international career also endeared him to American audiences. The San Francisco Examiner’s critic observed that Botha’s 2009 interpretation of Verdi’s Otello, his début rôle with San Francisco Opera, was ‘majestic and towering, yet believable, invoking sympathy,’ and esteemed critic John von Rhein, reviewing Lyric Opera of Chicago's 2015 production of Wagner’s opera, wrote that ‘Botha is today’s definitive Tannhäuser, and he has the vocal heft, lung power and stamina to make it through to the end of a very long opera without a hint of strain.’ In addition to Canio and Walther, his eighty-one performances at the MET also included portrayals of Beethoven’s Florestan, Verdi’s Don Carlo, Radamès, and Otello, Wagner’s Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and Siegmund, and Puccini’s Calàf.

Botha was a sterling example of an artist for whom an expansive girth was an aspect of rather than a hindrance to his stage presence. He was sometimes criticized for being a ‘stand and deliver’ singer, but how he delivered! His MET broadcasts document a legacy of fine, involved singing—a legacy not always advanced by his colleagues in those MET performances. There could be no better memento of Botha’s work as a Wagnerian than his account of the title rôle in the Profil recording of Lohengrin conducted by Semyon Bychkov. On disc, only Peter Anders truly rivals Botha as a Lohengrin whose timbre alone qualifies him for the title of Schwanritter. It was a timbre that should have gone on entrancing listeners for years to come.

Der Mann mit dem Schwert: South African tenor Johan Botha (1965 – 2016) as Siegmund in Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre at The Metropolitan Opera in 2009
[Photo by Ken Howard, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

ANGE FLÉGIER (1846 – 1927): Mélodies pour voix basse et piano—Jared Schwartz, bass; Mary Dibbern, piano; Thomas Demer, viola (‘Apaisement’) [Recorded in St. Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral, Dallas, Texas, USA, 27 – 28 April 2016; Toccata Classics TOCC 0306; 1 CD, 64:31; Available from Toccata Classics, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers; includes WORLD PREMIÈRE and MODERN PREMIÈRE RECORDINGS]

For the dedicated angler, among the greatest anxieties of time spent by, on, or in the water is the gnawing ignorance of what bounties were just beyond his grasp—the ones that got away. For the dedicated musician, too, there are always questions about the boundaries of his repertory. There are not neglected masterpieces in every music library and archive, shrugging their shoulders and wondering why they are incapable of lifting themselves out of the shadows, but there are untold numbers of works still waiting to be discovered by artists with the particular gifts needed to disclose their finest qualities to observers whose skepticism is a natural-born offspring of unfamiliarity. Recorded with mostly natural ambiance in the bright acoustic of Dallas’s Cathedral Church of Saint Matthew, this Toccata Classics disc unites superb-quality Mélodies for bass voice by little-remembered French composer Ange Flégier with American bass Jared Schwartz, a young Indianan whose singing on this disc is characterized by the qualities for which the music begs: clarity of mind, tone, and language. Not a newcomer to recording despite his youth, Schwartz nonetheless infuses this disc with an engrossing freshness that reveals far more than a thoughtfully-attained acquaintance with overlooked repertory. It is apparent in his singing here that, for Schwartz, music is not a casual paramour with whom he flirts but an adored mistress whose integrity he passionately upholds and increases. He and music are devoted lovers, in other words, and these accounts of Flégier’s Mélodies are their sweet kisses.

Born into a working-class family in Marseille in 1846, Flégier was in some ways an unlikely candidate for a position of importance in France’s often fiercely competitive musical establishment. Following a period of study at the Conservatoire de Marseille, the young musician left his native city and in 1866 enrolled at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris, where he encountered a number of the luminaries of French music of his time, including Hector Berlioz, Ambroise Thomas, and Daniel François Esprit Auber. Flégier’s music failed to take top prizes in the exalted competitions of the day, but it is worth noting that the names of the composers-in-training whose scores were victorious in the years in which Flégier’s compositions were their competitors are no more familiar to modern eyes than Flégier’s. Unless his dedications of his published works were exercises in well-aimed sycophancy, the Marseillais counted among his friends as discriminating a colleague as Jules Massenet, and neither the lack of historical documentation of extensive details of his youthful precocity nor the paucity of his works before the Twenty-First-Century public detracts from the undeniable quality of the Mélodies on this disc. Without question, these Mélodies reveal that Flégier was a tunesmith whose creations warrant comparison with the Lieder of Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss.

Accompanied by pianist Mary Dibbern with abundant sensitivity and the complementary firm rhythmic core and interpretive flexibility that are at the heart of the music, Schwartz sings ‘Le Cor,’ a setting of a text by Alfred de Vigny and perhaps the most widely known of Flégier’s Mélodies, with focus that reveals the emotional nuances of the song without exaggerating them. No less insightfully communicative is his performance of Flégier’s treatment of de Vigny’s words in ‘La Neige,’ the distinctive sounds of French vowels used to highlight the intelligence with which the composer translated the poet’s sentiments into musical language. The young bass does not allow the similarities between ‘La Poésie,’ an adaptation of verses by Édouard Pailleron, and Adolphe Adam’s familiar ‘Cantique de Noël’ to distract him from the originality of Flégier’s writing. Schwartz’s cognac-hued timbre, reminiscent of the voices of great French-speaking singers of prior generations like Heinz Rehfuss and René Bianco, flows through the music intoxicatingly, consonants lightly but effectively voiced.

The depths of expression reached in Flégier’s handling of Jean Richepin’s text in ‘Au crépuscule’ are reflected in the expansiveness of the accompaniment, and Dibbern provides Schwartz with a profoundly eloquent palette upon which to mix the colors of the vocal line. The interaction between singer and pianist is a model of the art that conceals art, their collaboration having been refined to the point of seeming as much biological as artistic without sounding in any way artificial or studio-bound. ‘À la dérive,’ another Richepin setting, was esteemed highly enough in the Nineteenth Century to be included alongside songs by Gounod, Massenet, and Verdi in a volume entitled Classical Vocal Gems by the Best Modern Composers, published in Boston in 1892. As performed on this disc by Schwartz and Dibbern, the song’s appeal is immediately apparent. In Flégier’s exquisitely melancholic response to Richepin’s ‘Les Larmes,’ too, the bass’s voice drapes over the polished-marble pillars of Dibbern’s playing like rustic silk, the occasional blemish in the vocal fabric revealing not ruinous imperfection but heartening humanity. Unlike so many young singers, Schwartz has the good sense and the musicality to transform very minor lapses in intonation into fleeting moments of vulnerability that suit the lush textures of the music.

The starkly descriptive text of ‘L’Homme et la Mer’ is drawn from Charles Baudelaire's seminal Les Fleurs du mal, one of the most influential collections of poetry published in the Nineteenth Century in any language, and the superb lyrical quality of Flégier’s setting is a testament not only to his skill as a composer but also to his acute perceptiveness as an interpreter of words. Schwartz and Dibbern heighten appreciation of the quality of Flégier’s music by exploring every recess of angst and ambiguity without overextending the dimensions of the music. The pair of Mélodies constructed from texts by René de Saint-Prest, ‘Le Manoir’ and ‘Ma coupe,’ occupy very different emotional landscapes, but the consistency of Dibbern’s playing, her phrasing always expertly matched to Flégier’s masterful mirroring of the flow of the text, aids Schwartz in limning the Mélodies’ differences solely by singing the music as written. The notes on the page serve singer and pianist well in the Armand Silvestre setting ‘Chant d’automne,’ as well, and they in turn craft a performance that is a splendid service to both composer and poet.

‘Apaisement’ is unique among the Mélodies recorded here in pairing the vocal line with an obbligato part for viola, delivered in this performance with warm tone and elasticity of line by Thomas Demer. The way in which Schwartz and Demer blend their sounds brings to mind the inner movements of Bach’s D-minor Concerto for two violins (BWV 1043) and Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra (K. 364/320d), their euphonious give and take enhancing the piquancy of Paul Verlaine’s words. Verlaine’s text again makes a strong impression in Schwartz’s singing of ‘Je ne sais pourquoi,’ the easy solidity of tone making the elegance of Flégier’s marriage of music with text all the more apparent. The most unusual of these Mélodies proves to be one of the most profoundly enjoyable: employing an excerpt from the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ‘O salutaris’ is the kind of song that reaffirms that the simplest modes of musical expression are sometimes the most metaphysically complex. With their performance of the piece, Schwartz and Dibbern reaffirm that the same can be said of singing. ‘Less is more’ is a cute cliché, but in music it is too often cited as a justification for performances that are marred by musicians whose resources are not equal to the demands of the music. This is a concern that never materializes in the context of this disc. Schwartz and Dibbern lack nothing that Flégier requires of them, and in their ideally-scaled, richly imaginative performances of these thirteen Mélodies they give neither more nor less than the music needs.

Every musical institutional whether educational or professional should demand and ensure that its constituents of all ages and levels of ability fully comprehend that impeccable vocalism is a component of but neither on its own constitutes nor is synonymous with good singing. Exasperatingly, great voices sometimes inhabit the bodies of idlers and idiots. Sometimes, too, remarkable techniques counterbalance and conceal the flaws in decidedly imperfect voices. For singers as much as for politicians, though, Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom is abundantly true: one might manage to fool some people all of the time and all people some of the time, it is impossible even now to deceive everyone all of the time. In his tenure at the Opéra de Paris, Ange Flégier likely learned this through observation, and perhaps this experience prompted him to compose Mélodies that offer performers nowhere to hide, vocally or artistically. In this age in which it sometimes seems that young singers are trained to think identically and to look and sound as impersonally interchangeable as possible, encountering a disc like this one and a developing artist like Jared Schwartz is an unexpected delight. How strange it seems that an intuitive young bass singing little-known but fascinating music beautifully and idiomatically might be interpreted as consciously ​daring to be different.

JULES MASSENET (1842 – 1912): Manon—Annick Massis (Manon), Alessandro Liberatore (Le chevalier des Grieux), Pierre Doyen (Lescaut), Roger Joakim (Le comte des Grieux), Papuna Tchuradze (Guillot de Morfontaine), Patrick Delcour (De Brétigny), Sandra Pastrana (Poussette), Alexise Yerna (Rosette), Sabine Conzen (Javotte); Chœur et Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal de Wallonie – Liège; Patrick Davin, conductor [Recorded during live performances at l’Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège, Belgique, in October 2014; Dynamic CDS 7751/2; 2 CDs, 151:49 (also available on DVD – Dynamic 37751); Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

When Abbé Antoine François Prévost’s controversial novella L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut was first published in 1731, it is doubtful that its author, no matter how cognizant he was of the quality of his work, could have imagined the lasting influence that the seventh and final installment in his Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité would exert on literature and art in general for generations to come. Educated by Jesuits and eventually accepted as a postulant by Benedictines, Prévost was as unconventional a man of the cloth as he was a man of letters. The morals of his Manon Leacaut and Chevalier des Grieux are decidedly more pragmatic than traditionally Christian, but there is at the heart of Prévost’s tale of the troubled lovers a grim explication of the repercussions of envy, greed, and recklessness. Presumptuous though it may be, it is not difficult to see in the Abbé des Grieux of the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice an autobiographical portrait of the Abbé Prévost glumly going through the motions of his Benedictine duties. Whether or not the author identified with his creations on a profoundly personal level, the vibrancy with which the characters in L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut are drawn is unquestionably a principal reason for the work’s appeal to later generations of artists. By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, Jean-Louis Aumer’s 1830 ballet and Daniel Auber’s 1856 opéra comique, both entitled Manon Lescaut, had firmly established Prévost’s Manon and Des Grieux as enduring presences in European art; presences that would continue to expand in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries on canvas, on film, and via musical settings including Hans Werner Henze’s 1952 Lyrisches Drama Boulevard Solitude.

