Sixties Soul still going strong: Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits starring Peter Noone in performance in the Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, San Antonio, Texas, on 20 March 2016
[Photo by the author]

There is an oft-cited quip suggesting that, if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. Now, a half-century after Motown drove across the continent and the British Invasion reclaimed the colonies, there are less-jovial connotations to that quaint maxim. Illness and injury are continually decimating both the memories and the mortalities of those who witnessed and participated in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, and too many of those who, like me, were born in the less-interesting decades that followed have never queried the sources of musical munificence in their own homes about the sounds and experiences that defined an era. If our grandparents, the courageous women and men who selflessly abandoned their everyday lives and battled not for the status quo but for preservation of the freedom for there to be a status quo, were the Greatest Generation, then our parents, the children of the turbulent but tremendously tuneful Sixties, are surely the Grooviest Generation. The photos of their haute couture and piled-high coiffures amuse us now, but follow George Jackson’s and Bob Seger’s advice, take any of those old records off the shelf, and there arises from the scratch of stylus on vinyl an atmosphere shaped by far more than words and lyrics. Better still, return to the source: hear an artist like Peter Noone, still playing in excess of 130 gigs each year with undimmed enthusiasm and professionalism, and the subtle and substantial changes in music of all genres are plainly, painfully apparent. Ours is a brave new world that has lost both its bravery and its novelty, especially in the exalted realm of Classical Music. There are ears that will ever respond more readily to Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII than to Herman’s Hermits’ ‘I’m Henry VIII, I Am,’ but there are many questions that gnaw at the core of Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century that might find no better answers than those proposed by still-swinging Sixties showmanship.

That this undoubtedly seems an unlikely theme for Voix des Arts necessitates a brief stint in the confessional. I principally write about Classical Music because this is my comfort zone. During my youth in the last millennium, I studied violin [no Arthur Grumiaux, to be sure], piano [no Artur Schnabel], and voice [no Caruso, Gigli, or even Poggi]. Regardless of whether I seriously considered a career as a professional musician, it is impossible to ascertain whether I possessed less ambition or talent. Despite having studied it in some depth, I love music. Loving music, I lead a double life, my Clark Kent guise boring the Classically-inclined public with my Tolstoy-length, excessively-detailed reviews by day and then, by night, donning my cape—a glow stick, actually—and transforming into a freeway-burning follower of Herman’s Hermits starring Peter Noone. [There comes a time, fellow travelers, when what one claims to be one’s parents predilections should and must be acknowledged as one’s own.] With today’s incarnation of the Hermits, comprised of master musicians Vance Brescia, Dave Ferrara, Rich Spina, and Billy Sullivan, Noone tours in the United States and abroad, appearing in as many different kinds of venues as there are towns to build them. Friday evening might find me critiquing a performance of Carmen; Saturday evening, singing along with ‘Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat.’ Rather than complicating my focus on the former, I find that the latter markedly sharpens my perspectives on all music.

I have during my time in the trenches met a few ‘serious’ singers, and, rightly or [mostly] wrongly, have even considered a few among them friends. For me, opera is life—not a means of making a living but life itself. I try to convey this in my writing and to apply this passion to my analyses of performances and recordings. Whether the work at hand is a Bach partita, a Bellini opera, a Brahms symphony, or a Bacharach song, a musician’s endeavor deserves attention from the critic at least as great as the effort expended in the performance. A performance of two hours’ duration, prepared over many more hours, seldom merits being assessed—or, more accurately, dismissed—in a single sentence, and, in those cases in which this is warranted, there is no complaint that cannot be stated civilly. My credo, unimpeded by editorial limitations, is profoundly simple: be thorough, honest, and courteous; and, if there is nothing positive to be said, say nothing at all. Complementing my great appreciation for his music and his unwavering commitment to making it at the highest level is my recognition of Noone’s embodiment of the critical tenets of my philosophy. He falls ill, experiences disappointments and losses, has aches and pains, and faces days when the voice wants rest, but audiences who discern this in his performances are far more perceptive than I. There are no cancellations, no complaints, and no excuses: the priority is the quality of the ticket buyer’s experience, not cosseting the artist’s ego.

