NICCOLÒ JOMMELLI (1714 – 1774): The Jommelli Album– Arias for Alto—Filippo Mineccia, countertenor; Nereydas; Javier Ulises Illán, conductor [Recorded in Sala Gayarre, Teatro Real de Madrid, and Concert Hall of Escuela Municipal de Música de Pinto, Madrid, Spain, in May and December 2014; Pan Classics PC 10352; 1 CD, 61:01; Available from NAXOS Direct, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Many Twenty-First-Century opera lovers, influenced by the conventional wisdom of opera in the Eighteenth Century having been dominated before 1750 by Händel and after mid-century by Mozart, would likely be surprised to hear composers active after 1740 name as an eminent innovator among their colleagues the Neapolitan master Niccolò Jommelli. Born just north of Naples in the Campania commune of Aversa in 1714, Jommelli was a prodigious boy whose musical abilities were recognized and encouraged from an early age by his well-to-do family. Considering the powerful ecclesiastical and civic patronage that he enjoyed and the espousal of his abilities by as esteemed a composer as Johann Adolf Hasse, it is strange that so little verifiable information about Jommelli’s musical education and early career has survived. Many vital details of his life—his youthful conservatory studies, his presumed tuition under the celebrated Padre Martini, his tenure at Venice’s Ospedale degli Incurabili—can only be cited with footnotes and qualifiers that document the ironic lack of documentation. Like Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers whose biographies are compromised by empty pages, however, acquaintance with Jommelli is best made through his music. In his operatic homages to two of literature’s foremost abandoned heroines, Armida and Dido, Jommelli proved himself to be a musical dramatist of the first order; an order higher, in fact, than a number of composers whose scores have been revived in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries could claim to have achieved. Jommelli deserves champions among today’s best exponents of Eighteenth-Century repertory, and in the context of this engaging new release from Pan Classics, The Jommelli Album, he finds one in Italian countertenor Filippo Mineccia. A bold artist who shares the composer’s theatrical savvy, Mineccia here does for Jommelli what Dame Janet Baker did for Bach and Händel: the performances on this disc adhere to stylistic parameters that would have been familiar to Jommelli but do so in ways that appeal powerfully to the modern listener.

The performance of Jommelli’s Sinfonia a due violine e basso that serves as an interval of sorts, dividing the sequence of arias on The Jommelli Album into two intelligently-planned halves, is indicative of the high levels of virtuosity and expressivity reached in their playing on this disc by the musicians of Spanish period-instrument ensemble Nereydas. Directed by Javier Ulises Illán, the group’s exuberant playing enlivens the spirited numbers and enhances the mood of more contemplative pieces. In their playing of the Sinfonia, the opening Largo smolders with subdued intensity that erupts excitingly in the subsequent Fuga, its subject deftly handled by both composer and musicians. The same building and release of tension shape Nereydas’s performances of the Largo and Allegro movements that constitute the Sinfonia’s second part. The strings further the progress that has been made in historically-informed performances since the early days of scrawny, strident string playing, and the continuo work by harpsichordist María González and Robert Cases and Manuel Minguillón on theorbo and guitar provides a firm foundation for both instruments and voice. Whether the inclusion of the guitar in this music is wholly faithful to the milieux in which the sampled works were first performed may be questioned, but Jommelli’s Neapolitan origins permit this element of creative license, one which detracts nothing but adds a dimension of variety to the orchestral sound. Illán supports the dramatic vignettes that Mineccia creates in each aria with tempi that are expertly judged to showcase music and singer. Wherever his music was performed in the Eighteenth Century, Jommelli is unlikely to have heard playing better than that on this disc.

1753 was a year of great importance in Jommelli’s career as a composer of opera, and that annus mirabilis is represented on The Jommelli Album by arias from a pair of his most accomplished scores. Premièred in Torino, Bajazette was Jommelli’s contribution to the musical legacy of the eponymous Ottoman sultan’s confrontation with the legendary Tamburlaine, an operatic obsession of sorts that extended from Händel’s Tamerlano and Vivaldi’s pasticcio Bajazet to Mysliveček’s Il gran Tamerlano. From Bajazette, Mineccia sings Leone’s exacting ‘Fra il mar turbato,’ a simile aria as exhilaratingly evocative of its tempestuous text as any of Vivaldi’s celebrated arias in a similar vein. Braving the divisions with absolute confidence, Mineccia makes the aria a dramatic as well as a musical tour de force. The ease with which he ascends into his upper register, which occasionally leads to over-emphatic projection of tones at the crests of phrases, is reminiscent of the pioneering singing of Russell Oberlin. Like fellow countertenors Max Emanuel Cenčić and Franco Fagioli, Mineccia possesses the ability to convincingly evince masculinity whilst singing in a high register, and his technique enables him to devote considerable attention to subtleties of text and the composer’s setting of it. Also dating from 1753, in which year it was premièred in Stuttgart, the La clemenza di Tito excerpted here was Jommelli’s first treatment of the popular libretto by Metastasio, to which he would return with revised scores for Ludwigsburg in 1765 and Lisbon in 1771, that was brought to the stage in the Eighteenth Century by an array of composers including Caldara, Hasse, Veracini, Gluck, Mysliveček, and, of course, Mozart. Sesto’s beautiful aria ‘Se mai senti spirarti sul volto’ is sung with eloquence shaped by the countertenor’s focused tones, the composer’s long phrases managed with admirable breath control. The character’s anguish throbs in Mineccia’s delivery of the words ‘son questi gli estremi sospiri del mio fido,’ but the response elicited by his vocalism is untroubled bliss.

First performed in Ludwigsburg in 1768, Jommelli’s La schiava liberata is the source of Don Garzia’s aria ‘Parto, ma la speranza,’ a beguiling number that Minecca sings handsomely, emphasizing the character’s ambivalence by being as attentive to rests as to notes. Here, too, the refinement of his technique is ably put to use, his noble phrasing complemented by his capacity for extending long lines without snatching breaths. Well-concealed discipline is also the core of Mineccia’s spontaneous-sounding performance of the title character’s aria ‘Salda rupe’ from Pelope, premièred in Stuttgart in 1755. The singer’s unpretentiously excellent diction in his native language is a trait that should not be taken for granted, especially in the performance of bravura music like Jommelli’s. Also noteworthy is Mineccia’s unfailing intelligence in embellishment: his ornamentation is restrained and musical, and he eschews the kind of overwrought cadenzas and tasteless above-the-stave interpolations that imperil the integrity of many singers’ performances of Eighteenth-Century repertory. The influence of Jommelli’s acquaintance with Hasse is particularly evident in ‘Salda rupe,’ and Mineccia’s confident, charismatic singing highlights the skill with which his countryman composed for the voice.

It was as a composer for the operatic stage that Jommelli was most appreciated during his lifetime, but he left to posterity a body of liturgically-themed work of equal significance. First performed in 1749 and known to have been admired by the musically astute Englishmen Charles Burney and Sir James Edward Smith, La passione di nostro signore Gesù Cristo is a superbly-crafted score, a setting of another of Metastasio’s widely-traveled texts that merits recognition as the equal of better-known versions by Caldara, Salieri, and Paisiello. Mineccia here sings Giovanni’s arias ‘Come a vista’ and ‘Ritornerà fra voi,’ both of which he distinguishes with elegant, unaffected vocalism. The music is overtly operatic, not unlike Caldara’s forward-looking stilo galante, but Mineccia’s singing is noticeably more intimate here than in the opera arias. As he articulates them, the arias are effectively contrasted, their differing sentiments easily discerned by the listener.

Dating from 1750, Jommelli’s Cantata per la Natività della Beatissima Vergine is another work of high quality that should be more frequently performed, its lyricism no less captivating than that of Pergolesi’s familiar Stabat mater. Hypnotically propelled by guitar continuo, Speranza’s aria ‘Pastor son’io’ receives from Mineccia and Nereydas a reading of undiluted piety, one that exudes precisely what the archetype that utters it symbolizes: hope. Mineccia’s voice is here at its most purely beautiful, the seamless integration of his registers facilitating the poise of his singing. Jommelli’s 1751 Lamentazioni per il mercoledì santo perpetuated a tradition of music composed for Holy Week that was prevalent in Italy throughout the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and the structure of the aria ‘O vos omnes’ suggests that Jommelli was aware of Alessandro Scarlatti’s standard-setting works for the Roman rites of settimana santa. Jommelli’s music combines simplicity and sophistication, and Mineccia sings it accordingly. Communication of the text is again the central focus of the singer’s endeavors, and he succeeds in conveying the sincere devotion of Jommelli’s writing.

In the course of The Jommelli Album, there are a few suspect pitches and instances in which passagework is attacked slightly too aggressively, but there is not one moment on this disc in which anything is faked or approximated. For many observers, Niccolò Jommelli’s name is likely to remain alongside those of throngs of his contemporaries as a notch on the timeline of opera between Händel and Mozart, but with The Jommelli Album Filippo Mineccia has given listeners a disc that makes Jommelli’s name one to remember.

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860 – 1911), ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841 – 1904), and JEAN SIBELIUS (1865 – 1957): All Who Wander—Jamie Barton, mezzo-soprano; Brian Zeger, piano [Recorded at SUNY Purchase, New York, USA, in August 2015; Delos DE 3494; 1 CD, 60:48; Available from Delos, NAXOS Direct, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

Adapting Mark Twain’s famous quip about the ruinous effects of a round of golf on a good walk, there unquestionably are people who would argue that an evening at the opera amounts to a symphonic performance spoiled by voices, and it must be admitted that there are also evenings at the opera that compel even the most diehard opera lovers to agree with that uncharitable sentiment. Opera was, is, and will forever be defined by voices; or, in the Twenty-First Century, it might be argued, by the lack of voices. In the incessant search for The Next Great Talent, opera is not unlike any other artistic—or not so artistic—genre, but there is the perception that in opera the stakes are higher, that the eminent prima donna is the peer of Meryl Streep and Dame Maggie Smith, not of Céline Dion and Dolly Parton. This, in essence, is both opera’s damnation and its salvation: potential audiences, particularly those whose hair is not yet silvered, can be alienated by the caviar-and-chandeliers atmosphere that persists in opera, but this can also be the critical component of convincing a potential buyer that a ticket to the opera is worth a hefty portion of a week’s wages. From Peri to Puts, opera has always been and must always be a spectacle, but when it looks better than it sounds the sacred fire tended by a long succession of dedicated artists is in danger of being extinguished. That flame has often seemed to sputter ominously in recent years, but the singing of Georgia-born mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton scatters rejuvenating sparks like the Santa Ana winds. With her début solo recital disc All Who Wander, this insightfully-conceived, expertly-engineered, and lovingly-presented Delos release, Barton crushes any doubts about her rôle as one of today’s vocal superheroes. If the flame flickers, deprived of the life-giving oxygen of great singing, her voice is the flint needed to rekindle the musical conflagration.

The deserving recipient [a distinction that cannot often be applied] of the 2014 Marian Anderson Award and the 2015 Richard Tucker Award, two of opera’s most coveted prizes, Barton has in recent seasons assumed a place among the sparsely-populated ranks of young singers who are fulfilling the promises of their early potential. With an operatic repertoire encompassing rôles as diverse as the male half of the title couple in Hasse’s Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra, Adalgisa in Bellini’s Norma, and Fricka in Wagner’s Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, she is a musical cat inspired rather than killed by curiosity. In her journey on All Who Wander, she is accompanied by a like-minded fellow traveler, pianist Brian Zeger, a collaborative artist whose own musical curiosity has led him to a level of esteem among his peers that is rightly reserved for the best among them. Here, it is virtually impossible to identify Zeger’s playing of any one song as being markedly more refined than his performances of others. The exceptional nature of the interpretive synchronicity that he contributes to the disc is indicated by the fact that one might think that Barton is playing the piano—a robust-toned Steinway concert grand—herself. Zeger’s sensitivity to the most minute details of Barton’s interpretations of these songs contributes indelibly to the impression that, though she is even now only halfway through her fourth decade, she has lived with this material for many years. Greatly blessed is the singer who enjoys such an organic connection with her pianist in the setting of her first recording of art songs. Equally blessed is the listener who has the privilege of hearing the products of that connection.

Opening with Gustav Mahler’s Fünf Lieder nach Rückert, Barton and Zeger figuratively dive into the deep end. Composed in 1901 and 1902, the Rückert-Lieder are among Mahler’s best-known works, espoused by many of the most gifted Lieder singers of the past century, and their continued popularity owes much to the emotional spectrum that the frail but temperamental composer unfurled in the five songs. The order of the Lieder adopted by Barton is particularly effective, imaginatively traversing the common themes in the otherwise unrelated songs. Placing ‘Ich atmet' einen linden Duft’ first in the sequence provides an engagingly personal introduction, inviting the listener into the very private world of the Lieder. Barton’s luscious timbre and generous but well-controlled vibrato are ideally suited to Mahler’s late-Romantic idiom, and the security of her intonation prompts special appreciation of the harmonies, affirming that even if only by a year or two these pieces are irrefutably of the Twentieth Century. The verbal clarity that she brings to ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ illuminates Mahler’s poetic handling of the text, the words seeming to generate music as they are enunciated. In the thorny writing of ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder!’, it is the sheer tonal amplitude that Barton has at her command that impresses, her precision as awesome as her power. The purity of line that she maintains in ‘Um Mitternacht’ coaxes the full measure of ethereal poignancy from the music. As in its four companions, the mezzo-soprano’s intuitive phrasing transforms ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ into a microcosm in which an intimate drama plays out from start to finish within the song’s duration. The Rückert-Lieder are not always a good repertory choice for young singers, but Barton masters their psychological challenges as unflappably as she meets their musical demands.

Barton supplements the Rückert-Lieder with performances of three additional Lieder by Mahler, each of which has its own very specific Zeitgeist. The ambiguity of ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’ is resolved in this performance with an unmistakable aura of tragedy, the anonymous poet’s final question, ‘Wo ist dein Herzliebster geblieben?’, answered by the dark coloration of the singer’s voice. The clouds continue to gather in Barton’s stormy account of ‘Erinnerung,’ the song’s lyricism flowing on the stream of her caramel-hued tone. Melodically, ‘Scheiden und Meiden’ is one of Mahler’s most appealing Lieder, and Zeger plays the ebullient piano part with the impassioned concentration of Callas singing the cadenza of Lucia’s mad scene. Barton’s singing of this song is representative of her approach to the Mahler selections: the voice expands as the music dictates, verbal inflections follow the dictates of the text, and dynamics are determined by the score.

The tremendous difficulties of the Czech language for non-native speakers likely accounts in large part for the neglect, apart from its most famous constituent, by important singers of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 55 Cigánské melodie. Merely for including these brilliantly tuneful songs on All Who Wander, Barton deserves the gratitude of every listener who appreciates Dvořák’s music, but the quality of her performances of the songs, musically and linguistically, surely qualifies her as an honorary citizen of Dvořák’s native Nelahozeves. Both Adolf Heyduk’s texts and Dvořák’s music were strongly influenced by Czech and Slovak folk song, and the immediacy of Barton’s singing of ‘Má píseň zas mi láskou zní’ bristles with Romany spirit: her song indeed ‘rings out so loud with love.’ The sting of loss that resounds in the conjured tinkling of the triangle in ‘Aj! Kterak trojhranec můj přerozkošně zvoní’ is unexpectedly moving in this performance, and the despair of ‘A les je tichý kolem kol’ is transported from the singer’s heart to the listener’s ears on a torrent of impeccably-managed vocalism. ‘Když mne stará matka zpívat, zpívat učívala,’ frequently translated as ‘Songs my mother taught me,’ is the most familiar of these songs and perhaps the best-known song in the Czech repertory, but there is nothing studied or hackneyed in Barton’s performance of it. The mother’s tears that saturate the text fall in the mezzo-soprano’s singing without diluting the focus of the voice. The brighter sentiments of ‘Struna naladěna’ are also tinged with foreboding, but this and the pair of songs that conclude the set, ‘Široké rukávy a široké gatě’ and ‘Dejte klec jestřábu ze zlata ryzého’ grippingly evoke the unfettered freedom and wild landscapes of gypsy life. As she sings these songs, Barton seems to metamorphose into a Bohemian girl, loosing her hair to the night breeze and unburdening her broken heart through song.

Like Dvořák’s Cigánské melodie, the art songs of Jean Sibelius are far too little known beyond the circle of singers who speak the languages of their texts. Written in the last years of the Nineteenth and the first years of the Twentieth Centuries, the Opera 36 and 37 songs are among the most popular of Sibelius’s contributions to the art song genre—popular, that is, within the confines of listeners who are aware of Sibelius’s songs at all. Progressing inevitably to its cathartic modulation from minor to major, ‘Svarta rosor’ (Op. 36, No. 1) is suffused with anguish, but Barton never indulges the temptation to over-emote. The crashing waves invoked in the text of ‘Säv, säv, susa’ (Op. 36, No. 4) flood Barton’s voice but do not sweep her off course, contrasting tellingly with the delicacy of ‘Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings mote’ (Op. 37, No. 5), the sorrow of the lines ‘Senast kom hon hem med bleka kinder; Ty de bleknat genom älskarns otro’ gently but profoundly expressed by vocal shading. The vivid imagery of ‘Kyssens hopp’ (Op. 13, No. 2) receives from Barton an interpretation of touchingly naïve idealism. The paean to March snow in ‘Marssnön’ (Op. 36, No. 5) is no less effective as sung here by the mezzo-soprano, the vernal warmth of her timbre meaningfully juxtaposed with the frigidity of the song’s words. Once heard, the tranquil, haunted eloquence with which Barton voices ‘En dröm lik sippans liv så kort uti en vårgrön ängd’ in ‘Var det en dröm?’ (Op. 37, No. 4) cannot be forgotten. As she and Zeger perform them, though, this is true of every line on All Who Wander. The wanderers of these songs find in this artistic partnership the kind of welcoming sanctuary for which the restless soul pines.

Great voices are ever in short supply. Those who endlessly lament that the first sixteen years of the Twenty-First Century have produced no Flagstad, Callas, Tebaldi, or Sutherland are seemingly content to ignore the fact that other generations also failed to cultivate singers with these ladies’ singular abilities. Singers such as these and countless others—Farinelli, Bordoni, Cuzzoni, Pasta, Malibran, Viardot, Falcon, Tamburini, Rubini, Nordica, Caruso, Muzio—were unique phenomena, no more duplicable than Molière, Einstein, and Picasso. Flagstad’s timbre, Callas’s chromatic scales, Tebaldi’s pianissimi, and Sutherland’s trill are artifacts of opera’s past as invaluable as the now-tattered flag that flew over Fort McHenry during a fateful night in the War of 1812, the rudimentary craft that lofted Orville Wright above Kitty Hawk, and Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, but they are not collectively or individually the criteria against which future generations of singers should be judged. To sing Isolde with beauty and integrity reminiscent of Flagstad’s is one thing, but to sing the music precisely as Flagstad sang it, though undeniably desirable, is not only to be a cipher rather than a genuine artist but also to rob Flagstad of her enduring significance. There are aspects of Jamie Barton’s artistry that recall a number of singers of the past: the burnished sound of her lower register recalls Ernestine Schumann-Heink and Clara Butt, her determination recalls Kathleen Ferrier, her dramatic instincts recall Irene Kramarich, and her range and stylistic versatility recall Giulietta Simionato. Whether following the paths of Ferrier in music by Mahler or Simionato in rôles like Giovanna Seymour in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, she is nonetheless emphatically her own artist. All Who Wander is a testament to Barton’s artistic individuality—and, equally importantly, to the depths of her talent. No, the Twenty-First Century has given us no Flagstad or Callas, but what a gift we have been given in Jamie Barton.

Dolce Vita—Jonas Kaufmann, tenor; Orchestra del Teatro Massimo di Palermo; Asher Fisch, conductor [Sony Classical 88875183632; 1 CD, 66:50; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

For those whose knowledge of Italian culture is defined by pasta and prohibitively-expensive shoes; those who have never seen the early-morning light creeping into Piazza di San Marco or watched the sun set over the cliffs of Sorrento; those who have never inhaled air heavy with aromas of freshly-pressed olives, just-sliced lemons, and truffles still damp with earth; for those for whom Italy is an irregular boot on a map, la dolce vita is perhaps nothing more than a poetic conceit or a 1960 Federico Fellini film seen on television during a sleepless night. Perhaps it is something genetic, something that those without Italian blood in their veins can observe and experience but never possess, a cultural essence as elusive as the answers to Turandot’s riddles. Like many of those aspects of life that are most difficult to translate into words, perhaps la dolce vita is an ever-changing spezzatino of the simplest ingredients: family dinners, hand-in-hand walks at twilight, Tuscan vistas, and the Amalfi sea air. The notion that Italians stroll through the streets of their towns great and small with operatic arias swelling their hearts and lungs is no more accurate than the cinematically-induced supposition that organized crime is a national pastime, but song is an integral part of Italy’s immortal mystique: ‘cambiano i suonatori,’ Italians say, ‘ma la musica è sempre quella.’ Dolce Vita, German tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s Sony Classical omaggio to the Italian spirit that has enthralled him since family holidays took him as a boy from his native Bavaria to the land of bel canto, is an affectionate survey of eighteen songs that epitomize the inimitable musical soul of bella Italia. La dolce vita is an ephemeral concept with different meanings for different people at different times, but hearing this disc can transport even the listener whose closest contact with Italy is the neighborhood pizzeria to the patria melodiosa of Pasta, Patti, Gigli, and Gobbi.

In the years since José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti redefined the commercial potential of tenor singing with their 1990 concert at the Terme di Caracalla, the recording of which launched the global Three Tenors phenomenon, Lucio Dalla’s ‘Caruso’ and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s ‘Mattinata’ have been two of the unofficial anthems of aggressively-marketed tenordom. Pavarotti absorbed ‘Caruso’ into his concert repertory very soon after its composition, and the song is now performed by tenors of every imaginable sub-Fach. Kaufmann sings the number affectionately but without overdoing the pathos, allowing the text to speak for itself without ruining his performance with syrupy pseudo-tragedy. Likewise, Kaufmann’s artistic shrewdness steers him clear of the temptation to sing ‘Mattinata’ as though it were a lost aria from Pagliacci. There is no lack of drama in his performance, but it is drama drawn from the song itself rather than imposed on it. Pacing these songs is hardly the equivalent of conducting Parsifal, but Israeli conductor Asher Fisch provides solid support in these and all of the selections on Dolce Vita, seconded by enthusiastic but sometimes rough-edged playing by the Orchestra del Teatro Massimo di Palermo.

No information about precisely where and when this disc was recorded is provided, but Kaufmann’s vocalism often sounds fatigued, especially in the near-relentless assaults on his upper register. A component of the tenor’s artistic magnetism is the thoughtfulness of his endeavors, however, and this is no empty-headed recital of sunny tunes. Kaufmann looks deeply though not necessarily critically into the texts and structures of these songs, and he honors Italy by highlighting the variety and skillfulness of purveyors of her popular song. Nino Rota was one of Italy’s—and the world’s—most significant Twentieth-Century tunesmiths, and his and lyricist Gianni Boncompagni’s ‘Parla più piano,’ known for its use in the film The Godfather, receives from Kaufmann a reading distinguished by subtlety and understatement. At his most emphatic, Kaufmann never stands in the way of the music. To his credit, he simply sings these songs rather than engaging in self-indulgent, pretentious ‘interpreting.’ ‘Passione,’ with music by Ernesto Tagliaferri and Nicola Valente and words by Libero Bovio, is especially effective here because Kaufmann focuses on the relationship between the words and the melodic line rather than on consciously striving to create a particular mood: this the songs does without manipulation, but not all singers are perceptive enough to notice. The same is true of ‘Un amore così grande,’ and Kaufmann devotes equal attention to the song’s music by Guido Maria Ferrilli and words by composer and Antonella Maggio. The dark timbre of his voice is often at odds with the bright patinas of this music, and though his good diction is not apt to be mistaken for that of a native speaker he intelligently puts the contrast between the wide-open emotions of a song like Romano Musumarra’s and Luca Barbarossa’s ‘Il canto’ and his opaque vowels to use as an expressive device.

​Giovanni d’Anzi’s and Tito Manlio’s ‘Voglio vivere così’ is dispatched by Kaufmann with gleaming tones, the lyrics enunciated with clarity. The charm of Salvatore Cardillo’s and Riccardo Cordiferro’s ‘Catari’, Catari’ (Core ’ngrato)’ finds an uninhibited outlet in the tenor’s traversal, the muscular sound of his voice giving the music a rhythmic spine that it lacks in many performances. The verve with which Kaufmann approaches each song is especially beneficial in his accounts of Ernesto de Curtis’s and Domenico Furnò’s ‘Ti voglio tanto bene’ and ‘Non ti scordar di me.’ A great-grandson of composer Saverio Mercadante, several of whose operatic rôles for tenor would be near-ideal fits for Kaufmann, De Curtis is one of the great songwriters of any era and nationality, and his music often seems to tap a vein that flows directly from the heart of Italy. Kaufmann cloaks ‘Ti voglio tanto bene’ in ardent yearning, and his bronzed sound makes the evergreen ‘Non ti scordar di me’ sound like a musical and situational cousin of Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne me quittes pas.’ With lyrics by Ernesto’s brother Giambattista de Curtis, ‘Torna a Surriento’ is another of the younger de Curtis’s finest achievements. Both brothers would undoubtedly be appreciative of this recording of their song, words and music given their due without the slightest suggestion of artifice.

Kaufmann sings the anonymous ‘Fenesta ca lucive’ incisively. As elsewhere on Dolce Vita, however, the results of his commendably straightforward endeavor are compromised to an extent by his toil. Still, no concerns complicate enjoyment of his voicing of Stanislao Gastaldon’s ‘Musica proibita’ and Cesare Andrea Bixio’s and Ennio Neri’s [presumably of no relation to the obsidian-voiced bass Giulio] ‘Parlami d’amore, Mariù.’ It is sometimes stated that Kaufmann, a singer with Verdi’s Manrico, Don Alvaro, Don Carlo, and now Radamès and Wagner’s Lohengrin, Walther von Stolzing, Siegmund, and Parsifal in his repertory, possesses an uncommonly large voice, but the strength that he commands is produced by projection, not amplitude or volume. The idea that big voices, powerful voices, and loud voices are identical and interchangeable is potentially ruinous for young singers, but Kaufmann is unusually astute in managing his resources according to the needs of his unique instrument, pushing histrionically but never vocally in his portrayals of characters like Puccini’s Cavaradossi and Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. In Domenico Modugno’s and Franco Migliacci’s ‘Volare,’ the singer’s voice soars above the picturesque landscape evoked by the orchestra. Kaufmann’s performance of Vincenzo de Crescenzo’s and Luigi Sica’s ‘Rondine al nido’ is one of the greatest joys of Dolce Vita. There is always a fascination in hearing serious artists take on ‘lighter’ repertory, but in the context of Dolce Vita it is Kaufmann’s seriousness, apparent in his sincerity of expression, that is the light that illuminates the beauties of these songs.

Familiarized throughout the world by singers like Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli, and Josh Groban, Francesco Sartori’s and Lucio Quarantotto’s ‘opera pop’ hit ‘Con te partirò’ remains one of the highest-grossing songs in any genre owing in no small part to its chorus, a soaring melody with the visceral appeal of a Puccini aria. Though preferable to an effortful, belted climax, the falsetto ending here is a misjudgment, sounding oddly strained, but, with no disrespect to the ranks of its previous interpreters, hearing a voice of true substance in the song is most welcome. The Eros Ramazzotti-esque pop croon that Kaufmann adopts for the disc’s final track, Stephin Merritt’s and Zucchero’s ‘Il libro dell‘amore,’ is anything but the most attractive of the sounds that the tenor produces in the course of Dolce Vita, but his performance of the song is strangely beguiling. Sounding properly awed and perhaps slightly frightened by what the pages of this book of love contain, one of the world’s most celebrated singers is for a moment an awkward boy tasting love for the first time. Through the power of song, his voice becomes that of every earnest lover.

A nation’s cultural identity cannot be reduced to platitudes and soundbites. It is impossible even with avalanches of words to quantify the qualities that make one community’s way of life different from others’. So much time is wasted contemplating what separates us from one another when what truly matters, what gives misguided and mistrusting humanity hope, is facilitating and fostering connections that unite us. Perhaps Italy’s appeal extends so far beyond her borders and diaspora because her culture, so recognizable even when undefinable, is endearingly welcoming. Join an Italian family at table, and it no longer matters which nation’s arms grace one’s passport: to be invited is to be accepted and embraced, to be initiated into a culture that thrives on celebrations of life’s moments, good and bad. No disc can fully capture or convey the spirit of Italy, but in the sixty-seven minutes of Dolce Vita Jonas Kaufmann blends the sultry, sensual sounds of timeless Italy into a savory ragù that nourishes the senses. Dolce Vita is far from perfect, but so are Italy and those who love her. Viva le imperfezioni!

La bella voce della dolce vita: Tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who celebrates the exuberant spirit of Italy on the Sony Classical recording Dolce Vita
[Photo by Julian Hargreaves, © by Sony Classical]

LOUIS-FERDINAND HÉROLD (1791 – 1833): Le pré aux clercs—Marie-Ève Munger (Isabelle de Montal), Marie Lenormand (Marguerite de Valois), Jeanne Crousaud (Nicette), Michael Spyres (Baron de Mergy), Éric Huchet (Cantarelli), Christian Helmer (Girot), Emiliano González Toro (Comte de Comminges), Leandro César (Le brigadier), Manuel Rebelo (Un exempt du guet), Tiago Batista (Un archer), Nuno Fonseca (Un archer); Coro e Orquestra Gulbenkian; Paul McCreesh, conductor [Recorded in the Grande Auditório – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal, 7 – 8 April 2015; Ediciones Singulares ES 1025; 2 CDs, 121:54; Available from NAXOS Direct, jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

‘Two young girls, the Farival twins, were playing a duet from “Zampa” upon the piano.’ For more than a century, this line from Kate Chopin’s 1899 proto-feminist novel The Awakening and occasional performances of the spirited Overture from the same work were as close as anyone outside of France could hope to get to the music of Louis-Ferdinand Hérold. Born in 1791 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, now adjacent to but then just west of Paris, Hérold was a precocious child whose musical talents manifested themselves early on, and his enrollment at the world-famous Paris Conservatoire in 1806, when he was only fifteen years old, brought him into contact with some of the most revered musicians in France, including Charles Simon Catel, Rodolphe Kreutzer, and Étienne Méhul. Six years later, in 1812, Hérold garnered the prestigious Prix de Rome, and 1828 found him receiving the Légion d’honneur from the Bourbon court of Charles X. On 3 May 1831, these honors were supplemented by what is now often cited as the greatest prize of Hérold’s career: the première at Paris’s Opéra-Comique of his Zampa, the Overture from which has, along with the ballet La fille mal gardée, rescued Hérolds’ name from oblivion beyond France and Germany. Five weeks before the composer’s untimely death from the ravages of tuberculosis, his final completed opéra comique opened to acclaim even greater than that lavished on Zampa. First performed on 15 December 1832, Le pré aux clercs proved so popular that it was chosen to formally christen the Opéra-Comique’s new venue, the second theatre in Paris to answer to the name Salle Favart, in 1840, and within forty years of its première had amassed more than a thousand performances in Paris—double the number of performances that Zampa received in the French capital during the same period. Were they en vacances along the Côte d’Azur rather than Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the Farival twins might well have serenaded Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier with music from Le pré aux clercs.