Premièred at Paris’s famed Opéra-Comique on 19 January 1884, Jules Massenet’s Manon is both its composer’s best-known opera and, alongside Giacomo Puccini’s breakthrough 1893 Manon Lescaut, one of the two most enduring operatic adaptations of Abbé Prévost’s novel. Performed a thousand times at the Opéra-Comique in the quarter-century after its first outing there, Manon was immediately recognized in and beyond France as the pinnacle of Massenet’s writing for the stage. A decade later, Massenet revisited the milieux of Prévost’s protagonists in Le portrait of Manon, an opéra-comique in one act in which the aged Des Grieux ultimately sanctions his nephew’s marriage to a young woman upon learning that she is Manon’s niece, but it was his Manon that both solidified Prévost’s legacy and secured his own position among the revered composers of opera. Now, 134 years after the opera’s first performance, Manon’s fortunes often seem imperiled by the decline of the legitimate French school of singing. At New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where Manon received its company première on 16 January 1895, with the ideal cast of Massenet’s beloved Sibyl Sanderson as Manon, Jean de Reszke as Des Grieux, and Pol Plançon as Comte des Grieux, the opera has been presented 272 times between its first hearing and 28 March 2015, the date of its most recent performance at the MET, whereas Gounod’s Faust and Bizet’s Carmen have been performed 752 and 1,001 times since their respective MET premières in 1883 and 1884. In recent seasons, singers of the caliber of Natalie Dessay and Diana Damrau have argued Manon’s case in opera houses throughout the world, but not even their best efforts have fully restored the Gallic sparkle that shone on archaic recordings of the opera featuring Fanny Heldy and Germaine Féraldy. Sparkle is what the heroine of this new Dynamic recording offers bountifully, giving listeners a rare Manon with a portrayal of Prévost’s and Massenet’s complex title character that can be appreciated without serious reservation.

Recorded during 2014 performances at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie, also taped and released on DVD by Dynamic, this recording documents a production by Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera that updated the opera’s action from Prévost’s time to that of a more modern, Louis Malle-esque France. On these discs, the only aural evidence of the production’s revised setting is the revving of the getaway vehicle’s engine as Des Grieux is abducted at the end of Act Two. Hardly what Massenet imagined for the scene more than a century ago, it is very effective on disc, the motor’s growling leaving no doubt that Des Grieux has been spirited away. Under the baton of conductor Patrick Davin, the Liège choral and orchestral forces give performances that are alternately sinewy and sumptuous as the score requires. The choral singing is impressive throughout the performance, especially in the Cours-la-Reine scene in Act Three, and, if not unfailingly first-rate, the orchestral playing is polished and often beautiful. The wit of Massenet’s orchestrations benefits from Davin’s handling of the score, which is confident despite tempi that occasionally hinder the momentum of scenes, not least in the opening minutes of Act One. In both the large-scaled public scenes and the moments of greatest intimacy between Manon and Des Grieux, however, Davin displays masterful control over the musical forces under his command, reveling in the contrasting grandeur and introspection. Utilizing the edition of the score with sung recitatives published by Heugel and Company, Davin maintains admirable continuity even when the energy of the performance intermittently wanes, enabling the cast to delve deeply into the nuances of Massenet’s music and Henri Meilhac’s and Philippe Gille’s libretto.

As Guillot de Morfontaine and De Brétigny, tenor Papuna Tchuradze and baritone Patrick Delcour sing excellently, bringing their characters to life with secure, vibrant tone and animated, intelligent use of text. The callous, opportunistic aspects of both men are revealed without either of them wholly descending into base villainy: Tchuradze’s and Delcour’s expertly-judged performances provide the antagonism required by the drama but spare the listener melodramatic excesses and ugly sounds. The trio of Spanish soprano Sandra Pastrana, Belgian mezzo-soprano Alexise Yerna, and Belgian soprano Sabine Conzen make Poussette, Rosette, and Javotte far more than the twittering ciphers that they are in many performances of Manon. Skillfully and mellifluously blending their voices, the ladies sing delightfully, creating distinctive vignettes that cast the ladies individually and collectively as effective foils for Manon. Pastrana’s and Conzen’s upper registers glisten, and Yerna’s tones are secure throughout the range of Rosette’s music. Poor singing in any of the opera’s supporting rôles is disfiguring though rarely altogether ruinous, but an ensemble of voices as capable as these markedly enriches this Manon.

The Comte des Grieux of baritone Roger Joakim is a commanding figure in the drama as an aptly authoritarian father for Des Grieux. Singing robustly throughout the performance, he gives a moving account of ‘Épouse quelque brave fille’ in the second tableau of Act Three, pleading with his son to put perpetuating the family name ahead of his newfound religious convictions. In Act Four, Joakim voices ‘Oui, je viens t’arracher à la honte qui chaque jour grandit sur toi’ powerfully. His refusal to aid Manon is harsh, but there is great warmth in Joakim’s Comte’s interactions with his son. As Manon’s cousin Lescaut, baritone Pierre Doyen complements Joakim’s strengths, singing handsomely and declaiming the text with burly clarity. His voice rings out impressively in ‘C’est bon! Je perdrais la mémoire quand il s’agit de boire!’ in Act One, and he chides Manon gently but potently in ‘Ne bronchez pas, soyez gentille.’ In solo lines and ensembles, Doyen’s singing is always noticed, and he plays his part in the opera’s plot with avidity. Lescaut’s ‘Frappez, je donnerais ma vie’ in Act Five is delivered with telling vehemence. As Lescaut’s realization that attempting to free Manon from imprisonment by force is futile turns to desperation and despair, Doyen’s tones become more rather than less focused, lending the actuality of Manon’s sentence added sting. Both Joakim’s and Doyen’s performances recall another Belgian singer with a significant relationship with Manon, José van Dam.

Italian tenor Alessandro Liberatore made his rôle début as the idealistic Chevalier des Grieux in this production, and it was an auspicious beginning for a characterization that, as recorded, already makes all of the points requested by Massenet. Liberatore’s vowel placement and basic timbre, especially above the stave, are often reminiscent of Roberto Alagna at his best, and the Italianate ardor of his singing—a quality that need not be excluded from performances of French repertory—compensates for occasional coarseness, uncertain intonation, and conspicuous effort. Des Grieux is a high part in terms of tessitura, but Liberatore copes encouragingly, the upper register projected firmly if not always smoothly. It is apparent that the tenor is a shrewd, capable musician, and the character he creates is therefore all the more believable. From des Grieux’s first sighting of Manon in Act One to the opera’s final scene, Liberatore sings captivatingly, never allowing the listener to forget that, once seen, Manon never leaves des Grieux’s heart. This is palpably expressed in Liberatore’s ardent voicing of ‘Enchanteresse! Manon, vous êtes la maîtresse de mon cœur’ in Act One: so zealously does Liberatore utter des Grieux’s words that his infatuation with the bewitching girl before him overtakes the listener. Joining his voice with Manon’s, this des Grieux sings ‘Nous vivrons à Paris tous les deux’ with a sense of purpose that makes his love at first sight seem inevitable.

The first of Des Grieux’s well-known arias, Act Two’s ‘En fermant les yeux, je vois là-bas une humble retraite,’ is phrased artfully, Liberatore’s vocalism just strenuous enough to remind the hearer of the incredible difficulty of the music. Battling uselessly in the second tableau of Act Three to rid himself of the memories of Manon that haunt him in the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice in which he has sought refuge in holy orders, he sings ‘Ah! fuyez, douce image à mon âme trop chère’ with bitter self-recrimination and blazing intensity. The change in the voice as Des Grieux sings ‘Non, j’avais écrit sur la sable ce rêve insensé d’un amour’ could not be greater: the fire is not extinguished but refined, the fervor channeled into a stream of molten silver that flows through Massenet’s sensual melodies. The conflagration grows hotter still with Liberatore’s singing of ‘Manon, Manon sphinx étonnant, véritable sirène!’ in Act Four, his burnished timbre conveying the depths of Des Grieux’s emotions. In this performance, the tragedy in the opera’s final act is devastating largely because of the spontaneity of Liberatore’s singing and the immediacy of his reactions to his Manon: rather than seeming like a well-rehearsed tenor singing his part correctly, he sounds like an anguished young man whose one true love is dying in his arms. His pained articulation of ‘Manon! pauvre Manon! Je te vois enchaînée avec ces misérables,’ the words too hurtful to him to be uttered, is at once both wrenching and alluring. There is no question that Manon is the fulcrum upon which Massenet’s drama balances, but Liberatore provides this Manon with a Des Grieux of equal grace and gravity.

Shamefully underrepresented on disc, French soprano Annick Massis is here a Manon of exceptional charisma and absolute, almost insouciant comfort with the music—music of a degree of difficulty that prompted another memorable Manon, Beverly Sills, to refer to the rôle as ‘the French Isolde.’ There is little Wagner in Manon, and at her most tempestuous Massenet’s heroine faces nothing like the orchestra avalanches that Isolde must withstand. In stamina, in managing the dispensation of her vocal resources in arduous music, and in preserving the purity of the upper register without exhausting the octave-and-a-half below, though, a Manon faces ordeals that are not unlike those that an Isolde must conquer. That Massis surmounts these challenges can be plainly heard on these discs, but the technical assurance and dramatic acuity with which she sings the rôle will surprise even her staunchest admirers. Not since the young Mirella Freni sang the part in Italian at La Scala in 1969 has a soprano of international stature so unaffectedly conveyed both sound and demeanor utterly right for a young woman en route au couvent.