As an opera lover [barely] under the age of forty, I am fascinated and admittedly mystified by tales of opera-going of generations past. Reflecting on the passing of Roberta Peters, a gracious lady rightly acclaimed as one of America’s most gifted and giving singers, I find it almost impossible in the context of today’s Classical Music environment to fathom an era in which singers like Peters, Dame Joan Sutherland, and Renata Tebaldi received their fans like friends. In a classic case of diving in at the deep end, my first exposure to professionally-produced opera was the Franco Zeffirelli production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera, a 1997 performance with Denyce Graves in the title role and Plácido Domingo as Don José. To her credit, Graves was a throwback to the divas of bygone days, amiably holding court with her admirers at the stage door. In this aspect of the operatic experience, the going has for the most part been downhill from that auspicious start.

Many keystrokes are expended in discussions of the struggles that opera and Classical Music face, especially in the United States. With funding imperiled on virtually every front, financing opera is a challenge of epic proportions, one that companies must meet with intelligence and innovation. Fundraising is a necessity, but it is also a significant current in the tsunamis of arrogance and elitism that have drowned opera in America in recent seasons. Yes, opera has almost always been and will likely always be perceived as an elitist art form, not without justification, but the language and stylistic barriers that frighten potential new audiences are made still more off-putting by the disconnect between stage and seats. The interaction that caused a boy from North Carolina to feel that Denyce Graves cared about whether he enjoyed her performance is now so often lacking. Graves is as charismatic a lady in the MET parking garage as she is on the MET stage, but many of today’s younger singers are also kind, insightful, approachable people—and there, dear readers, is the rub. Of what use is approachability when one can never be approached?

To be sure, ours is a world unlike the one inhabited by Sutherland and Tebaldi; unlike even the one in which I first attended a performance at the MET, for that matter. Security is a paramount concern. Artists’ safety is an inviolable right, but it is not often than an enthusiastic child is denied the opportunity to greet an idolized performer after a show because of security concerns. No, there is a private reception for donors, an invited-guests-only function, some sort of ‘Average Folks are not welcome’ event that adds another layer of bricks to the wall separating Art from Public. This is understandable and unavoidable but undeniably disheartening. I have often wondered whether I would have been so keen to return to the opera had Denyce Graves not taken five minutes from her life—five minutes to which my ticket emphatically did not entitle me—to say, ‘Thanks for coming to the show, kid. I’m glad that you enjoyed it and proud to have been part of your first night at the opera.’ For me, the obsession was already growing, but what about the child who now has no opportunity to utter awe-induced nonsense to the Figaro, Papageno, or Rodolfo who has won her heart?

When Peter Noone performs, it is the Herman persona that sent teeming crowds into frenzies in the 1960s who takes the stage. When he greets newly-won and decades-loyal fans in post-performance autograph lines that sometimes seem interminable, it is an amalgamation of Herman and Peter Noone who remembers names, inquires about absent spouses and children, and carries on witty banter worthy of Benny Hill. There of course are private receptions, backstage meetings for a fortunate few, and closed-door concessions to the pockets that pay venues’ bills, but Noone’s dedication to converting every creature in a seat into a fan is why, fifty years after he charmed Ed Sullivan and the youth of America, I remember as many Herman’s Hermits lyrics as da Ponte and Hofmannsthal libretti. Artistic responsibility is a two-way street. Perhaps I was not the most eager of attendees the first time that I heard Herman’s Hermits starring Peter Noone in concert, but I immediately sensed the abiding cognizance of responsibility for my enjoyment that Noone and the musicians with whom he surrounded himself exuded. I therefore felt a similar responsibility to switch off my prejudices and let the music minister to me on its own terms. I have felt that in the opera house, too, but the toil is greater. How many potential opera lovers and benefactors never deem it worth the effort to make the kinds of connections that open minds, hearts, and checkbooks?