A setting of a libretto adapted by François-Antoine-Eugène de Planard from Prosper Mérimée’s 1829 novel La Chronique du temps de Charles IX, the action of Le pré aux clercs is situated against the backdrop of the 1572 Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, a mass assassination, perhaps instigated by Catherine de’ Medici, of prominent Huguenots gathered in Paris to celebrate the wedding of the Valois King Charles IX’s sister Marguerite to the Calvinist-leaning future Henri IV, France’s first Bourbon monarch. The violence quickly expanded beyond Paris, becoming one of the bloodiest events in France’s religious struggles. Sharing this milieu with Meyerbeer’s vast Les Huguenots, Le pré aux clercs may seem on the surface to be a daftly light-hearted score, but de Planard and Hérold focused their attention on personal relationships rather than national politics. With his wealth of widely-lauded experience in Baroque repertory, especially Händel’s operas and oratorios, to his credit, British conductor Paul McCreesh approaches Hérold’s score with proven gifts for identifying and imparting drama on a scale that is unfailingly appropriate for the music. Under his direction, the Gulbenkian Foundation chorus and orchestra provide performances that fully substantiate the legitimacy of Le pré aux clerc’s popularity in the Nineteenth Century. As evidenced by the fine singing of members bass-baritone Leandro César as the Brigardier, bass Manuel Rebelo as the Exempt du guet, and bass Tiago Batista and tenor Nuno Fonseca as archers, the choristers are a strong presence in this performance, their sounds granting music and text the immediacy that the opera’s dramatic situations require. Whether in the Overture, the Entr’acte that introduces Act Two, or any of the opera’s scenes, the orchestra’s playing is also an integral component of the musical continuity that McCreesh succeeds in creating throughout the score’s three acts. The conductor’s mastery of a work like Händel’s Saul yields an appreciable comfort with the contrasts among Hérold’s intimate and epic scenes. Even in the opera’s dialogue, which is spoken by the cast with diction that ranges from acceptable to fluent, momentum never flags. Thanks for this is owed largely to McCreesh, whose innate musicality shapes a traversal of Le pré aux clercs that adventurously exposes the many felicities of Hérold’s well-written score to modern listeners’ discriminating ears.

Raising the curtain on Act One alongside the chorus with an aptly stirring account of ‘Ah! Quel beau jour de fête,’ the Girot of baritone Christian Helmer and Nicette of soprano Jeanne Crousaud, both benefiting from their portrayers’ native French, converse with dramatic specificity and solid, focused tones. The pair give a fine account of their duet, ‘Les rendez-vous de noble compagnie,’ Crousaud rising with minimal effort to Nicette’s top B♭s and Helmer partnering her with singing of flinty vigor.

Thrillingly bringing the ardent Baron de Mergy to life, American tenor Michael Spyres has only one aria in which to exhibit the easy swagger with which his voice and technique can ignite a performance, but he here proves no less incendiary in ensembles, his voice ringing with the fresh sparkle of a crystal goblet whether he is alone on stage or surrounded by the full cast. He traces the line in the recitative ‘Ce soir j’arrive donc’ imaginatively, and his vocalism in the lovely moderato aria ‘O ma tendre amie’ is elegant and beautifully-phrased. Spyres evokes the legacy of Nineteenth-Century French tenor singing by projecting the aria’s first top C with an authentic, gorgeously-managed voix mixte. The subsequent top B♭s and Cs that crown bursts of Rossinian fiorature, subtly and stylishly decorated by Spyres, are sung de la poitrine but equally attractively. Le pré aux clercs followed Rossini’s Guillaume Tell by less than three years, and Mergy’s music recalls Arnold’s ‘Asile héréditaire,’ music of which Spyres is one of today’s few wholly-qualified exponents. Hérold’s music mostly lacks the edge of brilliance obvious in Rossini’s, but Spyres’s singing supplies the dazzling technical marvels that his rôle demands.

In the ensemble that follows Mergy’s aria, ‘Allons! dressons la table!’, the sly Cantarelli of French lyric tenor Éric Huchet emerges with a stream of smooth, lean tone. One of the many relatives in Nineteenth-Century opera of Dandini in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Cantarelli is always at the ready, a committedly willing participant in actions to further any cause in which he believes, and Huchet strengthens his depiction with consistently animated singing. In the act’s vivid finale, ‘À la Navarre,’ French mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand and Québécoise coloratura soprano Marie-Ève Munger as Maguerite de Valois and her companion Isabelle de WHAT encounter the stony-hearted Comte de Comminges of Swiss/Chilean tenor Emiliano González Toro. The unforced dignity that Lenormand brings to her embodiment of the distraught queen is not unexpected, this trait being such a crucial element of the singer’s artistry, but it is an unusual pleasure to hear the gossamer-voiced González Toro in a villainous rôle. Owing to the natural allure of his timbre, every line that the tenor utters emits an electric charge of insinuation, and his words convincingly unnerve Marguerite and Isabelle. Munger and Lenormand are ideally matched in their rôles, the former’s flights above the stave complemented by the reliable sturdiness of the latter’s lower register. Each member of the cast exerts her or his presence in the ensemble, ending the act with concerted singing of tremendous impact.

Spurred by the orchestra’s sophisticated playing of the Entr’acte, the first scene of Act Two establishes the atmosphere for a contemplative scene for Isabelle that is not unlike Meyerbeer’s scene for her mistress Marguerite de Valois in Act Two of Les Huguenots. Munger sings Isabelle’s aria ‘Jours de mon enfance’ entrancingly. The young soprano’s bravura capabilities are wonderful, but her voice shimmers most alluringly in lyrical passages, her singing of French nasalized vowels having none of the pinched quality that jeopardizes even some native speakers’ performances. In the trio with Marguerite and Cantarelli that follows, ‘Vous me disiez sans cesse,’ Munger sings with confidence, her character’s frightened innocence compellingly countered by Lenormand’s regal bearing and Huchet’s fortitude. The subsequent Masquerade is a scene of inventive dramatic thrust, realized here with abandon that McCreesh controls meticulously without seeming to do so. In the act’s bristling final scene, a few of Lenormand’s highest notes are effortful, but the blazing intensity of ‘Tout est dit’ and ‘Je suis prisonnière’ is heightened by the suggestion of strain. Here, too, McCreesh and the cast evince exciting spontaneity whilst exacting laudable precision and preparation, increasing the finale’s tension with music making of bracing efficacy.

The Gulbenkian choristers reaffirm their collective excellence with a mesmerizing account of ‘Que j’aime ces ombrages’ to start Act Three. Building upon this foundation, Crousaud voices Nicette’s ‘À la fleur du bel âge’ with assurance and histrionic involvement that astutely advances the opera’s plot towards its resolution. Spyres, Munger, and Lenormand collaborate in a fantastic performance of the best number in the score, the trio ‘C’en est fait!’ Spyres infuses Baron de Mergy’s lines with golden-toned Romanticism, his navigation of difficult jaunts through the passaggio winningly assured, and he seems to truly listen to the ladies, the colorations of his vocalism growing brighter as he fully absorbs that Mergy and Isabelle are to be united in safety. It is impossible to imagine Mergy’s music being sung better by any tenor past or present. There are foreshadows of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier in the benevolent Marguerite’s interventions on behalf of the young lovers, and the integrity of Lenormand’s vocal demeanor would be a credit to any portrayal of Strauss’s noble character. Lenormand’s singing in this performance harkens back to the bygone era in which French singers like Germaine Cernay, Solange Michel, and Suzanne Juyol conveyed great passion with vocalism of exquisite poise. Munger, on the other hand, is representative of a new species of singer, one in whose endeavors lessons of the past are integrated with the stylistic versatility and cinema-worthy acting expected of today’s singers. Hearing her Isabelle in this performance, it is no surprise that she is a noteworthy interpreter of Gounod’s Juliette, of whom the delicate Isabelle is a kinswoman. The opera’s finale, launched by a sonorous ‘Je frémis!’ and concluded by a jagged, then jubilant ‘Nargue de la folie,’ perfectly summarizes all that came before, both in Hérold’s score and in this performance of it: leaving nothing to chance, every voice and instrument is dedicated to making every word and note count, and the final tally amounts to a Le pré aux clercs that surprises and satisfies.

One of the continuing amazements of opera in the Twenty-First Century is the obscurity in which many rewarding scores slumber whilst other works, some far less deserving of attention, are revived with enthusiasm and even relative frequency. Perusing the performance diaries of European theatres and festivals, one might reasonably presume that virtually every opera composed between 1650 and 1750 is a masterpiece, so regularly are Baroque operas brought back to the stage. There are forgotten gems from every epoch of opera’s remarkable history, many of which were celebrated as extraordinary achievements when they were first performed, and there are also scores that can sound more accomplished than they can justifiably claim to be when performed especially well. Louis-Ferdinand Hérold’s Le pré aux clercs might rightfully answer to both of these descriptions. It is a score of undeniable quality, but the performance that it receives on the discs, handsomely presented by Ediciones Singulares and generously sponsored by Palazzetto Bru Zane, gives the opera a stamp of importance that makes it seem the equal of the finest of its contemporaries. If it is not quite that, the illusion is nevertheless fabulously fulfilling.

Le bretteur à l'opéra: Tenor Michael Spyres (right) as Baron de Mergy in Louis-Ferdinand Hérold’s Le pré aux clers at Paris’s Opéra-Comique in 2015
[Photo by Pierre Grosbois, © by Opéra-Comique]

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Schubert Sessions, Lieder with Guitar—Philippe Sly, bass-baritone; John Charles Britton, guitar [Recorded in l’Église St-Augustin-de-Mirabel, Québec, Canada, in January 2016; Analekta AN 2 9999; 1 CD, 59:20; Available from Analekta, Amazon (Canada), Amazon (USA), iTunes, and major music retailers]

‘Don’t try to plan me or understand me / I can’t stand to be understood.’ These lines succinctly express the defining sentiment of The Turtles’ 1965 hit ‘Let Me Be,’ but they also epitomize the attitude of many artists past and present. The desire for acceptance is among the most basic aspects of humanity, but to be an artist is to be continually in conflict with some portions of society. For the artist touched by genius, the pressure to explain and justify the creative process must be overwhelming, so being widely ‘understood’ by the masses might logically be unpalatable. Perhaps this was not Franz Schubert’s personal philosophy, but the communal ethos of many of the composer’s Lieder embodies the conflict between a sensitive soul and the uncomprehending world in which it strives for meaningful connections. The image of Schubert the reclusive genius—shy, socially awkward, a German-speaking Emily Dickinson whose wars were waged in melodies rather than in books—is prominent in today’s gallery of biographical portraits of important composers, but applying modern notions of psychology, sociology, and sexuality to details of Schubert’s life produces a character study of dubious legitimacy. If one seeks meaningful acquaintance with Schubert, it is in his Lieder that one should search for him. Surpassing even the efforts of the great Mozart and Beethoven, Schubert elevated the German Lied to the pinnacle of artistic expression, his genius maturing through his composition of the more than six hundred songs via which he secured both his own legacy and the long-term future of the genre. It is fanciful to suggest that Schubert understood his own gifts most fully when engaged in the business of setting words to music, but hearing Schubert Sessions, this superbly-recorded Analekta disc of Schubert Lieder accompanied by guitar, irrefutably brings the listener very near to the epicenter of the composer’s creative genesis. It may be true that the greatest composers cannot hope to be universally understood, but neither can they hope for a plethora of performances of their music of the quality of Schubert Sessions. Perhaps an artist spurning the notion of being understood is born of the all-too-real fear of being misunderstood, but there is no misunderstanding Schubert Sessions: this is as affectionate a survey of Schubert’s Lieder as has ever appeared on disc; and, as hardly deserves to be an afterthought, one of the best-sung.

Adapting Schubert’s Lieder for performance with guitar rather than piano is not a recent innovation, but it is one that some purists are apt to reject without consideration, maintaining that arranging Schubert’s thoughtfully-conceived accompaniments distorts the composer’s brilliance. Are arrangements of the organic immediacy exhibited by John Charles Britton’s work on this disc truly so contrary to the spirit of Schubert’s invention? It can be argued that the accompaniments of some of the Lieder, especially those that evoke lovers’ and troubadours’ serenades, were consciously intended to mimic the timbral qualities of the guitar, and Britton’s transcriptions of the sixteen songs on this disc preserve the defining qualities of Schubert’s writing for piano whilst introducing unique nuances of their own. Impressive as Britton’s arrangements are, his playing of them is still more enjoyable. It is not merely that the guitarist’s nimble-fingered performance conquers every challenge of Schubert’s music and his adaptations of it: his playing is equally nimble-hearted, the emotions of each Lied heightened by his intuitive phrasing. The range of dynamics that Britton coaxes from his guitar is astounding. The guitar is his voice, and through its strings he sings with the strength and suavity of as noted an interpreter of Schubert as Hermann Schey.

The impeccably-trained voice of Canadian bass-baritone Philippe Sly has never sounded more purely beautiful on disc than in the performances on Schubert Sessions. Here, his is the voice of the young Wotan, as yet untroubled by the worries of empire and enemies, singing of the intimate pangs of a restless, relentlessly amorous spirit. ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ (Op. 72, D. 774) could be a serenade to Fricka to be sung on the Rhine, and Sly internalizes its sentiments to sublime effect, his voice flowing on the current of Britton’s playing. The melodic line of ‘Alinde’ (Op. 81, No. 1; D. 904) is caressed by the singer with a tender lover’s grace, and the eloquent simplicity of ‘Du bist die Ruh’ (Op. 59, No. 3; D. 776) here takes on an understated suggestion of sensuality, Sly’s breath control enabling preservation throughout the song of a hushed intensity that vibrantly but subtly brings the text to life. Few singers are as attentive as Sly to the sounds of the words in ‘An Sylvia’ (Op. 106, No. 4; D. 891). In his performance, aided by Britton’s gossamer touch, the Lied’s sense of awe is complemented by an Elizabethan gentility that conjures the dulcet atmosphere of a Dowland lute song.

‘Erlkönig’ (Op. 1, D. 328) is one of Schubert’s most popular Lieder among singers and listeners, and Sly and Britton reveal the full spectrum of its charms by approaching the song as a genuine narrative. Their handling of ‘An die Musik’ (Op. 88, No. 4; D. 547) is no less imaginative, but, aptly, it is the exceptional musicality of the performance that lingers in the memory. The manner in which the moods of ‘Ständchen’ (D. 957, No. 4) and ‘Wohin?’ (Op. 25, No. 2; D. 795) are differentiated within the parameters of the controlled environment of Sly’s and Britton’s performance is indicative of their shared interpretive intelligence and insightfulness. In these songs and in ‘Der Müller und der Bach’ (Op. 25, No. 19; D. 795), voice and guitar interact hypnotically, harmonies that are sometimes obscured in performances with piano highlighted by the transparency of Britton’s playing and Sly’s flawless intonation. Both ‘Der Leiermann’ (Op. 89, No. 24; D. 911) and ‘Der Doppelgänger’ (D. 957, No. 2) are sung with straightforward focus, and the delicacy of Sly’s singing of the often over-interpreted ‘Der Lindenbaum’ (Op. 89, No. 5; D. 911) is arresting. There is something of Gérard Souzay’s expressive depth in Sly’s singing without any of the affectation, but the young singer’s artistry has to its credit an omnipresent originality that distinguishes its owner as a Lieder singer of the highest order.

The distinct microcosms created in the four Lieder with which Schubert Sessions concludes form a sort of compass that guides the listener on a journey through the expressive topography that Schubert crafted in his body of songs. In ‘Der Jüngling an der Quelle’ (D. 300), the irrepressible energy of youth palpitates in both music and performance, and Sly’s singing is propelled by the wonder of new experiences. The contrast with ‘Du liebst mich nicht’ (Op. 59, No. 1; D. 756b) is therefore more profound. Sly’s mercurial, amethyst-hued vocalism is wondrously consistent, however. The utter earnestness of his delivery of ‘Der Fischers Liebesglück’ (D. 933) enables the listener to primarily concentrate on Schubert’s exquisite use of the words instead of performers’ egos. In Sly’s and Britton’s hands, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (Op. 7, No. 3; D. 531) is no Grand-Guignol melodrama in miniature. The song, one of Schubert’s most haunting, is in this performance an unexaggerated dialogue, one in which the singer’s lower register shimmers.

All performances of Lieder should be dialogues, conversations in music among like-minded artists whose principal goal is to serve as the conduits via which composers’ and poets’ conjoined modes of expression are communicated to listeners. In this case as in so many others, what is easily pontificated is far less easily accomplished. Despite what some of their representatives might insinuate, artists are imperfect human beings, after all, but the thrill of art is in the quest to make something marvelous of the imperfections. With his Lieder, Franz Schubert transformed life’s imperfections into many wonderful things. The imperfections of Schubert Sessions are the missed opportunities of Lieder that were not included on the disc—imperfections for which there is ample time in the fruitful career before Philippe Sly to make amends. Schubert and the German Lied, the songs on this disc and arrangements for guitar, Philippe Sly and John Charles Britton, the listener and Schubert Sessions: whether or not we achieve or even strive for understanding, The Turtles would be right to proclaim us ‘so happy together.’

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Die Walküre, WWV 86B—Petra Lang (Brünnhilde), Matthias Goerne (Wotan), Heidi Melton (Sieglinde), Stuart Skelton (Siegmund), Michelle DeYoung (Fricka), Falk Struckmann (Hunding), Sarah Castle (Waltraute), Karen Foster (Gerhilde), Katherine Broderick (Helmwige), Anna Burford (Schwertleite), Elaine McKrill (Ortlinde), Aurhelia Varak (Siegrune), Okka von der Damerau (Grimgerde), Laura Nykänen (Roßweiße); Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra; Jaap van Zweden, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during concert performances in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, Hong Kong, China, 21 and 23 January 2016; NAXOS 8.660394-97; 4 CDs (also available in Blu-ray Audio format), 236:32; Available from NAXOS Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It is not without justification that the name Richard Wagner strikes fear into the hearts of singers, conductors, impresarios, stage directors, and audiences. Mostly rightly and occasionally wrongly, Wagner’s operas are perceived as long, loud, perilously difficult to perform, and steeped in a mythology into which the listener must submerge himself—without the aid of a Bulfinch or Edith Hamilton—or sit stupefied as processions of deities, dwarves, giants, and men invade the stage. The trouble with reputations is that they too often reflect an entity’s negative rather than the positive aspects, and to dismiss Wagner’s operas, especially Der Ring des Nibelungen, because of their reputed defects is to be deprived of some of opera’s greatest thrills. To hear the Siegfried of Bernd Aldenhoff awaken the Brünnhilde of Astrid Varnay in the 1951 Bayreuther Festspiele Siegfried or the Siegmund of Jon Vickers burst into the humble abode of the Sieglinde of Dame Gwyneth Jones in the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Die Walküre of 16 December 1972, is to forget Wagner’s reputation for impenetrable storylines and—according to Rossini—dull quarters of hours and surrender to the ecstasy with which he infused the four monumental scores that comprise his Der Ring des Nibelungen. The ‘Erster Tag’ in Naxos’s complete Ring-in-progress, arguably the most ambitious operatic project that any label can undertake, this recording of Die Walküre expands the discography with that rarest of commodities: a performance of this tremendously demanding opera that legitimately deserved to be recorded for posterity.

Like the account of Das Rheingold that preceded it, this second installment in Naxos’s new Ring was recorded during concert performances in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, documenting the first complete presentation of Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen by an orchestra based in Hong Kong or mainland China. Here consistently on par with the work of their counterparts in the pits of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus, Wiener Staatsoper, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the playing of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra is contrastingly earthy, effervescent, and eloquent as the score demands. The primordial energy of the opening pages of Act One surges from the strings, and the brass and woodwind playing is often magnificent in Acts Two and Three. The orchestra’s performance is never less than thoroughly professional, and with that achievement they prove superior to many ensembles with decades-long associations with Wagner repertory. The postlude to Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde in Act Three, shaped by the composer almost like a Baroque ritornello, and the Zauberfeuermusik are sumptuously and soulfully played. From the first ominous notes of Act One to the cathartic final phrases of Act Three, the Hong Kong Philharmonic musicians rise to every spectacular challenge of the score, confirming that their stunningly beautiful city is a peer of Bayreuth as a home for idiomatic Wagner performances.

Music Director of both the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, as well as Music Director designate of the New York Philharmonic, Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden has established himself as one of his generation’s most respected conductors and administrators, continuing the tradition of his countrymen Eduard van Beinum and Bernard Haitink. With an array of impressive Wagnerian credentials to his credit, not the least of which is his exhilarating leadership of Hong Kong Philharmonic’s Das Rheingold, Zweden brings a wealth of experience and obvious dedication to his conducting of this Walküre. Zweden’s pacing of this performance occasionally recalls two of the great Wagner interpreters of prior generations: the insightfulness that he displays in highlighting the ways in which Wagner used the orchestra to further character developments brings to mind the conducting of Wilhelm Furtwängler, especially in Act Two, and, in the penultimate and final scenes of Act Three, the care that he takes to allow both singers and orchestra ample flexibility with which to explore the complex emotions that unfold in their parts resembles the meticulous attentiveness of Sir Reginald Goodall. Zweden fosters and maintains a superb balance between intensity and rapt expressivity, never sacrificing momentum when granting passages the expansiveness that they require. Zweden’s tempi unerringly meet the demands of the score, and there are far greater senses of tension and resolution in this performance than in many faster-paced, more pushed Walküres.

For every Walküre blessed with a steady-voiced ensemble of Valkyries—and it is indeed a blessing—there are countless performances of the opera in which the warrior maidens’ wailing is markedly more comical than Wagner intended it to be. Perhaps young singers respond ‘Ja!’ when offered an opportunity to sing one of the Valkyries without fully considering the difficulty of the music. The band of sisters in this performance is without a poorly-tuned instrument, however. Sopranos Karen Foster, Katherine Broderick, and Elaine McKrill as Gerhilde, Helmwige, and Ortlinde and mezzo-sopranos Sarah Castle, Anna Burford, Aurhelia Varak, Okka von der Damerau, and Laura Nykänen as Waltraute, Schwertleite, Siegrune, Grimgerde, and Roßweiße are musically and dramatically effective, individually and en masse, shielding Brünnhilde and then bemoaning her fate with fearless singing. Their sounds are not unfailingly beautiful, but hearing a wobble-free account of their music gives great pleasure.

As recently as 2011, German bass-baritone Falk Struckmann was a lecherously libidinous, powerfully-sung Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca at The Metropolitan Opera. Vocally, the distance from Scarpia, a rôle that punishes a baritone’s upper register, to Hunding in Die Walküre is great, but Struckmann spans the divide with astonishing comfort. As the implacable voice of conventionality in this performance, he sings robustly, the solidity of the voice throughout the range granting the character’s sinister utterances added impact. When Struckmann voices ‘Die so leidig Los dir beschied,’ there is no mistaking Hunding’s meaning or his distrust of the visitor to his home. Similarly, the bass-baritone’s delivery of ‘Ich weiß ein wildes Geschlecht’ pulses with villainous intent. Struckmann’s Hunding is predominantly a brutish, single-minded bully, but there are indications in his untiringly musical performance that the harsh man’s love for Sieglinde is sincere if crudely possessive. Hunding has little to do in Act Two aside from slaying Siegmund and being slain himself, but Struckmann commits the fateful act of vengeance with growling malevolence, all too willing to be Fricka’s pawn in her battle of morals with her proud husband. Like Hagen in Götterdämmerung, Hunding too often falls victim to ugly barking and shouting. He is a cruel, largely one-dimensional man, but Wagner wrote notes for him, obviously expecting the music to be sung, not snarled. Struckmann takes care to sing the music, and the product of that care is a credible, atypically enjoyable Hunding.

Considering aficionados’ profuse (and largely justified) lamentations for the state of Wagner singing in the first sixteen years of the new millennium, that this recording preserves one of the finest performances of Act One of Die Walküre ever committed to disc is a fantastically welcome surprise. Listeners could hope to encounter no more appealingly heroic a pair of young lovers among the ranks of today’s Wagner singers than soprano Heidi Melton and tenor Stuart Skelton. As Siegmund rushes exhaustedly onto the aural scene, his enemies at his heels, Skelton’s baritonal, buttered-rum voice fills the recorded space thrillingly, his diction generally laudable and his intonation uncommonly accurate. Skelton sings ‘Wes Herd dies auch sei’ with resilient but not insensitive masculinity. There is an audible change in his Siegmund’s demeanor when he encounters Melton’s Sieglinde, as well there should be: who could resist the allure of such a voice and the lady who nurtures it? The young soprano, already a practiced Wagnerian whose Sieglinde at the 2016 Festspiele immediately—and rightly—became part of Bayreuth lore, voices ‘Müd am Herd fand ich den Mann’ demurely, the hard reality of Sieglinde’s marriage conveyed by the granite core of Melton’s voluptuous voice. Her tone radiates erotic tension as she sings ‘Schläfst du, Gast?’ That tension is further heightens the mood initiated by Skelton’s declamation of ‘Ein Schwert verhieß mir der Vater.’ He is a Siegmund for whom—and for whose listeners—the great exclamations of ‘Notung!’ hold no terrors, and he sings the impassioned ‘Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond’ with burgeoning optimism and genuinely beautiful tone. Melton’s account of ‘Du bist der Lenz’ is the rare performance of this music in which the sound of the voice credibly matches the meaning of the words: as she sings of him, it is possible to fully believe that, in the frigid context of her torturous life, Siegmund truly initiates a vernal blossoming, epitomized by the sonorous top A with which Skelton ends Act One.

Wagner’s orchestra leaves no doubt that the tribulations endured by Siegmund and Sieglinde in Acts Two and Three will be anything but pleasant. Seeking shelter in their flight from Hunding’s dogged pursuit in Act Two, Skelton’s Siegmund articulates ‘Raste nun hier, gönne dir Ruh!’ with unmistakable affection, and his abiding concern for Sieglinde is touching. Skelton evinces more emotional engagement in his performance of ‘So jung und schön erschimmerst du mir’ than many Siegmunds manage to do in all of the character’s music. The tenor makes both ‘Zauberfest bezähmt ein Schlaf’ and ‘Der dort mich ruft’ profoundly personal musings rather than stentorian outbursts, and few of the most accomplished Siegmunds past and present expressed themselves so eloquently in the Todesverkündigung: here, Skelton astutely imparts the devotion to his partner that is the catalyst for Brünnhilde’s awakening to human feelings, a vital component of the Ring’s drama which must far too often be taken on faith. In Sieglinde’s brief but extraordinary music in Act Three, Melton provides the kind of singing for which Wagner connoisseurs long, mostly in vain. The soaring lines of ‘Rette mich, Kühne! Rette mein Kind!’ and ‘O hehrstes Wunder!’ are conquered, not merely survived, a feat of which a number of fine Sieglindes cannot boast, and the control that Melton has over her colossal voice is awesomely apparent. Pining for another Flagstad and Melchior is as pointless as comparing every subsequent Sieglinde and Siegmund to them, but this Walküre features a Sieglinde and Siegmund who earn the implicit praise of favorable comparisons with their illustrious predecessors.

On a level of excellence comparable with that inhabited by this performance’s rhyming Wälsung twins, Melton and Skelton, is mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, whose power and upper-register impact hint that both Sieglinde and Brünnhilde are well within her grasp. Riveting as her Fricka in the Naxos Rheingold was, her interpretation of the character in Die Walküre is still more successful. Her singing of ‘So ist es denn aus mit den ewigen Göttern’ wields force mightier than blows of Wotan’s spear, and she detonates ‘Deiner ew’gen Gattin heilige Ehre’ like histrionic dynamite. The fact that a figure who appears only in Das Rheingold and in one scene in Die Walküre casts such a long shadow over Der Ring as a whole is a testament to the brilliance of Wagner’s concept of the character, but not all Frickas exert every ounce of authority given to them by the composer. DeYoung’s Fricka is a goddess to the tips of her fingernails and the peaks of her shining top notes, and hers are arguments that cannot be ignored.

Met in the opening minutes of Act Two, when her ‘Hojotohos’ are war whoops worthy of the worst cinematic depictions of Native Americans on the attack, the Brünnhilde of German soprano—and former mezzo-soprano—Petra Lang improves steadily after this inauspicious start. She lacks the trill requested by Wagner, but so has virtually every Brünnhilde in recent memory with the exception of Rita Hunter, and her tone sometimes becomes strident when the ears most want it to bloom. Expanding a portfolio of Wagner characterizations that already includes the Walküre and Götterdämmerung Brünnhildes in Marek Janowski’s Pentatone Ring, recorded during concert performances, and a splendid Isolde at the 2016 Bayreuther Festspiele, Lang’s Brünnhilde in this Naxos Walküre is a formidable creation. Vocally, hers is a mature, sporadically cynical rather than an obviously youthful-sounding Brünnhilde, but she is an intelligent, inventive singer who uses the sheer effort required to sing the rôle to project the character’s naïveté. Conversing with her father, this Brünnhilde mirrors Wotan’s frustration and world-weariness from the first notes of ‘Schlimm, fürcht’ ich, schloß der Streit,’ notes that she dispatches with solid, focused tone. The surprise that she expresses in ‘So nimmst du von Siegmund den Sieg?’ progresses organically to the disbelief and exasperation of ‘So sah ich Siegvater nie.’ In the Todesverkündigung, the scene in which Brünnhilde reveals to Siegfried that it is Wotan’s will that he must fall in the coming fight with Hunding, there is a hauntingly disembodied quality in Lang’s voicing of ‘Siegmund! Sieh auf mich’ that recalls the Brünnhildes of fellow mezzo-soprano converts Dame Gwyneth Jones and Elizabeth Connell. Her dramatic profile sharpens as the scene’s momentum builds, limning the metamorphosis from unquestioning daughter to a free-thinking, intuitive woman willing to defy her father’s instructions in pursuit of what she perceives—and what she knows that Wotan perceives in his innermost thoughts—as the greater good.

Brünnhilde’s transformation in Act Three of Die Walküre is arguably the most vital character development in the Ring. It is her assimilation of mortality and human feelings that propels the cycle to its conclusion, and Lang compellingly depicts that crucial journey in her portrayal. Her Brünnhilde bursts breathlessly into her sisters’ company with a steel-edged vaulting of ‘Schützt mich und helft in höchster Not!’ When her apprising the Valkyries of her daring rescue of the pregnant Sieglinde is interrupted by her quarry’s rousing, the tenor of her singing changes as noticeably as did that of Siegmund’s when he first discovered Sieglinde in Act One. Lang’s voice shimmers as she tells Sieglinde that the child growing within her will be the world-altering hero Siegfried. Brünnhilde knows that Sieglinde’s safety depends upon defusing Wotan’s anger, and the trepidation that infuses Lang’s singing of ‘Hier bin ich, Vater’ reveals that the girl comprehends that punishment even for her father’s most-loved child will be severe. As she presents her defense in ‘War es so schmählich, was ich verbrach’ and receives Wotan’s response and sentence, it is apparent that this Brünnhilde is shocked by the seeming heartlessness of Wotan’s treatment of her, effectively foreshadowing the moments in Götterdämmerung in which the former Valkyrie becomes cognizant of the intricacies and implications of her anguished father’s plan. Lang shrinks from none of her rôle’s demands, rising to the top Bs and Cs with confidence and stamina. A Brünnhilde in possession of all of the notes must be appreciated, but Lang inspires adulation with her keenly expressive uses of those notes.

The great triumph of Hong Kong Philharmonic’s Rheingold was German baritone Matthias Goerne’s Wotan, and it is a triumph that is redoubled in Die Walküre. The criteria by which success in Wagner repertory is gauged are vastly different from those that govern the assessment of any other repertory, but by any standard Goerne’s singing in this performance is masterful. Engaged in heated discourse by first his beloved daughter and then his wife, Wotan is bowed in Act Two by the weight of supreme power. Goerne discloses with his kaleidoscopic vocalism that, though troubled, Wotan is gladdened by Brünnhilde’s presence, his ‘Nun zäume dein Roß’ resounding with subtle relief. Fricka’s entry changes the dramatic temperature from paternal warmth to icy determination, his wife now a political adversary instead of a caring mate. The fury of ‘Der alte Sturm, die alte Müh’!’ does not completely mask the heartbreak, and the irony of ‘Was verlangst du?’ is both unnerving and pitiable. Whether partnering DeYoung or Lang, Goerne sings handsomely and heroically. He is a Wotan who rules as sagaciously by charisma as by manipulation, but he equally despairs and berates himself for having lost the upper hand when Fricka backs him into an ethical corner from which there is no escape. Ignited by shame, his sorrow and disillusionment boil as he admits to Brünnhilde that Fricka’s agenda must prevail. The baritone bites at ‘So nimm meinen Segen, Niblungen Sohn!’ like a caged lion. Nevertheless, suavity and nobility are evident here and in the final fight between Siegmund and Hunding.