When Massis finesses the melodic line of ‘Je suis encor tout étourdie’ in Act One, it is impossible to doubt her innocence, and the wide-eyed wonder with which she shapes ‘Par aventure, peut-être avons-nous mieux une voiture la chaise d’un Seigneur’ is nothing short of perfect for the sentiment conjured by the words. Like Liberatore, Massis imparts a suggestion of destiny fulfilled in Manon’s first scene with Des Grieux, and soprano unites with tenor in a rapturous but engagingly personal account of ‘Nous vivrons à Paris tous les deux!’ As Massis voices ‘On l’appelle Manon, elle eut hier seize ans’ in Act Two, there is a momentary notion of the Violetta of Act Two of Verdi’s La traviata having melded with the Cio-Cio San of Act One of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, the fragile girl finding herself in a world for which she was not prepared and which she does not fully understand. In Massis’s performance, Manon’s ‘Adieu, notre petite table, qui, nous réunit si souvent!’ is not a melancholic farewell to a sort of adolescent ‘playing house’ but an acceptance of the unalterable farce in which she has cast herself and the necessity of playing her part in it.

This element of fatalism is manifested again in Act Three, in which the carefree façade that Massis’s Manon fabricates never hides the character’s vexation and vulnerability. The easy, spot-on top D with which she concludes ‘Je marche sur tous les chemins’ in the Cours-la-Reine tableau is but one of the attractions of her performance of the number: still more appealing are the lilting girlishness of her delivery and her unassailable intonation, the latter quality proving commendably consistent throughout the opera. The famous Gavotte, ‘Obéissons quand leur voix appelle,’ is sung with a proficiency not surprising in an acclaimed Lucia di Lammermoor: on recordings, only Bidú Sayão and Victoria de los Ángeles rival Massis’s performance of the Gavotte, and the French soprano’s voice is more evenly-produced in the lower octave than Sayão’s and sturdier and steadier at the top of the range than de los Ángeles’s. In the Act Three tableau set in the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, Massis’s statement of ‘Oui! Je fis cruelle et coupable!’ is crippling: what response is there to such a plea other than absolution? Her repetitions of ‘Je t’aime!’ are inflected with shifting attitudes, tentative and almost frightened at first but growing ever bolder.

Massis evinces an evolving determination in Act Four that stops just short of ferocity. She has acted foolishly but is no man’s fool, and there is a core of steel beneath the satin of her singing of ‘Notre opulence est envolée.’ The unforced expressivity with which she molds ‘Mon être tout entier, ma vie, et mon amour!’ and ‘Ce bruit de l’or ce rire et ses éclats joyeux!’ is enlightening, each note and word weighted precisely as the music dictates. Literally and figuratively, the landscapes of Act Five are vastly different from all that came before, the revelries of earlier scenes crushed by the fruits of humanity’s darkest impulses. In such a setting, Massis’s voicing of ‘Seul amour de mon âme!’ is a ray of pure light, her pristine sound distilled to an essence of emoting through song. The text motivates the flickering heat of the soprano’s articulation of ‘Ah! je sens une pure flamme m’éclairer de ses feux,’ and the directness with which she sings Manon’s last words, ‘Et c’est là l’histoire de Manon Lescaut,’ is heartbreaking. Admittedly, Massenet’s and his librettists’ ending can be slightly silly when performed indifferently, but for Massis, and because of her stunningly complete vocal and dramatic embodiment of the rôle, this performance truly is the simply-told story of Manon Lescaut.

As noted an interpreter of French repertory as British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is cited as having remarked that he would have willing sacrificed all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti in order to have the score of Massenet’s Manon. Beecham of course had the luxury of living during the last stand of French opera in the magnificent tradition of the Nineteenth Century, a final burst of Gallic esprit for which he was responsible in part. Were he hearing today’s performances of the opera that he so loved (and today’s period-appropriate renderings of the Brandenburgs), would he still feel compelled to readily discard Bach’s works in favor of Massenet’s? Beecham also had the luxury of insightfulness: he could discern in the pages of Massenet’s score the splendors that have too often been obscured in performances of Manon in the past three decades. It is imperfect, as any human effort is doomed to be, but this Opéra Royal de Wallonie Manon is far closer to the kind of performance that Beecham might have imagined. With as distinguished a Manon as has appeared on disc in a generation and an earnest, impassioned Des Grieux who loves her, it is difficult to imagine Prévost, Massenet, Beecham, or any listener who hears this recording failing to love her, too.

Les amants malheureuses: Tenor Alessandro Liberatore as Chevalier des Grieux and soprano Annick Massis as Manon Lescaut in Opéra Royal de Wallonie’s 2014 production of Jules Massenet’s Manon
[Photo © 2014 by Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège]

CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK (1714 – 1787), FRANÇOIS-ADRIEN BOIËLDIEU (1775 – 1834), GIACOMO MEYERBEER (1791 – 1864), GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868), GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848), VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835), HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803 – 1869), and GEORGES BIZET (1838 – 1875):Gala Concert celebrating Washington Concert Opera’s Thirtieth Anniversary—Angela Meade (soprano), Vivica Genaux (mezzo-soprano), Michele Angelini (tenor), Javier Arrey (baritone), Jonas Hacker (tenor); Washington Concert Opera Orchestra; Antony Walker, conductor [Lisner Auditorium, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA; Sunday, 18 September 2016]

In the troubled years since ill-advisedly speculative economics and the aftereffects of the 11 September terrorist attacks plunged the world into a recession that has yet to wholly relinquish its grip on global financial markets, a number of milestones have been observed in the Performing Arts community, many of them grim reminders of the dire consequences of the necessary relationship between money and art. Venerated opera companies have ceased to perform, and Arts institutions of all descriptions have been forced into insolvency, victims of decimated public funding and private donors adversely affected by economic conditions. Amidst this upheaval and the disappointment and disillusionment that it spawned among Arts supporters, Washington Concert Opera performances have continued to serve as a beacon to opera companies large and small, signaling that opera in the Twenty-First Century may and perhaps even must be a business but that the genre is still foremost defined by music. In recent seasons, making music at the highest possible level has often seemed a secondary concern at best for some institutions, and there is no more admirable and heartening legacy in opera today than WCO’s well-deserved reputation for reliability. The thirtieth anniversary of WCO’s formation is a milestone worth celebrating in grandiose fashion, and this the company did with a gala concert in Lisner Auditorium on the evening of Sunday, 18 September. Enlisting a well-matched ensemble of established and emerging operatic luminaries—soprano Angela Meade, mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, tenors Michele Angelini and Jonas Hacker, and baritone Javier Arrey—alongside WCO’s resident orchestra, the company’s thirty years of bringing excellent-quality opera to Washington-area audiences were fêted with conviction that also whetted the appetite for future performances, not least the current season​’s presentations of Jules Massenet’s Hérodiade with Michaela Martens, Joyce El-Khoury, and Michael Fabiano [20 November 2016] and Beethoven’s Leonore with Marjorie Owens, Simon O’Neill, Celena Shafer, and Alan Held [5 March 2017].

​Founded by conductor Stephen Crout and Arts administrator and advocate Peter Russell in 1986, Washington Concert Opera sprang to life in that year with a performance of Georges Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles that featured soprano Hei-Kyung Hong, tenor Jerry Hadley, and baritone Gaétan Laperrière. From that auspicious start until the end of his tenure with WCO in 2002, Crout presided over performances that furthered the company​’s mission of providing audiences in the nation’s capital opportunities to hear works seldom if ever performed in North America. A specialization in bel canto repertory that developed early in WCO’s history has been lovingly and thrillingly nurtured by current Artistic Director Antony Walker, leading to Washington Concert Opera often surging to the forefront of opera in the United States by presenting promising young American singers early in their careers, international singers in their American débuts, and celebrated singers in rôle débuts or in parts they may not sing elsewhere.

Marking his fifteenth season at the helm of Washington Concert Opera, Walker deserves the lion’s share of praise for the improvements in the performance standards of the WCO Chorus and Orchestra, the results of which were much in evidence in the orchestral playing on Sunday evening, passing moments of ragged ensemble and a few mistakes by the horns notwithstanding. Gala concerts are apt to be boisterous affairs, and there was no shortage of enthusiasm among the WCO performers. Nevertheless, Walker maintained control, guiding the concert with the good-natured charm of a ringmaster to the manner born. This is not to imply that a circus atmosphere prevailed, except in the sense that the singers engaged in high-flying vocal trapeze acts, high notes whizzing through Lisner Auditorium: with Walker on the podium, no safety nets were required, every individual on the stage, whatever her or his function, clearly relishing the environment of unwavering support that Walker’s leadership begets.

Few if any preludes in opera are more deservedly popular than the Overture from Gioachino Rossini’s La gazza ladra. With its crisp rhythms, quicksilver thematic shifts, and Rossini’s signature crescendi, the Overture was an ideal showcase for Walker’s dynamic style of conducting. Ever an animated presence, Walker spurred the WCO Orchestra to a performance of furious brilliance, the pompous march that follows the opening snare drum rolls sprung with compelling tautness. Phrases for woodwinds were caressed by the musicians, and Walker and the orchestra highlighted the contrast with the minor-key restatement of the primary subject. The Overture​’s zany conclusion took flight—literally so in Walker’s case!—and prepared the audience for the ensuing buffet of bel canto delicacies.

La bella donna è un giovane: Mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux singing Maffio Orsini’s Brindisi from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert, 18 September 2016
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

​A favorite of Washington audiences thanks in no small part to acclaimed WCO portrayals of Rossini’s Falliero in Bianca e Falliero, Angelina in La Cenerentola, and Arsace in Semiramide, the Alaska native Genaux launched the concert’s vocal selections by scoring a home run for the WCO team, knocking ‘Il segreto per esser felici,’ Maffio Orsini’s Brindisi from Act Two of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, out of the park. Even in the concert setting, Genaux was the temperamental young reveler to the life, recreating on the Lisner Auditorium stage the dagger’s-point characterization with which she enlivened Minnesota Opera’s 2004 production of Lucrezia Borgia. Her Italian diction scintillated, and her performance of the Brindisi, distinguished by fiorature of pinpoint accuracy, was a rousing summons to WCO’s party.

Top C x 9: Tenor Michele Angelini singing Tonio’s ‘Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête’ from Gaetano Donizetti’s La fille du régiment in Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert, 18 September 2016
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

​Looking like a young Kennedy with Italian rather than Irish genes, Angelini unmistakably proved himself to be a true contender in the bout for dominance among today’s foremost tenori di grazia with an account of Tonio’s ‘Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête’ from Act One of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment that radiated stylistic suavity. So spirited was his declaration of his love for Marie that one almost expected her—or any number of smitten ladies in the audience, for that matter—to rush into his arms. The ebullient cabaletta ‘Pour mon âme, quel destin’ should be party fare only for the adventurous tenor who is sure of his abilities and preparation, memories of a dismal failure being dreadfully difficult to expunge from listeners’ musical consciences. In this performance, Angelini’s singing lacked neither adventure nor preparation. Each of the eight written top Cs was struck like a perfectly-tuned cymbal, and the long-sustained interpolated ninth was projected with boyish glee. Only Lederhosen was missing from the tenor’s portrayal of the shy but ardent Tyrolean lad.