However greatly we have come to rely upon social media and technology for communication, there is so much more to meaningfully enjoying, promoting, and supporting art than liking Facebook pages and following Twitter accounts. Art is an exchange, a sharing of ideas from which no one can be excluded if art is to remain viable. That opera has become a commodity that is bought and sold on a closed but visible market is abundantly apparent. Such is progress, and, if managed properly, opera and its future can benefit from it. No one would admit more quickly than Noone that singing ‘Leaning on the Lamp Post’ is not as strenuous an undertaking as performing Isolde’s Liebestod, but no one is more aware than Noone that selling‘Leaning on the Lamp Post’ is as vital to the success of a Herman's Hermits starring Peter Noone as the emotional and musical power of a soprano’s Liebestod is to the effectiveness of a performance of Tristan und Isolde. In an unpoetically commercial sense, the essence of artistry is the sales pitch. As pivotal in the effort to preserve opera as in that to keep music from the 1960s playing is convincing consumers to buy something that they know that they do not need.

What can Madama Butterfly learn from Mrs. Brown? One might think that the view from high atop the hill overlooking Nagasaki’s harbor is ideal for peering over the horizon into the future of opera, but that view is too often obstructed by reflections of the dizzying misfortunes to which opera in the Twenty-First Century, like Cio-Cio San, is susceptible. Still, Herman would remind us that ‘it ain’t no good to pine.’ I fear for the survival of opera not because of the quality or validity of the music or the aptitude of young singers but because the pressures of sustaining a career in too many instances no longer allow singers to be the kind of crusaders for opera that Peters, Sutherland, and Tebaldi were, garnering as much veneration after the curtain fell as when on stage. It is upon veneration of singers and singing that the perseverance of opera depends. Opera could learn much from Peter Noone about the elusive art of maintaining uncompromising seriousness in one’s artistry without forgetting that the surest method of earning a listener’s respect is to sincerely and palpably reciprocate it.

FRANCESCO ANTONIO FACCIO (1840 – 1891): Amleto—Alex Richardson (Amleto), Abla Lynn Hamza (Ofelia), Joseph Hubbard (Orazio), Caroline Worra (Geltrude), Shannon De Vine (Claudio), Matthew Curran (Polonio, Primo becchino), Paul Bower (Marcello, Un sacerdote), Javier González (Laerte), Jeffrey Beruan (Lo spettro, Luciano), Jonathan Charles Tay (Un araldo, Il re Gonzaga), Heather Youngquist (La regina); Chorus and Orchestra of Opera Southwest; Anthony Barrese, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during performances at Opera Southwest, Albuquerque Journal Theatre, National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, 26 and 31 October and 2 November 2014; Opera Southwest 888295410748; 2 CDs, 149:36; Available from Opera Southwest and major music retailers]

It is irrefutably true that artists are no less subject than any other men to John Donne’s oft-quoted assertion that ‘no man is an island,’ but plentiful are the opportunities for drowning in the tumultuous seas that separate creative geniuses from the nearest neighboring shores. Fond as modern society is of attaching labels to every possible entity, a sobriquet like ‘the Czech Mozart’ is as damaging as it is flattering to the modern reputation of the Eighteenth-Century composer Josef Mysliveček, heightening interest but also suggesting a discernible element of conventionality. In a sense, promoting Franco Faccio’s Shakespeare-derived opera Amleto as the ‘missing link between Verdi and verismo’ places this forsaken score in a context that emphasizes its significance in the evolution of Italian opera in the Nineteenth Century but undermines its merits as a destination in its own right. With a libretto by Arrigo Boito, the composer of the still-under-appreciated Mefistofele and Nerone whose libretti for Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff qualify him for the title of Italy’s most gifted operatic adaptor of Shakespeare, Amleto first recreated something rotten in Denmark on the stage of Genoa’s Teatro Carlo Felice on 30 May 1865, with Mario Tiberini, Verdi’s first Don Alvaro in the revised version of La forza del destino that continues to be preferred today, in the title rôle. Neither a rousing success nor the dismal failure that its subsequent neglect might suggest it to have been, Amleto can be said to have suffered a variation of the fate endured by its protagonist: misrepresented, misunderstood, ignored, and dismissed, Faccio’s most accomplished score now seeks in today’s reappraisal the retribution that it deserves.