It is in Act Three that a Wotan achieves or misses greatness, and it is in Act Three of this Walküre that Goerne carves for his Wotan a place of honor among those of Friedrich Schorr, Hans Hotter, and George London. There is brassy menace in Goerne’s singing of ‘Wo ist Brünnhild’, wo die Verbrecherin?’ that yields to the sort of ire that derives solely from the bitterest disappointment. As Goerne shapes the narrative in ‘So tatest du, was so gern zu tun ich begehrt’ and ‘Nicht streb, o Maid, den Mut mir zu stören,’ Wotan’s disappointment at his own monumental failures is manifested as vividly as his reaction to Brünnhilde’s disobedience. Goerne easily traverses the wide range of the music, as steady on high as in the lowest depths of the part, and he is more responsive to Wagner’s genius for using text to propel melodic lines than any Wotan on disc since Julius Huehn.

Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde can be one of opera’s most heart-wrenching scenes, the tragedy of a father separated from his child not by uncontrollable circumstances but by the necessity of preserving the social order of which he was the primary architect battering the foundations of the most basic human instincts. In Goerne’s performance, resignation and resistance claw at the god’s psyche as he sings ‘Leb wohl, du kühnes, herrliches Kind!’ Until his last note falls silent, it seems possible that Goerne’s Wotan could reverse his decision and restore Brünnhilde to her sisters, intensifying the sadness of his ultimate abandonment of her. The broken voice of every grieving father sings in Goerne’s exquisitely-phrased ‘Der Augen leuchtendes Paar,’ and he summons Loge in ‘Loge, hör! Lausche hieher!’ with vehemence aimed as much at himself as at Brünnhilde’s would-be molesters. The protecting fire already burns in this Wotan’s voice as he pronounces ‘Wer meines Speeres Spitze fürchtet.’ The debacles with which Wotan contends in Die Walküre furrow the brow and darken the visage of the youthful, virile god introduced by Goerne in Das Rheingold, but the voice remains an instrument worthy of the fabled halls of Walhall.

Die Walküre is the most popular of the four operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen because, amidst the titanic context of the cycle’s drama, it recounts a self-contained story with a beginning, an ending, and a logical path from one to the other, comprehension of the broader, symbolic importance of which is not necessary in order to appreciate the opera’s plentiful musical and dramatic virtues. Intriguingly, however, this Walküre is especially enthralling because it is clearly a chapter in a continuing saga: its surging linear storytelling benefits from knowing the origins of the characters’ plights, established in the preceding Das Rheingold, and having foreknowledge of how their destinies play out. Principally, though, this is a Walküre of enduring value because Wagner’s score is performed so well. Perfection is perhaps more difficult to attain and analyze in the performance of Wagner’s operas than in those of any other composer; and, in reality, that elusive perfection matters less. This Walküre aims for persuasion, not perfection, and it comes closer than many performances of the opera to the latter by proving so adept at the former.

HENRY PURCELL (1659 – 1695): The Fairy Queen, Z.629—Marc Molomot (Puck), Kimberly Eileen Jones (Tanya), Cedric Berry (Ron), Alexandra Martinez-Turano (Helena, Dancer), Scott J. Brunscheen (Demetrius), Darryl Taylor (Herman), Ryan Belongie (Lysander), Roberto Gomez (Shakes); Haymarket Opera Orchestra; Jory Vinikour, harpsichord and conductor [Andreas Mitisek, Production Design and Director; Dan Weingarten, Lighting Designs; David Lee Bradke, Lighting Director; Chicago Opera Theater, The Studebaker Theater, Fine Arts Building, Chicago, Illinois, USA; Friday, 11 November 2016]

Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ Though the contexts and the meanings of the related words are very different, it can be asserted with ample justification that giving Henry Purcell an opportunity to compose a masque inspired him to express human truths through music. Born in London’s Royal Borough of Westminster in 1659, Purcell is, despite his extraordinary significance to English music, a figure about whose biography there is at least as much conjecture as there is consensus. The composer Daniel Purcell, commonly identified as Henry’s younger brother, may have actually been his cousin or a lesser relation, for example, and constructing a chronology of the elder Purcell’s career with any pretension of accuracy is virtually impossible. Painstaking scholarship has yielded relative certainty about the likelihood that Purcell’s largest-scaled work for the stage, the masque The Fairy Queen, was composed in 1692 and premièred at the Queen’s Theatre in the same year in celebration of the wedding anniversary of Britain’s dual monarchs, William III and Mary II. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the Queen’s Theatre was a marvel of form and function, the feats of stagecraft made possible by the fruits of Wren’s genius manifested in the music written for the venue. It was as an entertainment to be presented among the five acts of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that The Fairy Queen was conceived, but the masque’s words, authorship of which remains unidentified, are only tangentially related to Shakespeare’s play. Given this masque within the structure of one of Western literature’s greatest works for the stage in which to perform his musical magic, Purcell tells the truth with stunning wit and wisdom. Perhaps, as Emily Dickinson put it, he sometimes tells it ‘slant,’ but the truth in The Fairy Queen is unfailingly tuneful.

The first fully-staged show to be presented in the newly-rejuvenated Studebaker Theater in the historic Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, Chicago Opera Theater’s production of The Fairy Queen, designed and directed by COT General Director Andreas Mitisek and utilizing a very free adaptation of Purcell’s semi-opera [numbers were cut and reordered, vocal parts were changed, and music from other scores by Purcell, mainly King Arthur, was interpolated] by the trio of inventive minds—Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza—united in Culture Clash, fused Purcell’s musical ‘Restoration spectacular’ with elements of the plot of its intended Shakespearean setting. Transplanting the action from Shakespeare’s distant antiquity to a vague present, the mysterious sylvan world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was traded for a seedy Las Vegas establishment that recalled the continental haunts of Christopher Isherwood and his circle of moral miscreants. Though intermittently effective in the most basic ways, especially in exploring how decent people can unintentionally but devastatingly hurt one another, the production left few tired, dramatically pointless clichés of sexual depravity untouched. Here a nightclub owner who was equal parts Joel Grey’s Emcee in Cabaret, Jonathan Pryce’s Engineer in Miss Saigon, and a parody of every roué in opera, COT’s Puck was deprived of the mercurial charisma that renders Shakespeare’s incarnation of the character memorable. No new ground was excavated by the production’s race, gender, and sexual preference stereotypes, and the innuendo and pantomime depravity, typified by the heroine of sorts suggestively unzipping Puck’s trousers, were uncomfortable for the cast and, most critically, for Purcell. Dan Weingarten’s lighting designs and David Lee Bradke’s implementation of them brought the production vividly to life, though the strobe lights in Part Two emphasized the garishness of the pseudo-erotic cavorting at the expense of the unfolding emotional drama. There were many affecting moments in the performance, but they mostly occurred in spite of rather than because of the production. Modernizing Baroque scores when bringing them to the stage has become common practice, sometimes with fantastic results, but the problem with reimagining The Fairy Queen as Lulu is that Purcell’s risqué but sublime, sensitive work is at odds with a nonsensical story about repulsive people. Purcell demands poetry, not pornography, and this production failed its participants and its patrons by using the artists on stage as objects in a sexual farce rather than vessels for the unadulterated outpouring of Purcell’s music.

Man with a plan: Harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour, conductor of Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen, 11 November 2016
[Photo by Nuccio di Nuzzo]

Purcell’s champion and savior in this production was internationally-acclaimed harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour. Leading the period-instrument orchestra of Chicago’s Haymarket Opera, with which company he will perform Alessandro Scarlatti’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista at Malta’s Valletta Baroque Festival in January 2017, Vinikour labored mightily to enthrone this Fairy Queen in a musical realm that Purcell would recognize and endorse. The Haymarket musicians—first violinists Jeri-Lou Zike, Ann Duggan, and Wendy Benner; second violinists Martin Davids, Emi Tanabe, and Lori Ashikawa; violists Liz Hagen and Dave Moss; cellists Craig Trompeter and Lucien Werner; violone player Jerry Fuller; Dave Walker on theorbo; Kathryn Montoya and Sung Lee doubling on oboe and recorder; Kris Kwapis and Tom Pfotenhauer on natural trumpet; and Brandon Podjasek on kettle drums and tambourine—collaborated with Vinikour in the creation of a sound world in which one could take refuge from the tomfoolery littering the stage. Even from the perspective of the Twenty-First Century, in which perceptions of orchestral grandeur are shaped in the opera house by Wagner and Richard Strauss and in the concert hall by Mahler, it is remarkable to experience how much sheer sound an ensemble of eighteen musicians can generate. That sound was sporadically compromised by faltering intonation and a handful of flaws from the notoriously unmanageable valveless trumpets, but, on the whole, the period instruments and their handlers made wonderfully diverting noises. Guiding the performance as though extemporaneously composing the score himself, Vinikour provided continuo playing that was inventive but restrained, and his colleagues in the pit shared his gifts for crisp rhythms, pinpoint articulations of harmonic progressions, and purposeful ornaments. The pruning and restructuring to which the score was subjected limited cohesion among scenes, but Vinikour achieved marvels in sustaining momentum and facilitating musical characterization by both singers and instrumentalists. Long in demand as a vocal coach and respected recital partner for some of the world’s best singers, Vinikour débuted as a conductor of opera as recently as August 2016, when he paced West Edge Opera’s performances of Händel’s Agrippina in Oakland, California, but a novice’s nerves were not apparent in this Fairy Queen. He and the orchestra supplied the foundation of professionalism that the production sorely needed, and his spot-on tempi and grounding musicality counterbalanced the unnecessary scenic stupidity.

Also covering the lead rôles, the seven choristers—tenor Jonathan Weyant, soprano Lari Stait, basses Zacharias Niedzwiecki and Samuel Weiser, mezzo-sopranos Kira Dills-DeSurra and Quinn Middleman, and tenor Patrick Dean Shelton—sang strongly and often very beautifully. In an ensemble of this size, the quality of each individual voice was apparent, and the young singers revealed themselves to be first-rate artists in the making. Temporarily abandoning his Club FQ bartending duties to writhe acrobatically as the dominatrix Miss Trixie’s scantily-clad ‘pussy cat’ in the production’s second half, Niedzwiecki literally revealed more than his colleagues, but his singing was as impressive as his physique. Any one of these talented youngsters might have stepped into a leading rôle with assurance. As an ensemble, their work was marvelous: lulling the anguished Tanya to sleep, their singing of ‘Hush, no more, be silent all’ was the musical zenith of the performance.

Shakes—an apt name for a perennially-inebriated barstool bard who merrily trades couplets for Courvoisier—was portrayed with absolute conviction by baritone Roberto Gomez, a lauded Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia whose familiarity with Rossinian fiorature paid rich dividends in his singing of Purcell’s music. Among the cast, Gomez seemed most at ease with the bawdy comedy (but was also spared the most provocative of it, it must be admitted), delivering lines with near-perfect timing, reacting organically to the other players, and taking bits like Shakes’s concerted flirtation with Puck—falling victim to his own aphrodisiacal concoction—in stride. Though the tessitura of his music sometimes seemed marginally too low for him, the baritone sonorously entreated his friends at Club FQ to ‘Fill up the bowl,’ and he was a champion stutterer in Purcell’s parody music. Gomez was an amiable Drunken Poet, a good-natured if excessively-boozed Christopher Sly who sang with a good grasp of Purcell’s idiom. Can one really imagine Sly propositioning a tavern keeper, though?

Boys on the town: Countertenors Ryan Belongie as Lysander (left) and Darryl Taylor as Herman (right) in Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen, 11 November 2016
[Photo by Liz Lauren / Handout]

The production made it difficult to empathize with any of the characters, especially the party-seeking newlyweds Lysander and Herman, but the interpreters of these rôles worked diligently to connect with their audience. Countertenor Ryan Belongie was a suavely handsome Lysander who coped manfully with being asked to romp embarrassingly—and shirtlessly—with Helena. Vocally, his was a mellifluous performance, and the quality of his acting largely matched the caliber of his singing. Arriving at Club FQ, Belongie’s Lysander duetted erotically with Herman, but his potion-induced transition to heterosexuality was equally adroit. His delivery of the line ‘I even find her breasts enticing’ when ogling Helena was hilarious. His lean, sinewy voice flowed through Purcell’s melodic lines like pure honey, and he negotiated divisions with surety. He radiated boyish sex appeal but was also the most maturely expressive of the principals: gaining cognizance of his brief liaison with Helena, his face conveyed heartbreak and regret as earnestly as his singing.

Fellow countertenor Darryl Taylor was a supernova of virility as Herman, flexing his muscles like a prizefighter and donning South Beach-esque attire with aplomb. Like Belongie, he found in Purcell’s music ample opportunities for honeyed vocalism, and his agility was admirable. The melting lyricism of his singing in ensembles was delightful. The imagery of ‘See my many coloured fields’ was manifested in his light-emitting shoes, but it was the voice that shone most brightly. The staging required Taylor to camp it up shamelessly, but the integrity of his artistry could not be obscured.

In this production, Demetrius and Helena were not yet married but already pursuing counseling in an effort to heal and preserve their foundering relationship. One wondered whether its survival was really wanted by the henpecked Demetrius of tenor Scott Brunscheen. Tall, feigning awkwardness, and clearly unnerved by his bossy bride-to-be, he could not be faulted for his reluctance to make a lifelong commitment to Helena. Vocally, there was nothing hesitant in Brunscheen’s performance. His lithe, attractive lyric tenor was firm and focused throughout the performance, and the liquid ease of his singing was enchanting. Dramatically, Brunscheen was the crestfallen fiancé to the life, unsure of himself and awaiting instructions from Helena on what to think and feel. The singer’s voice soared with the freedom and confidence that the character’s spirit lacked, and his admission to Helena that, whilst under the influence of Puck’s elixir, he had done quite a bit more than staring into another man’s eyes was bizarrely touching.

What fools these mortals be: Soprano Alexandra Martinez-Turano as Helena (left) and countertenor Ryan Belongie as Lysander (right) in Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen, 11 November 2016
[Photo by Liz Lauren / Handout]

Singing as gracefully as she moved as an exotic dancer in Club FQ, soprano Alexandra Martinez-Turano was a fanciful, flexible Helena who seemed besotted with the notion of being married but not so much with its practical implications, especially those implications that she could not micromanage. It was unfortunate that this production perpetuated the slander that folks who enjoy a bit of fun are essentially sex-addicted sluts. Shakespeare’s Helena, though unquestionably highly-strung, is no Athenian Jezebel, but COT’s Helena was undeniably an historically-informed girl gone wild. Martinez-Turano therefore earned special praise for making the character interesting. Her vocalism was unimpeachable. Her performance lent the expected metamorphosis from uptight prude to sexually-liberated ‘true self’ emotional sincerity. Recasting the languidly sensual ‘If Love’s a sweet passion’ as a quartet for Helena, Demetrius, Herman, and Lysander was among the production’s foremost successes, and the singers traded lines beguilingly. Here and in every passage that she sang, Martinez-Turano’s crystalline tones were a great asset to this Fairy Queen.

Standing in for Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania, COT’s Ron and Tanya were sung by a pair of expert singing actors whose well-matched musical and dramatic qualities enabled them to loft their characterizations above the production’s obsession with flesh and carnal gratification. Bass-baritone Cedric Berry projected machismo and a voice of fabulous mettle to the theater’s last row. A man with natural weaknesses rather than a licentious philanderer, the Ron created by Berry was a hard-surfaced but tender-hearted husband whose love for Tanya seemed to ooze from his pores. Distracted by Martinez-Turano’s feisty señorita, he voiced ‘See, I obey’ commandingly, and he joined Martinez-Turano in a steamy rendition of ‘Come, come, come, come, let us leave the town.’ Parted from Tanya by the fallout from his straying eyes and hands, Ron’s life was stopped in its tracks. Berry expressed the character’s guilt and loss in his heartfelt, compellingly-sung ‘Next, winter comes slowly.’ Turning on Puck in frantic anger after the well-intentioned cocktail misdirected Tanya’s affections, Berry raged rousingly in ‘Arise, ye subterranean winds,’ tossing off the difficult passagework and deploying dazzling thunderbolts of sound at the top of the range. In the production’s penultimate scene, Ron’s reconciliation with Tanya was nobly done: in addition to earning Tanya’s forgiveness, the sighs of surrender and warm applause made it clear that Berry’s debonair wooing won over hearts in the audience. His was the best singing of the evening, an unforgettable performance by a star on the rise.

The course of true love never did run smooth: Soprano Kimberly Eileen Jones as Tanya (left) and bass-baritone Cedric Berry as Ron (right) in Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen, 11 November 2016
[Photo by Liz Lauren / Handout]

Partnering Berry as the temperamental Tanya, soprano Kimberly Eileen Jones looked like a svelte Jennifer Hudson and sounded like a young Camilla Williams. Discovering her husband prostrate beneath an undulating dancer, Jones’s eruption of ire was ferocious: most of the men in the theatre likely wanted to cower beneath their seats merely for having looked at the shimmying Delilah. The production’s single greatest misstep was staging a comedic routine for Puck during Tanya’s singing of the score’s most famous number and one of the pinnacles of Seventeenth-Century music, the passacaglia-form Plaint ‘O let me weep.’ Jones phrased the air magisterially, her command of the requisite style more certain here than in any other number. She sometimes sacrificed diction to the use of distorted vowels more conducive to vocal production, especially as her lines ascended, but the rounded tones that she produced rarely failed to compensate for the lack of verbal clarity. The bravura demands of ‘Hark! how all things in one sound rejoice’ and ‘Hark! the echoing air’ were sparklingly met. Nevertheless, Jones was happiest when her melodies were unencumbered by fiorature, but she wielded a good trill. Like Berry’s, her performance satisfied and promised still finer things to come. Though the production’s depiction of African American culture was dispiritingly unoriginal and even insulting, placing a couple of color at its center was a commendable and irrefutable validation that all singers as gifted as Berry and Jones belong on all of the world’s important stages.

The elixir of lust: Tenor Marc Molomot as Puck (left) and soprano Kimberly Eileen Jones as Tanya (right) in Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen, 11 November 2016
[Photo by Liz Lauren / Handout]

The nucleus around which the supercharged particles of this Fairy Queen whirred was the Puck of tenor Marc Molomot. A celebrated exponent of French repertory ranging from Lully to Poulenc, Molomot’s haute-contre voice was a good fit for Purcell’s music, which was likely composed for voices in the English tradition of singers like John Dowland, their natural ranges poised between the modern distinctions of tenor and countertenor. Some of the music assigned to Molomot was slightly too low for his vocal center of gravity, but he conquered every challenge, singing attractively even when burdened with ridiculous stage business. Only with the advent of the Hanoverian dynasty that was established in England after the death of the childless last scion of the House of Stuart, Queen Anne, was the full force of the Italian Baroque felt by English musicians. Thus, French influences are prevalent in Purcell’s music, and Molomot thrived on the elegance of the composer’s vocal writing. Not every note that he sang was perfectly-pitched or of surpassing beauty, but he inhabited the rôle and his music from the heels of his cordovan loafers to his neon-pink hair. The tenor’s voicings of ‘Come, all ye songsters of the sky’ and the epithalamium ‘Thrice happy lovers’ were the performance’s finest instances of Purcellian vocal authenticity. Singing, dancing, joking, hectoring, reduced to his undershirt and jockey shorts, Molomot never succumbed to superfluity. In a production with much to offend, his multifaceted Puck indelibly made amends.

Preparing The Fairy Queen for performance is not unlike trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. Modern attention spans make staging the work in its original guise as a companion to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream unpalatable, and without that context the score has no dramatic foundation. In order to stage Fairy Queen in operatic form, a plot must therefore be devised, and in the fulfillment of that necessity Chicago Opera Theater’s production was not without merit. With an intelligent, uniformly capable cast on stage and an ensemble of virtuosi in the pit, all marshaled by an acknowledged master of Baroque repertory, the Shakespeare-derived story of lovers and their foibles would have sufficed. Leaving well enough alone is rarely a principle that wins arguments in opera, however, and the impulse to shock here outweighed the responsibility to serve the composer. Performed stylishly and sometimes exquisitely, COT’s production was not truly The Fairy Queen, Purcell, or Shakespeare, but it was great fun.

Scene of the crime: the harpsichord played by harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour in Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen
[Photo by the author]

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Don Giovanni, K. 527—Dimitris Tiliakos (Don Giovanni), Vito Priante (Leporello), Myrtò Papatanasiu (Donna Anna), Karina Gauvin (Donna Elvira), Kenneth Tarver (Don Ottavio), Guido Loconsolo (Masetto), Christina Gansch (Zerlina), Mika Kares (Il Commendatore); MusicAeterna (Orchestra and Chorus of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre); Teodor Currentzis, conductor [Recorded in P. I. Tchaikovsky State Opera and Ballet Theatre, Perm, Russia, 23 November – 7 December 2015; Sony Classical 88985316032; 3 CDs, 170:10; Available from Amazaon (USA), iTunes (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

From ancient accounts of Potiphar’s wife’s adulterous but not unrequited infatuation with the virtuous Joseph to the literary exploits of Molière’s Tartuffe, de Laclos’s Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmomt, de Sade’s Justine, and Byron’s Don Juan, the adventures of amatory predators and prey have ignited artists’ and audiences’ imaginations. Libidinous appetites and the pursuit of their fulfillment are components of human nature commonly regarded as inappropriate topics for polite conversation, but the boundaries of propriety upon the operatic stage have, since Monteverdi’s Nerone first enacted his debaucheries in song, been an ever-changing, wide-ranging measure of societal attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Composed for Prague in response to the tremendous success that his Le nozze di Figaro had previously enjoyed in that city, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni reunited the composer with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, whose texts melded pointed social commentary with eloquent expressions of emotion. The class warfare that serves as the backdrop for the characters’ intimate drama in Le nozze di Figaro also wages just beyond the fringes of Don Giovanni’s plot, but here there are no obvious victors; none, that is, except for the listener, who is treated to three hours of the finest music in opera. In its way, Don Giovanni is as bold and seductive as the poetry of Walt Whitman and the paintings of Gustav Klimnt, but, of these, Mozart’s was the most timeless and universal genius. This recording confirms time after time that the opera’s capacity to provoke and surprise is undiminished more than two centuries after its first performance. Whether in Prague in 1787 or in Perm in 2015, Mozart’s and da Ponte’s magnificently complex but also engagingly simple tale of Don Giovanni and his conquests forces performers and observers to peer into the corners of our psyches that we endeavor to hide from others’ view. We may not like what we see, but a performance of Don Giovanni like the one on these discs makes it impossible to dislike what we hear.

In a sense, Don Giovanni poses questions not unlike those suggested by Leonardo da Vinci’s famed Gioconda, whose ambiguous visage leads the observer to ponder whether she is consciously smiling and, if so, why and at whom. In this recording, the final leg of his journey through Mozart’s three operas with libretti by da Ponte, Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis strips away layers of well-meaning but inauthentic performance traditions in the manner of an art historian restoring a weathered canvas. Recorded in full in 2014, scrapped because the results did not achieve the spirit of rediscovery that the conductor sought, and finally recorded anew in 2015, the performance on these discs, preserved by Sony Classical in clean acoustics that heighten dramatic propulsion by evoking a theatrical atmosphere, mines Mozart’s score for answers to difficult questions. Accompanied on this adventure by the voices and instruments of MusicAeterna, artists of the Perm State Opera and Ballet, Currentzis takes Don Giovanni at face value, approaching it as neither an academic treatise nor a post-Freudian psychological muddle. Perhaps, as his correspondence suggests, Mozart was not the most mature of men, but his music is reliably logical in construction. It is Mozart’s logic that Currentzis follows, and it leads him to musical details that many performances overlook.

The continuo in this recording is a model of its kind, elaborate but never obtrusive. The notion that Mozart or any other self-respecting musician who was involved with performing Don Giovanni during the composer’s lifetime merely plonked out chords during secco recitatives is absurd, but so is much of the continuo playing heard today. Here, an ideal balance between imagination and integrity is achieved. Throughout the performance, instrumental obbligati are beautifully done, the instruments singing with the voices they support. Though true, it is misleading to state that Currentzis’s conducting is revolutionary. This implies that the conductor’s work is idiosyncratic, which denotes a departure from convention with a pejorative connotation. In fact, Currentzis’s conducting of this Don Giovanni is both revolutionary and idiosyncratic in the sense that he regards the opera as neither a dainty, Baroque-influenced period piece nor a Romanticized psychodrama but as a hybrid work with elements of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century innovations. The opera may have been written in and for a more genteel time, but it is anything but polite. Astonishingly, though, Currentzis never forces or pushes the singers or the orchestra. Tempi and instrumental balances sound precisely right for a score composed in 1787. Currentzis has acquired—and actively cultivated—a ‘bad boy of Classical Music’ persona, but he is the right ‘bad boy’ for the job of reintroducing Don Giovanni as Mozart and da Ponte conceived it.

Il Commendatore serves as the catalyst for the opera’s explosive dramatic reactions, first by dying at Don Giovanni’s hand in Act One and by returning in Act Two in petrified form to instigate his murderer’s final judgement. Projecting every note of the part with fiery focus, Finnish bass Mika Kares is a Commendatore who deserves the title. Moreover, Kares is a bona fide bass who plays the part after the manner of Ludwig Weber and Gottlob Frick. The Commendatore interrupting Don Giovanni’s attempted mischief with Donna Anna, Kares voices a frightening ‘Lasciala, indegno!’ Perhaps old in the ways of the world, this is no wheezing, decrepit Commendatore: Kares depicts a still-brawny father who is a potent threat to Giovanni. ‘Ah, soccorso! Son tradito!’ is neither shouted nor crooned, and the bass brings atypical dignity to the Commendatore’s death. In this performance, with a Commendatore who does not sound like a demented troll, it is possible to appreciate Donna Anna’s prolonged grieving, often a source of humor in performances of Don Giovanni. There is nothing comical about Kares’s singing in Act Two, when the Commendatore’s stone monument accosts Giovanni and Leporello in the cemetery and subsequently turns up as invited at Giovanni’s banquet. The gravity of ‘Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m’invitasti, e son venuto’ and the calls for Giovanni to repent resounds in Kares’s vocalism, and he is totally convincing as the no-longer-of-this-world statue without resorting to artificial vocal production or being distorted by misguided audio effects. Kares’s Commendatore is unique in sounding as though he actually wants Giovanni to avoid damnation by repenting. Few singers bother to do anything other than sing the notes that Mozart wrote for the Commendatore, and even fewer manage to sing them well. Kares both sings ably and legitimately interprets the rôle.

Italian baritone Guido Loconsolo is a confident, youthful Masetto, almost a plebeian Don Giovanni in training, whose singing of Mozart’s notes is as accomplished as his handling of da Ponte’s words. Not even when Masetto’s anger is uncontainable does the singer relinquish his firm control over the voice. Tossing off ‘Giovinetti leggieri di testa’ with the effervescent joy of an adoring fiancé on his wedding day, Loconsolo gives Masetto the charm and appeal that he possesses in the score but so often lacks on stage and on disc. His voice rings out handsomely in ‘Ho capito, signor sì!’ Whether with the intention of spotlighting the social divide that separates him from Don Giovanni or owing to unimaginative singers, Masetto is often portrayed as a grunting simpleton, a sort of Neanderthal with a hot temper and little trust in his betrothed’s capacity for fidelity. Loconsolo’s Masetto is no empty-headed brute. It would be no surprise to find him in a barroom brawl, but, unlike many rival portrayals, he would indubitably have a good reason for throwing punches and, most winningly, would sing splendidly whilst doing so.

Austrian soprano Christina Gansch provides Loconsolo’s Masetto with a Zerlina of feminine wile and flirtatious sweetness whose sensibilities complement his own. Gansch voices ‘Giovinette che fate all’amore’ brightly but without the hard edge that many sopranos bring to the music. When this Zerlina sings ‘Vorrei e non vorrei’ in response to Giovanni’s wooing ‘Là ci darem la mano,’ she sounds credibly bewildered, both flattered and frightened by the philanderer’s attention. The aria ‘Batti, batti, o bel Masetto’ is virtually unbearable in many performances, sopranos smothering the music with cuteness and self-indulgent cooing. Here, however, the singer’s vocalism is certainly pretty but never coy or caricatured. Following her colleagues’ examples, Gansch embellishes her music liberally but tastefully, adding an easy top C to the cadenza in her beautifully-sung ‘Vedrai, carino, se sei buonino’ in Act Two. This recording delights unexpectedly by including the scene in which Zerlina abducts Leporello and threatens to slice him to shreds with a razor, composed for the opera’s first production in Vienna and now almost always omitted. The soprano’s silvery tones acquire a glinting edge as she hurls ‘Non v’è pietà, briccone’ at Leporello, believing him to have beaten Masetto, but she is no murderess. This fit of vengeful rage out of her system and Giovanni dispatched to incendiary retribution, Zerlina is the cheerful, clever bride once more, and she is heard with pleasure in the opera’s finale. Gansch’s Zerlina is not a chirping schoolgirl but an independent young woman who sings stylishly and refuses to be any man’s plaything—unless she wants to be.

Vocally and dramatically, Don Ottavio is often a pronounced weakness in otherwise enjoyable performances and recordings of Don Giovanni. In recent years, a true Mozart tenor—a singer like Anton Dermota, whose repertory was built upon the foundation of Mozart singing and whose stylishness and technical acumen as a Mozartean remained reliable throughout a long career—has been as rare as a genuine Heldentenor. There are tenors who manage Don Ottavio’s music effectively, but almost none of his contemporaries rivals American tenor Kenneth Tarver’s level of comfort in the rôle. Ottavio’s music offers the singer nowhere to hide. A singer who requires no vocal hiding places, Tarver contributed an exemplary portrayal of Ottavio to René Jacobs’s harmonia mundi recording of Don Giovanni, as well as having sung Ferrando in Currentzis’s account of Così fan tutte for Sony Classical, but he surpasses both of those performances with his Ottavio in this Don Giovanni. Vowing to aid his fiancée Donna Anna in identifying and having revenge on her attacker—assuming, that is, that she was as unwilling a recipient of Giovanni’s love-making as she later indicates to Ottavio—and her father’s murderer, Tarver possesses the vocal power needed for the oath-swearing duet, singing ‘Senti, cor mio, deh senti’ with gripping bravado. Learning from Anna what transpired in the moment’s before the Commendatore’s death, this Ottavio comforts his beloved with the soothing timbre of his voice in the intense accompagnato that precedes Anna’s ‘Or sai chi l’onore.’ Tarver’s performance of ‘Dalla sua pace la mia dipende’ is magical: on recordings, only Cesare Valletti rivals him for tonal beauty, but Tarver’s technique enables even more exquisite breath control than Valletti had at his command. Furthermore, Tarver is a rare Ottavio who is not upstaged by his female cohorts in the sublime trio in the Act One finale, ‘Protegga il giusto cielo il zelo del mio cor!’ In the Act Two sextet, Tarver sings ‘Tergi il ciglio, o vita mia’ lovingly, but it is his account of ‘Il mio tesoro intanto andate a consolar’ that most ravishes the ears and enthralls the heart. The long runs are sung with single breaths as Mozart surely intended, and the evenness of tone from bottom to top is exceptional. This Ottavio seems to thoroughly understand and accept his Anna, and his lines in the opera’s final scene are affectionately articulated. Tarver is a wonderful singer and great artist, but this Ottavio is an extraordinary performance even by his own standards.