​If Genaux’s singing of the Lucrezia Borgia Brindisi was a home run, her traversal of the barnstorming bravura showpiece that ends Act One of Hector Berlioz’s edition of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, ‘Amour, viens rendre à mon âme,’ was a grand slam. Appended to the score for Gluck’s tenor Orphée in the Paris version of the opera, then adapted to an Italian text for inclusion in the Vienna version for altos male or female, and finally reinstated with a different French text in Berlioz’s edition of the score for Pauline Viardot, the aria’s musical construction was long—and wrongly, musicologists now assert—attributed to Ferdinando Bertoni. Genaux is likely the only singer in the world today who is an acclaimed interpreter not only of both Gluck’s and Bertoni’s Orfeos but also of music written for and by Viardot. Loading the bases with volleys of the astonishing coloratura singing that is her trademark, surprisingly soft-grained accents amidst the fireworks, and evenness across the registers that bettered her own highest standards, she concluded her performance of ‘Amour, viens à mon âme’ with a superb cadenza that accomplished the near-impossible feat of combining tastefulness and virtuosity.

​François-Adrien Boiëldieu’s La dame blanche is now almost never performed, especially outside of France, and hearing Angelini sing Georges Brown’s cavatina ‘Viens, gentille dame’ provided resounding evidence both of why the score deserves to be resurrected more frequently and why it is not. The beauties of Boiëldieu’s music are many, but difficulties abound, too, not least in Georges’s stratospheric vocal lines. Ideally, Georges demands the legato of Tito Schipa, the bravura technique of Ugo Benelli, and the upper extension of Ivan Kozlovsky, and the French diction of Georges Thill—in short, Michel Sénéchal. It was Sénéchal that Angelini’s singing often recalled, the passagework handled cleanly and excursions above the stave comfortably integrated into melodic phrases. A pair of notes at the very top of the range were compromised by the effort required to produce them, but this was evidence of the singer’s commitment to holding nothing back. French bel canto and Italian bel canto are related but not identical species, but Angelini’s technique proved as winsome en français as in italiano.

Regina di bel canto: Soprano Angela Meade singing Marguerite’s ‘O beau pays de la Touraine’ from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots in Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert, 18 September 2016
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

​Though it is more effective, musically and dramatically, in the context of the full opera than as a concert excerpt, Marguerite de Valois’s ‘O beau pays de la Touraine’ from Act Two of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots has long been a favorite concert and recital number for sopranos. As sung in Lisner Auditorium by native Washingtonian—the state, not the District—soprano Angela Meade, the aria and its effervescent cabaletta were unreservedly enjoyable. On the form that she exhibited throughout the concert, in fact, Meade might have sung the most insipid, banal pieces in the soprano repertory and convinced the audience that they were masterworks. The limpid tones that she devoted to Marguerite’s contemplation were spun like silk, and the solidity and intonational assurance of her upper register only occasionally faltered; and then only very slightly. Hearing Meade’s voice move through Meyerbeer’s music with such ease, it was impossible to banish the recollection that the sui generis Dame Joan Sutherland is virtually the only singer in recent memory to have completely conquered Marguerite’s music on a scale befitting Grand Opéra. Meade’s timbre is nothing like Sutherland’s, but there is something of the great Australian’s grandeur in Meade’s vocal deportment. There are also elements of the exhilarating fearlessness of Cristina Deutekom and Marisa Galvany in Meade’s singing. At her best, as she was on this evening, she inspires memories of the Mexican soprano Gilda Cruz-Romo, a Metropolitan Opera stalwart in Verdi and Puccini repertory whose fiery bel canto singing in rôles like Bellini’s Norma and Donizetti’s Anna Bolena—rôles that are cornerstones of Meade’s repertory—is too little appreciated. The operatic world is ever sorely in need of a true soprano drammatico d’agilità, and Meade’s singing confirmed her status as today’s preeminent candidate for that distinction.

​Genaux and Angelini united their voices in a performance of the expansive duet for Elena and Giacomo from Act One of La donna del lago that would have delighted the consummate showman Rossini. Culminating in the daunting ‘Cielo! In qual estasi rapir mi sento d’inesprimibile,’ the duet is a fearsome test for both singers, the tessitura of the music written for Rossini’s wife and muse Isabella Colbran and their frequent collaborator, tenor Giovanni David, awkward for modern voices. There was no hint of awkwardness in Genaux’s and Angelini’s singing. Individually and in tandem, their ease in navigating fiorature—punishing even for Rossini—inducing awe. Genaux expressed Elena’s reticence with touching restraint, reluctant even to allow herself to listen to Giacomo’s heartfelt words. Sung as they were by Angelini, though, resistance was impossible.

Sulla riva del lago: Tenor Michele Angelini and mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux singing Giacomo’s and Elena’s duet from Act One of Gioachino Rossini’s La donna del lago in Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert, 18 September 2016
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

​A highlight of Washington Concert Opera’s past was the company’s 2001 performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s Il pirata with Romanian-born diva Nelly Miricioiu as Imogene. Until presented by WCO and subsequently staged at The Metropolitan Opera with Renée Fleming in the 2002 – 2003 Season, Pirata’s legacy in the United States consisted almost solely of a single, still-zealously-discussed 1959 concert performance by American Opera Society in which Maria Callas sang Imogene. Closing the first half of WCO’s concert with Pirata’s extended mad scene for Imogene, Meade managed the aria’s cantilena with impressive legato, but it was her singing of the cabaletta ‘Oh, sole! ti vela di tenebre oscure’ that rightfully earned her the audience’s vociferous bravos. Conjuring Callas with her pointed delivery of the words ‘palco funesto,’ with the difference of Meade’s vitriol having been aimed at the fateful scaffold of Felice Romani’s text rather than the manager’s box, her top C at the scene’s end may have rung the bells of the distant National Cathedral.

​Beginning the concert’s second half with a nod to WCO’s first performance, Wisconsin-born tenor Jonas Hacker, a current scholar at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts and one of America’s most promising young singers, and Chilean baritone Javier Arrey, the talented Alphonse in WCO’s March 2016 performance of Donizetti’s La favorite, offered a handsome account of ‘Au fond du temple saint’ from Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles. For listeners in whose esteem the recording of the duet by Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill remains the gold standard, Hacker’s and Arrey’s performance gave no reason for disappointment, the tenor’s fresh, youthful tone and bright, ringing upper register not unlike Björling’s. Arrey then offered a stirring reading of Riccardo’s scene from Act One of Bellini’s I puritani. The baritone’s technical prowess served him well in the red-blooded declamation of ‘Ah, per sempre io ti perdei,’ and the polished-mahogany timbre of his voice shone in the aria’s long lines.

Uomo dei dolori: Baritone Javier Arrey singing Riccardo’s ‘Ah, per sempre io ti perdei’ from Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani in Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert, 18 September 2016
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

​Meade also sampled I puritani, offering a beautifully-phrased journey through Elvira’s haunting Act Two mad scene. Her voicing of ‘O rendetemi la speme’ was impeccably poised, and she sang the sublime ‘Qui la voce sua soave mi chiamava’ mesmerizingly, her legato caressing Bellini’s melodies with an ardent lover’s hand. The essence of the text of effervescent cabaletta, ‘Vien, diletto, è in ciel la luna,’ was audible in Meade’s vocalism, her coloratura truly seeming to penetrate and scatter the clouds of madness like soft moonlight. She ascended to the traditional, interpolated top E♭ with a gossamer touch, musing rather than blaring, her movingly innocent Elvira seemingly untrusting of her own emotional stability. The breath control alone that Bellini’s music demands is impossible for many singers, but Meade sang the scene as though coached in it by the composer himself.

​Angelini returned to Rossini with Narciso’s delightful ‘Intesi, ah! tutto intesi’ from Act Two of Il turco in Italia, a clever choice that offered the tenor an opportunity to summarize the best of his artistry in six minutes of no-holds-barred bravura singing. Angelini seized the opportunity with abandon, and he gave the audience six of the finest minutes of an uncommonly enjoyable evening. Anyone pondering standing in the way of Narciso’s realization of his amorous goals would have done well to note the intensity with which Angelini intoned ‘vendetta.’ Tenors who sing Narciso would do well to take note of how Angelini sang the aria: from the baritonal lows to the stratospheric highs and in every run that bridged the interval, the voice never faltered. Moreover, his tones fuller and more rounded than those of many tenori di grazia, Angelini is the rare representative of his Fach who sounds like a bonafide leading man.

Boys will be boys: Tenor Michele Angelini and mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux singing Gennaro’s and Orsini’s duet from Act Two of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

​Calbo’s aria ‘Non temer: d’un basso affetto’ from Act Two of Rossini’s Maometto secondo—or Neocle’s aria from Act Three of L’assedio di Corinto—was detonated by Genaux like a landmine, carefully-controlled volleys of notes fired into every corner of the auditorium. Capital-region audiences were treated to Genaux’s powerhouse singing of this music in Baltimore Opera’s 2006 production of L’assedio di Corinto, but her WCO performance was, remarkably, more responsive to the nuances of the text despite the concert setting. A decade after her Baltimore performance, Genaux’s voice is richer, with a broad palette of colors that evince dramatic expression in the most fiendish bravura passages, and she retains her singular gift for articulating each individual note in roulades as composers like Rossini surely intended. Her descending chromatic scales were simply incredible: Callas, the foremost mistress of chromatic scales, would have approved. The cabaletta ‘E d’un trono alla speranza’ was as much acted as sung. Limning Calbo’s conflicted feelings with each return of the words ‘basso affetto,’ Genaux’s ornaments twinkled as brilliantly as her bejeweled jacket. The performance epitomized the qualities that make Genaux a genuinely one-of-a-kind Rossini singer: every note of the music was in place as few singers can manage, and the character sprang to life in a way that even fewer artists can achieve in music of such technical difficulty.

​Prefacing the concert’s dramatic conclusion with Orsini’s and Gennaro’s duet from Act Two of Lucrezia Borgia, ‘Onde a lei ti mostri grato ella ha finto di salvarti,’ Genaux and Angelini again partnered one another with unforced charisma, Orsini’s goading as convincing as Gennaro’s misgivings. One of the marvels of Washington Concert Opera performances is the miracles of ensemble singing that are often achieved with limited rehearsal schedules, and this was especially true of Genaux’s and Angelini’s singing in the Lucrezia Borgia duet. Their dramatic timing and responsiveness to one another were extraordinary, better than in many staged performances, and they blended their very different timbres with consummate rapport. Theirs was a performance to convert any non-believers who think that opera—and especially a nearly-two-centuries-old duet for two male characters with no post-Freudian romantic subtext—cannot be sexy.