Born in Verona in 1840, two months before Tchaikovsky was born four thousand kilometers away in today’s Udmurt Republic, Francesco Antonio Faccio honed his gifts at the Milan Conservatory, where his studies brought him into contact with Boito. The friendship that developed between them was both productive and potentially injurious: their barbed and very public criticism of the Italian musical establishment earned them the ire of Verdi, the undisputed sovereign of that establishment. Fortunately for Faccio, Verdi was capable of graciousness and seeing talent despite triviality, eventually facilitating the younger man’s appointment as conductor at Teatro alla Scala and advocating for Faccio’s conducting of the first performances and momentous productions of Verdi’s own later operas. Faccio was only twenty-five years old when Amleto was premièred in Genoa and not yet thirty-one when his revision of the score was first heard at La Scala in 1871. Though Faccio was to live for another two decades [ironically, Verdi, bastion of the ‘old guard’ against which Faccio and Boito railed, outlived his younger Veronese colleague by ten years], this is where Amleto’s journey stalled until the Twenty-First Century. Dramatically, Boito’s libretto for Amleto is in no way inferior to his Shakespeare libretti for Verdi. Musically, Faccio’s score is the equal or superior of many of the pieces that have been resurrected in recent years, including Filippo Marchetti’s Ruy Blas, the title rôle in which was created in 1869 by the first Amleto, Mario Tiberini. Faccio’s mastery of orchestration is sometimes more striking than his skill as a melodist, but Amleto is a work that profusely rewards the listener’s curiosity.

Recorded during critically-acclaimed performances at Albuquerque’s Opera Southwest, this release provides Amleto and its creator with a substantial measure of the vengeance to which the opera’s neglect entitles them. Like Shakespeare’s play, which is gripping when read but can be overwhelming in performance, it is apparent that Faccio’s opera is better suited to the stage than to the studio. Even at their most bountiful, noises from stage and audience in this recording are not bothersome, the extraneous sounds contributing to the performance’s palpable atmosphere—a trait invaluable to both Hamlet and Amleto. Also crucial in the creation of the atmosphere that the opera needs are the efforts of the Opera Southwest Chorus and Orchestra. The orchestra’s playing luxuriates in the richness of Faccio’s part writing, the few mistakes that remind the listener that this recording documents live performances indicating the difficulty of the music. Orchestral textures are for the most part ideal, and balance of ensemble is thoughtfully managed, especially in the grand public scenes. Faccio’s choral writing prefigures passages that Verdi would create in Act Two of Aida and the opening scene of Otello, and the choral singing in this performance is one of Opera Southwest’s foremost achievements. The choristers consistently deliver energetic accounts of their music, often giving the performance the dramatic force of Greek tragedy, and their efforts are unerringly musical. With this recording, Opera Southwest’s personnel provide further evidence of the fantastic work being done by America’s regional opera companies, work often superior to the efforts of larger companies in and beyond the United States.

That resurrecting Amleto was not merely a project but a personal crusade for composer and conductor Anthony Barrese is audible in every second of this recording. Having prepared the critical edition of Faccio’s score, now receiving attention throughout the world, he conducts the performance on these discs as though his life, as well as the opera’s fortunes, depended on it. In Barrese’s hands, an electric ambience is engendered via the opera’s opening pages that permeates the performance, the dramatic tension maintained until the final chord of Faccio’s score. Musical gestures are always at the service of the narrative, the conductor facilitating a reading in which the climaxes of every scene are fully realized but organically fused within the opera’s overall structure. The chosen tempi keep the opera moving without pushing any of the performers on stage or in the pit beyond the limits of comfort or good taste. Unlike the endeavors of many proponents for overlooked repertory, Barrese’s pacing of Amleto does not attempt to force the listener to accept the opera as a rediscovered masterpiece: rather, Faccio’s music is performed with equal measures of passion and precision, and the listener is invited to draw his own conclusions. It is impossible to know how Mendelssohn’s conducting of the Bach Passions sounded, but, as it was guided by the affections of rediscovery and dauntless advocacy, it can be surmised that, in spirit, it must have resembled Barrese’s conducting of Amleto.