At her first appearance, the Donna Anna of Greek soprano Myrtò Papatanasiu sounds vocally undernourished, but that appearance thankfully proves to be deceiving. Anna’s terror as her father comes to her rescue and is slain by Don Giovanni invigorates the opera’s first scene, the soprano evincing the life-or-death tension of the situation without going off the rails vocally. In the accompagnato ‘Ma qual mai s’offre, oh dei!’ and the vengeance-pledging duet with Ottavio, Papatanasiu sings with growing power and nuance, securing her dramatic footing with a coldly determined exclamation of ‘Fuggi, crudele, fuggi!’ Anna’s lines in the quartet with Giovanni, Ottavio, and the raving Elvira are pointedly sung. The stirring accompagnato ‘Don Ottavio, son morta!’ is launched with laser-like tonal accuracy and histrionic kinesis. It was in the aria ‘Or sai chi l’onore rapire a me volse’ that powerhouse Annas like Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, and Dame Gwyneth Jones excelled, but Papatanasiu’s more modestly-dimensioned voice scales the heights of the music excitingly, the fearsome top As projected without strain or scrambling. She partners Tarver radiantly in the masquers’ trio, matching his elegant shaping of ‘Protegga il giusto cielo il zelo del mio cor!’ and rising above the stave with encouraging ease. Joining in Act Two’s masterful sextet, Papatanasiu voices ‘Lascia, lascia alla mia pena questo picciolo ristoro’ endearingly but with an abiding sense of her prolonged agony over the loss of her father. Unlike many recorded Annas, Papatanasiu projects mental clarity in the accompagnato ‘Crudele? Ah no, mio bene’ and aria ‘Non mi dir, bell’idol mio.’ Why the aria is frequently cited as a bravura showpiece is perplexing. Its bravura writing is very difficult, to be sure, but the piece is not a perch upon which songbirds can pose and tweet roulades. Both Currentzis and Papatanasiu are alert to this and give the aria the dramatic immediacy for which it cries out. The soprano brings tremendous focus to her negotiations of the vocal line, always emphasizing melody rather than technical display. Her technique is fully equal to the coloratura, but Papatanasiu is above all a gratifyingly musical Donna Anna whose instincts direct her to the expressive core of every phrase. In the Act Two finale, her words to Ottavio are sung with conspicuous feeling, this Anna putting him off not out of capriciousness but because the grief in her heart does not yet allow room for him to inhabit it fully. Papatanasiu makes the rôle her own as few singers on disc have done, and solely in terms of raw vocalism she is an uncommonly successful Donna Anna.

Provided that she sings her difficult music capably, a Donna Elvira can be forgiven for seeming somewhat ridiculous. After all, hers is the unfortunate lot of endeavoring to loathe and publicly denounce a man with whom she falls in love anew in every scene: she may be destined for a convent, but it will surely be an institution in which the face of every saint is transformed in this highly-strung lady’s mind into that of Giovanni. Singing accurately and exaggerating nothing, Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin proves a hearteningly musical and uncommonly moving Donna Elvira. Yes, the character’s actions and reactions are often illogical, but in Gauvin’s performance they never seem so: her Elvira is not a wounded animal caught in a snare but a deeply sensitive woman whose capacity for love greatly exceeds that for skepticism. At her first entrance, it is discernible in her electrifying but affecting account of the aria ‘Ah! chi mi dice mai quel barbaro dov’è’ that Gauvin is an Elvira who has pored over the emotional aspects of the rôle as closely as she studied the music. Her ‘Ah! fuggi il traditor’ both throbs with fury and exudes despondency and jealousy, and the music is authoritatively sung. Gauvin’s voice scintillates in the quartet, her singing of ‘Non ti fidar, o misera’ limning the ambiguity of her feelings. With both ‘Bisogna aver coraggio’ and ‘Vendichi il giusto cielo il mio tradito amor!’ in the trio with Anna and Ottavio, Gauvin markedly deepens her characterization of Elvira, fully exploring the complexities with which Mozart and da Ponte enriched the part. The Act Two trio also inspires the singer to musical emoting of the highest order, her ‘Ah! taci, ingiusto core, non palpitrarmi in seno’ projected with Callas-like sensitivity to the relationships between the vocal line and the meaning of the text. Fascinating, too, is the insightfulness with which she enunciates ‘Sola, sola, in buio loco’ in the sextet. Neither in performance nor on disc does Elvira’s accompagnato ‘In quali eccessi, o numi, in quai misfatti orribili, tremendi’ often wield the histrionic force that Gauvin builds in her singing of the music: in her hands, the passage is no less riveting than the accompagnato that precedes Anna’s ‘Or sai chi l’onore.’ This is followed by a performance of the aria ‘Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata’ that astounds. Her widely-lauded credentials in Baroque repertory contribute to what is clearly a sapient understanding not only of Mozart’s music but also of Currentzis’s concept of Don Giovanni. In the brief duration of this single aria, she wholly embodies the essence of this recording: nothing is overwrought, but no phrase wants for ardor. As Gauvin sings it, Elvira’s ‘L’ultima prova dell’amor mio ancor vogl’io fare con te’ fuels the conflagration that ultimately consumes Giovanni, the absolute sincerity of her appeal to Giovanni’s better nature all the more poignant for being so euphoniously sung. There is also palpable lyricism in Gauvin’s singing of Elvira’s resolve to enter a convent. From Luise Helletsgruber, Jarmila Novotná, and Eleanor Steber to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Sena Jurinac, and Leyla Gencer, Elvira has been portrayed in broadcast and studio recordings by some of opera’s most renowned singing actresses. With her performance on this recording, Gauvin asserts that she is the equal of the best of them.

A poor Leporello can undermine the best intentions of any Don Giovanni, and a good Leporello can lessen the impact of the deficiencies of a haphazard performance of the opera. In the performance on the present discs, the Leporello of Italian baritone Vito Priante is precisely what a skilled manservant should be: always at hand, anticipating his master’s needs, fulfilling his duties with alacrity, and standing aside when he is not meant to be the center of attention. Priante’s voice is lighter in both timbre and weight than those of many recorded Leporellos, but his interpretation of the rôle, unforcedly funny and sharp-witted, is among the most substantial on disc. He dispatches ‘Notte e giorno faticar’ with the elegance of a man who has learned much from his exposure to high society, and his interactions with Giovanni throughout the opera reflect a sardonic awareness that, though he is a nobleman, Giovanni is anything but noble. As Priante sings it, ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’ seems intended to mitigate Elvira’s embarrassment rather than to increase it by mocking her. As each of the opera’s characters emerges in the Act One finale, Leporello’s critical part in the drama becomes ever more evident, his responses to each participant’s competing agenda disclosing a mind far quicker than Giovanni appreciates—a major contributing factor in the Don’s eventual downfall. The Act Two duet with his abusive master draws stark irony from Priante, Leporello barely able to contain his contempt for Giovanni and his injustices in his firmly-sung ‘No, no, padrone, non vo’ restar.’ As when singing the Catalogue Aria in Act One, Priante emphasizes an element of sympathy for Elvira in his statement of ‘State a veder la pazza, che ancor gli crederà,’ and he pleads ‘Perdono, perdono, signori miei’ in the sextet with subtle desperation. The aria ‘Ah, pietà, signori miei’ goes for nothing in many performances, but the understated nuances of Priante’s traversal of the aria heighten its importance in the progression of the opera’s narrative. The restored scene with Zerlina proves to be this Leporello’s greatest vehicle for musical characterization, and he seizes every opportunity to use da Ponte’s words as a springboard for diving deeply into the character’s motivations. Priante’s ‘Per queste tue manine candide e tenerelle’ is as thoughtful as his ‘Amico, per pietà, un poco d’acqua fresca o ch’io mi moro!’ is amusing. He acutely conveys Leporello’s horror and fear in the duet ‘O statua gentilissima del gran Commendatore’ and in ‘Ah, Signor, per carità’ in the finale without placing one note or syllable beyond the boundaries of good taste. To his credit, Priante never attempts to emulate the Leporellos of larger voices, preferring to sing the part on his own terms. Those terms, negotiated by singer and conductor with Mozart’s music as the mediator, produce one of the liveliest and loveliest Leporellos on disc.

It is easy to view Don Giovanni, Conte d’Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro, and Guglielmo in Così fan tutte as Mozart’s equivalents of Verdi’s Rigoletto, Giorgio Germont in La traviata, and Conte di Luna in Il trovatore. The vocal Fächen that are so frequently cited today were considerably less codified during and for another generation after Mozart’s career, and his rôles in baritone range are only marginally less difficult to cast with complete success than Verdi’s great baritone parts. Acclaimed for his work in Verdi repertory, particularly the title rôle in Macbeth and Giorgio Germont, Greek baritone Dimitris Tiliakos is the ideal protagonist for Currentzis’s pragmatic Don Giovanni. Suave, sensual, and sonorously masculine, Tiliakos’s Giovanni dominates this performance despite the very strong work by his colleagues. Tussling with the Commendatore after being discovered in the act of assailing Donna Anna’s honor, Tiliakos sings like a man possessed, his voice flashing in the dark soundscape like lightning. The contrast with ‘Là ci darem la mano’ could not be greater. Here, the baritone’s vocalism is like the whisper of a summer breeze: Zerlina can hardly be blamed for following where it leads. Tiliakos voices ‘La povera ragazza è pazza, amici miei’ in the quartet with deceptive concern, and he follows this with a volatile reading of ‘Fin ch’han dal vino calda la testa,’ one which combines musical virtuosity with dramatic acuity. The pace of the Act One finale is set by Tiliakos’s animated singing of ‘Su, svegliatevi, da bravi!’ and ‘Ecco il birbo che t’ha offesa.’ Opening Act Two with the duet with Leporello, this Giovanni brandishes ‘Eh via, buffone, non mi seccar’ like a slap to Leporello’s face. Then, in the trio with Elvira and Leporello, he intones ‘Discendi, o gioia bella’ alluringly. Tiliakos sings one of the most beautiful and erotic accounts of the canzonetta ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro’ on disc, his hypnotic mezza voce and idiomatic diction captivating. The aria ‘Metà di voi qua vadano’ benefits from Tiliakos’s assertive swagger, and his insistent manner infuses ‘Finiscila, o nel petto ti metto questo acciar’ in the duet with Leporello with excitement. Defiant to the end, Tiliakos’s Giovanni mercilessly teases and torments Leporello at the banquet in the opera’s penultimate scene, and the baritone sings ‘Già la mensa è preparata’ with insouciance. The interpolated top A with which Tiliakos expresses his ultimate truculence aptly summarizes his interpretation of the rôle: his Giovanni is his own man, answering only to himself and recognizing no moral authority of this or any other world. There are more smoothly-sung Giovannis on disc, but Tiliakos blends Pinza’s vivacity, Siepi’s joviality, Gobbi’s urbanity, and Taddei’s panache in a brilliantly-executed, compellingly-vocalized depiction of one of opera’s most chameleonic characters.

Mozart’s and da Ponte’s Don Giovanni is an operatic moving target with no definitive edition or interpretation. In the eight decades since the first complete recording of the opera was issued, recorded performances have appeared with relative regularity, populating a discography with renditions ranging in their prevailing sentiments from bawdy comedy to proto-Wagnerian tragedy. The de jure atman of this prismatic dramma giocoso dwells somewhere between these extremes. It is an opera that every listener hears differently. 229 years after its première, it is impossible to know precisely how Mozart and da Ponte ‘heard’ Don Giovanni, but with this recording Teodor Currentzis, MusicAeterna, and an uniformly superlative cast purvey as cogent a ‘hearing’ of this glorious, exacting masterpiece as has been committed to disc.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI (1710 – 1736): Adriano in Siria—Yuriy Mynenko (Adriano), Romina Basso (Emirena), Franco Fagioli (Farnaspe), Dilyara Idrisova (Sabina), Juan Sancho (Osroe), Çiğdem Soyarslan (Aquilio); Capella Cracoviensis; Jan Tomasz Adamus, conductor [Recorded in the studios of Radio Kraków, Kraków, Poland, 19 – 26 August 2015; DECCA483 0004; 3 CDs, 177:59; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It could not have been surmised at the time at which the infant’s first cries resounded in Rome in 1698 how indelibly the course of opera was altered by the birth into a grocer’s family of Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi. A boy with precocious gifts for poetic improvisation and the artful use of words as an expressive device, the young Trapassi was ceded to the custody of an aristocrat who recognized and wished to further cultivate the lad’s talents. It was from his noble patron that Trapassi received the nom de plume that appeared more frequently than any other on opera playbills in the Eighteenth Century: Metastasio. Inheriting and mostly squandering a substantial fortune before he reached the age of twenty-five, the handsome, enterprising Metastasio tried his hand at writing libretti with a flattering text for a serenata celebrating a royal birthday. The first performance of the serenata, set to music by Nicola Porpora, was distinguished by the participation of two of the greatest singers of the age, the castrato Farinelli and soprano Marianna Bulgarelli, both of whom were impressed by the poet’s work. With Bulgarelli’s unstinting advocacy, Metastasio was launched on the path that led to his eventual succession of Apostolo Zeno as imperial court poet to the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1730, the thirty-two-year-old Metastasio settled in Vienna, his name already associated with operas by several of Europe’s most respected composers.

Among Metastasio’s many libretti, his text for Adriano in Siria, a dramatization of episodes in the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian, was one of the most successful, its appeal to composers continuing well into the Nineteenth Century. First set to music by Antonio Caldara in 1732, the libretto was taken up by Geminiano Giacomelli, Francesco Maria Veracini, Riccardo Broschi (brother of Farinelli), Baldasdare Galuppi (twice), Carl Heinrich Graun, Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, Josef Mysliveček, Pasquale Anfossi, Luigi Cherubini, Johann Simon Mayr, and hosts of other composers in the century before its last use by a well-known composer, Saverio Mercadante, in 1828. The typically convoluted plot concerning the amorous and political intrigues among Hadrian, the Parthian king Osroa and prince Farnaspe, and the ladies Emirena and Sabina clearly seized composers’ imaginations with its rich lodes of subdued passions, shifting loyalties, and near-constant deception, all rife for musical mining. Two years after the première of Caldara’s Adriano in Siria in Vienna, a treatment of the text by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi reached the stage of Naples’s Teatro San Bartolomeo. First performed on 25 October 1734, the opera was created by a cast that included Maria Marta Monticelli, Giustina Turcotti, Catarina Fumagalli, and the ill-tempered castrato Caffarelli, begrudgingly acknowledged by Porpora as the finest singer in Italy. Overshadowed in the past half-century by Lo frate ’nnamorato, La serva padrona (originally an intermezzo in Il prigionier superbo), and L’Olimpiade, also a setting of a Metastasio libretto, Adriano in Siria is a masterful example of Neapolitan opera seria and a work that deserves the near-perfectly-executed attention that it receives on this DECCA recording.

His life ended prematurely by consumption before he reached his twenty-seventh birthday, Pergolesi is a figure whose importance to the progressive development of the Italian Baroque is difficult to assess owing to the mythology spurred by Romanticized accounts of his last days and the legacy of his Stabat mater, alleged to have been the best-known and most-published musical work of the Eighteenth Century. This recording of Adriano in Siria significantly expands today’s listeners’ ability to assess Pergolesi’s work within the boundaries of performance practices appropriate for the music. Hearing this recording, it is virtually impossible to accept that the first production of Adriano in Siria did not meet with success. The quality of the performance on these well-engineered discs is extremely high, it is true, but can a performance with Caffarelli at its center really have been markedly inferior? Perhaps even with the light-hearted intermezzo that accompanied it at its première Adriano in Siria was too somber for the farce-loving Neapolitans.

Today’s listeners are certainly no strangers to the phenomenon of genius being rejected whilst mediocrity is embraced, but the performance of Adriano in Siria led here by Jan Tomasz Adamus manifests Pergolesi’s genius in ways that cannot be ignored. The conductor implements tempi that invigorate the now-archaic formulae of opera seria with bristling vitality, only occasionally applying slightly more pressure than the music can withstand, and his work is complemented by the stylish, alert playing of Capella Cracoviensis. Joined on harpsichord by Marcin Świąkiewicz and on theorbo by Ophira Zakai, Adamus keeps the long stretches of secco recitative moving, generating welcome linear continuity among scenes but also granting the singers latitude in highlighting passages of particular importance. The sounds produced by oboists Magdalena Karolak and Aleš Ambrosi and horn players Nicolas Chedmail and Gijs Laceulle contribute excitingly to the orchestral canvas upon which the singers create their character portraits. There is nothing strikingly original in the opera’s Sinfonia, but Adamus and Capella Cracoviensis make it a true introduction to the drama that follows rather than merely a noisy bit of music tacked on at the head of the score. In a few instances, most notably in those arias in which extroverted emotions burst forth, the orchestra’s emphatic playing yields abrasive, excessively-accentuated chords, but every whimper and roar is justified by elements of the plot. Much of Pergolesi’s music warrants the clichéd assessment that the composer was ‘ahead of his time.’ In this performance of Adriano in Siria, Adamus and his colleagues keep pace with Pergolesi’s musical soothsaying from the first note of the Sinfonia to the last bar of the chorus that ends Act Three.

The Roman tribune Aquilio, Adriano’s friend and confidant, has a vested interest in encouraging the emperor’s designs on Emirena: by abandoning the intended imperial consort, Sabina, there would be no obstacle to Aquilio revealing his own love for Caesar’s betrothed. Turkish soprano Çiğdem Soyarslan’s timbre is unmistakably feminine, but she credibly evinces the young man’s romantic dilemma with carefully-managed vocal acting. Hers is an endearingly youthful, almost naïve performance: not even Aquilio’s scheming deprives her singing of its buoyancy. In Act One, Soyarslan delivers ‘Vuoi punir l’ingrato amante?’ with bright, sharp-edged tone and forthright clarity of purpose. Aquilio’s aria in Act Two, ‘Saggio guerriero antico,’ is solidly done, and the soprano’s performance of ‘Contento forse vivere del mio martir potrei’ in Act Three lacks only a prevailing dramatic profile. Still, Soyarslan’s Aquilio is an active participant in the machinations that upset the opera’s amatory equilibrium. Vocally, she is not apt to be mistaken for a man, Roman or otherwise, but she possesses every trait needed to be identified as a singer with great promise.

Portraying the proud Parthian king Osroa, histrionic cousin of Bajazet in Händel’s Tamerlano, Spanish tenor Juan Sancho sings incisively, limning the hot-tempered sovereign’s dogged pursuit of vengeance with musical braggadocio. The intentions are sometimes more enjoyable than the results, but Sancho holds nothing back in his analysis of the character’s arrogance, animosity, and eventual ambivalence. The Act One aria ‘Sprezza il furor del vento’ is lustily sung, its volleys of fiorature blazingly dispatched. Later, Osroa declares that his daughter and Farnaspe perishing as collateral damage in his plot to burn the seats of Roman power is an acceptable outcome, but his music tells a vastly different story. Sancho expertly but unpretentiously executes every hairpin emotional turn of the accompagnato ‘E pure, ad onta del mio furor,’ the potential consequences of the king’s rash actions suddenly flooding his conscience. The tenor’s voicing of the aria ‘A un semplice istante’ seethes with doubt and guilt. Sancho heightens the contrasts between Osroa’s arias in Acts Two and Three, ‘Leon piagato a morte’ and ‘Ti perdi e confondi,’ by using the texts as the blueprints for his construction of musical edifices. Sancho is an exceptionally intelligent singer who unflinchingly meets every challenge of the parts that he sings, but the stress that his no-holds-barred approach exerts on his upper register can be worrying. His vocalism is as resilient as it is intuitive, however, and his conflicted, rabble-rousing Osroa in this performance is an exhilarating depiction of a flawed, fascinating man.

Assuming the patrician mien of Sabina, whose betrothal to Adriano the emperor is all too willing to ignore in order to woo the conquered Emirena, young Russian soprano Dilyara Idrisova illuminates Pergolesi’s melodic lines with a voice that shimmers like the last rays of twilight on autumn foliage. Still a very young singer, her technique remains noticeably ‘green’ in fiorature, and her placement of tones is not always completely steady. Nevertheless, the unaffected beauty of her singing of Sabina’s aria in Act One, ‘Chi soffre, senza pianto,’ is profoundly fulfilling and wholly appropriate to the dramatic situation. In Act Two, she meaningfully imparts the indignation of ‘Ah, ingrato, m’inganni’ without over-emoting or distorting the lovely timbre of her voice. ‘Splenda per voi sereno’ draws from her a wholly different spectrum of vocal colors, used with the utmost delicacy even when the character is under duress. The Act Three aria ‘Digli ch’è un infedele’ receives from Idrisova a performance of maturity and refinement that belie her youth. The noble lady’s trials do not seem out of place in the handling of her young interpreter, and the music is movingly, sometimes magically sung. What an auspicious introduction this is for a singer who seems poised to prove an invaluable asset to performances of Baroque repertory.

When Adriano in Siria was first performed, both Aquilio and the title rôle were assigned to female singers in travesti, a boon to the production’s irascible primo uomo that serendipitously avoided pitting Caffarelli against a rival castrato. For this recording, though, Adriano is restored to the proper gender in a mercurial performance by Ukrainian countertenor Yuriy Mynenko. Gilding his attractive voice with a bright edge, Mynenko convincingly projects Adriano’s regal bearing, articulating text imperiously and phrasing with authority. His aria in Act One, ‘Dal labbro che t’accende,’ is delivered with abundant feeling and technical prowess. Of an altogether different ethos is Adriano’s aria in Act Two, ‘Tutti nemici e rei,’ and Mynenko impresses by adapting his comportment so discernibly within the parameters of the characterization he has created. Furthering this achievement, he fashions a traversal of ‘Fra poco assiso in trono Cesare parlerà’ in Act Three that adds another dimension of complexity to his Adriano. The efficacy of Mynenko’s artistry is revealed by the adroitness with which he transforms a petulant, self-centered autocrat into an approachable, sympathetic man whose heart is as volatile as his empire. Teatro San Bartolomeo’s impresario got it right in 1734: had he been compelled to compete with singing as dexterous, thoughtful, and even throughout the range as Mynenko provides here, Caffarelli would have been fuming.

Pergolesi’s music for Emirena, the daughter of Osroa who, though betrothed and deeply devoted to Farnaspe, has the misfortune of rousing Adriano’s passion, is ideally suited to the voice and dramatic attitudes of Italian mezzo-soprano Romina Basso. In fact, reviving Adriano in Siria was worthwhile solely for the opportunity that it afforded Basso to be heard in this part. The lone native Italian in the cast, her diction is a beacon for her colleagues, who strive to reach the level of communicativeness that she effortlessly exhibits. Basso’s voice, here sounding at its absolute peak, is an extraordinary instrument, her ebony-hued, contralto-like lower register ideally integrated with the rich upper reaches. It is a voice in which the tears of tragic heroines sparkle—a voice in which, in the context of Adriano in Siria, the pain of a woman who believes that she has been abandoned by her lover resounds with heart-wrenching beauty. Both of Emirena’s arias in Act One, ‘Prigioniera abbandonata’ and the sublime ‘Sola mi lasci piangere,’ are sung with impeccable musicality and in-depth understanding of the texts. Not surprisingly, Basso shapes recitatives nearly as memorably as she sculpts arias, her impassioned but reliably tasteful utterances in secco recitatives constituting the dramatic spine of the performance. As she brings it to life, ‘Quell’amplesso e quel perdono’ in Act Two becomes a poignantly intimate expression of uncertainty. The Act Three duet with Farnaspe, ‘L’estremo pegno almeno ricevi,’ is lofted by Basso’s singing to dizzying heights of ecstatic sensuality. Basso is the rare artist in whose singing early composers’ goals of using the new genre of opera to recreate the exalted ideals of Greek drama are fully realized. As potent an exponent of her repertory as Stignani and Simionato were of theirs, Basso here offers a performance of Pergolesi’s Emirena to stand alongside Stignani’s Adalgisa and Simionato’s Eboli.

If Caffarelli sang Farnaspe more brilliantly in Naples in 1734 than Argentine countertenor Franco Fagioli does on these discs, the most flattering contemporary commentary about the castrato did not do him justice. Few singers possess the technical wherewithal to sing music composed for Caffarelli, and this is especially true of Pergolesi’s music for Farnaspe in Adriano in Siria. Ferocious in terms of both its near-ridiculous bravura writing and its two-octave compass, Farnaspe’s music requires nothing less than best-in-the-world virtuosity and largely receives it from Fagioli in this performance. His entrance aria in Act One, ‘Sul mio cor so ben qual sia,’ is the stuff of singers’ nightmares, but Fagioli’s wide-awake, intrepid singing clears the music’s hurdles with athleticism to spare. Without question, Fagioli forces his superb natural instrument, usually when braving rapid-fire fiorature, but he is a shrewd singer who knows and respects the voice’s limitations. The expressivity of which he is capable surges to the surface in the aria with which Farnaspe ends Act One, ‘Lieto così talvolta,’ a discourse with a splendidly-written oboe obbligato. In this music, the twenty-four-year-old Pergolesi rivaled Händel as a musical poet, and Fagioli recites the young composer’s verses lovingly. Farnaspe also ends Act Two, the aria that Pergolesi gave him for this purpose, ‘Torbido in volto e nero,’ again testing the singer’s capabilities. Fagioli aces this test, but he is at his best in the Act Three duet with Emirena, ‘L’estremo pegno almeno ricevi.’ Momentarily setting aside the responsibilities of his rank, Farnaspe is here a tender lover, and Fagioli blends his tones with Basso’s gorgeously. Even among today’s ranks of gifted countertenors, Fagioli is sui generis. His portrayal of Pergolesi’s Farnaspe on this recording is singing of an order of which the pioneers of his Fach, world-changing artists like Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin, can scarcely have dreamed.

As recently as a decade ago, the appearance on a major label of a studio recording of any of Pergolesi’s surviving operas was unimaginable. Who, though, might have imagined that in 2016 it would be possible to record a Pergolesi opera with far greater success than could be mustered in recordings of scores by Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and Richard Strauss? With this fantastic recording of Pergolesi’s Adriano in Siria, the DECCA discography welcomes a release worthy of inclusion among the label’s classics of previous generations, recordings like Knappertsbusch’s Meistersinger, the elder Kleiber’s Rosenkavalier, Böhm’s Frau ohne Schatten, and Solti’s Ring. Thus is our brave new—or, rather, old—world!

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Roberto Devereux—Ştefan Pop (Roberto Devereux, conte di Essex), Mariella Devia (Elisabetta I, regina d’Inghiterra), Sonia Ganassi (Sara, duchessa di Nottingham), Mansoo Kim (Il duca di Nottingham), Alessandro Fantoni (Lord Cecil), Claudio Ottino (Sir Gualtiero Raleigh), Matteo Armanino (Un paggio), Loris Purpura (Un familiare di Nottingham); Coro ed Orchestra del Teatro Carlo Felice; Francesco Lanzillotta, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in performance at Teatro Carlo Felice, Genova, Italy, on 20 and 24 March 2016; DynamicCDS7755.02; 2 CDs, 130:51; Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

One of the most-discussed operatic events in America in recent years was Opera Orchestra of New York’s 2014 concert performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. OONY’s relationship with the third of the operas that comprise the so-called ‘Tudor Trilogy,’ a designation not conceived by Donizetti [his seldom-performed Elisabetta al castelo di Kenilworth expands the trilogy to a tetralogy—L’annello dei Tudori?], began with a 1991 performance featuring Martile Rowland, Fernando de la Mora, and Stella Zambalis, enriching the long drought between the score’s first outings in New York, the still-revered 1965 American Opera Society concert performance with Montserrat Caballé as Elisabetta and the New York City Opera production mounted for Beverly Sills, and NYCO’s revival with Lauren Flanigan and the opera’s Metropolitan Opera première in 2016 with Sondra Radvanovsky. More so than the opera’s relative rarity in the international repertory, a neglect that has recently abated to some extent, what made OONY’s 2014 performance a genuine event was the participation of Italian soprano Mariella Devia. Despite having been heard at The Metropolitan Opera as Konstanze and Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Così fan tutte, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and Gilda and Nannetta in Verdi’s Rigoletto and Falstaff in a career with the company sporadically spanning fifteen years, Devia has been an exasperatingly infrequent visitor to North America, a scarcity mirrored by the soprano’s unaccountably sparse commercial discography. ​Now, bel canto lovers are simultaneously treated to two recordings of Roberto Devereux featuring Devia, a filmed souvenir of an acclaimed Madrid production with Gregory Kunde in the title rôle and the present aural and visual mementos of two March 2016 performances in Genoa’s Teatro Carlo Felice. Dynamic’s engineers clearly appreciated the significance of this project, producing one of the label’s finest releases. Neither stage noises nor audience disruptions come between the listener and the thrilling performance of Roberto Devereux that plays out on these discs. Its strong cast notwithstanding, this release is undeniably an instance of unabashed diva worship. In this opera in which the Earl of Essex claims the title but it is Elisabetta who ultimately sears her name into the listener’s psyche, is that not as it should be?

Under the baton of conductor Francesco Lanzillotta, the Teatro Carlo Felice choral and orchestral forces acquit themselves professionally and idiomatically. The opera’s programmatic Sinfonia, popularized in concert repertory by its quoting of ‘God Save the Queen,’ is buoyantly played by the orchestra and confidently paced by the conductor. With its extended melodic lines and quicksilver rhythms, Roberto Devereux is an opera that—in good performances, at least—sounds easier than it is for all of the musicians in the pit. Even so, very few of the inevitable mistakes that give live performances their unique frisson intrude in this recording. The balance between stage and pit achieved by Lanzillotta is commendable, and Dynamic’s flattering acoustics permit appreciation of the cleverness of Donizetti’s orchestrations. After laudable work in Act One, the choral singing in ‘L’ore trascorrono’ at the start of Act Two is disappointingly ragged in both tone and ensemble, though the hushed final chord is managed well. Granting the principals relative interpretive license, Lanzillotta maintains tighter control of the performance than many conductors who approach bel canto repertory with greater rigidity. Roberto Devereux is a momentous destination along the route from the quintessential bel canto of Bellini to the dramatic Romanticism of Verdi, but Lanzillotta is careful to avoid letting lyricism or bombast dominate this performance. The dominant force in this recording is Donizetti. Here, too, is this not as it should be?

Represented by the appealing singing of Matteo Armanino as the page and Loris Purpura as Nottingham's servant, care was taken in the casting of supporting rôles. Relative to their historical importance in the political milieux of Elizabethan England, Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Cecil were marginalized by Donizetti and his librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, serving their sovereign in Roberto Devereux more as scene setters than as ambitious courtiers. Claudio Ottino voices Gualtiero’s lines robustly, and Alessandro Fantoni makes the most of every note that Donizetti allotted to Cecil. Bad singing in any of these rôles is not an insurmountable disaster, but far more enjoyable is the Roberto Devereux that, like this one, needs to make no apologies for the performances of its secondary players.

The Duca di Nottingham of South Korean baritone Mansoo Kim is an unsubtle but not unfeeling man in possession of a voice of good quality. Occasionally recalling the bel canto singing of Renato Bruson, Kim’s performance fuses unimpeachable musicality with well-honed dramatic instincts. In Act One, Kim gives ably-sung, dramatically urgent accounts of ‘Forse in quel cor sensible’ and ‘Qui ribelle ognum ti chiama,’ his upper register focused and projected impressively. As the Duca pleads in Act Two for the queen to spare Roberto’s life, Kim duets with Devia’s Elisabetta excitingly, his lines in ‘Non venni mai si mesto’ delivered with conviction, and the baritone sings commandingly in the trio with Elisabetta and Roberto, ‘Ecco l'indegno.’ Reading the fateful letter that his wife receives from Roberto in Act Three, Kim partners Ganassi’s Sara powerfully in ‘Non sai che un nume vindice.’ The knots that bound the characters’ allegiances loosed by the revelation that Sara, compelled by the queen’s prerogative to marry Nottingham, is the unnamed rival for Roberto’s love, Nottingham exacts vengeance with cataclysmic results. Kim’s final utterances are as crushing as the blows of the axe that claim Roberto’s head. Kim’s vocalism is sometimes short on bel canto elegance, but he brings the conflict-hardened duke to life with style and bravado.