Brava, diva: Soprano Angela Meade receiving the audience’s adulation during Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert, 18 September 2016
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

​The decision to end the concert with the finale from Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia looked back to 1989, when Nelly Miricioiu made her WCO début as the infamous daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Angelini was Gennaro to Meade’s Lucrezia in the 2014 Bel Canto at Caramoor Lucrezia Borgia, and the chemistry of that performance was rekindled in Washington. Eschewing ‘Era desso il figlio mio,’ the cabaletta for Lucrezia that Donizetti added after the opera’s première, Meade and Angelini performed Donizetti’s 1840 finale nuovo, with the tenor singing the cantilena ‘Madre, se ognor lontano vissi al materno seno’ gorgeously and wielding a terrific trill. His Gennaro went about the business of dying without gasping and sobbing, expiring with interminable musicality. It was a pity that Donizetti and his librettist did not give Gennaro a stronger grasp as Meade’s Lucrezia tossed a plethora of monumental, firmly-anchored tones to him. Beguilingly naïve in Huguenots, incendiary in Pirata, and unsettlingly bittersweet in Puritani, Meade swelled her golden lungs with the air of tragedy in Lucrezia Borgia. Lighter voices—Montserrat Caballé, Beverly Sills, Edita Gruberová, Mariella Devia—have sung (and, in the cases of the last pair of these, continue to sing) Lucrezia effectively, but Meade possesses the vocal amplitude that is ideally suited to the music and the character. Her chest register, never pushed or guttural, thundered with power that would have earned Dolora Zajick’s applause, but, vitally, the snarls were Donizetti’s and Lucrezia’s, not Angela Meade’s. If human hearts responded to the electricity of notes, the mighty top D with which Meade crowned the scene might have defibrillated the poisoned Gennaro, Orsini, and their comrades back to life. The energy discharged in Lisner Auditorium was staggering.

​Birthdays can be troublesome affairs. One notes the passing of the years and detects in the mirror’s brutal honesty creasing and sagging in the most inconvenient of places. Birthdays are also celebrations of having seen and done, suffered and survived, failed and carried on, and the wrinkles and rolls remind us of having laughed at our own foibles and shared feasts with beloved family and friends. For those in the metropolitan Washington Arts community, whether as practitioners or patrons, Washington Concert Opera performances have for the past three decades been cherished friends. WCO’s thirtieth birthday was an occasion truly worthy of celebration, and the concert that invigorated the extended WCO family in Lisner Auditorium on Sunday evening commemorated thirty seasons of great performances with an unforgettable evening of world-class singing. Bring on the next thirty years!

Quintet of quality: (from left to right) Tenor Jonas Hacker, baritone Javier Arrey, tenor Michele Angelini, mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, and soprano Angela Meade during ovations for Washington Concert Opera’s 30th Anniversary Concert, 18 September 2016
[Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Zaide, K. 344—Sophie Bevan (Zaide), Allan Clayton (Gomatz), Jacques Imbrailo (Allazim), Stuart Jackson (Sultan Soliman), Darren Jeffery (Osmin, Zaram), Jonathan McGovern (Vorsinger); The Orchestra of Classical Opera; Ian Page, conductor [Recorded at the Church of St. Augustine, Kilburn, London, UK, 10 – 13 March 2016; Signum Classics SIGCD473; 1 CD, 77:54; Available from Signum Records, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

When the twenty-something Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart abandoned the torso of a Singspiel without a head or limbs, the work that later musical meddlers would christen as Zaide did not even have a name by which to call herself. Begun in Salzburg in 1779, ostensibly in response to Hapsburg emperor Joseph II’s launching the prior year of an initiative to bring opera in German to the German-speaking inhabitants of imperial Vienna and with the intention of laying siege to the Austrian capital with a stage-ready Oper auf Deutsch in hand, the work that would eventually answer to the name Zaide was conceived as a Turkish-themed Singspiel in three acts after the fashion of similarly-scaled works by Ignaz Holzbauer and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Whatever Mozart’s intentions for his orphaned Zaide entailed, work on speculation could not supersede endeavors with guaranteed financial reward. When Karl Theodor, the deep-pocketed Elector of Bavaria, offered a commission for an opera to be premièred during Munich’s 1781 Carnival season, it was therefore ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to Zaide and ‘Benvenuto’ to Idomeneo, re di Creta. As it turned out, Idomeneo proved to be as useful a vehicle for Mozart’s introduction into Viennese musical circles as Zaide might have been, word of its success in Munich drifting eastward over the Alps and infiltrating the Emperor’s inner sanctum by the time that Mozart arrived in Vienna with the goal of settling permanently in the city. Whether Mozart purposefully avoided resuming work on Zaide, as seems most likely, or merely never got back round to it can only be conjectured, but a fallacy that can be definitively dispelled is the notion that the score was merely a blueprint for the later Singspielen Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte.

Zaide and her pair of more widely-known siblings share notable qualities, not the least of which is exceptionally elegant writing for voices, but it is interesting to observe that Mozart’s completed numbers for Zaide did not find their way into other pieces. Imagine Händel’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga,’ which began its long life as an instrumemtal sarabande in the early opera Almira, Königin von Castilien and recurred with a slightly different text as an aria in Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno before assuming its now-famous place in Rinaldo, being consigned to neglect in an unfinished score! Even as a youngster, Mozart possessed an uncanny ability to unerringly separate the musical wheat from the chaff, and he surely knew that the numbers that he wrote for his experimental, Turkish-themed Singspiel were of fine quality. Händel and Rossini would not have allowed a piece like Zaide’s ‘Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben’ to languish in silence, especially if they were drawing musical portraits of a Konstanze and a Pamina. In her extant music, Zaide’s value is easily discerned, yet transforming even the most obvious merit into sounds of comparable quality can be an unexpectedly strenuous challenge, one never fully met by previous recordings of Zaide despite the presence of several very accomplished individual performances among them. Ignoring how prior generations of performers and performances have suggested that Mozart’s operas should sound and relying upon Mozart himself for guidance in recreating the singular sound worlds of his works for the stage, Classical Opera’s ventures set new benchmarks by returning the immortal Wunderkind’s music to the parameters of his invention. Here, at last, is Zaide wholly as Mozart knew her when he capriciously cast her aside.

Their affinity for performing Mozart’s early operas with period-appropriate principals that are as fun as they are inherently right for the music previously exhibited in phenomenal Signum Classics recordings of Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots, Mitridate, re di Ponto, and Il re pastore, Classical Opera and conductor Ian Page here turn their attention to Zaide with a recording that would effortlessly sweep the boards even if the score’s discography were less underwhelming. With pitch tuned to A = 430 Hz, the performance of Zaide on this disc has a bright patina from start to finish that heightens appreciation of the precious alloys with which the score was forged. Furthermore, Page paces a performance that has the continuity and linearity of a fully-functional opera rather than seeming like a disjointed traversal of a fragmentary work. Page’s work discards the once-fashionable concept of arbitrarily quickening tempi in Mozart’s music in a wrongheaded, faster-is-more-authentic approach. From his first operatic outings as a boy setting pompous texts about Arcadian idylls and moral dilemmas of antiquity, Mozart bothered to fully absorb the meanings of text when composing, and, following this example, Page establishes tempi in Zaide that highlight the skill with which Mozart united words with music. Launching the performance with the Overture from Mozart’s incidental music for Thamos, König in Ägypten (K. 345/336a), played with tremendous élan by The Orchestra of Classical Opera, the conductor collaborates with musicians and singers to create a propulsive account of Zaide that succeeds more than any other recorded performance of the score at both offering the listener a wholly satisfying musical experience and presenting the score on a scale that would have been familiar to Mozart. This is not Zaide as a prologue to Die Entführung aus dem Serail but as its own work. She is small of stature, occasionally unsteady on her feet, and a bit shy, but Zaide is, this recording reveals, compellingly unique and worthy of her creator.

With voices of the quality of those of baritone Jonathan McGovern as the Vorsinger and Peter Aisher, Robin Bailey, Simon Chalford Gilkes, Ed Hughes, Stuart Laing, Nick Morton, and Dominic Walsh as the Sultan’s Sklaven, the performance of the opening chorus, ‘Brüder, laßt uns lustig sein,’ could not possibly fail to delight, and the singing provided by this illustrious ensemble of gentlemen is as far from failure as human efforts can be. Well-trained voices are not always effective en masse, but each voice in this group occupies an appropriate space in the sonic mosaic, establishing an evocative, aptly exotic environment to host the drama to come.

Obviously a kinsman of his namesake in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Osmin in Zaide has considerably less material with which to make his mark, but bass-baritone Darren Jeffery breathes life into the blustering fellow, not as vibrantly characterized by Mozart or the librettist, Johann Andreas Schachtner, as his Entführung counterpart, with a characterful, strongly-sung performance of the aria ‘Wer hungrig bei der Tafel sitzt.’ Jeffery’s technical assurance enables him to gallop through the music without forcing or distorting his handsome, sinewy voice.

Interpreting Sultan Soliman, more sympathetic in song than Entführung’s Bassa Selim often is in speech, tenor Stuart Jackson is an expert counterbalance for the ardently romantic Gomatz. Jackson’s flexible, slightly metallic voice shimmers and slithers insinuatingly through the Sultan’s music, the singer’s command of subtle inflections apparent from the first line of the Melologo, ‘Zaide entflohen,’ and growing ever more impactful in the aria that follows. Jackson voices ‘Der stolze Löw läßt sich zwar zähmen’ with easy mastery of Mozart’s idiom, at once redolent of Händel’s writing for Grimoaldo in Rodelinda and foreshadowing music for Mozart’s own Pedrillo and Monostatos. The aria ‘Ich bin so bös’ als gut’ is sung with a keen fusion of musicality and imagination. Like Jeffery, Jackson evinces dramatic credibility in his music, lifting Soliman off the pages of Mozart’s score with spirited, sophisticated singing.

Singing Allazim with a baritone voice that sounds destined by nature for feats of greatness in Mozart’s music for Conte d’Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Guglielmo in Così fan tutte, and Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, Jacques Imbrailo shares Jeffery’s and Jackson’s talent for engendering a three-dimensional dramatic profile for his rôle. Though decidedly more serious, the wily Allazim is not unlike Dandini in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, his head always in the game and his eyes always on the prize—in this case, a future in freedom for Zaide, Gomatz, and himself. Imbrailo intones Allazim’s aria ‘Nur mutig, mein Herze, versuche dein Glück’ with engrossing focus, and he voices his lines in the terzetto with Zaide and Gomatz, ‘O selige Wonne’ meaningfully, his sincerity complementing the lovers’ starry-eyed emoting and providing the ensemble with an anchor in reality. The baritone’s attractive vocalism envelops the aria ‘Ihr Mächtigen seht ungerührt’ in a cloak of velvet without smothering the vocal line. Historically, many baritones have been inclined to over-sing in Mozart rôles, digging into their lowest notes and belting out the top notes as though they were singing music by Verdi. Their basic timbres are quite different, but Imbrailo’s affinity for Mozart’s style is so complete that he could be mistaken in certain phrases on this recording for Hermann Prey. Is there any higher standard of achievement in Mozart singing?