Heard as both the Araldo and Il Re Gonzaga, tenor Jonathan Charles Tay exemplifies the meticulous casting that was enacted in filling the roster for Opera Southwest’s production with singers qualified to make the most positive of impressions with their handling of Faccio’s music. In the second part of Act Two, Tay sings ‘Vieni, compagna, un tiepido orezzo verspertin fa carolar le mammole nel placido giardin’ with total immersion in the drama, the singer’s vocal colorations reflecting the subtleties of the text. Similarly, tenor Javier González injects a rigid spine into Laerte, a figure too often inert in performances of Hamlet, voicing ‘Sovra il desco inebriato piovan canti, incenso e fiori’ in Act One with steady tone and sure dramatic instincts. These gentlemen’s performances are complemented by the strong, sonorous vocalism of bass Matthew Curran as the Primo Becchino and Polonio. In the latter rôle, this imaginative singer is a credible father to González’s Laerte and the fragile Ofelia, even his most pompous political passages softened by paternal tenderness. The insightful wisdom of his ‘To thine own self be true’ speech notwithstanding, the loss when Shakespeare’s Hamlet erroneously slays Polonius is rarely deeply felt, but Curran makes the character truly amusing in his self-importance and genuinely sympathetic in his vestiges of humanity, not least by sculpting ‘Quand’ei qui giunga, a lui verrà mia figlia’ in Act Two with dignity and distinguished tone.

In addition to honorably aiding Faccio as Opera Southwest’s chorus master, baritone Paul Bower sings the composer’s music for Marcello and Un Sacerdote with vigor and well-projected tone, setting a fine example for the choristers under his direction. Joining the chorus in following that example, soprano Heather Youngquist contributes singing of excellent quality as La Regina in the traveling troupe’s play—the play that is the thing in which Hamlet contrives to ‘catch the conscience of the king.’

One of the most fascinating aspects of Amleto is the manner in which Faccio endowed characters that function in Shakespeare as little more than stock figures who set the moods of scenes or advance literary conceits with innovative, interesting, and skillfully-written music. It is therefore strange to observe how comparatively few opportunities for musical expression Faccio provided for Orazio, Shakespeare’s Horatio and one of Hamlet’s most consequential figures. [In the First Folio edition of Hamlet, Horatio speaks 292 lines, fewer than several characters but 122 more than Ophelia!] In this performance of Amleto, bass Joseph Hubbard grants Orazio the stature of his Shakespearean counterpart. Singing with imperturbable concentration, Hubbard precisely gauges the gravity of each note and word of his part, attaining the difficult balance between urgency and levity. Faccio’s Orazio is basically a conventional operatic secondo uomo, but Hubbard’s Orazio is a man with his own identity, in Amleto’s service but never in his shadow.

Bass Jeffrey Beruan is a singer whose performances often inspire that most frustrating of operatic questions: why are so many companies casting less-qualified vocalists for appropriate rôles when an artist of Beruan’s caliber is available? Interpreting Luciano and the pivotal part of Lo Spettro in this performance of Amleto, the bass exhibits his considerable strengths in singing of thrilling impact. In the second part of Act One, Beruan’s articulation of the ghost’s ‘Tu dêi saper ch’io son l’anima lesa del morto padre tuo’ is chilling, the effect on the listener as great as that on Amleto. Equally potent is his voicing of ‘Ma intorno io sento come un olir di soffio mattutino,’ his enunciation of text as imposing as his musical prowess. ‘Figliuol, dal cieco furiar rimanti’ in Act Three is conveyed with galvanizing conviction. In certain passages, the range of the ghost’s music challenges Beruan, taking him into territories both above and below the stave in which intonational security momentarily falters. Occasionally, too, the singer’s declamation is slightly more emphatic than the music necessitates, and the raw force expended takes a toll on tonal quality. Still, Beruan’s performance is shaped by an earnest response to the score, and he haunts this Amleto with artistry of a high order.