Italian mezzo-soprano Sonia Ganassi has devoted much of her career to service to the bel canto muse, and her portrayal of Sara, the reluctant Duchess of Nottingham, in this performance of Roberto Devereux provides ample evidence of why, even after she has expanded her repertoire to include heavier rôles, she continues to be in demand for bel canto performances. Making her entrance in Act One recounting the tale of fair Rosamund, mistress of Henry II and the eponymous heroine of Donizetti’s 1834 opera Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, Ganassi sounds marginally unsteady, her top notes effortful and off-pitch. She settles the voice for a flawed but refined traversal of the melodious romanza ‘All’afflitto è dolce il pianto.’ Sara brings the curtain down on Act One with the pulse-quickening duet with Roberto, ‘Dacchè tornasti, ahi misera.’ Here, Ganassi takes charge like the consummate mistress of bel canto that she is, producing centered, impactful tones and hurling out notes above the stave with complete control and spot-on intonation. The Act Three duet with Nottingham, ‘Non sai che un nume vindice,’ inspires the mezzo-soprano to her finest singing of the performance. Her every note in the opera’s final act draws its impetus from the text, and her Sara is ultimately as much a tragic heroine as Elisabetta. In this setting, Ganassi is a seconda donna upon whose music a prima donna voice is lavished.

Singing the title rôle with bright, secure tone, Romanian tenor Ştefan Pop furnishes this recording with what many performances of Roberto Devereux lack: a Roberto worthy of his top billing. The gravity of the earl’s predicament in Act One never weighs down Pop’s vocalism, but he meaningfully conveys the inner anguish that afflicts Roberto. Denying his illicit love for the now-married Sara when confronted by the queen, whose advisors press her to grant the royal assent to Roberto’s death warrant, Pop voices ‘Nascondi, frena i palpiti’ vividly, endeavoring to maintain a proper bel canto line even when plumbing the depths of the character’s emotions. Benefiting from his partnership with the experienced Ganassi, he fearlessly scales the vocal and expressive heights of the duet with Sara, ‘Dacchè tornasti, ahi misera,’ ending Act One with a pyrotechnical display of electrically-charged singing and unison top notes. In the Act Two trio with Elisabetta and Nottingham, ‘Ecco l’indegno,’ Pop fires cannonades of heated responses to Devia’s and Kim’s impassioned discourse. Imprisoned and awaiting execution, Roberto’s beautifully-written scene in Act Three is tastefully handled by the young tenor. His breath control in the aria ‘Come uno spirto angelico’ is admirable, and the integration of his upper and lower registers also earns praise. Pop manages the difficult cabaletta ‘Bagnato il sen di lagrime’ better than any other Roberto on disc: concentrating on phrasing rather than individual notes, he reveals the integrity of music that can seem banal. Among Donizetti’s rôles for tenor, Roberto is one of the most difficult to cast. With Pop, this production got it right.

It is apparent from the first familiar strains of ‘God Save the Queen’ in the Sinfonia that, no matter whose name is on the score’s cover, Elisabetta is the opera’s protagonist. The Sinfonia invokes Providential blessing, but Devia is a queen who needs no divine intervention. Returning to this daunting rôle on her home turf, sixty miles from her native city of Chiusavecchia, and less than a month before celebrating her sixty-eighth birthday, Devia is an astonishingly assured presence at the center of the drama. The voice is drier, harder-edged, and less pliant than in years past, but the voice’s basic timbre has ever been a potent cocktail with a splash of tart limoncello. In this performance, Devia takes more time in executing fiorature than she might have done a decade ago, but she and Lanzillotta never allow momentum to be adversely affected. Still, like Sutherland in the seasons just before her retirement, Devia’s agility remains incredible. In Elisabetta’s Act One cavatina, ‘L’amor suo mi fe’ beata,’ it is immediately obvious that Devia is in excellent voice, and she utilizes her still-miraculous technique to accomplish feat after feat of superb singing. She spins the cavatina’s melodic lines like vocal silk, the thread of sound never in danger of breaking. In the Act Two duet with Nottingham, ‘Non venni mai si mesto,’ the soprano’s vocalism is at once wondrously steely and hauntingly ethereal, and Devia leaves no doubt in the trio with Nottingham and Roberto, ‘Ecco l’indegno,’ that Elisabetta is wounded to the core of her soul. Discovering too late that Sara is her rival and that even she, the most powerful woman on earth, is powerless to save Roberto from the death that she sanctioned, Elisabetta’s scene at the close of Act Three contains the opera’s most visceral music. Devia voices the poignant aria ‘Vivi ingrato, a lei d’accanto’ with intense emotional involvement, imparting the extent to which the aging queen’s happiness is dependent upon the crumbling relationships that have sustained her in the lonely years of her virginal reign. Vocally and histrionically, she remains the reigning monarch of this music. The maestoso cabaletta ‘Quel sangue versato al cielo s’innalza’ is the outward culmination of Elisabetta’s inner turmoil and one of the true peaks of dramatic bel canto. After a first statement of the cabaletta’s theme that is wracked with pain, Devia’s voice takes on an air of serenity in the repeat, the crown already lifted from her mind if not from her head. This phenomenal music needs no interpolated high notes in order to make an indelible impression, but the easy, defiant top D with which Devia concludes her performance is the ecstatic cry of a woman reclaiming her freedom. This is, after all, the heir of Henry VIII, the diminutive figure with the soaring spirit who proudly declared herself to be to the marrow of her bones the issue of her legendary sire. History relays that Henry VIII was an uncommonly accomplished singer: in that regard, Devia’s Elisabetta is indeed very much her father’s daughter.

The collector in search of good-quality recordings of Devia in her best rôles has before him difficult sleuthing. Fortunately, enthusiasts with technological ingenuity like that of Australia-based Celestial Audio have made in-house and broadcast recordings of some of Devia’s most memorable performances available to her admirers. [Celestial Audio’s newest Devia release, catalogue number CA1888, preserves an excellent 2006 La Scala-in-Tokyo performance of Verdi’s La traviata in which Devia’s Violetta was paired with Giuseppe Filianoti’s handsome, handsomely-sung Alfredo.] This Dynamic recording of Teatro Carlo Felice’s production of Roberto Devereux gratifyingly fills a lamentable gap in the documentation of one of the most remarkable careers in opera. Better late than never, it is tempting to say; but in this case, in some ways better now than ever.

La regina del bel canto: Soprano Mariella Devia as Elisabetta I in Teatro Carlo Felice’s March 2016 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux
[Photo by Marcello Orselli, © by Teatro Carlo Felice]

Tenori trionfanti: Tenors Stephen Costello (left) and Zachary Wilder (right)
[Photos © by Merri Cyr/Askonas Holt (Costello) & Teddie Hwang/Hazard Chase (Wilder)]

In 1996, I waltzed at the age of eighteen into a well-meaning university professor’s voice studio, armed with every quality necessary to prepare for and pursue a successful career as an opera singer—every quality, that is, except for those two most vital ones, talent and ambition. Like F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri in Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of Amadeus, the passion was abundantly present, the discipline was a work in progress but steadily progressing, and the thirst for knowledge was all-consuming. Ultimately, though, the acquired craftsmanship was of far greater value than the raw materials bestowed by nature. I have sung and occasionally might even have sung well, but there is no musical alchemy capable of transforming vocal lead into platinum. No lesson is more difficult to impart to the sort of stubborn young singer that I was (and sometimes still am, fleeting youth notwithstanding) than that which conveys the plain truth that he is a pretender, no golden-throated Duke of York but a tuneless Perkin Warbeck. It is a lesson that I have been slow to learn and even slower to fully accept, but the most precious gift of mediocrity is the ability to appreciate greatness on a profoundly intimate level. In that regard, two of America’s most talented singers have been especially influential teachers. With very different voices and careers similar only in their conscientiousness and significance in their respective repertories, tenors Stephen Costello and Zachary Wilder are the practitioners of the philosophy that led me to the door of that voice studio twenty years ago. Artists of once-in-a-generation distinction, they are something considerably more personal for me: they are artists who epitomize the singer that I can never be.

WHAT TO HEAR

Neither Stephen Costello nor Zachary Wilder is as extensively represented on disc as he deserves to be. In truth, though, despite their considerable merits, neither gentleman’s recordings fully convey the broad spectrum of vocal colors with which their live performances are illuminated. Nonetheless, their recordings are excellent introductions to their work.

Documenting both Costello’s beautiful handling of bel canto repertory and his début at London’s Royal Opera House, Opera Rara’s ‘live’ recording of Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix [ORC43] preserves the tenor’s exquisitely-phrased account of Carlo’s romanza ‘Se tanto in ira agl’uomini.’ His native Philadelphia’s spirit of brotherly love permeates his performance of Jake Heggie’s Friendly Persuasions: Homage to Poulenc on Pentatone’s disc Here/After, Songs of Lost Voices [PTC 5186 515], but the most persuasive of the qualities evident in his singing of the Persuasions is the voice’s beauty. Costello created the rôle of Greenhorn in Heggie’s Moby-Dick in the opera’s 2010 première at The Dallas Opera, and his reprisal of the part in San Francisco was filmed and released on DVD and Blu-ray by EuroArts: see it to experience a remarkable fusion of sublime singing and intensely moving characterization. Among performances not currently available on disc, seek recordings of the Wiener Staatsoper broadcast of Puccini’s La bohème dating from 6 September 2010, in which Costello’s heart-wrenching Rodolfo partners the poetic Mimì of Krassimira Stoyanova, and Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2016 concert presentation of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, in which his singing of the Sänger’s ‘Di rigori armato il seno’ was mesmerizing.

One of his generation’s finest exponents of Baroque repertory, Wilder is heard at his estimable best in the recently-released ATMA Classique recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243) and Johann Kuhnau’s Cantata ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’ [ACD22727]. His singing of Bach’s ‘Et misericordia’ (with countertenor James Laing) and ‘Deposuit potentes’ and Kuhnau’s ‘Ich huld’ge dir, grossmächt’ger Prinz’ exudes confidence and absolute comfort with both composers’ idioms. Simply put, his performance of ‘Would you gain the tender Creature’ in Händel’s Acis and Galatea [cpo 777 877-2] is one of the most sublime pieces of singing ever committed to disc. In recordings of music by composers as diverse as Giosotto Zamponi, John Blow, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Félicien David, Wilder’s voice flows like molten silver. Poised to conquer bel canto repertory with the same grace and elegance that he brings to his Baroque performances, Wilder’s recordings to date chronicle a compelling, uncompromisingly musical journey.

JEFFREY RODEN: threads of a prayer, volume one—Sandro Ivo Bartoli, piano; Bennewitz Quartet; Szymon Marciniak, double bass; Wolfgang Fischer, timpani; Johannes Kronfeld, trombone [Recorded in Reitstadel, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Germany, 20 – 22 May 2016; Solaire Records SOL1003-2; 2 CDs, 140:50; Available from Solaire Records and major music retailers]

Casting aside semantics and etymology, how does one really define music? It seems obvious enough: combinations of melody and harmony manipulated in specific ways produce music. What, though, does this truly mean? Patterns of notes, rests, dynamics, tempi, and key signatures make music of arbitrary lines and scribblings on a page, of course, but what makes music significant in an artistic sense is the way in which sounds transcend the mechanics of physics to become audible emotions. To hear sound is one of the most basic functions of being human, but to hear emotions is an essential tenet of humanity, one not possessed by all members of the species. Hearing threads of a prayer – volume one, Solaire Records’ new release dedicated to music by American composer Jeffrey Roden [volume two will be forthcoming in 2017], adds dimensions to the meaning of music in the simplest but most profound ways, asking each listener not to observe and react but to participate, to discern within his own experience the origins of each note, the places in the psyche from which the notes are ripped, still pulsating with life. This is music that speaks not in individual chords, bars, or phrases but in extended paragraphs, in great swaths of thought that seem neither to begin nor to end, and it cannot be played or discussed in conventional ways. As acknowledged in Tobias Fischer’s wondrously literate liner notes [his essay in lieu of a dates-and-facts biography of the composer is fantastic] and by Dirk Fischer’s immaculately-engineered acoustics, this is also music that must not be presented to the listener with the modern recording industry’s slick, assembly-line indifference. Like Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony and Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, the works on this first volume of threads of a prayer redefine music with insights as illuminating but ungraspable as sunlight. Like the touch of the summer sun upon one’s face, Roden’s music is as much felt as heard.

From the opening bars of the first of the twelve prayers that begin disc one, it is apparent that Roden is as gifted and communicative a composer for piano as Chopin was and that Italian pianist Sandro Ivo Bartoli is as keenly insightful an interpreter of Roden’s work as Artur Rubinstein was of Chopin’s. The splendors of Bartoli’s technique are never doubted, but spiritual virtuosity is the hallmark of his playing here. The rhythmic precision of his executions of Roden’s pieces is no less impressive or vital than in his previous Solaire recording of music by Franz Liszt, but, unlike the heartbeats that propel Liszt’s melodic lines, Roden’s rhythms are footsteps, cautiously placed but ambivalent. Are they the performer’s own steps, or is he retracing someone else’s? The prayers need no programmatic context, but they might be interpreted as abstract portraits of Christ’s apostles, each man in his turn revealed as a crumbling façade of ceremonial—and sometimes sanctimonious—faith behind which humor, doubt, anger, and pride lurk. Perhaps they are representatives of the dodecagonal tone row or the artificial calendrical divisions of a year. Subtly but slyly contrasted, the prayers are at once appeals to all and to no deities: nothing is either as pure or as putrid as it first seems, in life or in music, and these pieces sputter and sigh with half-told truths. Bartoli understands that striving to impose finite interpretations on the prayers would be to obstruct the connection between composer and listener.

The untitled 10 pieces that follow the twelve prayers are of a vastly different character but exhibit the same devotion to giving emotions audible essences that can be molded according to performers’ and listeners’ unique psychological identities. Bartoli’s pianism is here like a microscope, examining the individual particles of Roden’s musical molecules and revealing the stunningly beautiful landscapes within the stark tonal topography. Each of the ten pieces is its own microcosm, but they collectively function as a compelling entity, lodestars within a galaxy near enough to be perceived but too distant to be wholly scrutinized. Bartoli again fuses rhythmic tautness with elasticity of phrasing, maximizing the impact of each melodic unit without jeopardizing each piece’s structural integrity. There are very discreet allusions to sonata form in the interplay of principal subjects within and among the pieces. Bartoli is alert to every motivic device, emphasizing even the relationships intimated by measured silence. To assert that these pieces are not bountifully tuneful in the manner of music by Brahms or Dvořák is to overlook their greatest achievement: rather than overtly stated, their wealths of melody are suggested, cunningly inspired in the listener’s mind and therefore different for every pair of ears. Indeed, the pieces as recorded here seem to change with every hearing, a powerful testament to both Bartoli’s astonishingly skills as a musical storyteller and Roden’s creation of a musical language that is comprehensible regardless of the dialect with which it is delivered.

Conceived in homage to the late B.B. King, the passing of a king is equals parts elegy, raucous New Orleans jazz funeral, dialogue with a silenced voice, and coming to terms with an altered reality. It is said that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but Roden disavows that platitude with a tribute to a musical legend shaped not by quotations from his works but by reminiscences of the feelings evoked by King’s music. Whether or not his style is one’s proverbial cup of tea, it is impossible to steep in B.B. King’s music without surrendering to its propulsive energy. The same can be said of Roden’s the passing of a king and Bartoli’s playing of it. The pianist’s performance draws the listener into the embrace of the music, and the unaffected sincerity of the composer’s writing fills the listener with wistful recollections. Any musician should be honored to be so lovingly remembered by a colleague. This music reveals that the most exalted mode of flattery for an artist is serving as the foundation upon which other artists erect their own monumental works.

Composed for an octet comprised of two violins, viola, cello, double bass, piano, trombone, and timpani, the many latitudes of grief is a work of such deeply-considered emotional honesty that it sometimes seems too intimate for public performance, as though an exchange between confessor and sinner were conducted in music. Joined by Bartoli, double bass player Szymon Marciniak, trombonist Johannes Kronfeld, and timpanist Wolfgang Fischer, the musicians of Bennewitz Quartet—violinists Jakub Fišer and Štěpán Ježek, violist Jiří Pinkas, and cellist Štěpán Doležal—engage with Roden’s music not merely as professionals realizing their parts but as fellow travelers on the journey of coping with loss. There is perhaps no greater fallacy in modern psychology, especially in America, than the concept of closure. For all of society’s efforts at compartmentalization, life is not a book in which grief is written upon a page that is subsequently turned and forgotten. Just as the abundance or absence of water sculpts physical landscapes, torrents of grief carve recesses in human hearts, canyons that resound with reminders of voices that can only be heard in the memory—or, Roden discloses, in music. Wielded by Kronfeld with piercingly accurate intonation, the trombone startles, mourns, and consoles with equal force, and the piano and timpani form an unlikely confederation of safety and insecurity. Like the grieving process, nothing in the many latitudes of grief is predictable. Relative tranquility is interrupted by unexpected, unstoppable agony, and the paralysis of uncertainty suddenly gives way to the sure footing of even-measured acceptance. Like all of the pieces included on this pair of discs, this is groundbreaking, fresh music that nonetheless immediately sounds familiar. John Milton and William Styron wrote of ‘darkness visible’: in the many latitudes of grief, Jeffrey Roden wrote of darkness audible.

The differences between the untitled quintets #2 and #3 are as significant as they are understated, but Roden’s craft in the works on these discs is guided by making bold statements with delicate expressions. As performed here, the quintets capture the fleeting effervescence of champagne: they sparkle alluringly, ignite the senses, and are rapidly but satisfyingly consumed. Unlike many composers past and present, Roden was endowed with intelligence and sagacity that prevent him from lingering over even the most fecund of ideas. Not one concept is extended beyond the music’s inherent ability to sustain it. The quintets are Existential pieces, however. Each note has its own importance, and each note contributes to the cumulative impact of the music. The musicians comprehend and highlight this, often playing as though they were a single organism. Likewise, leaves for string quartet is magically played by the Bennewitz Quartet, the shifting textural profiles of the music given unanticipated dimensions that expose the skillfulness of Roden’s part writing like complex stitchwork held under a magnifying glass. Listening, one feels the pierce of the needle, the pull of the thread, and the exhilaration of gaps closing. These are not works to be heard passively: like the heroine’s ribbon in Claude Berri’s film Manon des Sources, these works become affixed to the listener, not like garments slipped on but like appendages that grow with every subsequent sound.

When writing about a composer’s work, especially that of one whose compositions are not yet familiar like Beethoven’s symphonies and Chopin’s nocturnes to virtually every listener apt to be interested in them, comparisons with other composers are tempting and sometimes helpfully informative. To state that a Vivaldi opera is like a Händel opera without the flashes of emotional insight is to provide the curious reader with a point of reference from which to launch an exploration of his own. The composer who denies having been influenced by fellow tunesmiths cannot be trusted, but comparing Jeffrey Roden’s music to that of any other composer in any genre would be a disservice to this artist and the originality of his work. Composition cannot be a vocation for Roden, something that he pursues at certain hours and in certain places, jotting down notes like the minutes of a meeting between himself and his muse. No, music must be second nature for Roden, an alternate comfort zone in which he contemplates, reasons, and dreams. As our world continually invents new means of communicating, we forget how to listen, how to truly hear and absorb the confounding cacophony that engulfs us. With the pieces on this first volume of threads of a prayer, all superbly performed, Jeffrey Roden reminds us that there is music even in our most unassuming thoughts and actions. We need only switch off our devices, silence our tongues, and let music happen.

Schöne Königin: Soprano Jessica Pratt, débuting at The Metropolitan Opera as Die Königin der Nacht in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on 20 December 2016
[Photo by Benjamin Ealovega; used with permission]

Mimi Benzell, Lucia Popp, Cristina Deutekom, Colette Boky, Rita Shane, Edita Gruberová, Luciana Serra, Laura Aikin. In the 116 years since the company's first performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on 30 March 1900, these are some of the acclaimed singers whose voices were first heard at The Metropolitan Opera in the stratospheric reaches of the Königin der Nacht’s music. Sung in the opera’s 1791 première in Vienna’s Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, the capacity of which is estimated by historians to have numbered no more than a thousand seats, by Josepha Hofer, eldest sister of Mozart’s wife Constanze, the Königin der Nacht joined rôles in operas by Ignaz Holzbauer, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Antonio Salieri in the ranks of the most daunting parts composed for the soprano voice in the second half of the Eighteenth Century. Hofer retained her brother-in-law’s cantankerous Königin in her repertory for a decade before her retirement from the stage in 1805, and in her footsteps an astonishing array of singers have followed, ranging from high coloraturas like Lily Pons and Erika Köth to more dramatic voices like those of Zdzisława Donat and Edda Moser. So great are the Königin’s trials that even a singer as renowned for her easy mastery of high tessitura as Dame Joan Sutherland employed downward transpositions in her few performances of the rôle. Requiring no adjustments to Mozart’s fiendish music and already widely celebrated for her fearlessness in traversing musical terrain where many singers rightly fear to tread, soprano Jessica Pratt is uniquely qualified to bring fresh sparkle to the Königin’s diadem when she débuts at The Metropolitan Opera on 20 December 2016, reigning over the family-oriented, holiday-season revival of Julie Taymor’s groundbreaking production of Die Zauberflöte. Hark, opera lovers: as Die drei Damen exclaim in Act One, ‘Sie kommt!’ Here is the rare Queen of the Night worthy of her starry crown.

Her sensational technical acumen notwithstanding, Pratt’s Königin der Nacht for the MET, which will be sung in J. D. McClatchy’s English translation, will not be solely a vocal phenomenon. As she revealed in a recent exchange, she is not only cognizant of the legacy of the ladies who have donned the Königin’s mantle in years past but has also deeply pondered the character’s emotions and motivations. For Pratt, bringing the Königin to life necessitates the fostering of a delicate but unassailable equilibrium between music and drama. ‘To not let the fury of the part ruin the vocal line, to find the right balance between portraying her anger and frustration and keeping an accuracy and a good quality in the vocal line and in the tone of the voice,’ she cites as the foremost principles that guide her interpretation of this fascinating woman. Pursuing this balance puts both the voice and the mind on the right path, she suggests—and proves with her performances, not least in her 2011 rôle and house débuts as Die Königin at London’s Royal Opera House.

Ever a practical creature of the theatre as well as a lofty-minded artist, Pratt is alert to the non-vocal difficulties posed by the Königin. ‘The other challenge for me,’ she confides, ‘is all the time I have on my hands between arias! The main bulk of my repertoire consists of rôles [in which], once I go on stage, I usually remain on stage and come off again at the end of the opera, three or four hours later. There’s no time to get nervous.’ Her critically-acclaimed triumphs in recent portrayals of the eponymous heroines of Rossini’s Semiramide and Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix and rarely-heard Rosmonda d’Inghilterra confirmed that her near-constant presence on stage kept nerves at bay. With this in mind, Pratt has given particular thought to ensuring that New Yorkers are as delighted by her Königin as Roman and Florentine audiences were by her Rossini and Donizetti performances. ‘My extra little challenge [in Die Zauberflöte] is to distract myself and keep the voice warmed up and ready, while taking care not to tire it out it before I go back on stage!’

Nachdenkliche Sängerin: Soprano Jessica Pratt, débuting at The Metropolitan Opera as Die Königin der Nacht in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on 20 December 2016
[Photo by Benjamin Ealovega; used with permission]

Many Mozart aficionados are familiar with Trollflöjten, Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film adaptation of Die Zauberflöte, much-loved images in which depict the Königin, portrayed by Swedish soprano Birgit Nordin, and Die drei Damen smoking—directly beneath a ‘No Smoking’ placard—and perusing magazines backstage, the embodiments of ennui. Beverly Sills famously quipped that she and her husband managed to address 250 holiday greeting cards in her dressing room in the time between the Königin’s two arias, ‘O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn’ in Act One and ‘Der Hölle Rache kocht in meimen Herzen’ in Act Two. How will Pratt pass the time in which Mozart and Schikaneder leave her stranded backstage? ‘Probably reading a book, doing some cross stitch, or sewing beads on a gown,’ she replies without hesitation, adding, ‘I don’t like being idle, so, during rehearsals and performances, I tend to sew beads on performance gowns or stoles or cross stitch.’ These, she intimates, are ‘small distractions that relax me but don’t require too much concentration, as most of my mind will be on the performance.’

The technical demands of Pratt’s repertory, in which the Königin is only one of many coloratura beasts, are extraordinary, both in the contexts of each performance and in the cumulative impact on the voice. Ever aware of the centuries-old traditions of bel canto singing that she furthers, this soprano is uncommonly clear-sighted about the unstinting care that must be expended in maintaining the quality of the superb technique that she has cultivated. As she starts to judiciously consider ‘heavier’ rôles, especially in Verdi repertory, Pratt recalls the wisdom of Birgit Nilsson, who sang Elettra and Donna Anna in Mozart’s Idomeneo and Don Giovanni and retained ‘lighter’ Italian rôles in her active repertory even when her career consisted primarily of legendary outings as Wagner's Brünnhildes and Isolde and Richard Strauss’s Elektra. ‘I think Birgit Nilsson was right,’ Pratt says. ‘Singing rôles that have a lot of coloratura demands that the singer dominates [her] technique for coloratura, and this in itself will help to keep flexibility in the voice.’ Is this unique to the Königin and Mozart repertory, or does the same logic apply to all coloratura parts? ‘I feel the same way about Rossini and Donizetti,’ she answers. ‘Every composer has something in particular which requires us to develop our technical abilities. I find [that] the coloratura di forza of Rossini is great for keeping my coloratura in line. The languid central lines of a Bellini rôle help me to develop my legato.’

Uncharitable to her colleagues as it may be to say so, it is her understanding of both the obstacles of the music that she sings and the skills needed to conquer them that sets Pratt apart from today’s would-be prime donne. Rather than obsessing about the rôle’s ferocious fiorature and five F₆s, she focuses on giving audiences a Königin of dramatic specificity and vocal health. Débuting with a company of the MET’s significance, in a house of such vast dimensions, in a rôle like Die Königin der Nacht is a prospect that might justifiably give many singers nightmares, but Pratt’s attention is devoted not to this milestone but to the miles that she has traveled in her career to date and those still before her. ‘The choice of repertoire is a very important thing for a singer,’ she summarizes. ‘It shapes a voice over time more than many of us are aware.’ More than most singers are aware, she might have truthfully said, but not more than she is aware. With this thoughtful singer’s début, The Metropolitan Opera roster gains a Königin der Nacht who not only deserves her crown but has measured meticulously to ensure that it is a true fit.

Rötliche Königin: A design sketch for Die Königin der Nacht's costume in Julie Taymor's production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte for The Metropolitan Opera
[Image © by Julie Taymor]

MET performances of Die Zauberflöte featuring Jessica Pratt as Die Königin der Nacht are scheduled for 20, 23, and 29 December 2016, and 5 January 2017. To purchase tickets, please visit the MET’s website.
Her début performance on 20 December will be live-streamed on the MET’s website [free] and via MET Opera Radio Channel 74 on SiriusXM^® [subscription required].

To learn more about Jessica Pratt and her engagements throughout the world, please visit her official website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Sincerest thanks are extended to Ms. Pratt for her astute and candid responses and to Mindi Rayner of Mindi Rayner Public Relations for facilitating this article.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750): Goldberg Variations, BWV 988—Ignacio Prego, harpsichord [Recorded in Centro Cultural La Torre, Guadarrama, Spain, in July 2015; Glossa GCD 923510; 1 CD, 79:08; Available from NAXOS Direct, fnac (France), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

​In a musical history from which so many pages are exasperatingly missing, one episode in the career of Johann Sebastian Bach that is at least moderately well-documented is his composition of the so-called Goldberg Variations. Unlike the vast majority of Bach’s many works, the aria and its thirty variations were published during the composer’s lifetime, appearing in print in 1741 in copies pressed from hand-engraved, error-filled copper plates prepared in Nürnberg by Bach’s acquaintance Balthasar Schmid. Bearing the title ‘Clavier Ubung bestehend in einer ARIA mit verschiedenen Verænderungen vors Clavicimbal mit 2 Manualen,’ the Schmid edition leaves no doubt that Bach intended for the work to be performed on a double-manual harpsichord, a conclusion further solidified by corrections in the composer’s own hand in one of the nineteen surviving copies from Schmid’s initial print run. Even with this wealth of evidence, though, there are unanswered—and now likely to remain unanswerable—questions about the genesis of the Goldberg Variations. If the oft-repeated story suggesting that the variations were composed in fulfillment of an explicit commission from an insomniac Russian aristocrat is credible, why does the score have no dedication to the patron to whom its existence was owed, and why, if intended solely for private performance, was Bach allowed to publish it?

​A logical point at which to begin wrangling with the variations’ enigmas is the obvious question suggested by the title by which the work came to be identified: who was Goldberg? Born in the Prussian town of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) in 1727, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg had achieved the advanced age of fourteen by the time that the variations that now carry his surname were published, a circumstance that has led some Bach biographers to dismiss as apocryphal the notion that the variations were composed for the adolescent Goldberg to play on demand for the soothing of his employer, Count Hermann-Karl von Keyserlingk, the Russian ambassador to Saxony. Mozart, Mendelssohn, and virtually any of Bach’s children could certainly have played—or written, for that matter—the variations at the age of fourteen, and Goldberg having garnered aristocratic patronage and contact with Bach at an early age suggests some degree of precocity. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the adolescent Goldberg was to his master what Farinelli was in his retirement to the Spanish court, an exceptional talent reserved for private enjoyment. In spite of gnawing inquisitiveness, though, to concentrate too much on solving what is now likely to remain an inscrutable mystery is perhaps to overlook the greatest thrill of the Goldberg Variations: experiencing them as their still-unidentified first performer and hearer must have known them more than two centuries ago.

Playing a clarion-toned harpsichord built in Milan in 2004 in the mode of a Christian Vater instrument dating from 1738, Spanish harpsichordist Ignacio Prego surprises, educates, and gladdens the listener wearied by lifeless, pedantic performances of Bach’s music with a sparkling, stimulating traversal of the Goldberg Variations. One of his generation’s most ruminative artists, one whose talents as a soloist were confirmed by his superb Cantus Records recording of Bach’s French Suites [reviewed here] and whose expertise in continuo playing is revealed on the recently-released Glossa disc featuring music from Cervantes-inspired operas by Antonio Caldara [The Cervantes Operas featuring La Ritirata and Josetxu Obregón—Glossa GCD 923104], Prego brings to his playing of the Goldberg Variations an exuberant youthfulness tempered by profound respect for both the music and previous interpretations of it. In this performance, there is never a sense of a young musician making radical choices solely for the sake of putting his idiosyncratic ‘stamp’ on the music. Rather, Prego has clearly studied and appreciated the efforts of Bach interpreters ranging from Wanda Landowska (and her magnificently anachronistic Pleyel harpsichord)​ ​and lead-wristed pianists​​ ​to more recent, historically-informed practitioners. There are many harpsichordists capable of playing the Goldbergs proficiently, but mastery of this music depends upon skills only partially governed by technique: imagination and individuality. Bach was an innovator, and his works are frequently mistreated by performers who follow fads rather than the music. On this disc, however, Bach’s music is in exceptionally loving, properly-guided hands.

Presented with the informed advocacy of a doctoral thesis on the interpretation of the variations, Prego’s performance begins with an account of the Aria that truly sings, the player’s measured tempo enabling atypically clear articulation—and appreciation on the listener’s part—of the subject that is subsequently so adroitly handled by the composer. Throughout his performance, Prego shapes each variation like a paragraph in a continuous narrative, the first pair of variations phrased with keen focus on Bach’s use of the source thematic material. The third variation, Canone all’ Unisuono, receives a performance that revels in the music’s contrapuntal intricacies without turning the piece into a dull academic treatise. Vitality is at the heart of Prego’s playing of the fourth and fifth variations, as well, and the expressive harmonic nuances of the sixth variation, Canone alla Seconda, are drawn to the surface by the young harpsichordist’s wonderful animation of inner voices. The subtle transitions of mood and chromatic twists in the seventh and eighth variations here lead organically to the brilliant virtuosity exhibited in the ninth and tenth variations, Canone alla Terza and Fughetta. For the next pair of variations, culminating in the Canone alla Quarta of the twelfth, Prego summons a burst of interpretive energy that he channels into the darkest recesses of the music, spotlighting thematic links lurking in the densest passages. This spirit of adventure persists in his deliveries of the very different thirteenth and fourteenth variations, the undulating melodic lines of which are traced with determined delicacy. Notable throughout the variations is the combination of strength and softness that Prego employs: passages that demand raw power receive it, but the prevailing lyricism of Prego’s playing, disclosing felicities in Bach’s writing that remain hidden in many other keyboardists’ performances, gives compelling credence to the notion of the Goldbergs having been composed to soothe a restless mind. The Canone alla Quinta of the fifteenth variation blossoms under Prego’s care, Bach’s treatment of the principal subject illuminated by the unexaggerated lightness of the harpsichordist’s approach. Some musicians are ostensibly inclined to toil at making this music sound important: Prego is content to allow the variations’ importance to emerge by pursuing no agenda but Bach’s.