Any doubt that Allan Clayton is a Mozart tenor in the class of Anton Dermota, Fritz Wunderlich, Stuart Burrows, and George Shirley is irrefutably put to rest by his singing of Gomatz’s music in this performance of Zaide. The innate nobility of phrasing and beauty of tone that distinguished the singing of those great Mozarteans of generations past course through every bar that Clayton sings in Zaide. If he contributed nothing more than vocalism, he would be fully convincing as the young slave who captures Zaide’s heart, but he expresses emotions through song with an unaffected immediacy that recalls Richard Tauber. Even without knowing a single word of German, it would be possible to grasp the sentimental gist of his every utterance. This is true from the first word of the Melologo ‘Unerforschliche Fügung,’ which he declaims with diction that, if not likely to be mistaken for a native speaker’s, is significantly superior to the learned-by-rote schoolboy German with which too many singers compromise their performances of Mozart rôles. Clayton traces the melodic line of the aria ‘Rase, Schicksal, wüte immer’ with the viscous flow of Turkish honey. In the duetto with Zaide, ‘Meine Seele hüpft vor Freuden,’ this Gomatz partners his Zaide with tones that truly seem extracted from the depths of his soul. The tenor’s soft-textured upper register, allied with unimpeachable support through the passaggio, gives his singing of the aria ‘Herr und Freund, wie dank’ ich dir’ an aura of newly-found peace of mind that heightens the mood conjured by the text. Clayton lavishes on Gomatz’s part in the terzetto with Zaide and Allazim, ‘O selige Wonne,’ the sort of effortlessly beautiful vocalism that listeners long to hear in Tamino’s ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön.’ A vital tenet of Clayton’s artistic credo is undoubtedly some variation of the notion that anything worth doing is worth doing well: as Gomatz in Zaide, no one on disc has done better.

Zaide’s is the sole female voice in the Singspiel as it survives, Mozart having given her no Blonde in whom to confide her secrets and ambitions, and upon her falls the task of taming the opera’s testosterone-driven madness with level-headed femininity. A singer better suited to this tall order than soprano Sophie Bevan would be a veritable operatic unicorn. Like the character herself, Bevan’s singing is sometimes marginally insecure, especially as she ascends above the stave, but her musical and histrionic instincts are never less than excellent. Zaide’s—and Zaide’s—best-known aria is the gracefully-scored ‘Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben,’ and every ribbon of eloquence that Mozart threaded into the music is unfurled by Bevan with the utmost delicacy. She is unafraid of bold gestures, however, and a throbbing vein of resilience is never far beneath the surface of her portrayal of Zaide. She guilelessly mingles her voice with Clayton’s in the duetto ‘Meine Seele hüpft vor Freuden,’ their tones joining like lovers’ hands. In the terzetto with Gomatz and Allazim, too, she proves a first-rate exponent of Mozartean ensemble singing, intertwining her lines with those of her male colleagues with the uncomplicated joy of a girl braiding her hair. Bevan’s voice gleams in her singing of the aria ‘Trostlos schluchzet Philomele,’ and her technique rises to every challenge of the demanding aria ‘Tiger! Wetze nur die Klauen.’ With singing of the quality provided by Bevan’s colleagues in this performance, this is a Zaide that would be at least reservedly enjoyable without a strong Zaide, but what would be the point? The point of this Zaide is that Bevan’s Zaide is the catalyst for the Singspiel’s drama and the heart that beats within this captivating musical torso.

The performance of the opera’s de facto final quartetto, ‘Freundin, stille deine Tränen,’ is representative of this disc as a whole. Mozart deploys the voices of Zaide, Gomatz, Soliman, and Allazim with intelligence, and Page, the orchestra, and the singers respond in kind. With Bevan’s Zaide as the center of emotional gravity and Page’s conducting providing the necessary centripetal force, they indelibly broaden the theatrical efficacy and musical significance of Mozart’s discarded score.

In the decades following Mozart’s untimely death in 1791, only weeks before his thirty-seventh birthday, his lore grew to such an extent that well-meaning Nineteenth-Century guardians of the Mozart Mythology sought to protect him from the ill-effects on his reputation of such deficiencies as the perceived immorality of Così fan tutte, the alleged banality of Die Zauberflöte, and the certain embarrassments of his large assortment of musical juvenilia. Not every work composed by Mozart in the years before he reached artistic maturity is a masterpiece, but performances and recordings in recent years, particularly some of those issued in commemoration of the Mozart anniversaries in 1956 and 1991, confirmed that no apologies need to be made for the musical products of the composer’s youth. If an apology is necessitated by this recording of Zaide, it is Mozart’s to make: he really should apologize to this cast for failing to give them a complete Zaide with which to further gladden Twenty-First-Century listeners. This recording of Zaide is a splendid achievement with which every Mozartean should celebrate the 260^th anniversary of the master’s birth.

NEFIRI BEHRAM AĞA (? –  circa 1560), FABRITIO CAROSO (1527? – after 1605), BELLEROFONTE CASTALDI (1580? – 1649), ANTONIO CESTI (1623 – 1669), MARCO DA GAGLIANO (1582 – 1643), ANDREA FALCONIERI (1585? – 1656), JOHANN HIERONYMUS KAPSBERGER (1580 – 1651), BIAGIO MARINI (1594 – 1663), CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI (1567 – 1643), DERVIŞ FRENK MUSTAFA (? – ?), MICHAEL PRAETORIUS (1571 – 1621), LUIGI ROSSI (circa 1597 – 1653), SALOMONE ROSSI (circa 1570 – circa 1630), GIOVANNI FELICE SANCES (1600 – 1679), and ALI UFKÎ (né Wojciech Bobwski, 1610 – 1675): Ballo Turco – from Venice to Istanbul—Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, soprano; Pera Ensemble; Mehmet C. Yeşilçay, conductor [Recorded in MIAM Studios, Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2014; Oehms Classics OC 1858; 1 CD (also available on 2 vinyl LPs, OC 1860), 62:37; Available from Oehms Classics (CD and LP), Naxos Direct (LP), jpc (CD / LP– Germany), and major music retailers]

​Despite the life- and world-changing technological advances that propelled civilization during the Twentieth Century into a modern wonderland that would have confounded Jules Verne’s imagination, the first sixteen years of the Twenty-First Century have often been troubled not by the problems of new inventions but by plagues wrought by humanity, dilemmas that should be eradicated or at least marginalized by today’s society’s ability to connect largely without delays or barriers. Damningly, compromise, cooperation, and diplomacy frequently seem to be last resorts rather than the foremost tools for reconciliation that logic would suggest them to be. Not even art and artists are immune to the perils of personal and global politics, nor have they ever been, but in an age in which chasms of time, distance, language, and customs can be lessened almost effortlessly there is crippling divisiveness at every turn. Ballo Turco – from Venice to Istanbul, this new Oehms Classics release featuring cross-cultural Pera Ensemble and intrepid Italian soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, rejoices in what is perhaps the most maddeningly simple mode of communication among divergent cultures: great music. Hardly the path of least resistance, sharing musical traditions comforts, consoles, challenges, and enlightens as few endeavors can do, artists’s egos submerged in the deluges of dialogue that their sounds produce. Here, the musical highway stretches from Venice to Istanbul, but it might just as readily link Adelaide to Addis Ababa or Dallas to Damascus. The Lebanese-born author and philosopher Khalil Gibran wrote that ‘music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life, bringing peace, abolishing strife.’ Dancing into the ears, Ballo Turco makes discord impossible. Like the people who make it, music has many accents, but the joy that it can bring—and brings in every minute of Ballo Turco—is neither Turkish nor Italian, Muslim nor Christian, old nor new.

​The instrumental pieces that frame the vocal selections on Ballo Turco are perfect vehicles for the exploration and exhibition of the ideals that guide the adventures of Pera Ensemble and the group’s founder, Ud virtuoso Mehmet C. Yeşilçay. In the generations that followed the publication of Marco Polo’s Livre des merveilles du monde at the turn of the Fourteenth Century, European thinkers increasingly studied and embraced Eastern methodologies, learning from the examples of cultures that flourished whilst Europe languished in the Dark Ages. Like the Moors in northern Africa and Iberia, Ottoman artists, mathematicians, and scientists advanced their fields during a time in which critical thinking in Europe was largely confined to monastic communities. Pera Ensemble’s propulsive percussion plays a vital part in the performances on Ballo Turco: this is music that is felt, not merely heard, and the feeling with which it is played here is irresistible.

Under Yeşilçay’s dauntless leadership, the Pera Ensemble musicians raise a splendid clatter in the Ballo d’Eunuchi that ends Act One of Antonio Cesti’s 1657 opera La Dori: the band of eunuchs who dance in this music have charisma more than sufficient to compensate for more tangible parts that they may lack. Contrasted with musical and dramatic insightfulness by both composer and performers, Andrea Falconieri’s ‘La suave melodia,’ sounding uncannily like a Händel sarabande, and ‘Corriente dicha la Mota’ from Il libro primo di canzone, published in Naples in 1650, are delivered with brio that highlights the shifting moods of the music. Similarly, the clever melding of ‘La Moresque’ from Michael Praetorius’s Terpsichore with the familiar Moresca from Act Five of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 masterpiece L’Orfeo enhances the structural and thematic integrities of both pieces, qualities in the refinement of which Pera Ensemble’s members excel. Nothing is forced upon the music: these performances expose the taste of every Moorish spice with which the composers flavored their concoctions.

The plaintiveness that lurks beneath the extroverted surface of Johannes Hieronymus Kapsberger’s Ciaccona from Libro IV d’intavolatura di chitarrone bursts into view in Pera Ensemble’s performance, the lilting principal subject complemented by metrical tautness that conveys the restlessness that gives the Ciaccona its distinctive momentum. The skill with which Yeşilçay simultaneously emphasizes both the qualities that differentiate each composer featured on Ballo Turco from the others and those that link them is an essential component of the realization of this recording’s primary goal. This is particularly apparent in Biagio Marini’s Sinfonia terzo tuono from his Opus 22 collection published in Venice in 1655 under the title Per ogni sorte di strumento musicale diversi generi di sonate, da chiesa, e da camera. Performed with imagination that gives this ‘old’ music an astonishingly new sound, the piece unmistakably closes the distance between Eastern and Western musical traditions, revealing the artistic kinship between Istanbul and Venice to be very close.

Born in Europe as Wojciech Bobowski, Ali Ufkî became one of his adopted Ottoman Empire’s most influential scholars and musicians, his Mecmua-i Sâz ü Söz still recognized as one of the seminal works of Ottoman art. As played here, Ufkî’s ‘Askin ile’ leaves no doubts of its composers’ gifts or dedication to the musical traditions of the culture in which he immersed himself. His ‘Rehavi Semai,’ also drawn from Mecmua-i Sâz ü Söz, is equally effective on its own merits and as an example of the cooperative spirit that is the defining ethos of Ballo Turco. Just as the music blends sounds from opposite shores of the Mediterranean, Pera Ensemble’s playing epitomizes the synthesis of virtuosity and open-mindedness.