With the Ouverture of the sixteenth variation, Prego figuratively begins the Goldbergs’ homeward journey, christening the voyage with an effervescent toast to the Ouverture’s musical landscape. The crispness of his executions of Bach’s ornaments contrasts marvelously with the graceful flow of his playing. The transition to the seventeenth variation has the unforced awe of rounding a curve in the road and seeing a wholly new vista, and the Canone alla Sexta of the eighteenth variation transforms that vista with the diverting novelty of a kaleidoscope. The linear momentum of the nineteenth and twentieth variations surges from Prego’s fingers but never at the expense of the music’s latent poise. From the bustling interplay of voices in the twenty-first variation’s Canone alla Settima, the sequence of the twenty-second and twenty-third variations progresses naturally, never hurried, to the fugal kinesis of the twenty-fourth variation’s Canone all’ Ottava. Similarly, the tuneful springs of variations twenty-five and twenty-six, tapped by Prego with especially sensitive playing, feed the deluge of invention that gushes from the Canone alla Nona of the twenty-seventh variation. Prego dedicates particular attention to the thematic relationships woven into the resplendent fabrics of the final three variations, facilitating heightened recognition of the triadic structures that Bach utilized throughout the Goldbergs. Whether the remarkable mathematical precision of Bach’s work was achieved by design or arose unintentionally from his unparalleled skill for fostering musical symbiosis, the Goldbergs are essentially a brilliant algorithm, one enacted by Prego with the computational genius of René Descartes. Still more rewarding is the emotional directness with which the harpsichordist bares the souls of variations twenty-eight and twenty-nine, every note of his performances allied with its purpose within the scope of the Goldbergs. So, too, is the Quodlibet of the final variation given expertly-judged emphases on both its individual qualities and its function within the Goldbergs as an unified entity. In his playing of the Aria’s da capo​, Pregro resolves the cycle with a potent reminder of the sentiments that provided the journey with its expressive destination. This is no carbon copy of the opening Aria, however. Prego evokes a conscious feeling of fulfillment, his unerring musical stewardship having led the listener into the presence of the true spirit of the Goldbergs and into the wondrous heart of Bach’s creativity.

The musical milieux of the first half of the Eighteenth Century inspire many confounding questions among modern musicologists, musicians, and audiences. To precisely which pitch were instruments in a particular venue tuned? How did the realization of continuo in one city differ from those in other cities? How did the voices of great castrati like Farinelli and Senesino truly sound? Alongside such queries as these, the questions of for whose performance and for whose enjoyment the Goldberg Variations were intended seem largely insignificant, especially considering that questions of provenance have—or should have—little effect on performance of the music. That Ignacio Prego is an accomplished technician is apparent as soon as his fingers cause plectra to make contact with strings, but the finest aspects of his artistry emerge when the sounds that result from his playing cause listeners to surrender their preconceptions and prejudices to the seduction of music in its most distilled forms. In his performance of the Goldberg Variations, this gifted young musician renders the music’s lingering conundra inconsequential. What matters is the quality of the music, and this music has never sounded more beautiful, searching, or revolutionary than in Ignacio Prego’s performance on this indispensable disc.

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): Manon Lescaut—Anna Netrebko (Manon Lescaut), Yusif Eyvazov (Il cavaliere Renato des Grieux), Armando Piña (Lescaut), Carlos Chausson (Geronte di Ravoir), Benjamin Bernheim (Edmondo), Erik Anstine (L’oste, Un sergente), Patrick Vogel (Il maestro di ballo, Un lampionaio), Szilvia Vörös (Un musico), Simon Shibambu (Un comandante di marina), Daliborka Miteva (Madrigalista), Martina Reder (Madrigalista), Cornelia Sonnleithner (Madrigalista), Ariana Holecek (Madrigalista); Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor; Münchner Rundfunkorchester; Marco Armiliato, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during performances at the 2016 Salzburger Festspiele, Großes Festspielhaus, Salzburg, Austria, in August 2016; Deutsche Grammophon479 6828; 2 CDs, 127:50; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

His early operas Le villi and Edgar, both scores with undeniable though hardly abundant merits, never having claimed places in the standard repertory, it is with Manon Lescaut that Giacomo Puccini's three-decade career as the master of sentimental music drama began in the esteem of most opera lovers. Premièred at the Teatro Regio di Torino on 1 February 1893, with soprano Cesira Ferrani—also Puccini’s first Mimì in La bohème three years later—in the title rôle and tenor Giuseppe Cremonini as Chevalier des Grieux, an adaptation for the Italian stage of Abbé Prévost’s 1831 saga L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut for was a daring choice for the thirty-something composer and his proponents. Though it was not until eight months after the première of Manon Lescaut that Jules Massenet’s Manon reached Italy, news of the phenomenal success of Massenet’s opera had flowed southward over the Alps for nearly a decade by the time that Manon first met her tragic end in italiano on the stage of Milan’s Teatro Carcano on 19 October 1893. Respectively published by the rival firms Casa Sonzogno and Casa Ricordi, there is no doubting that Massenet’s and Puccini’s scores were subjected to publicity-stunt rivalries. Intriguingly, though, it was a Manon judiciously reworked to more closely resemble Manon Lescaut that besieged Milan. Gone was Massenet’s pivotal Cours de la Reine scene, but ‘in’ were a new, evocative Italian translation of the libretto and widespread revisions to the score. Despite Puccini’s vow to eschew the ‘powder and minuets’ of Massenet’s quintessentially Gallic retelling of Prévost’s story, there is a certain heady sophistication amidst the churning emotions of Manon Lescaut. As Puccini asserted and the heroine of this recording of Manon Lescaut, internationally-acclaimed soprano Anna Netrebko, would surely agree, as multidimensional a woman as Manon can have more than one lover, and the Italian composer pressed his suit with music that retains its magnetism after 113 years.

Puccini the orchestrator seldom receives the appreciation that he deserves, even his La fanciulla del West and Turandot, Puccini’s most progressive works, seldom being praised for the ingenuity of their scoring. From the bustling open pages of Act One to the opera’s evocative Intermezzo, Manon Lescaut exhibits the flair for orchestration that would produce its most luscious fruits in the final fifteen years of Puccini’s career. Under the well-honed, authentically Italianate guidance of conductor Marco Armiliato, a familiar presence in performances of Puccini repertory throughout the world, the Münchner Rundfunkorchester musicians provide this Manon Lescaut with a vibrant setting redolent both of Puccini’s Romanticized Italy and of Prévost’s France. An aptly French cosmopolitanism permeates the orchestral playing, complemented by welcome doses of take-no-prisoners Italian temperament and Teutonic discipline. The high standard set by the instrumentalists’ work is upheld by the excellent singing of the Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor. Whether portraying the rowdy patrons of the Amiens tavern or the abusive populace of Le Havre, the choristers balance characterful singing with well-schooled ensemble. The efforts of both orchestra and chorus benefit from Armiliato’s sensible tempi. The conductor provides his leading lady with the frame in which to display her portrait of Puccini’s tempestuous heroine without seeming to passively indulge her. There is no doubt that the soul of this Manon Lescaut resides upon the stage, but the spine of the performance is in the pit, where it belongs.

In generations past, the concept of ‘festival casting’ suggested a level of artistic quality in the context of a major festival like the Salzburger Festspiele that exceeded the everyday achievements of opera companies in their regular seasons. Salzburg’s cast for this Manon Lescaut recaptures some of that now-elusive allure, filling supporting rôles with voices of leading-rôle potential. Anchoring the relay team of promising young artists, South African bass-baritone Simon Shibambu delivers the Comandante di marina’s few words with wonderful presence. Singing attractively, American bass Erik Anstine impresses as both L’oste in Act One and Un sergente in Act Three. Also embracing double duty, German tenor Patrick Vogel voices Il maestro di ballo’s ‘Un po’ elevato il busto’ in Act Two and Un lampionaio’s ‘...e Kate rispose al re’ in Act Three with fine, focused tones.

Singing the rôle of the anonymous Musico who serenades Manon in Act Two, Hungarian mezzo-soprano Szilvia Vörös, winner of the First Éva Marton International Singing Competition, dispatches ‘Sulla vetta tu del monte erri, o Clori’ lusciously, her timbre ideally suited to the music. She is backed dulcetly by the Madrigalisti of sopranos Daliborka Miteva and Martina Reder and mezzo-sopranos Cornelia Sonnleithner and Ariana Holecek. The ladies create a formidable ensemble, uniting their voices in a wall of sound that is handsomely adorned by the intricately-woven tapestry of Puccini’s faux-Baroque madrigal.

The singing of French tenor Benjamin Bernheim as Edmondo is one of this performance’s foremost strengths. His spirited depiction of the boisterous young student’s humor and hubris enlivens Act One. The opera’s rollicking opening scene begins with an account of ‘Ave, sera gentile, che discendi col tuo corteo di zeffiri e di stelle’ in which Bernheim’s vocalism is as fresh and free as the music itself. Later, he sings ‘Addio mia stella, addio mio fior’ with insinuating subtlety. The irony of ‘Vecchietto amabile, incipriato Pluton sei tu!’ is anything but subtle, but it is sung so appealingly that it for once seems merely jocular rather than truly mean-spirited. Bernheim’s Edmondo is a fun-loving fellow who makes easy going of the top G♯s, As, and B of his part. The only regret inspired by Bernheim’s performance is that Edmondo appears only in Act One.

Spanish bass-baritone Carlos Chausson is a great asset to the performance as the vindictive roué Geronte di Ravoir, the veteran singer’s voice still as steady as the character’s practiced flirtation is vile. With his vivid but unexaggerated singing in Act One, Chausson makes Geronte’s infatuation with Manon palpable: listening to his exchanges with Lescaut, the old man’s rapacious lust is unmistakable. In Act Two, his singing of ‘Affé, madamigella, or comprendo il perché di nostr’attesa!’ exudes the impotent rage of a man whose pride has been deflated by his lover’s betrayal. Chausson’s Geronte is not all bluster, however: in the quieter moments of his interaction with Manon before Des Grieux’s arrival, there are suggestions of gentleness and legitimate affection in his demeanor. There is no question that Geronte is a caddish, spoiled misogynist, but Chausson, consistently singing well, gives the hateful codger an unexpected vein of humanity.

The rôle of Lescaut, Manon’s brother in Puccini’s opera [he is her cousin in Massenet’s Manon], is in many ways a thankless part. The casts of many performances of Manon Lescaut are promoted as Soprano Lead, Tenor Lead, and Some Other People, but a lackluster Lescaut can markedly dim the wattage of several of Puccini’s most illuminating scenes. In this Manon Lescaut, Mexican baritone Armando Piña is a Lescaut who works hard to match the vocal lumina emitted by his high-profile colleagues. Lescaut is something of an enigma, his agenda never wholly obvious, but Piña lets the music speak for itself. Taking charge of Act One like an amiable but self-serving master of ceremonies, his Lescaut seems to be at the center of every plot, and the baritone voices ‘Certo, certo, ho più sana la testa di quel che non sembri’ robustly. In Act Two, this Lescaut sounds as bored as his sister, and Piña sings ‘Ah! che insieme delizioso! Sei splendida e lucente!’ with a wonderful flash of boyish glee. The contrast with ‘È il vecchio tavolier (per noi) tal quale cassa del danaro universale!’ could hardly be greater. Manon is an unabashed but idealistic materialist, but Lescaut, no less an opportunist, always has an eye turned towards the consequences of his and others’ decisions. Piña does not ignore the callousness of Lescaut’s character, but, like Chausson, he strives to make the part atypically sympathetic. Lescaut’s tessitura is high, and there are rough patches in Piña’s negotiations of it, but his is an earnest, ably-sung performance that reflects thorough preparation.

Netrebko’s husband off the stage, Azerbaijani tenor Yusif Eyvazov joins her compellingly on the stage in this performance of Manon Lescaut, strengthening the drama by making Renato des Grieux a genuine protagonist rather than merely another of Manon’s admirers. Entering in Act One with the brooding sensitivity of Werther or Hoffmann, Eyvazov sings ‘L’amor! L’amor?! Questa tragedia, ovver commedia, io non conosco!’ impetuously, notes and words pealed out insouciantly. The tenor’s voice tends to blare above the stave, especially when dynamics rise above mezzo forte, and his vocalism can be monotonous. Still, the delicacy of ‘Tra voi, belle, brune e bionde si nasconde giovinetta vaga e vezzosa’ is not lost on him, and he phrases ‘Donna non vidi mai simile a questa!’ with red-blooded passion that crests on easy, secure top B♭s. In duet with Manon, this Des Grieux holds nothing back, matching his partner decibel for decibel. Bursting in on Manon’s comfortable but listless cohabitation with Geronte in Act Two, Eyvazov depicts a figure not unlike Mozart’s Donna Elvira, disenfranchised and entranced at once. His elation turning to desperation as Geronte’s vengeance is enacted, the tenor’s singing grows ever more intense, culminating in a piercing ‘Ah! Manon, mi tradisce il tuo folle pensier’ of cataclysmic dramatic force. Their timbres are very different, the younger tenor’s brighter and more metallic, but Eyvazov’s daring, driven singing in this performance often recalls that of Francesco Merli, the first recorded Des Grieux. Act Three of Manon Lescaut is a veritable obstacle course for the tenor, and the fact that Eyvazov emerges unscathed from the act’s final anguished utterance is a testament to the solidity of his technique. His deliveries of ‘Dietro al destino mi traggo livido’ and ‘Manon, disperato, è il mio prego!’ are viscerally exciting, but it is his ‘Ah! non v’avvicinate! Ché, vivo me, costei nessun strappar potrà!’ that lingers in the memory. The upper register is pushed, but it responds without serious weakness, only an openness on the highest tones prompting lasting concern. In many performances of Manon Leacaut, the expiring heroine dominates Act Four to such an extent that the brief act seems like an extended solo scene. Here, though, Eyvazov does not allow the listener to forget that this is also Des Grieux’s tragedy. The desolation of his ‘Tutta su me ti posa, o mia stanca diletta’ is wrenching, and he heeds Puccini’s ‘con passione infinita’ instructions in his pained articulation of ‘Un funesto delirio ti percote, t’offende.’ Also featured alongside Netrebko in selections on her Deutsche Grammophon disc Verismo and recently acclaimed as Calàf under Gustavo Dudamel’s baton in a Wiener Staatsoper revival of Turandot, Eyvazov is rapidly establishing his credentials as a valuable interpreter of Italian repertory. More refulgent than refined, he is not yet a highly-polished artist, but as recorded here he is a savvy, sonorous Des Grieux.

Thus far in her career, Manon Lescaut is the Puccini heroine that Netrebko has most made her own. Her Mimì in La bohème, unfailingly touching, has generally lacked the unforgettable frailty of Rosanna Carteri’s portrayal or Mirella Freni’s unaffected sweetness, but the Russian soprano’s Manon Lescaut, not unlike her much-appreciated depiction of Massenet’s Manon, possesses consummate musicality and a sharply-etched dramatic profile. Netrebko’s is not a conventionally Italianate voice, but it can be and in this performance often is a very beautiful one. Her rôle début as Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin in Dresden, earlier this year, was nothing short of revelatory, clearly indicating one path open to Netrebko as her career progresses. At times, her Manon in this performance wields a Wagnerian grandeur, honoring the tradition of Marcella Pobbe and Renata Tebaldi, both persuasive Elsas, albeit in Italian. Missing from this performance are Licia Albanese’s near-perfect command of Puccini’s style, Dorothy Kirsten’s vocal unflappability, and Magda Olivero’s boundless charisma, but Netrebko’s Manon is a memorable portrayal in its own right, an insightfully-concocted melange of the best aspects of her artistry. When she intimates ‘Manon Lescaut mi chiamo’ in Act One, this Manon immediately has Des Grieux—and the listener, for that matter—in the palm of her hand. Innocence, while not inherently objectionable, equates with inexperience and missed opportunities, and Netrebko is a Manon who is anxious to get on with the business of living. For her, love is an adventure, not a commitment. Nevertheless, Netrebko’s singing of ‘Una fanciulla povera son io’ radiates sincerity, and the sheltered young girl’s contrived coquetry is gradually transformed into fanciful jubilation as she duets with Des Grieux. In Act Two, Netrebko sings Manon’s aria ‘In quelle trine morbide’ beautifully, soaring to the top B♭s without worry, and her top C in the subsequent duet with Lescaut gleams. Netrebko is at her most charming in Manon’s gavotte, ‘L’ora, o Tirsi, è vaga e bella,’ phrasing the number with elegance. Reunited with Des Grieux, she unleashes a deluge of emotion in ‘Tu, tu, amore? Tu? Sei tu, ah, mio immenso amore? Dio!’

Epitomized by her readings of ‘Io voglio il tuo perdono’ and the desperate outbursts of Act Three, not least the ecstatic top C on her dejected ‘Addio’ to Des Grieux and Leacaut, this is Netrebko’s most expressive performance on disc to date; and, along with her touching portrayal of the title rôle in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, also her most beautifully-sung. In the brief span of Act Four, Netrebko the diva is wholly absorbed by Manon Lescaut the tragic heroine. She voices ‘Sola... perduta, abbandonata... in landa desolata!’ with enthralling immediacy, demanding that the listener look with her into the face of death. The climactic top B♭ is her cry of surrender, the moment at which reality banishes her illusions. As Netrebko inflects the words, ‘Io t’amo tanto... e muoio!’ becomes a sort of philosophical mantra of her Manon. Her ‘Le mie colpe... travolgerà l’oblio... ma... l’amor mio... non muore’ is shaped less by selfishness and self-pity than by a longing for Des Grieux to cling to memories of a happier past. The deficiency of Act Four of Manon Lescaut is that, unlike Mimì’s, Cio-Cio San’s, and Liù’s demises, the soprano must consciously strive to give Manon’s death histrionic gravity. Netrebko succeeds, not by overdoing the melodrama of the opera’s final scene but by having theretofore created a Manon who engages the senses and garners the listener’s affection. The soprano’s experience with Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder is put to good use: hers is a Manon Lescaut whose final moments movingly convey a Straussian acceptance of the inevitable. The tragedy is not to die but to die without having made peace with life. Aided by a fine ensemble of singers and musicians and a conductor whose sensibilities harmonize with her own, one of today’s most famous singers here bequeaths to posterity a recording of an interpretation that nobly justifies her reputation.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750): Partitas for Harpsichord, BWV 825 – 830: Jory Vinikour, harpsichord [Recorded at Sono Luminus Studios, Boyce, Virginia, USA, 17 – 21 March 2015; Sono Luminus DSL-92209; 3 CDs, 153:34; Available from Sono Luminus, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

​Readers who visit Voix des Arts often know that the harpsichord music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the playing of harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour are two of this author’s greatest passions. It will hardly be surprising, then, that Vinikour’s new, sonically-spectacular Sono Luminus recording of Bach’s six remarkable Partitas for solo harpsichord, BWV 825 – 830, was eagerly awaited. Those readers who are familiar with Vinikour’s work will be even less surprised to discover that the anticipation was justified and is magnificently fulfilled by the performances that grace these three discs. Born in Chicago and now again based in his native city after a long residency in France, Vinikour restores to America one of her foremost musical treasures, one who enriches life in Chicagoland and throughout the United States through both his solo playing and his leadership of Chicago Bach Ensemble and Milwaukee-based Great Lakes Baroque, Ltd. Still, not even these accomplishments overshadow what Vinikour achieves with this recording of the six Partitas. Measured solely against the exalted standards of Bach’s work, this is demonically demanding, richly rewarding music, music that some keyboard virtuosi perform as insipid exhibitions of their technical proficiency. Vinikour of course deserves profuse praise for the incendiary virtuosity with which he ignites the Partitas, but his pyrotechnics are intended to illuminate, not to distract and blind. Ultimately, what ushers this release into the company of the most important Bach recordings is its documentation of Vinikour’s faculty for allying historically-informed erudition with timeless eloquence. In his playing of the Partitas, the music sighs and smiles, jokes and jostles, ponders and prays, but the supreme marvel of this recording is that every sentiment that emanates from these performances comes directly from Bach’s scores.

Built in 1995 by Virginia-based Thomas and Barbara Wolf, the double-manual ​harpsichord heard in these performances of Bach’s Partitas was modeled after a 1739 single-manual instrument from the workshop of Hannover-born Christian Vater. Any music played on this splendid instrument could not fail to make a favorable impression on the listener, but the interplay of the harpsichord’s exceptional clarity and rich but perfectly-balanced overtones, expertly managed by Vinikour and captured with rare immediacy by Sono Luminus’s technicians, is ideal for Bach’s opulent music. Published individually between 1726 and 1730 and collectively under the title Clavier-Übung I in 1731, the six Partitas were likely the last of Bach’s suites for keyboard to be composed, furthering the aims pursued in his so-called English and French Suites. That the Partitas are milestones both in Bach’s writing for the harpsichord and in the keyboard literature as a whole is apparent in every bar of the music, and Vinikour’s playing, while observing every intricacy of the scores, reveals that Bach’s expressive vocabulary was no less prodigious in the harpsichord’s language than in his musical essays for orchestra and voices.

Introducing his performance of Partita No. 1 in B♭ major (BWV 825) with a broadly-phrased but quicksilver account of the magisterial Praeludium, a movement worthy of the greatest of Bach’s works for organ, Vinikour at once establishes a musical environment in which virtuosity and interpretive intelligence are the defining virtues of the playing. In this performance, the solemnity of the music is never allowed to completely overshadow the flashes of humor. Vinikour’s fingers deliver the Allemande with the unerring precision of a dancer’s feet, and he makes the bustling Corrente redolent not of a society of starched jabots and powdered periwigs but of an assembly of spirited youths. This is not to suggest that Vinikour’s performance is in any way lacking in sophistication: rather, his is the sophistication of sincere connection with the music rather than snobbish proselytizing. There is an appealing serenity at the heart of his playing of the Sarabande, the bel canto flow of its melody emphasized, and Menuets 1 and 2 are here genuinely festive, not artificially formal. The energy that Vinikour expends in his exhilarating performance of the Giga that ends the first Partita sounds sufficient to illuminate the Manhattan skyline for years to come, but, instead of the harpsichordist’s ego, it is the composer’s brilliance that glistens in the tuneful glow.

What can superficially be deemed an arbitrary progression of tonalities among the Partitas is revealed upon closer scrutiny to be a carefully-considered, deliberately-wrought exploration of the full range of sonorities and expressive possibilities afforded by the keys selected by Bach. Partita No. 2 in C minor (BWV 826) begins with a Sinfonia that receives from Vinikour exceptionally fine handling. His recent conducting of Händel’s Agrippina for California’s West Edge Opera and Purcell’s Fairy-Queen for Chicago Opera Theater confirmed the depth of Vinikour’s talent for attentive management both of pieces’ individual structures and of their functions within the overall construction of a score, and this talent is as apparent in the Partitas as in large-scaled vocal works. As in Partita No. 1, the sequence of Allemande, Courante, and Sarabande in Partita No. 2 is traced with focus on the distinct rhythmic identities of each form, thematic development exposed with remarkable clarity that never disrupts the lyrical tides of the music. Unique among the Partitas, the effervescent Rondeaux is dispatched by Vinikour with cosmopolitan elegance: the fallacy of Bach having virtually been an artistic loner is dispelled by the close kinship with similar music by François Couperin, Girolamo Frescobaldi, and Johann Jakob Froberger that Vinikour’s performance discloses. The Partita’s closing Capriccio is an ideal showcase for harpsichord and harpsichordist. The instrument’s response is as compelling as the musician’s mastery of it, the flawless articulation of passagework putting many fine harpsichords and harpsichordists to shame.

It is with an imaginative Fantasia of the type found throughout Bach’s oeuvre for keyboard that Partita No. 3 in A minor (BWV 827) begins, and the freedom within historically-appropriate parameters with which Vinikour plays it expands the sparks of ingenuity that flicker throughout the Fantasia into a conflagration that consumes the Partita as a whole. The taut fingering in the subsequent Allemande gives way to appealing contrasts of vigor and tranquility in the Corrente and Sarabande, the player’s wrists seeming first to be controlled by tightly-wound springs and then by spring zephyrs. The term having a substantially less risqué connotation in the Eighteenth Century than it now evokes, Bach’s Burlesca is charming rather than insinuating, but there is nothing quaint about Vinikour’s playing; no more so than there is anything overtly comical in his playing of the Scherzo, an early use of this form which further validates Bach’s stature as an innovator. The concluding Gigue’s demands are met with unflappable ease, but Vinikour is not satisfied by merely playing the notes capably—a feat, it must be admitted, that is commendable in its own right. His playing here is beguilingly balletic, every decorative note of the Gigue perfectly en pointe.

​Partita No. ​4 in D major (BWV 828) is prefaced by an Ouvertüre in Bach’s most extroverted ceremonial style, and Vinikour’s performance verifies its place among the Eighteenth Century’s greatest compositions for the keyboard. Prefiguring Brahms by more than a century, an essential aspect of Bach’s artistry was his ability to make even rigid adherence to conventions seem revolutionary, and Vinikour highlights the breadth of the composer’s creativity by achieving an astounding degree of expressive pliability whilst also carefully observing rhythmic and dynamic boundaries. In this Partita, an Aria infiltrates the Allemande – Courante – Sarabande formula between the latter two numbers, and this simple addition alters the course of the Partita surprisingly. Nobly phrased by Vinikour, the subdued Aria introduces an aura of introspection that persists in the Sarabande, one of Bach’s most beautiful. The Menuet and Gigue that follow breathe the unpolluted air of Bach’s purest vein of musical expression. Vinikour understands that the only means of performing this music that is true to Bach is to regard the notes upon the page not as a portal that leads to some hidden world of meaning but as the essence of that meaning. To interpret this music effectively is simply to play it without agendas or affectation: Bach said all that needs to be said in the music itself, and Vinikour’s stylish, selfless playing allows Bach to speak with tremendous impact.

The opening movement of Partita No. 5 in G major (BWV 829) was designated a Praeambulum by Bach, and the number has in Vinikour’s performance the driving force of a Verdi overture. More than almost any of his contemporaries, Bach excelled at developing thematic material in novel ways, exploiting every form known to him so cleverly that he redefined their emotive capacities, and Vinikour is sensitive to the manner in which Bach employed subjects and countersubjects in intimate dialogues. The harpsichordist recounts the narrative that Bach wove into the trusted pattern of Allemande, Corrente, and Sarabande with playing of demonstrative beauty, extracting frequently-overlooked subtleties from the music’s inner voices. The Tempo di Minuetto, Passepied, and Gigue constitute as varied a concatenation as occurs in any of the Partitas, and Vinikour plays each of the three pieces insightfully, differentiating their individual atmospheres and spotlighting the links among them.

​With Partita No. ​6 in E minor (BWV 830), Bach brought to fruition a cyclical body of work for the harpsichord that, whatever his initial intentions may have been, has ultimately exerted as great an influence on Western music as Beethoven’s String Quartets and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is impossible to hear Domenico Scarlatti’s, Haydn’s, Mozart’s, or Beethoven’s Sonatas for keyboard, Chopin’s Nocturnes, or the Piano Concerti of Schumann, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky without perceiving the lessons that these composers learned from Bach’s keyboard music. As Vinikour plays the blazing Toccata with which the sixth Partita commences, it is also impossible to hear this music without gaining or refining a sense of Bach’s significance as one of the musical guideposts at which past and future meet. There is special gravity in Vinikour’s performance of this Partita’s Allemande, too, his pacing facilitating complete realization of Bach’s unerring symmetry. After the fashion of Partita No. 4, an Air here steals into the company of the Corrente and Sarabande, punctuating the pulsating dances, both charismatically played by Vinikour, with a dulcet interlude almost stream-of-conscience-like in its harmonic evolution. Like the fifth Partita’s Tempo di Minuetto, the Tempo di Gavotta in the sixth Partita receives from Vinikour a traversal of uncompromising concentration melded with uncommon expressive elasticity. Too many musicians seemingly believe that Bach repertory must either be approached with arms-length reverence or subjected to overwrought interpretations in order to be acquitted of charges of academic dullness. Crowning a performance notable for its undeviating commitment to providing the listener with an experience akin to what might be heard were Bach himself at the keyboard, Vinikour’s playing of the final Gigue entrances, his fingers truly jigging through the music. As in every movement in all six of the Partitas, Vinikour finds precisely the correct mood for the Gigue—Bach’s.

More than a half-century after it was liberated from opera house orchestra pits, there are listeners who still think that the harpsichord belongs in drawing rooms and salons rather than in concert halls; or recording studios, for that matter. Likewise, an image of Bach as a dour figure peering down upon the world from an organ loft persists. Indicative to Twenty-First-Century observers of shortsightedness and downright ignorance, it is telling that Bach was primarily esteemed by his own children not as a composer but as a keyboard virtuoso. Industrious as he was throughout a long career, one wonders how much music other than his own his children heard Bach play. Could they hear the performances of the six Partitas on these Sono Luminus discs, how might they have re-evaluated their father’s legacy? Bach is now rightly esteemed as one of music’s greatest masters, but even a reputation such as his can stand occasional substantiation. Were Bach an unknown composer whose Partitas were discovered in a moldy library, Jory Vinikour’s performance of them would convince the skeptical listener that their creator was surely an unheralded genius. He now needs no advocacy, but a performance like this one, a performance in which the Partitas sound newly discovered, reaffirms that Bach was a genius both of his own age and for all time.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906 – 1975): Violin Concerto No. 2, Opus 129 and PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840 – 1893): Violin Concerto, Opus 35—Linus Roth, violin; London Symphony Orchestra; Thomas Sanderling, conductor [Recorded at LSO St. Luke’s, London, UK, 2 – 4 May 2016; Challenge ClassicsCC72689; 1 SACD, 74:25; Available from Challenge Records, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

​The Serbian poet Dejan Stojanović wrote in his poem ‘Dancing of Sounds’ that ‘There is no competition of sounds / Between a nightingale and a violin.’ When he penned these words, Stojanović had perhaps never heard the playing of German violinist Linus Roth, so it is likely that he did not realize how insightful his words are. Simply put, to hear Roth play is to experience one of Art’s greatest phenomena, a human equivalent of birdsong echoing through a wood and the roar of Niagara. From the violin in his hands, th​e 1703 Stradivarius instrument played in years past by Jean Baptiste Charles ​​​Dancla and Nathan Milstein, Roth cajoles sounds ​that recall not only the playing of these legendary forebears [one of Dancla’s most precocious pupils, Maud Powell, left a legacy of recordings said by contemporaries to enshrine vital elements of Dancla’s technique] but also, more pointedly, the mesmerizing tones of Austrian violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan and the disarming lyricism of Schneiderhan’s wife, soprano Irmgard Seefried. Perhaps it is too clichéd to suggest that Roth’s playing ‘sings,’ but his violin is truly the voice of artistry that encompasses understanding of the most intimate implications of musical communication. As his well-documented espousal of the nearly-forgotten music of Mieczysław Weinberg has revealed, Roth clearly perceives his responsibility as one of the Twenty-First Century’s most gifted violinists as extending beyond the interpretation of composers’ music to acting as a direct link between composers and listeners, whether they are separated by a fortnight or a century. ​Here focusing his artistry on concerti by Dmitri Shostakovich and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in performances preserved in sound of sparkling clarity, Roth bares the souls of both works, playing them as freshly as though the ink on the scores were still wet. Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky are now viewed from a post-Freudian perspective as composers with proverbial ‘baggage,’ but Roth frees these concerti from anachronistic pseudo-psychological associations. His formula is disarmingly simple: combine great music with great music making, and all contexts and subtexts become irrelevant.

​Formally premièred in 1967 by David Oistrakh, to whom the score was dedicated, and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, the second of Shostakovich’s two remarkable concerti for violin and orchestra (Opus 129) was the last of the composer’s six concerti, completing the symmetry of the pairs of concerti for cello and piano. ​The base key of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2, C♯ minor, has prompted comparisons with other significant works with the same tonal foundation, not least Beethoven’s powerful Opus 131 String Quartet, but Shostakovich’s music is utterly original. The dialogues that the composer created between soloist and orchestra are sometimes stunningly creative but are unfailingly integrated into the Concerto’s flow. There are virtually always suggestions of anxiety, ambiguity, and stark expressive candor in Shostakovich’s music, but performances that emphasize these qualities do so at the expense of the brighter moods that emerge when allowed to penetrate the surface. At its most powerful, Roth’s playing of the Shostakovich Concerto maintains a concentrated lightness, a vein of unaffected humility amidst the cyclonic virtuosity. In the Concerto’s opening Moderato movement, this is manifested most rewardingly in the violinist’s subtle handling of the thematic continuity with which Shostakovich manipulated the sonata form that constitutes the music’s skeleton. Roth’s individual style of playing bears little resemblance to that of David Oistrakh, but the younger musician shares with his Ukrainian predecessor an uncanny capacity for spotlighting melody, a skill that Roth exercises without placing a single accent contrary to the score’s indications.

The meandering course of the Adagio movement is followed by Roth with a gossamer tread that gives the music a dream-like aura. Returning to​ ​Stojanović​’s analogy, the violin is here a weary nightingale greeting the dawn, its song subdued by its exhausting nocturnal vigil. Things are rarely wholly as they initially seem in Shostakovich’s music, and there is a steely core that lurks in these bittersweet cadences like the blade beneath a matador’s muleta. Shostakovich crafted and Roth recreates a delicate but endearingly awkward pas de deux between slow movements from a Prokofiev symphony and a Bach partita: past and present embrace, first one and then the other lifted into view. Roth’s supple phrasing makes the transitions imperceptible. ​This is also true in the Concerto​’s closing movement, in which Roth manages the shift from Adagio to Allegro​—and the corresponding changes of mood—with irrepressible momentum and imagination. This is some of Shostakovich’s most exhilarating, spontaneous-sounding music, and it is a testament to Roth’s absorption of every detail of the composer’s writing that his performance exudes easy confidence. His connection with the music’s expressivity never disrupted by his often breathtaking feats of virtuosity, Roth exudes assurance in a piece in the performance of which many violinists rely upon arrogance.

In certain ways, the Russia into which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 was not markedly different from Russia in 2016. At the time of the composer’s birth in the town of Votkinsk in today’s Udmurt Republic, the doggedly conservative Tsar Nicholas I was in the middle of his three-decade reign, a period in which Russia was plagued by inner turmoil—at the time of his succession, the Decembrist revolt of 1825, the subject of an once-popular opera, threatened to prevent Nicholas from occupying the imperial throne vacated by one of his older brothers and refused by another—and a litany of ill-conceived foreign policies that politically and economically isolated the vast, fiercely proud nation. Isolation was likewise perhaps the single most defining aspect of Tchaikovsky’s life and musical career. His was a life that embodied the ambiguity of Francesco Maria Piave’s familiar description of Paris in his libretto for Verdi’s La traviata as ‘questo popoloso deserto che appellano Parigi.’ Reading the body of his correspondence that survived familial and governmental censorship, the Tchaikovsky who quickly emerges is a man whose existence could accurately be described as a populated desert, a life that was lonely and often distressingly solitary despite its extensive dramatis personæ.

The extent to which Tchaikovsky fell victim to the frequently hypocritical social conventions of his time continues to be questioned without hope of definitive resolution, but what cannot be doubted is that even an artist as important as Tchaikovsky would find today’s political climate in Russia little if any more hospitable than it was in 1893, when, under circumstances still debated by scholars, the composer’s life ended, perhaps at his own hand. Nevertheless, the kinship between Tchaikovsky’s life and Piave’s characterization of Parisian demimonde society in La traviata is analogous to the parallel between Twenty-First-Century perspectives on Tchaikovsky’s music and Maria Callas’s oft-quoted remark about attentive listeners finding the full spectrum of her artistry in her recordings. In music, knowledge is not always power; or not the sort of power that consistently proves beneficial, at any rate. That Tchaikovsky was homosexual is beyond doubt, but the notion that he was an archetypal ‘gay artist’ is a meaningless and frankly ill-considered application of modern sensibilities to a man whose manifest seriousness of purpose confirms to have been concerned with being a worthy heir to the legacy of Mozart, not with furthering a social agenda. Which are the passages in any of Tchaikovsky’s works that would miraculously be of lesser quality were it discovered that their creator was actually heterosexual? The tragedy of Tchaikovsky’s life is that he could not live openly, publicly following his heart’s lead, but the tragedy of his afterlife is that his music is now too often subjected to scrutiny based not upon its inherent quality but upon superfluous connotations. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is a masterpiece not by a gay composer but by a great one.

Composed in 1878 whilst Tchaikovsky sought refuge in Switzerland from his farcical marriage, the writing for the soloist in his Opus 35 Concerto was guided by Iosif Kotek, a violinist with a burgeoning reputation and Tchaikovsky’s pupil and probable paramour. A decade passed before the Concerto was published in full score and began to be widely established in the international repertory, a delay that now seems inexplicable, but, as was often the case, the quality of Tchaikovsky’s music was not immediately recognized. Subsequent generations of violinists have vindicated the Concerto and its sensitive composer, and Roth’s performance further honors Tchaikovsky’s genius​. ​The technical demands of the Concerto’s Allegro moderato movement are near-demonic, but Roth tames even the most ferocious passages with playing that blends palpitating brilliance with astonishing calmness. This music has been recorded by many of the greatest violinists of the past century, and Roth here equals the best of their performances, recalling the majesty of David Oistrakh’s recording with Franz Konwitschny and Staatskapelle Dresden and the ebullience of Jascha Heifetz’s reading with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony. Unique to Roth’s performance is its prevailing youthfulness: in his hands, this is a young man’s music, the influence of Iosif Kotek and the fact that Tchaikovsky was only thirty-eight years old at the time of the Concerto’s genesis continually apparent.

In the G-minor Andante Canzonetta, Tchaikovsky partners the violin and orchestra as though he were writing chamber music for only two instruments. Roth responds with playing of conversational immediacy, each note’s significance in the musical conversation carefully but not obsessively considered. One of the most compelling components of Roth’s artistry is that he listens to rather than merely playing the music—all of the music, not solely his part in it—and reacts to intricacies that many soloists seemingly do not hear. The passing of thematic material from soloist to orchestra is a vital element of the construction of many concerti, but Roth bothers to question why motifs are treated in specific ways: it is not enough to suppose that Tchaikovsky did so because Brahms did so, who did so because Schumann did so, who did so because Beethoven did so, who did so because Mozart and Haydn did so. As the Canzonetta is played in this performance, Tchaikovsky’s voice resounds with tremendous personality, the lush Romanticism of the harmony cushioning wistful, emotionally vulnerable melody that seems as natural to Roth as to Tchaikovsky.

The Concerto’s Allegro vivacissimo finale is the sort of ambivalent music that Tchaikovsky composed with extraordinary profundity and tunefulness. Like that of Mozart, whose work the Russian composer idolized, Tchaikovsky’s music often evokes contrasting emotions simultaneously: effervescent, even banal melodies can convey surprising depths of discord. The breadth of the finale’s spiritual adventure, its heart stated by the composer to be the pursuit of pure beauty, is enhanced by the expansiveness of Roth’s phrasing, his affinity for finding song within any piece disclosing the close kinship of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto with music by Grieg and Sibelius. As in his performance of the Shostakovich Concerto, the sureness of his negotiations of difficult intervals and passagework and the security of his intonation are unimpeachable, but these are only facets of Roth’s playing. In opera, those who possess great voices are not necessarily great singers. A violinist with a great technique can only be a great artist if that technique is allied with sagacity that begins rather than ends with notes on a page. Roth’s interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto is built upon a lovingly-honed acquaintance with the score that he shares with the listener with the enthusiasm of introducing one cherished friend to another—in short, the work of a major artist.

In the performances on this disc, Roth enjoys superlative support from the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Thomas Sanderling. Some of today’s most talented soloists seem to exist in artistic vacuums, never interacting or communicating with their orchestral colleagues, and their recordings, while technically proficient to a considerable degree, flounder in a sort of emotional wasteland littered with meaningless notes. Artists need not be kindred spirits in order to collaborate effectively, but camaraderie and cordiality are as vital in music as chemistry between Romeo and Juliet is in theatre. Roth’s efforts on this disc are enhanced by tempi that are right both for the music and for his performance of it. Balances between orchestra and soloist sometimes sound slightly artificial, reminding the listener that this recording is a product of the studio rather than the concert hall. Likewise, the orchestral playing is occasionally pedestrian, especially in the Tchaikovsky Concerto. Always professional and commendably precise, the orchestra’s work contrasts with rather than sharing the propulsive energy of Roth’s playing. These Concerti are soloist-driven, however, and both Sanderling and the LSO are attentive, engaged passengers in Roth’s success-bound musical caravan.

In the poem quoted at the start, Dejan Stojanović also wrote that ‘Art is apotheosis; / Often, the complaint of beauty.’ In the music of Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, the poet’s words echo a particularly poignant truth. Their works were perhaps the complaints of beautiful souls subjected to the ugliness of societies in which they were seers amidst almost universal blindness. Humanity still crawls along, seeking distant trinkets in darkness when there are so many well-lit treasures within reach. Though only towering peaks in a career already as magnificently craggy as the Himalayas, Linus Roth’s performances of these Violin Concerti by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky are an apotheosis in an important artist’s mastery of his instrument.

​A score of such profound beauty that as vitriolic a critic of Italian opera as Richard Wagner extolled its virtues, Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma has in its 185-year history come to epitomize bel canto in the hearts and minds of many opera lovers. First performed at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala on 26 December 1831, by a cast that included Giuditta Pasta in the title rôle, Giulia Grisi as Adalgisa, Domenico Donzelli as Pollione, and Vincenzo Negrini as Oroveso, Norma was celebrated almost immediately as Bellini’s magnum opus, a distinction made all the more apparent by the musical and dramatic miracles wrought by the singers to whom the opera’s creation was entrusted. Considering that he famously remarked that the success of a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore depends upon as minor a thing as the engagement of the world’s four greatest singers, how might Enrico Caruso have assessed Norma’s demands? As evidenced by performances featuring an array of Normas of varying technical and histrionic abilities, ranging from Maria Malibran to Maria Callas and from Ángela Peralta to Angela Meade, a Norma with a wholly-qualified exponent of its eponymous heroine at its core can be one of opera’s most memorable experiences. A Norma with an ill-suited or ill-prepared Druidess, on the other hand, cannot be forgotten quickly enough. The ferocity of the title rôle’s demands notwithstanding, the part in Norma that is too easily overlooked when performed well but is impossible to ignore when poorly done is that of the conductor. Rarely is the presence on the podium the prime attraction of a performance of Norma, but Lyric Opera of Chicago’s January – February 2017 presentation of Kevin Newbury’s production of Bellini’s bel canto juggernaut will offer audiences what they now so seldom encounter: a conductor with the interpretive and musical skills necessary to bridge the divide between the people on the stage and those in the seats. Débuting with the company with this Herculean labor, Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza brings to the Windy City an acquaintance with Italian repertory that might justifiably be characterized as one of today’s most productive love affairs.

Born in Brescia in Italy’s Lombardia region, where he assumes a place in a centuries-old musical legacy including one of the world’s most influential schools of violin making and the eminent pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Frizza has in the course of the fifteen years since his professional début in a Pesaro performance of Rossini’s Stabat mater restored to performances of Italian repertory in many of the world’s important theatres aspects of authentic Italianate style lacking since the età d’oro of Arturo Toscanini, Victor de Sabata, and Tullio Serafin. Surprisingly for someone so comfortable in the topsy-turvy world of opera, Frizza’s earliest musical encounters were not with the great divas of his youth, and he maintains that unmistakable comfort by observing the vital difference between being a servant to music and a slave to the demands of an international career. ‘When I go on holiday, I don’t want to hear music,’ he offers. ‘If it’s obligatory to take an iPod to a desert island, I would load it with music of rock bands from the 1980s and ’90s, which is the music I grew up with.’ Recalling the example of Callas, whose intensity on stage was reportedly offset by a fondness for television cartoons when she was away from the stage, Frizza is cognizant of the necessity of balancing industry with repose. ‘I need to rest my brain,’ he imparts. This is one of the important lessons that he has learned from the progress of his career, about which he is characteristically circumspect, as candid about failures as about successes. ‘If I could go back, I would try not to make some of the mistakes I made,’ he muses. ‘The experience I gained by myself. I started young and never worked with a great conductor. Having not had that chance, I precluded the opportunity to make myself known when I was very young. In today’s media market, to start now, at thirty-five you’re old!’ Now only in his mid-forties, Frizza exudes healthful, youthful energy both in conversation and in performance, an artist in his prime who possesses a great conductor’s interpretive sagacity and a rock star’s easy charisma.

Launching a tenure at New York’s Metropolitan Opera that has to date encompassed sixty-eight outings in operas by Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, and Puccini, Frizza first bowed at the MET in a 2009 performance of Rigoletto. His focus at the MET on these cornerstones of the Italian repertory has both sharpened his attention to details of familiar scores that are overlooked in many performances and intensified his appreciation for the defining lifeblood of Italian opera. The masterworks of Italian opera constitute their own sort of alternate universe, Frizza suggests; one that enthralls opera lovers not with artificial relevance but with its liberating implausibility. What happens in opera stays in opera, one might say, but are there situations in the operas that he conducts that Frizza might strive to convince the composers to alter to better suit modern sensibilities? ‘If someone suggested that I try to get a composer to change something—I am just an interpreter!’ he exclaims without hesitation. ‘I have the background and information I need from the composer himself or herself. We must always think about the historical periods in which these works were written and the value they had at those times,’ he says. This, he asserts, is critical not merely to the enjoyment but also to the survival of opera in and beyond the Twenty-First Century. ‘If [these values are not considered],’ he adds, ‘all the works of the Italian melodrama would never be performed. Who would believe today that we can avenge a lover’s betrayal? It is far-fetched.’ How, then, does opera forge a path forward that balances respect for composers’ intentions with contemporary social trends and the prospective expectations of future audiences? Returning to his commitment to upholding the sanctity of composers’ and librettists’ endeavors, past, present, and future, Frizza states, ‘To a lesser degree, it is appropriate not to change something that was perfect in the era in which it was composed but to write new works.’ The dramatic struggles of Norma and Rigoletto are precisely as Romani, Bellini, Piave, and Verdi meant them to be. Today’s attitudes belong in scores written to express them, Frizza philosophizes, not in the distinctive milieux of works of past generations.

Stage creature in his natural habitat: Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza, débuting at Lyric Opera of Chicago in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma on 28 January 2017, conducting at the 2013 Richard Tucker Gala [Photo © by Dario Acosta]

Among Frizza’s sixty-eight appearances at The MET are acclaimed performances of Rossini’s Armida, Bellini’s Norma, and Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, joining lauded productions of other bel canto scores that the conductor has paced throughout Europe and with San Francisco Opera. If not a conscious specialization, Frizza’s mastery of this repertory has garnered recognition of his unaffectedly stylish handling of bel canto—recognition that, as Frizza is eloquent in conveying, begets enormous responsibility. ‘Performing and interpreting the bel canto style is a challenge,’ he confides, ‘because it requires special care and, above all, a musical vision of the writing from the point of view of the voice.’ This seems obvious, especially in the analysis of an idiom that can be translated as ‘beautiful singing,’ but Frizza is uncommonly sensitive to the abuses that bel canto has suffered as the principal focus of opera has deviated from voices. ‘The writing cannot be separated from the vocal quality and technique of the interpreter,’ he insists. ‘Basically, it’s like we wanted to play a Chopin piano concerto, ignoring the characteristics, attitudes, and tendencies of the pianist. In bel canto, the same thing happens.’ How, then, does he pursue his goal of remedying the distortion to which bel canto has been subjected in recent years? ‘What I like to emphasize in my performances of bel canto operas,’ the spirited Maestro shares, ‘is the chance to not betray the spirit and the will of the composer, while using the “peculiarities” of each individual voice with which I am working.’ Without pause, he concedes that this is anything but an easy task. ‘It’s a very difficult challenge, but I don’t think there can only be one interpretation for bel canto works, as well as for opera in general. To the contrary, each piece is transformed by the same element that makes it alive: the voice!’

Though twenty years have passed since Bellini’s Norma was last heard at Lyric Opera of Chicago, with June Anderson in the title rôle, the company’s relationship with the score began in LOC’s inaugural season, when the formidable quartet of Maria Callas, Giulietta Simionato, Mirto Picchi, and Nicola Rossi-Lemeni treated Chicagoland to two performances of Norma in November 1954. Frizza perceives the significance of this history more clearly that anyone. ‘Performing Norma is difficult for all the interpreters: singers, conductor, and director,’ he says. ‘From my perspective, the greatest difficulty is to tell the story with a lot of tension, without ever letting it falter, supported by the slow moments and elasticity of Bellini’s writing.’ With these ‘slow moments’ in mind, are there ways in which Frizza feels that Norma could be improved? ‘Honestly, I wouldn’t change anything in either the libretto or plot,’ he responds, echoing his thoughts on efforts to ‘modernize’ works of the past. ‘I think that the central theme of the finale is well demonstrated by the protagonist by making us reflect on the rôle of a mother and her bond with her children.’ How does Adalgisa fit into this stratagem, Romani and Bellini having omitted her from the opera’s penultimate and final scenes and denied her tribulations resolution? ‘Adalgisa actually serves to help us get to this,’ Frizza proposes. ‘She is just a means to help the story evolve: she is not central but only functional.’

The title rôle in Norma is altogether another matter, however. In his career, Frizza has worked with several of today’s most celebrated Normas, each of whom brings unique qualities to her interpretation. In Frizza’s view, the act of singing Norma initiates a singer into a sorority that is rightly respected, the rôle being easy, as Zinka Milanov quipped, only if sung badly. ‘All Normas become legendary when they die or when they stop singing,’ the Maestro surmises, but he quickly augments this with a more nuanced assessment. ‘Well, I think that after Maria Callas there have not been many other legendary Normas—excellent, yes, and great, as well, but not legendary. I wish that I could have been able to work with La Divina, more to learn some secrets of her art than for me to give her something. It is obvious that when two artists collaborate, there’s always a synthesis of different ideas that merge when each brings something and then receives something in return.’ While elevating performances of Norma to the greatest heights of lyric tragedy, this exchange of ideas can make the opera difficult going for the novice. ‘I would say that Norma is not the work I would propose as a first opera,’ Frizza confesses, ‘but I’d try to make [a first-time operagoer] understand how music and poetry together are the tools to express the highest and deepest feelings.’ Frizza’s performances confirm that he is among the very small number of conductors, of whom there are likely no fewer now in previous generations, who is capable of making a listener’s first or fiftieth Norma an unforgettably moving experience.

From Brescia, con amore: Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza, débuting at Lyric Opera of Chicago in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma on 28 January 2017
[Photo © by Merri Cyr]

Looking beyond Norma, Frizza’s advocacy for bel canto repertory has done much to rejuvenate the spirit of the renaissance spurred by Callas, Sutherland, Gencer, Sills, and Caballé. Leading performances of Donizetti’s still-too-seldom-performed Linda di Chamounix in Rome in 2016, Frizza verified to audiences that Donizetti at his best equaled Verdi as a dramatist. Asked about the progress and the work still to be done in advancing the cause of bel canto, Frizza summarizes, ‘I believe that in bel canto there has been a tremendous resurgence of study and rediscovery. There are some composers who have not yet become known or totally understood. I think that Donizetti is a composer who today is unfortunately too misunderstood and poorly exhibited in productions. Rossini, on the other hand, has done very well.’ The mistreatment of Donizetti in no way results from any deficiency on the composer’s part, this devoted exponent of his work argues. ‘I think that [Donizetti] is brilliant,’ Frizza asserts, ‘and I’m sure that in the next few years, with the help of the Fondazione Donizetti and the Festival Internazionale Donizetti Opera di Bergamo, we will get to know him.’ There is no doubt that Riccardo Frizza’s help will also contribute invaluably to that acquaintance.

Leonard Bernstein said that ‘technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.’ This is true in the literal sense that a conductor’s gestures communicate to the musicians under his guidance the course that their efforts are to take. Less tangible but no less meaningful is the conductor’s rôle as the bridge over which composers’ ideas cross into audiences’ collective consciences. That he describes the essence of his artistry as a ‘burst of energy’ that electrifies a performance ‘without overpowering the voices’ indicates the prodigious gifts of technique and communication that Riccardo Frizza brings to his work. Virtually every music lover has his own definition of a great conductor, but Bernstein’s wisdom is as solid a foundation as any: a conductor in whose work technique and communication are synonymous has the potential to achieve greatness. Rather than grabbing at greatness by attempting to reconfigure masterpieces of Italian opera to conform with today’s tastes, this son of Brescia earns greatness by reminding audiences of composers’ tastes. In a field too often mired in egotism and elitism, Riccardo Frizza is a Rooseveltian conductor who walks softly but wields a baton with big impact.

Norma’s leading man: Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza, débuting at Lyric Opera of Chicago in Vincenzo Bellini's Norma on 28 January 2017
[Photo © by J. Henry Fair]

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of Bellini’s Norma featuring Sondra Radvanovsky as Norma, Elizabeth DeShong as Adalgisa, Russell Thomas as Pollione, and Andrea Silvestrelli as Oroveso opens on Saturday, 28 January 2017, and repeats on 1, 5, 9, 13, 18, and 24 February. To purchase tickets, please visit LOC’s website.

To learn more about Riccardo Frizza and his engagements throughout the world, please visit his official website and follow him on Twitter.

Sincerest thanks are extended to Maestro Frizza for his engaging, intelligent responses and to Karen Kriendler Nelson of KKN Enterprises for liaising with Maestro Frizza and translating his responses for this article.

ALBAN BERG (1885 – 1935): Wozzeck, Opus 7—Roman Trekel (Wozzeck), Anne Schwanewilms (Marie), Marc Molomot (Hauptmann), Nathan Berg (Doktor), Gordon Gietz (Tambourmajor), Robert McPherson (Andres), Katherine Ciesinski (Margret), Calvin Griffin (Erster Handwerksbursche), Samuel Schultz (Zweiter Handwerksbursche), Brenton Ryan (Der Narr); Members of Houston Grand Opera Children’s Chorus, Deutsche Samstagsschule Houston, Chorus of Students and Alumni of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music; Houston Symphony Orchestra; Hans Graf, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during concert performances in Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts, Houston, Texas, USA, 1 – 2 March 2013; NAXOS 8.660390-91; 2 CDs, 97:52; Available from NaxosDirect, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It is now difficult to believe that Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Händel’s Tamerlano, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s La forza del destino, virtually all of Wagner’s mature operas, Strauss’s Salome and Elektra, and Britten’s Peter Grimes were considered radical when they were first performed. The history of opera is shaped by innovations, advancements in compositional techniques enacted upon the stage in efforts conscious and unconscious to propel musical invention. Each generation’s operatic revolutions provide the foundations for subsequent generations’ efforts at progress. In the decades since the course of Western music as a whole was altered by cataclysmic World Wars, the question with which opera companies, record labels, and opera lovers have contended is whether new scores have taken opera in directions that are artistically and fiscally sustainable—a question for which there are no easy answers. There were certainly no prefabricated responses to the social and psychological stimuli that led Viennese composer Alban Berg to grapple during the moral and physical devastation of the Great War with making an opera of Nineteenth-Century playwright Karl Georg Büchner’s thorny Woyzeck. Written over the course of eight years, 1914 – 1922, and premièred in Berlin with Erich Kleiber on the podium, Berg’s Wozzeck proved to be a turning point for German opera, largely deserting Wagnerian Romanticism in favor of a starker, tonally ambiguous modernity that continues to be manifested in the music of Aribert Reimann and Basel-born Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini, whose E.T.A. Hoffmann-inspired opera Der Sandmann embodies aesthetics not unlike those of Wozzeck. Not surprisingly, Wozzeck, too, was deemed a radical, dangerous piece in 1925, and it is as chameleonic an opera as has ever been written, one with music that can take on an astonishing array of colors in the glows of different performances. Documenting a pair of concert performances by the Houston Symphony Orchestra that earned praise from the local press, this new NAXOS recording, expertly engineered and edited by Bradley W. Sayles, enriches the Wozzeck discography with an uncommonly dignified reading of the score. In short, what makes this Wozzeck radical is its uncompromising musicality.

There are a plethora of reasons for singers, orchestras, conductors, opera companies, record labels, and listeners to fear Wozzeck. For opera companies and record labels, a production or recording of Wozzeck rarely equates with robust sales, and conductors often receive credit, fairly or unfairly, for performances’ failures of both commission and omission. Wozzeck is indeed a score to be approached with caution, and it is with the caution of dedication to treating the opera with the unconditional preparedness that it merits that Austrian-born conductor Hans Graf and the Houston Symphony Orchestra approach it in this performance. In Graf’s case, that preparation occasionally leads to an atmosphere of stolidity that deprives the performance of momentum. Graf’s pacing emphasizes the score’s cinematic construction, his focus on the quixotic humors of each of the fifteen scenes facilitating a traversal that accentuates Wozzeck’s episodic rather than its cumulative might. The unfailingly capable playing of the Houston Symphony musicians undoubtedly owes much to Graf’s leadership, but their individual virtuosity, not least in the gripping D-minor Interlude in Act Three, confirms that their conscientiousness is no less comprehensive than their director’s. [At the time of the Wozzeck performances in 2013, Graf was completing his final season as Houston Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director, at the end of which he assumed the title of HSO’s Conductor Laureate.] ​Trained by chorus mistress Karen Reeves, the singing of members of Houston Grand Opera Children's Chorus​ in the opera’s final scene is ideal, sounding thoroughly professional but credibly childlike in music that can be spoiled by the well-meaning efforts of youngsters who sound as though they wandered in from a choir school. Likewise, the work of the chorus of students and alumni from Rice University's Shepherd School of Music is accomplished without being too refined: the denizens of Wozzeck are hardly courtiers singing madrigals, and the impact of Berg’s choral writing is undermined by singing that lacks the grit exhibited by the Houston choristers. With these personnel all on peak form, recording Wozzeck in concert yielded an aural document which preserves the tension of live performance without the distractions of stage noises. Though lacking consistent musical and narrative propulsion, this is a Wozzeck in which everyone’s best efforts are audible, an achievement of which few studio-recorded Wozzecks can boast.

The first voice heard in Wozzeck is that of ​the Hauptmann, the petulant captain whose puerile and frankly bizarre taunting of Wozzeck heightens the title character’s disenfranchising isolation and social ineptitude—often with sounds of dubious musicality. In this performance, that voice belongs to tenor Marc Molomot, whose intrepid singing of the Hauptmann’s angular, awkwardly high-lying music is one of this Wozzeck’s greatest strengths. Precisely what motivates the Hauptmann’s idiosyncratic actions is one of Büchner’s and Berg’s gnawing enigmas, but Molomot, ever a shrewd artist with an uncanny ability to topple façades and reveal the most basic foundations of a character and his music, employs his incisive vocalism in the opening scene of Act One with aptly insinuating insipidity that contrasts with the enticing sheen of his timbre. Singing ‘Langsam, Wozzeck, langsam! Eins nach dem Andern!’ with absolute security and an uncommon degree of intonational accuracy, he endows the performance with a Hauptmann who both intrigues and repulses. The clarity of the tenor’s diction lends his utterance of ‘Es wird mir ganz angst um die Welt​’ unanticipated dramatic force. In the second scene of Act Two, Molomot’s Hauptmann momentously spars with the Doktor, his voicing of ‘Wohin so eilig, geehrtester Herr Sargnagel?’ bursting with irony. Then, in the fourth scene of Act Three, Molomot weights his delivery of ‘Es ist das Wasser im Teich. Das Wasser ruft. Es ist schon lange Niemand ertrunken. Kommen Sie, Doktor! Es ist nicht gut zu hören’ with intensity appropriate to the meaning of the text but without forcing or artificially inflating his tonal amplitude. His singing allows the listener to hear far more of the notes that Berg wrote for the rôle than is typical of most depictions, and, moreover, they are notes that one actually enjoys hearing. In many performances, the Hauptmann is more a pathetic jester than a serious combatant in the psychological contest that precipitates Wozzeck’s ultimate tragedy. Molomot’s Hauptmann is a three-dimensional figure, however, a Twentieth-Century cousin of Rameau’s Platée who perhaps victimizes Wozzeck because he has in some unknown way been a victim himself. Vocally, not even Hugues Cuénod’s RAI Roma Hauptmann in italiano is more distinguished.

As sung by​ bass-baritone Nathan Berg, the sinister Doktor is both a suitably neurotic foil to Molomot’s Hauptmann and a menacing catalyst in the tragic chain of emotional reactions that destroy Wozzeck. In the fourth scene of Act One, Berg—the fortuitously-surnamed native of Saskatchewan is presumably of no close relation to the composer—pours out ‘Was erleb’ ich, Wozzeck? Ein Mann ein Wort?’ lustily, his dark-hued voice enfolding music and words like the melodramatic twirl of a silent-film villain’s cape. The eery suggestiveness of his statement of ‘Ich hab’s geseh’n, Wozzeck, Er hat wieder gehustet​’ is unsettling and, again complementing Molomot’s Hauptmann, all the more riveting for being so handsomely sung. Berg’s command of Baroque repertory is evident in his Doktor’s incisive exchanges with the Hauptmann in Act Two’s second scene, the bass-baritone articulating ‘Wohin so langsam, geehrtester Herr Exercizengel?’ with the sure timing of a singer skilled at enlivening secco recitatives. Berg’s Doktor is unnerving without being wholly unhinged; irredeemable, to be sure, but not altogether unsympathetic. With the voice always under complete control, Berg creates a characterization that is as steeped in sadness as in sadism, a convincing individual both troubled and troubling rather than an unimaginative shadow of Josef Mengele.

There is nothing foolish about tenor Brenton Ryan’s voicing of ​Der Narr’s fateful pronouncement of ‘Ich riech, ich riech Blut!​’ in the fourth scene of Act Two: for once, the quality of the singer’s voice is equal to the significance of the character’s words. Similarly, the Erster and Zweiter Handwerksburschen of bass-baritone Calvin Griffin and baritone Samuel Schultz bring voices of excellent caliber and potential to their duties in the fourth scene of Act Two. Upholding the standard set by her male colleagues, mezzo-soprano Katherine Ciesinski​brings the often-negligible Margret to life with vocalism of inviolable concentration that makes her a fitting partner for the opera’s equivocal heroine in the Act One scene with Marie. [Incidentally, Ciesinski’s sister Kristine is a celebrated Marie, so perhaps there is a genetic predisposition to mastery of Berg’s music.] In the third scene of ​Act Three, Ciesinski articulates ‘In’s Schwabenland, da mag ich nit​’ with apposite simplicity, an exemplary example of the benefit of the work of a major artist in a minor rôle.

Wozzeck’s comrade Andres, like Margret a rôle that is frequently forgettable even in effective performances, receives from versatile tenor Robert McPherson a portrayal of musical and dramatic integrity bolstered by fine singing. In his appearance in Act One’s second scene, this Andres phrases ‘Das ist die schöne Jägerei’ with stirring vigor, the character’s presence broadened by the suppleness of the singer’s musical declamation. In the fourth scene of Act Two, McPherson’s sonorous account of ‘O Tochter, liebe Tochter, was hast du gedenkt’ exudes a quality rarely deployed in Wozzeck: charm. McPherson’s enunciation of text is occasionally slightly wooden, at odds with his smooth vocal production, but there are alluring nuances in his handling of Andres’s music that are also seldom encountered in performances of the opera. Wozzeck is a man who is much in need of a true friend, and McPherson here adds a new facet to the work’s cataclysmic dénouement by subtly bringing Andres from the periphery to the center of the drama.