Salomone Rossi’s Gagliarda prima detta la Turca, one of the pieces assembled in Il terzo libro de varie sonate, sinfonie, gagliarde, brandi e corrente during the decade extending from 1613 to 1623, receives from Pera Ensemble a reading that entices like the piquant aromas of Turkish sumac and çörek otu tossed with Venetian bigołi. The sharp rhythms of the music punctuate the performance arrestingly. This is true, too, of the musicians’ performance of their integration of Ufkî’s Pişrev-i efrenci yani pavane with Fabritio Carosoî’s Balleto Pauaniglia and the Pavane de Spaigne from Praetorius’s Terpsichore. Ethnic and aesthetic boundaries are here wholly obliterated, and what remains is the purest essence of music. The stylistic harmony achieved in this amalgamation of music from three vastly different traditions resoundingly validates the concept of Ballo Turco: no matter how great the differences may seem, the shortest path between two points—or, more accurately, points of view—is music.

​In the impassioned strains of Giovanni Felice Sances’s ‘Usurpator tiranno della tua libertà sia Lilla altrui,’ Lombardi Mazzulli unveils her sumptuous voice with the sensuality of a Raqesah, her tones gliding evocatively through the music like the flexing muscles of a dancer’s body. ‘Lasciate Averno, o pene, e me seguite!’ from Luigi Rossi’s opera Orfeo might have been composed to order for Lombardi Mazzulli, whose Euridice in Ferdinando Bertoni’s 1776 setting of the same libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi used by Gluck in his 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice, recorded in performance in Ferrara and released on CD by the fra bernardo label, established her as one of today’s preeminent exponents of that episode in mythology in even its most unfamiliar operatic incarnations. She navigates the intricacies of Rossi’s music fearlessly, every embellishment of the vocal line presented with absolute conviction and heightened sensitivity to its contribution to the interpretation of the words. Ballo Turco’s core principles also shine in Lombardi Mazzulli’s singing of Bellerofonte Castaldi’s ‘Chi vidde più lieto e felice di meî.’ Echoing Pera Ensemble’s merging of cultures with her own intuitive scrutiny of the felicities of the composer’s marriage of music and text, the soprano’s vocalism makes Rossi’s demanding vocal lines sound grippingly spontaneous.

Introduced by rhythmically crisp accounts of his Sinfonia à tre and Ballo Grande à tre from the same source, ‘O felici fortunate’ from Marco da Gagliano’s Ballo di Donne Turche emerges as one of the most enjoyable selections on Ballo Turco owing to the exciting performance that it receives from Lombardi Mazzulli and Pera Ensemble. The interactions among instruments and voice are effectuated with extraordinary​ eloquence, the integrity of the piece maintained and even enhanced by the innovative handling that the music receives from singer and instrumentalists. Dating from the Sixteenth Century, the anonymous ‘Canto dell’egizia Fatima’ is sung by Lombardi Mazzulli with undeviating dramatic focus, every word of the emotionally-charged text deeply and truly expressed without a single syllable being over-accentuated. The soprano’s technical mastery of music of this vintage is remarkable, her execution of the Early Baroque trillo that eludes most singers earning special admiration, but no less praiseworthy is the way in which she strips away every modicum of artifice in pursuit of total emotional honesty. Raw emotions occasionally require raw sounds, and Lombardi Mazzulli complies with an abandon that comes only from the certainty of complete preparedness.

The brilliant clarity of Lombardi Mazzulli’s enunciation of texts is an integral element of her artistry, and the natural grace of her management of words is the pedestal upon which her stirring performances of Derviş Frenk Mustafa’s ‘Murabba’ and Nefiri Behram Ağa’s ‘Bayati peşrev’ are erected. The vocal lines driven by the singer’s vowels, the provocative harmonies of these pieces shimmer spectacularly in the bright glow of Pera Ensemble’s playing. Lombardi Mazzulli never gives the impression of being a patently European Konstanze or Zaide trying out Turkish garb for her own amusement or benefit. Figuratively joining hands with Yeşilçay and her Pera Ensemble colleagues, she ventures courageously into this music. The success of the enterprise is apparent in the fact that these are selections—and Ballo Turco a recording—that stimulates senses and sensibilities in unexpected and perspective-altering ways.

When new recordings seek to convey specific messages to today’s listeners, what they communicate is too often a statement of arrogance rather than advocacy.​ A recording like Ballo Turco could all too easily have been a didactic exercise in lecturing listeners on how they should react to the relationships among musical, but this release focuses on allowing listeners to reach their own conclusions, informed by performances guided not by pedagogy but by unwavering belief in the music’s power to transcend cultural differences. The performances by Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, Mehmet C. Yeşilçay, and Pera Ensemble on Ballo Turco transcend the kind of faceless, impersonal music-making that disfigures so many of today’s recordings. The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow proclaimed music the universal language, and it is a tongue that Ballo Turco speaks with riveting fluency: rather than ‘from Venice to Istanbul,’ Ballo Turco might have been subtitled ‘from our hearts to yours.’

ANTON BRUCKNER (1824 – 1896): Symphony No. 2 in C minor, WAB 102 (Robert Haas’s composite edition, published in 1938, based on Bruckner’s 1877 version, with features from previous versions)—Orchestre Métropolitain; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor [Recorded in Maison symphonique, Montréal, Québec, Canada, in September 2015; ATMA Classique ACD2 2708; 1 CD, time; Available from ATMA Classique, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Since the completion of its earliest version in 1872 and its première by the Wiener Philharmoniker under the composer’s direction a year later, Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor (WAB 102) has been a source of confusion, frustration, and elation for conductors, musicians, musicologists, and music lovers. Not published until two decades after the completion of the first version, the score underwent extensive revisions, wrought first by the composer himself in the years prior to his death in 1896 and then by scholars who struggled to make sense of the material produced by Bruckner’s reconsiderations. Recorded in well-balanced, spacious sound that conveys a perceptible sense of the fine acoustic ambiance of Montréal’s Maison symphonique, this ATMA Classique performance of Symphony No. 2 by Orchestre Métropolitain and internationally-renowned conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin continues a commitment to Bruckner’s Symphonies that has thus far produced a series of warmly-received recordings that, alongside his traversal of Robert Schumann’s symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon, have confirmed Nézet-Séguin’s standing as a significant interpreter of Nineteenth-Century symphonic repertory. Among these lauded recordings, the present account of Symphony No. 2 is the most obviously personal of Nézet-Séguin’s recorded Bruckner outings to date. As he is a boundlessly vivacious young man with a smile as bright as the Montréal skyline by night, melancholy would seem as foreign to the conductor’s temperament as rampant arrogance was to the composer’s, but Nézet-Séguin ignores none of the score’s shadows. Still, this is not music of intergalactic tragedy, and this performance deals as successfully with subtle humor as with starkness. There are no definitive answers to the questions posed by Symphony No. 2, but those proposed by Nézet-Séguin and the Montréal musicians on this disc are exceptionally persuasive.

The principal quandaries into which a performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 2 wades are questions of the order of the score’s four movements and the matter of a critical horn solo in the final pages of the Adagio movement that was declared unplayable by an early would-be exponent of the part and was subsequently reworked for clarinet and violas. Like Bach’s Passions and many of Händel’s operas and oratorios, a performance of Symphony No. 2 with absolute fidelity to Bruckner’s final thoughts on the score is at best an elusive chimera. For this performance, Nézet-Séguin and his Orchestre Métropolitain colleagues use a composite version of the score that amalgamates Robert Haas’s 1938 edition, primarily based upon the composer’s 1877 revision, with elements from Bruckner’s original structure and later revisions. The work that comes to life in this version possesses greater cohesion than has often been the case with the symphony, and its dimensions here benefit from increased symmetry. The tightening of the score that Bruckner achieved in 1877 is combined with the freshness of his initial invention, producing a free-flowing construction in which the music never hinders the conductor’s efforts at maintaining consistent momentum during thematic development. Bruckner was an avowed devotee of Wagner, but his own motivic writing is more redolent of the Biergarten than of Bayreuth: the links among the movements of Symphony No. 2, clear-sightedly examined but not exaggerated in this performance, are more episodic than literal. This reading wholly avoids falling into the trap of ridiculously treating the symphony’s four movements as a miniature Der Ring des Nibelungen.

As an interpreter of Bruckner’s symphonies, Nézet-Séguin is neither a cupcakes-and-kittens optimist who lathers the music in sentimentality that is never fully rinsed away nor a fatalistic firebrand who scorches and singes the music indiscriminately. This is especially true in this performance of Symphony No. 2, which he paces with a pragmatism not unlike his approach to Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony. Mahler, who appreciated and espoused Bruckner’s music, assessed the older composer as a musical deity with a pronounced vein of imbecilic tendencies, and if this seems more indelicate than Mahler likely intended it to be it is nonetheless an apt analysis of the man who emerges from Bruckner’s scores. There are undeniable absurdities in Bruckner’s music, but they are fewer in Symphony No. 2 than in other works. The Orchestre Métropolitain musicians respond to Nézet-Séguin’s leadership of the symphony’s opening ‘Ziemlich schnell’ movement with palpable understanding, the string playing, wonderfully reliable throughout the performance, granting the composer’s dense writing a welcome buoyancy. The intelligently-judged balances among the orchestra’s sections that Nézet-Séguin and the musicians achieve provide a setting in which the beauty of Bruckner’s music can be appreciated without longing for this or that phrase to be more or less prominent in the soundscape.

The tempi that Nézet-Séguin sets in the Adagio (‘Feierlich, etwas bewegt’) and Scherzo (marked ‘Schnell’—‘Mäßig schnell’ in some editions—by the composer) movements allow the symphony’s expressive energy to evolve at a cumulative pace that draws the listener’s attention into details of orchestration and phrasing without jeopardizing contemplation of the work’s broader design. In the Adagio, there are no concerns about the capabilities of any of Orchestre Métropolitain’s personnel. This is music of dark moods, but conductor and orchestra refuse to wallow in them, preferring to get on with performing the notes before them rather than indulging in the dangerous business of questioning the artistic impetus of the composer’s instructions instead of merely following them. To say that Nézet-Séguin takes the time to fully ponder the expressive implications of Bruckner’s harmonic progressions is not to suggest that the performance is at all ponderous. There is little true jocularity to mine in playing the Scherzo, but its—no one tell Bruckner!—almost Brahmsian ambivalence is tellingly exposed. A heightened awareness of the novelty of Bruckner’s part writing is facilitated by the robust but flexible orchestral textures that Nézet-Séguin encourages: in the Scherzo’s boldest moments, not only Mahler but Schönberg, Webern, Berg, Schulhoff, and Krenek also appear on the horizon, foreshadowed in music that unmistakably owes a debt of gratitude to Beethoven’s late string quartets.

The symphony’s final movement, designated ‘Mehr schnell’ by the composer, is a sort of cabaletta to the scene and two-part aria that precede it. Here, Nézet-Séguin’s leadership occasionally sounds cautious rather than confident, but a measure of caution is indicative of a commendable drive to conserve emotional electricity and preserve musicality even in the most frenetic passages. If the movement’s raw impact is marginally reduced, the enhanced refinement—a quality not often cited among the principal virtues of Bruckner’s music—that Nézet-Séguin’s approach reveals is ample compensation. In the symphony’s final moments, Orchestre Métropolitain’s greatest assets are deployed. Like their conductor’s endeavors, the musicians’ playing weds youthful exuberance with the assurance of experience. Collectively, they are as attentive to the smiles as to the scowls in Bruckner’s music, and their performance of Symphony No. 2 is convincingly grand on a scale appropriate to the score.

Offered as a bonus to listeners who purchase this release in digital format is an unabashedly Romantic performance of Leopold Stokowski’s elegiac arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh’ (BWV 478). The flamboyant Stokowski’s orchestration of Bach’s hauntingly beautiful music is surprisingly sensitive, and Nézet-Séguin conducts the piece with complementary intensity and restraint that honor both Bach and Stokowski. With a modern-instrument band like Orchestre Métropolitain and an ensemble of dedicated singers, Nézet-Séguin would likely be an ideal champion of Felix Mendelssohn’s edition of Bach’s Matthäus-Passion.

Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson are unlikely visitors to a review of a recording of a Bruckner symphony, but the advice of their ‘Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys’ might have served the curmudgeonly Bruckner equally well as an enjoinder to thwart youngsters’ intentions to become composers or conductors. His was a career complicated by critical hostility, some of which he unintentionally instigated, amorous disappointments, and bouts with depression, but the latter-day image of Bruckner desolately perched in his Linz organ loft, a man apart from his surroundings, is likely no more accurate a depiction of his life than accounts of lifelong puerility are of Mozart’s. Symphony No. 2 is neither Bruckner’s best nor his most radical work, but the debate that it has spawned among scholars validates its significance in its composer’s and the wider symphonic canons. Often battered by the musical establishment of which he was a reluctant part, the introverted Bruckner might well have advised an eager young man with Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s gifts to pursue greatness as a doctor, lawyer, or such, but this is a performance of his Symphony No. 2 that would surely have inspired him to press a coin into the conductor’s hand as a humble, heartfelt ‘Vielen Dank.’

MICHAEL NYMAN (born 1944): The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat—Matthew Treviño (Dr. P), Rebecca Sjöwall (Mrs. P), Ryan MacPherson (Neurologist); Nashville Opera; Dean Williamson, conductor [Recorded at Ocean Way Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 23 – 25 May 2015; NAXOS 8.660398; 1 CD, 58:08; Available from NAXOS Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Not even the most eloquent words can fully express the enormity of the extent to which human existence has changed in the seventy-one years since the end of World War Two. As we spin on our appointed orbital path, technology enables us to know precisely where we are and from whence we came at every moment, but we often seem unable or unwilling to recall, in a figurative sense, who we are or ought to be. From this collective identity crisis, a product of the horrors of war and Holocaust and the struggles of recovery and reform, arose the Theatre of the Absurd, a literary movement that reflected—and continues to reflect—the dissociative inclinations of modern civilization. Adapted by the composer, librettist Christopher Rawlence, and Michael Morris from British-born neurologist Oliver Sacks’s groundbreaking 1985 case study of visual agnosia, a peculiar condition that affects sufferers’ capacities to visually identify known items without compromising their actual vision or memory, Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a startling, thought-provoking parable of man’s frequent inability to connect with himself and the world that he inhabits, a musical extension of the Theatre of the Absurd that recalls the psychological penetration of Edward Albee’s plays. Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the opera’s 1986 première at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, this superb NAXOS release documents a realization of Nyman’s concentrated drama for Nashville Opera by visionary director John Hoomes, whose erudition recreated the opera within a discernibly contemporary but ultimately timeless context. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a narrative of intensely personal, intimately-scaled trials and triumphs, but the performance on this disc poignantly makes the tribulations of Nyman’s three characters those of every listener.

​Expertly led by conductor Dean Williamson, the talented musicians from the Nashville Opera Orchestra—violinists Dave Davidson and Conni Ellisor, violist Simona Rusu, cellists Michael Samis and Sari Reist, harpist Mary Alice Hoepfinger, and pianist Amy Tate Williams—fill every bar of Nyman’s score with shimmering sounds that powerfully impart the dramatic crux of each scene. The purpose of every ostinato is here made apparent, and the billowing, vocalise-like cascades of the singer’s melodic lines are paralleled and perfectly supported by the musicians’ playing. Every part is integral to the whole, but Hoepfinger and Williams give especially strong performances of very difficult music. Williamson paces the opera with such immediacy that the performance’s fifty-eight minutes dart past, but passages that demand a slowing of the dramatic propulsion unfailingly receive it. Staging The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in Nashville was a brave venture, as it would be for virtually any American opera company, but, weighing the evidence of this recording, is there any score in the standard repertory that Nashville Opera might have performed at a higher level? When not even a well-executed Carmen or La bohème is guaranteed to fill seats, how much more fulfilling it is to have a performance of this quality of less-known repertory. Both the enthusiastic audience and critical reception for Hoomes’s production and the caliber of this recording confirm that Nashville is as nurturing a home for grand opera as for the Grand Ole Opry.

​Nyman’s style in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is unapologetically minimalist, but the repetitive figurations in the orchestra do not stifle an air of mesmerizing lyricism. As in Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, melodic fragments occur throughout Nyman’s score and are assembled by the composer into an overall thematic profile that permeates each of the opera’s scenes. Cinematic in scope, the opera progresses like a musical My Dinner with Andre, words guiding the chronicle’s course. In the opera’s ​​​​Prologue, which in a dramatic sense is not unlike the opening scene of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, the Sacks-like neurologist of tenor Ryan MacPherson is introduced with music and text of detachment, the clinician preserving professional courtesy in his initial description of the case under his examination. Whether sung or spoken, MacPherson’s crystal-clear diction is an asset throughout the performance, and he makes the neurologist’s utterances sound credibly academic but never cold or unfeeling.

When the object of the neurologist’s scrutiny and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. P, are met in the subsequent scene, ‘​The First Examination,’ MacPherson becomes an active participant in the story rather than an objective observer, and the added warmth with which MacPherson infuses his singing translates this shift in perspectives into sound. Portraying Dr. P with charm and sympathetic humility, bass Matthew Treviño immediately earns the listener’s attention and affection. The surreal difficulties endured by Mrs. P are brought into sharp focus by the singing of soprano Rebecca Sjöwall, her voice taking on a steely edge as her vocal lines climb. The mounting vexation of ‘Traffic,’ ‘The Shoe,’ and ‘The Slides’ ripples through the music, and the singers and Nashville Opera musicians channel this vehemence into their performances. In both voices and instruments, the tenderness that alters the atmosphere in ‘The River’ and ‘The Dressing Ritual’ prompts an outpouring of expressivity that thrusts the hearts of the characters and of the opera itself to the surface.

It is not merely in terms of its placement in the score that ‘The House Call’ is the opera’s core. With his astute use of the descant of ‘Ich grolle nicht’ from Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Nyman increases and intensifies the link between the isolation resulting from Dr. P’s condition and artists’ eternal combat with misunderstanding and rejection. The sounds that emerge from ‘The Solids’ and ‘The Photographs’ evoke the tangible aspects of life, objects that can be handled and hoarded, while the relentless rhythmic pulse of ‘The Rose,’ ‘The Glove,’ and ‘The Chess Game’ conjure recollections of responses to internal and external stimuli, rendering the inexplicable circumstances of Dr. P’s malady stunningly comprehensible. Not least in the manipulation of Schumann’s melody, Treviño’s singing in this scene is unstintingly powerful, his ruggedly attractive timbre deployed with full cognizance of the ways in which the basic sound of the voice influences the ways in which the words greet listeners’ ears. At their most challenging for the singers, Nyman’s vocal lines are always written with a confident grasp of the capabilities of human voices, a quality that many contemporary composers have never bothered to acquire, and the fruits of this gift markedly broaden the appeal of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Both ‘Visual Memory’ and ‘The Street’ contribute unforgettably to the cumulative effectiveness of ‘The Test,’ the scene in which Nyman’s invention is arguably at its most original. In the ‘Paintings as Pathology?’, too, the composer’s innovation is spellbinding, his setting of text in ‘An Argument’ revealing the philosophical depths of his musical and dramatic sensibilities. In these more than in any other scenes in the opera, MacPherson, Treviño, and Sjöwall interact with the intuitive collaboration of chamber musicians. Theirs is the kind of give-and-take coexistence that every operatic ensemble deserves but so few receive. The insights that their cooperative spirit yields gives ‘The Prescription’ an aura of authoritativeness that the same passage in the first recording of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The artists in that performance were no less committed to the opera, but MacPherson, Treviño, and Sjöwall bring these symbolism-laden characters to life with daring familiarity. The earlier Dr. and Mrs. P convince, but Treviño’s and Sjöwall’s portrayals enthrall, their singing not always polished or perfectly-tuned but never debilitatingly stilted or studied.

In the Epilogue, the subdued desolation of ‘The Prognosis’ is movingly evinced by the neurologist’s statement of ‘I cannot tell you what is wrong,’ and Treviño and Sjöwall react to MacPherson’s words with singing of meticulously-judged fortitude, their delivery never overwhelming the text or Nyman’s music. Speaking with exemplary articulation that never seems artificial, MacPherson utters ‘I think that music, for him, took the place of the image’ with utter simplicity that suggests that this migration from one sensitivity to another is second nature. Sjöwall’s vocalism grows more astringent in the opera’s final minutes, aptly suggesting Mrs. P’s agitation and anxiety. That there is no true resolution of the situation in which Nyman’s characters are embroiled is the only valid ending for the opera: a concerted finale of any sort would seem mechanical and contrived. As interpreted by MacPherson, Treviño, and Sjöwall, the sole trajectory that is faithful to the psyches of the people they create is carrying on, and that requires no ceremony or musical fanfare.

In a time in which the sanctity of life has been superseded by glamorized violence and children murder their peers because they believe that fictional characters demand it, the bizarre situations and twisted realities of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, keystones of the Twentieth Century’s literary response to teetering on the edge of annihilation, no longer shock and bewilder as they once did. The absurdities of these seminal works have been exchanged for new, even less fathomable ones, malaises that afflict society rather than populating scenes in plays and pages in books. Humanity in the Twenty-First Century is a cyclone of discontent, denial, and depravity that would challenge the analytical prowess of Sigmund Freud, a tempest that rages in Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat with disquieting ferocity. Perhaps the greatest achievement of this NAXOS recording is how enticing it makes chaos sound.