The ​Tambourmajor is one of the most loathsome characters in opera, a sexual predator exhilarated by the pursuit of challenging prey. Nevertheless, like the confrontation between Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Donna Anna, there is uncertainty about the extent of Marie’s complicity in the sexual assault perpetrated upon her by the Tambourmajor. By accepting his gift of earrings, the latent symbolism of which would have been bounteous fodder for Sigmund Freud, there is at least an implication of receptiveness, but it is clear that Marie is taken by brutality, not by wooing. The Tambourmajor of Alberta-born tenor Gordon Gietz is that most threatening of psychopaths, one who masks his neurosis with normalcy. His portrayal is a study of the sort of irrepressible appetite for carnal conquest that engenders a dissociative disbelief in both the act and the concept of refusal. The drive with which Gietz sets this in motion places too much pressure on the voice in some passages, but the singer never allows the actor to push too perilously. In the contest of wills with Marie in the final scene of Act One, Gietz’s Tambourmajor hurls out ‘Wenn ich erst am Sonntag den grossen Federbusch hab’, und die weissen Hanschuh!​’ scorchingly, the voice resounding with a metallic ring that would be welcome in Siegfried’s forging song. His prevailing musical muscularity notwithstanding, this is a thinking Tambourmajor, one who transcends the mindless trumpeting of a libidinous fraternity brother obsessed with his own erotic prowess.

Acclaimed for her compelling interpretations of Richard Strauss’s operatic heroines, German soprano Anne Schwanewilms ignites this Wozzeck with a forceful, fascinating interpretation of the prismatic Marie. Like Nedda in Leoncavalli’s Pagliacci, Giorgetta in Puccini’s Il tabarro, and Zemfira in Rachmaninov’s Aleko, Schanewilms’s Marie is a woman in crisis, not so much a conventional operatic damsel in distress as a working-class Mother Courage whose circumstances crush idealism. Interestingly, Schwanewilms’s performance on this recording often brings to mind the work of two very different musical personalities, the unflappable Eleanor Steber, the Metropolitan Opera’s first Marie, and Regina Resnik, a magnificent singing actress who was not a MET Marie but should have been. In Schwanewilms’s singing here, the luminosity of the upper octave of Steber’s voice is combined with the evenness of the young Resnik’s negotiations of vocal registers. Vocally, Schwanewilms is as talented a technician as has ever been heard as Marie, and she rivals Steber, Eileen Farrell, Christa Ludwig, and Sena Jurinac for tonal luster in this music. From her lulling ‘Tschin Bum, Tschin Bum, Bum, Bum, Bum! Hö​rst Bub? Da kommen sie!’ at her entrance in the third scene in Act One to the final note of her part, Schwanewilms inhabits the rôle with conviction, breathing life into Marie with atypical decorum and no shortage of temperament. She voices ‘Mädel, was fangst Du jetzt an?’ ardently, and this tigress reveals her claws in her first faceoff with Wozzeck. In the fifth scene, battling the Tambourmajor, Schwanewilms’s manages Marie’s erupting fury with the adroitness of a great Brünnhilde in Act Two of Götterdämmerung. She both goads and recoils from her attacker, and the soprano’s measured, perceptive singing juxtaposes meaningfully with Gietz’s more savage emoting.

In the opening scene of Act Two, Schwanewilms phrases ‘Was die Steine glänzen? Was sind's für weiche? Was hat er gesagt?’ with keen judgment of the gravity of the text, and she pilots the discourse in the succeeding scene with Wozzeck with a voicing of ‘Ich bin doch ein schlecht Mensch’ of unmistakable purport. In the act’s third scene, she again seizes the advantage over Wozzeck, investing her declaration of ‘Lieber ein Messer in den Leib, als eine Hand auf mich’ with a wealth of expressive zeal. In Act Three, Schwanewilms’s Marie is a woman at her breaking point who nonetheless possesses reserves of resilience and defiance. The first scene is representative of the sophistication of the soprano’s artistry: at once flinty and seductively feminine, even romantic, she sings ‘Und ist kein Betrug in seinem Munde erfunden worden’ with fervor. Her Marie faces her final conflict with Wozzeck unflinchingly, seeming to embrace death at her partner’s hand as the inevitable destination of her harrowing journey. By turns maternal, sensual, dominating, and demure, Schwanewilms’s performance has markedly greater depth than many Maries, eschewing the commonplace trend of portraying the character as a soulless harridan. Above all, it is an unexpected and therefore increased pleasure to hear the rôle truly and glamorously sung.

German baritone ​Roman Trekel is a Wozzeck with a Lieder singer’s suavity and sensitivity, recalling the Wozzeck of his countryman Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau but bringing to Berg’s music a tougher, more rugged natural instrument and a notion of the rôle defined more by machismo than by metaphysics. This is not to intimate that Trekel’s Wozzeck is a bumbling simpleton, but the resonant bonhomie of his singing of ‘Wir arme Leut! Sehn Sie, Herr Hauptmann, Geld, Geld!’ at his first appearance in Act One is redolent more of testosterone than of grey matter. In the scene that follows, Trekel intones ‘Du, der Platz ist verflucht!​​’ with glimmers of the frustration, violence, and inability to overcome social barriers that eventually overwhelm and obliterate him. The very different demands of the dialogues with first Marie and then the Doktor in the ensuing scenes are met with commendable comprehension of the consequence of their dramatic volatility.

Reuniting with Marie in the first scene of Act Two, Trekel’s growling ‘Was der Bub immer schläft!’ reflects Wozzeck’s discomfort with the social rôles he is expected to play. Tellingly, he is more comfortable in the next scene with the Hauptmann and the Doktor, dispatching ‘Herr Hauptmann, ich bin ein armer Teufel!’ with assurance. Insecurity steals back into the characterization with Marie’s return in Scene Three, but the baritone’s singing of​ ‘Der Mensch ist ein Abgrund, es schwindelt Einem, wenn man hinunterschaut mich schwindelt...’ is formidably solid. Trading gibes with Andres in Scene Four and jeers with the Tambourmajor in Scene Five, Trekel’s vocalism flickers with growing discontent and angst.

In the opera’s final act, Trekel’s portrait of Wozzeck is painted in dark colors that do not entirely obscure the lighter aspects of the tormented man’s psyche. What light has shone in Wozzeck’s spirit is extinguished in the second scene of Act Three, however, his exasperation exploding into deadly ferocity with a vehement account of ‘Bist weit gegangen, Marie.’ The raw expressivity of Trekel’s pained ‘Tanzt Alle; tanzt nur zu, springt, schwitzt und stinkt, es holt Euch doch noch einmal der Teufel!’ in Scene Three is haunting, but it is his despondent ‘Das Messer? Wo ist das Messer? Ich hab’s dagelassen...’ in Scene Four that breaks the heart. Partnering Schwanewilms with comparable eloquence and captivating vocalism, Trekel rescues Wozzeck from the caricatured Punch and Judy show buffoonery in which it has often been mired in recent years. Dramatically, Trekel’s Wozzeck is a peer of Tito Gobbi’s astute interpretation, and his singing is some of the finest heard in Wozzeck’s music since Hermann Uhde introduced the character to the Metropolitan Opera in 1959.

It is indicative of the adaptive artistry of this cast that, with the addition of a pair of capable sopranos, they might constitute a near-perfect ensemble for Richard Strauss’s Arabella. If this suggests that the voices in this performance are plusher than those in many Wozzecks, it is a valid suggestion. The voices are, in fact, the glory of this Wozzeck. They are the pith of a performance in which the many beauties of Berg’s score are permitted to cast their spells on the listener, shattering the stigmas of atonality and Sprechgesang. When there is ugliness in this performance, it arises from the text rather than from the music, Berg having set the text with extraordinary responsiveness to its complexities. Seemingly paradoxically, the preeminence in this performance’s ethos of unveiling the oft-hidden beauties of the music causes the score to sound more, not less, revolutionary. There can be no single definitive Wozzeck, but this is a brilliant one in which the music appeals as powerfully as the drama appalls.

GEORGES BIZET (1838 – 1876): Carmen—Sandra Piques Eddy (Carmen), Dinyar Vania (Don José), Melinda Whittington (Micaëla), David Pershall (Escamillo), Joann Martinson (Frasquita), Stephanie Foley Davis (Mercédès), Donald Hartmann (Zuniga), Scott MacLeod (Le Dancaïre), Jacob Ryan Wright (Le Remendado), Ted Federle (Moralès); Members of Greensboro Youth Chorus, Greensboro Opera Chorus; Greensboro Opera Orchestra; Ted Taylor, conductor [David Holley, Stage Director; James Bumgardner, Chorus Master; Franco Colavecchia, Scenic Designer; Jeff Neubauer, Lighting Designer and Technical Director; Susan Memmott Allred, Costume Designer; Greensboro Opera, UNCG Auditorium, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 13 January 2017]

Few premières in the history of opera have triggered more extensive hyperbole, theorizing, analysis, and sheer Romantic yarning than the first performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Introduced to the discerning Parisian audience at the famed Opéra-Comique on 3 March 1875, Carmen suffered a difficult birth that left the score and its sensitive composer battered and bruised. Many accounts would have modern observers believe that the opera’s première was an unmitigated fiasco that undermined Bizet’s spiritual and physical health and sent him to an early grave. Indeed, it was just less than three months after Carmen’s opening that Bizet died, a misfortune allegedly supernaturally foreseen by the first Carmen during the Act Three card reading scene. It should be noted that this premonition transpired during the thirty-third performance of the opera. Scandal is often the most productive tool of propaganda, and first-night audiences and critics still accustomed to the formulae of Auber, Halévy, Meyerbeer, and Gounod were undoubtedly scandalized by the myriad of musical and dramatic innovations in Bizet’s setting of Henri Meilhac’s and Ludovic Halévy’s adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s like-named novella. Regardless of contemporary critical reaction to the opera, Carmen having amassed thirty-three performances at the Opéra-Comique within ninety days of the première is representative of the kind of ‘failure’ to which many creative artists might aspire. Still, Bizet was disappointed by the reception that Carmen received from the musical community, and that disappointment surely took a toll on his precarious health. Had the delicate young composer, not yet thirty-seven years old at the time of his death, witnessed Greensboro Opera’s January 2017 production of his beloved opera, perhaps he might have taken strength from the endearment that his score inspired. If there was uncertainty about Carmen’s merits in 1875, there was none about the enduring magnestism of Bizet’s magnum opus or the complete success of Greensboro Opera’s performance of it.

Mérimée’s Carmen is hardly Fifty Shades of Grey, but the novella is a work of stark brutality—starker and more brutal than Bizet’s Carmen reflects, in fact, the composer and his librettists having intentionally blunted the edges of the principal characterizations. Don José in particular is far more sympathetic in Bizet’s Carmen than in Mérimée’s, in the context of which he is a homicidal bandit even before encountering Carmen. Brought to the stage under the guidance of Greensboro Opera’s Artistic Director David Holley, Greensboro’s operatic savior, this production of Carmen beautifully and creatively eschewed modern trends in directorial enterprise by evocatively recreating Carmen’s Andalucía. First seen at Chautauqua Opera, Franco Colavecchia’s sets filled the UNCG Auditorium stage with the essence of Spain, their earth tones providing a vivid but unobtrusive backdrop for the coruscating passions of the opera’s drama. Likewise, Susan Memmott Allred’s costumes, designed for Utah Opera, exuded the sabor picante of Sevilla without subjecting the cast to an evening of discomfort or embarrassment. ​The scenic representation of Lillas Pastia’s tavern at the start of Act Two was markedly enhanced by a picturesque paso doble choreographed by Michael Job and splendidly danced by Maria-Elena Surprenant and D. Jerome Wells. A singer himself, Holley is reliably attentive to the physiological demands of singing and conceives his stagings with this in mind. His Carmen, thoughtfully illuminated by Jeff Neubauer’s lighting designs, exuded compendious acquaintance with Bizet’s score, understanding of the opera’s dramatic and historical contexts, and an abiding sense of responsibility for supporting his cast. The product of that responsibility was a performance notable for deftness and effectiveness of ensemble and its fidelity to the composer’s music and librettists’ words.

Presiding in the orchestra pit was Texas-born conductor Ted Taylor, a member of the faculty of Yale University’s esteemed School of Music who is recognized as one of America’s finest collaborators with singers, whether on the podium or at the keyboard. Challenged by a rehearsal period disrupted by the effects of a winter storm, Taylor and the Greensboro Opera Orchestra delivered a performance of Bizet’s score that immediately established and unerringly maintained the momentum that a performance must possess in order for the opera’s tragic narrative to engage the listener. Taylor’s choices of tempi and command of rubato, judiciously employed, were consistently commendable, the organic course of the drama—one of Bizet’s greatest achievements and one for which he does not receive sufficient credit—propelled but never pushed. It was largely owing to Taylor’s handling of the score that the performance conveyed the humor, inventiveness, and grandeur of Bizet’s music.

String playing in the opera’s raucous Prélude was unsettled, and instances of ragged ensemble noticeably but harmlessly recurred elsewhere in the performance. To an extent, Carmen falls victim to the curse of popularity: exceptionally popular works often tend to be deemed far easier than they actually are, and the strings’ efforts were unfailingly committed even when the results were less praiseworthy that the concentration. There was no lack of spirit in the orchestra’s performance of the first Entr’acte, its rhythms tautly executed by Taylor and the musicians. The superb wind playing in the exquisitely beautiful second Entr’acte drew audible murmurs of appreciation from the audience, and, conjuring an atmosphere of tranquility, the piece ably served as a distinctly-contrasted backdrop to the ire that boils in the act’s final minutes. Likewise, the horn obbligato in Micaëla’s Act Three aria was played by principal hornist Abigail Pack with excellent intonation and artful phrasing. The third Entr’acte, an Aragonaise that would not be out of place in Manuel Penella’s El gato montés, received from Taylor and the orchestra a buoyant reading. In opera, passion and perfection are not always wholly compatible, but this performance exhibited that an earnest abundance of the former compensates for a marginal lack of the latter.

Impeccably prepared by their director, Ann K. Doyle, members of Greensboro Youth Chorus proved themselves to be consummate professionals despite the dates on their birth certificates. They sang the Chœur des gamins, ‘Avec la garde montante, nous arrivons, nous voilà,’ charmingly and contributed boisterously to the scene outside of the plaza de toros at the start of Act Four. Their adult counterparts, drilled by chorus master James Bumgardner, sang fantastically whether portraying soldiers, cigarette girls, or townspeople. The gentlemen’s performance of the soldiers’ ‘Sur la place chacun passe, chacun vient, chacun va’ was sonorous, and the ladies’ account of the Chœur des cigarières, ‘Dans l’air, nous suivons des yeux la fumée, la fumée,’ was captivating. In the finales of Acts Two and Three, the choral singing was thrilling. The difficult rhythms in Act Four defeat many choristers but not this group: here and elsewhere in this Carmen, they sang better than the choruses of some of the world’s most famous opera companies.

Les amants condamnés: Mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy as Carmen (right) and tenor Dinyar Vania as Don José (left) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, January 2017
[Photo © by Greensboro Opera]

The Moralès of baritone Ted Federle, a graduate of both the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, seized his opportunities to make a positive impression in Act One, launching ‘À la porte du corps de garde’ with firm, resonant tone. Cheeky insinuations oozed from his dulcet voicing of ‘Regardez donc cette petite qui semble vouloir nous parler,’ and the boyish glee of his ‘Non, ma charmante, il n’est pas là’ in response to Micaëla’s query about Don José’s whereabouts left no doubt concerning Moralès’s willingness—no, eagerness—to substitute for José in whichever activities Micaëla had in mind. A suggestion of wistfulness blended with licentiousness in Federle’s delivery of ‘L’oiseau s’envole, on s’en console,’ adding a pang of loneliness to his obvious longing for female companionship. French vowels suited Federle’s lovely lyric voice, and he wore Moralès’s uniform handsomely.

The smugglers Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado were entrusted to a pair of wonderful singers whose curricula vitarum also contain North Carolina connections, baritone and High Point University faculty member Scott MacLeod and tenor Jacob Ryan Wright, another UNCG alumnus and scholar at the UNCSA A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute. Bravely singing despite battling influenza, MacLeod reaffirmed his artistic integrity by singing not just capably but excellently. He may well have collapsed offstage in illness-exasperated exhaustion, but when on stage he radiated energy and good vocal health. In the Act Two scene chez Lillas Pastia, he voiced ‘Pas trop mauvaises les nouvelles, et nous pouvons encore faire quelques beaux coups!’ wittily. In the sparkling Quintet and throughout Act Three, both he and Wright satisfied musically and convinced dramatically. Wright’s reedy tenor and MacLeod’s flexible baritone intertwined attractively, and they made most winsome partners in crime.

One of the foremost accomplishments of Sir Rudolf Bing’s storied two-decade tenure as General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera was the cultivation of a true company of well-trained singers for supporting rôles who could be called upon to step into larger assignments when circumstances so dictated. A rôle like Zuniga in Carmen could therefore be entrusted to singers of the caliber of Osie Hawkins, Norman Scott, and Morley Meredith, a now-extinct boon to MET performances resurrected in Greensboro with the casting of bass-baritone Donald Hartmann as the dragoons’ licentious lieutenant. In his Act One exchange with José, ‘C’est bien là, n’est-ce pas, dans ce grand bâtiment, que travaillent les cigarières,’ Hartmann goaded his distracted colleague, and with ‘Ce qui t’occupe, ami, je le sais bien: une jeune fille charmante, qu’on appelle Micaëla, jupe bleue et natte tombante’ he amusingly provoked José into confessing that his thoughts were occupied by Micaëla. Ordering José to bind Carmen’s hands and conduct her to prison after her fight in the cigarette factory, Hartmann’s singing of ‘C’est dommage, c’est grand dommage, car elle est gentille vraiment!’ was delightful, his Zuniga never more in his element than when personifying hypocrisy. Admonishing Carmen in Act Two for choosing José, a mere soldier, rather than an officer—himself, that is—with ‘Le choix n’est pas heureux; c’est se mésallier de prendre le soldat quand on a l’officier,’ this natural comedian and not the projected supertitle earned the audience’s laughter. Later, acquiescing at gunpoint to Carmen and her cohorts, he bade the performance adieu with his trademark spot-on timing and saturnine timbre. Stating that Hartmann sang well is like saying that oceans are deep, but his Zuniga was a burst of sunlight in Carmen’s smoky world, ever a cad but never a clown.

Singing Mercédès and Frasquita, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis, one of central North Carolina’s musical treasures, and native North Dakotan soprano and highly respected local pedagogue Joann Martinson infused Act Two with a potent dose of gypsy grit, reveling in their lines in the Quintet and finale. Both ladies sang dashingly in Act Three, not least in the card-reading Trio, in which their refrains of ‘Mêlons! Coupons! Rien, c’est cela! Trois cartes ici... Quatre là!’ first established the playful mood of the scene and later sought to reclaim it after Carmen’s fateful turn with the cards. Martinson’s radiant top B♭s and Cs in ensembles were matched by Foley Davis’s excursions into her dark-chocolate lower register. One of the most emotionally-charged details of the production was Frasquita’s and Mercédès’s final farewell to Carmen in Act Four: having seen Don José lurking in the crowd, her friends intuited that Carmen’s death knell was sounding, and their desperate pleas for her to flee quickly transformed into heartfelt goodbyes. Both Martinson and Foley Davis are significant talents, and their performances significantly boosted the already-high benchmark of this Carmen.

An alumna of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, by the campus of which institution Greensboro Opera’s Carmen was hosted, soprano Melinda Whittington treated the near-capacity audience to a portrayal of the innocent Micaëla that delved further into the character’s psyche than most conventional operatic ingénue interpretations manage or attempt to do. Deflecting Moralès’s flirtation in the Act One scene in which she seeks José among the soldiers on duty, this Micaëla was polite to a fault, clinging to her serene decorum as a defense against impropriety. Having located her martial swain, Whittington sang ‘Oui, je parlerai; ce que l'on m'a donné je vous le donnerai’ in the duet with José gorgeously, her projection a model of proper placement of French vowels in the mask. The sweetness with which she uttered ‘Un baiser pour son fils! José, je vous le rends, comme je l'ai promis’ was touching, the intimacy of the sentiment imparted with absolute sincerity. Though in a purely musical sense it is perhaps the single finest number in the score, rarely is Micaëla’s aria in Act Three, ‘Je dis, que rien ne m’épouvante,’ the zenith of a performance of Carmen, but Whittington’s traversal of the aria, crowned with a phenomenal top B, deservedly received the most enthusiastic ovation of the evening. Unusually, the soprano’s plea for José to return to the arms of his dying mother in the Act Three finale seemed even to briefly move Carmen. Whittington voiced ‘Moi, je viens te chercher’ without artifice, ascending to a perfectly-controlled climactic top B♭. By insightfully depicting Micaëla as a smart, resilient young woman whose purity is a conscious choice rather than a byproduct of prudishness, Whittington raised the stakes in this Carmen. Often, why Don José’s head is so easily turned by Carmen is all too apparent, but the tragedy in this performance was intensified by the woman he discarded singing so beautifully and poignantly.

Bravo, toréro: Baritone David Pershall as Escamillo (center) in Greensboro Opera’s production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, January 2017
[Photo © by Greensboro Opera]

Debonair baritone David Pershall brought to the arrogant, self-assured toreador Escamillo precisely the vocal and histrionic panache that the rôle requires. Already a seasoned artist among whose leading ladies in theatres throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Opera and Wiener Staatsoper, are luminaries such as Nelly Miricioiu and Anna Netrebko, Pershall gave Escamillo—a character who, when sung by unimaginative vocalists, can all too easily devolve into a cipher in sequins—a bravado-driven presence. His entrance in Act Two, heralded by the chorus, is one of the most memorable in opera, and Pershall’s confident, ringing performance of the famous Chanson du toréro, ‘Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre,’ was unforgettable. The baritone’s impactful top Fs electrified the auditorium more reliably than the power grid, and his top G in the Act Three duet with José, initiated with a smugly ironic ‘Quelques lignes plus bas et tout était fini,’ wielded a force like Krakatoa’s. In the Act Four scene before the bullfight, Pershall’s singing throbbed with swagger and raw masculinity, but there was also genuine tenderness in his conversation with Carmen. There was a loving heart beneath the proud exterior. This, as with Whittington’s Micaëla, sharpened appreciation of both the character and the artist portraying him. In Spanish culture, great matadors have often been among the most popular celebrities, and Pershall enriched Greensboro Opera’s Carmen with an Escamillo worthy of the front pages of El mundo and El país.

Expanding his presence in the operatic activities of the Piedmont regions of North Carolina and Virginia, where he has been heard in recent months as Alfredo in Opera Roanoke’s production of Verdi’s La traviata and Cavaradossi in Piedmont Opera’s Tosca, tenor Dinyar Vania brought to Greensboro Opera’s Carmen an interpretation of Don José in which honor and brutality were in near-constant conflict. In his discourse with Zuniga in Act One, Vania’s José articulated ‘Mon officier, je n’en sais rien, et m’occupe assez peu de ces galanteries’ with humility. The change in the volatile young man’s demeanor after his first meeting with Carmen was therefore all the more pronounced. The wonder that flooded the tenor’s voice and expression as he sang ‘Quels regards! Quelle effronterie! Cette fleur-là m’a fait l’effet d’une balle qui m’arrivait!’ after receiving the flower from Carmen was the first glimpse of infatuation. His reverie broken by Micaëla’s arrival, Vania’s José could only partially focus on his girlfriend and her news of his mother. Still, in their duet, Vania sang ‘Parle-moi de ma mère!’ yearningly, the sinewy strength of the voice softened by expansive phrasing. In the act’s final minutes, convinced to aid Carmen in her escape at the expense of his own freedom, Vania’s increasingly white-hot vocalism divulged that obsession had taken root.

First heard in Act Two from afar, Vania voiced ‘Halte là! Qui va là? Dragon d'Alcala!’ as José approached Lillas Pastia’s tavern with the elation of a virile young soldier en route to a rendezvous with his lover. The subsequent duet with Carmen magnified the tension already beginning to fracture their relationship, mirrored in vocalism of bronzed brawn. Vania’s performance of José’s andantino aria ‘La fleur que tu m’avais jetée’—not designated as an aria in Bizet’s manuscript, incidentally—was impassioned but impressively restrained, the ascent to its notorious top B♭ handled with finesse and astonishing ease. Throughout the performance, Vania’s upper register was deployed with unforced vigor, the evenness of timbre and support from bottom to top recalling the best singing of Mario del Monaco. In both the Act Two finale and the opening of Act Three, Vania made José’s desperation palpable. He answered the bullfighter’s affable irony with full-throated threats in the duet with Escamillo, the hospitality of his initial ‘Je connais votre nom, soyez le bienvenu; mais vraiment, camarade, vous pouviez y rester’ replaced with hostility when he realized that he was Carmen’s cast-off paramour to whom Escamillo referred. Here, too, Vania’s top B♭ was exhilarating.

Verdi is justly credited with having created one of opera’s most novel scenes with the ‘Miserere’ that follows Leonora’s aria in Act Four of Il trovatore. No less novel is the final scene of Carmen, in which the protagonists’ final struggle transpires in counterpoint with the offstage exclamations of the crowd observing the bullfight. Reacting to Carmen’s declaration of being oblivious to José’s anger, Vania sang ‘Je ne menace pas, j’implore, je supplie; notre passé, Carmen, je l’oublie’ with eloquence, his José clearly believing in that moment that his intention was to win back Carmen’s heart instead of plunging his dagger into it. The moment of his psychotic break and murder of the object of his desire was shockingly visceral. There were no screams and stock gestures, but so visceral was the strike of his blade that the blow lifted Carmen off the stage like a doll. The Otello-like ‘Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée!’ was the anguished cry of an irreparably broken man, sung rather than shouted. Bringing to his rôle a voice of dimensions virtually ideal for the music, Vania sang with animalistic fervor, but it was the flawed humanity of his performance that made his not just a well-sung but a deeply affecting Don José.

The array of different voice types that have graced the world’s stages in the title rôle of Carmen is mind-boggling. From the earthy mezzo-sopranos of Gladys Swarthout and Risë Stevens and the Gallic sopranos of Emma Calvé and Zélie de Lussan to the Wagnerian voices of Lilli Lehmann, Olive Fremstad, and Régine Crespin and utterly unique talents like Geraldine Farrar, Florence Easton, Maria Jeritza, Rosa Ponselle, and Lily Djanel, Carmen has appealed to artists of diverse Fächer and schools of singing. Bruna Castagna, Fedora Barbieri, and Giulietta Simionato, three of the greatest legitimate Verdi mezzo-sopranos of the Twentieth Century, were acclaimed Carmens, and Bizet’s eponymous gypsy was an early Auckland rôle for pre-Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, before the start of her international career. Carmen was created by Célestine Galli-Marié, a high mezzo-soprano whose surname, like that of Cornélie Falcon, became synonymous with a Fach comprised of rôles for which she was acclaimed, most notably the name parts in Thomas’s Mignon and Offenbach’s Fantasio, and this succinctly demonstrates the singularity of Carmen’s music: so unique was the voice of the singer for whom the part was written that, not unlike the character herself, she fomented her own mythology.

Oui, elle est gentille vraiment: Mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy as the title heroine in Greensboro Opera’s production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, January 2017
[Photo © by Greensboro Opera]

Among the ranks of notable Carmens, it was Teresa Berganza’s portrayal that was brought to mind by the feisty Carmen of mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy. Her singing of her first recitative in Act One [the Guiraud recitatives were utilized], ‘Quand je vous aimerai,’ introduced a Carmen who teased without malice: her barbs were made for eliciting reactions, not for drawing blood. Piques Eddy purred and growled ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser,’ the well-known Habanera, her F♯s and Gs at the top of the stave secure and the quality of the voice as superlative at piano as at forte. Jockeying for dominance in the melodrama with José and Zuniga, she dispatched ‘Tralalalala, coupe-moi, brûle-moi, je ne te dirai rien’ insouciantly but with an iron grip on its effects on her audience. The seductive Séguedille, ‘Près des remparts de Séville,’ was in Piques Eddy’s performance like the piping of a snake charmer: deaf men might well have been hypnotized by the serpentine lilt of this siren’s song.

Transported to Lillas Pastia’s tavern in Act Two, the beguilingly beautiful mezzo-soprano intoned the Chanson bohème, ‘Les tringles des sistres tintaient avec un éclat métallique,’ with feline grace. Joining her comrades in the Quintet, this Carmen was unquestionably sincere in her statement of ‘Mes amis, je serais fort aise de partir avec vous ce soir’ despite their good-natured mocking. Taunting José in their duet upon his arrival at the tavern, Piques Eddy made Carmen’s contemplation of José’s flower aria a marvel of shifting emotions, seeming to sense that she was already in over her head. Their quarrel interrupted by Zuniga’s unwitting arrival, this quick-thinking Carmen silenced Don José and then dealt with Zuniga with a slyly dangerous ‘Bel officier! bel officier, l’amour vous joue en ce moment un assez vilain tour.’ There was no doubting that the core tenet of Piques Eddy’s Carmen’s philosophy was ‘La liberté,’ and her singing in the Act Two finale was a rousing paean to the freedom of her bohemian lifestyle.

It was in Act Three that Piques Eddy’s Carmen was subtlest. She sought refuge from her torment in ensembles, subjugating her individuality to the relative safety of community. In the Trio with Frasquita and Mercédès, she voiced ‘Carreau, pique...la mort! J’ai bien lu...moi d’abord’ with abandon, and her brief musing on the unchangeability of destiny, a passage that could almost have been extracted from an opera by Händel, was wrenching. After bitterly mocking José in the act’s finale and demanding that he return with Micaëla to his native village and his dying mother’s bedside, Piques Eddy’s Carmen broke down in tears as José fled. Precisely which emotions assailed her can only be conjectured, but the singer gave the character a vulnerability that she often lacks, the gypsy’s soul as upended in that awful moment as the soldier’s.

In progression, Act Four presented tableaux of Carmen in each of the consequential relationships that define her existence in the opera. First entering by Escamillo’s side and then greeting the anxious Frasquita and Mercédès, she symbolically reconciled present and past, already cognizant of what fate had in store for her. The expressive dignity with which Piques Eddy voiced ‘L’on m’avait avertie que tu n’étais pas loin, que tu devais venir; l’on m’avait même dit de craindre pour ma vie mais je suis brave et n'ai pas voulu fuir’ was remarkable, the character’s poise and the singer’s personality indivisible. She fired ‘Carmen jamais n’a menti’ at José with the unstoppable fury of a landslide. She could speak only the truth when a lie might have spared her, but Piques Eddy was a Carmen for whom the inescapable slavery of living dishonestly was a sentence worse than death. Like her colleagues, she sang extraordinarily well, but hers ultimately was not a performance in which the notes were the emphasis. When she was on the UNCG Auditorium stage, she was Carmen, and the notes came not from her throat but from her heart.

That Bizet’s Carmen is one of opera’s finest scores cannot be denied even by those who do not appreciate or enjoy it. In its ebullient scenes, there are hints of Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, and Saint-Saëns and Ravel hide in the sophisticatedly Gallic melodies of the opera’s most lyrical passages. Wagner is there, tiptoeing through the motivic writing, and Tchaikovsky peeks from the orchestra pit. Nevertheless, the voice that emerges most clearly is no one’s but Bizet’s. Often, though, it is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to discern during performances why Carmen’s popularity never wanes. At her core, Carmen is not as complicated as is often suggested: she lives to love and loves to live, and some productions stand in her way. Its musical standards higher than those achieved by many companies with far deeper pockets, Greensboro Opera’s Carmen encouraged unfeigned characterizations, not abstract concepts. Carmen’s magic does not require complex spells and exotic potions. Allow Bizet’s characters to sing the music that he composed for them without impediments, and they work their magic. In Greensboro, how it worked!

Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée: Mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy as Carmen and tenor Dinyar Vania as Don José in Greensboro Opera’s production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, January 2017
[Photo © by Greensboro Opera]