The villainous Claudius is the point at which all of Hamlet subplots intersect. Guilty of both fratricide and regicide, in addition to having married his murdered brother’s wife, Claudius is the quarry of Hamlet’s messy, meandering quest for revenge. Portrayed by baritone Shannon De Vine, Faccio’s and Boito’s Claudio is an usurper who is both conniving and cowardly, not the equal of Verdi’s and Boito’s Iago but a plausible catalyst for Amleto’s neuroses. In Act One, De Vine assumes an imperious stance in ‘Di giulivi clamori sorga un tuon per le splendide sale,’ the baritone cloaking the character’s treachery in smooth vocal acting. The baritone sings ‘Libiam! La lagrima sul ciglio spunti’ with bravado, manifesting a sweeping contrast with the burgeoning nervousness that grips Claudio during the play within a play in Act Two. The near-manic sentiments of ‘O nera colpa! Orribilmente inflitta entro l’occhio dell’anima!’ in the first part of Act Three are imparted by De Vine with resonant certitude. De Vine’s reading of ‘S’empian le coppe di prezioso vino’ in the second part of Act Four trembles with the conflicting emotions of a man who senses that the game is up. Dramatically, De Vine is a Claudio worthy of the Globe: musically, he speaks Faccio’s musical language with compelling fluency.

In Ambroise Thomas’s operatic incarnation of Hamlet, it is the titular prince’s mother Gertrude who claims much of the best music, particularly in her duets with Claudius and Hamlet and the arioso ‘Dans sons regards plus sombre.’ Faccio’s Geltrude enjoys a similar caliber of music, and she receives from soprano Caroline Worra a portrayal of visceral immediacy apt for the character and musical poise befitting a queen. To the mother’s tense dealings with her son and the wife’s increasingly troubled discourses with her husband Worra brings emotional directness and singing of white-hot charisma. In the scene with Claudio and Polonio in the first part of Act Three, the soprano excels as a mistress of dramatic utterance allied with undeviating adherence to exalted musical values. Worra’s voicing of ‘Ah! che alfine all’empio scherno mi ribello, o snaturato!’ reverberates with feeling. The singer’s easy command of the tessitura of Geltrude’s music is wonderful, and the scope of Worra’s artistry is revealed by the extent to which she exerts a prodigious histrionic presence even in the context of an audio recording.

Ophelia is among the Bard’s most one-dimensional heroines, her function in Hamlet being largely that of a witness to other characters’ machinations. Great actresses have managed to make her more than a static figure who strikes poses akin to Sir John Everett Millais’s famous depiction of the drowned Ophelia, but, whether the score before her bears the name of Faccio or Thomas upon its cover, the soprano portraying Ophelia faces a problematic task when seeking to infuse the character with anything resembling unaffected verisimilitude. From the first notes of her entrance music, soprano Abla Lynn Hamza strives admirably to create an engaging Ofelia, phrasing the lovely ‘Dubita pur che brillino degl’astri le carole’ artfully and rising to the fortissimo top C with assurance. In Act Two, Hamza’s account of ‘Signor, da gran tempo - tenevo nel cor di rendervi questa - memoria d’amor’ exudes femininity, but this is no shrinking-violet Ofelia: rather than being lost in the character’s delicacy, this soprano embraces it, making it an integral but not the defining element of her interpretation. Unsurprisingly, the pinnacle of Faccio’s writing for Ofelia is her mad scene in the second part of Act Three. Here, Hamza’s thoughtfulness produces a traversal of ‘La bara involta d’un drappo nero move alla volta del cimitero’ that transcends oft-parodied operatic insanity. Hamza’s Ofelia persuasively and movingly relinquishes her grip on rationality, but the singer’s grasp on the music remains firm. When this Ofelia sings ‘Ahimè! chi piange? è il salice, che piange, e piange tanto che l’acqua del suo pianto formò questo ruscel,’ she seems to have already entered a state beyond mortality. Hamza’s technique meets the strenuous demands of Faccio’s music without resorting to trickery, and her vocal confidence markedly enhances her kaleidoscopic portrait of Ofelia.

The title rôle in Hamlet is among the greatest creations in theatre and literature, the tormented Danish prince having captivated audiences throughout the world in an extraordinary array of portrayals in different styles, methods, and languages. On stage and screen, he has been hearty and handsome, narcissistic and near-demented, idealistic and idiosyncratic, and, as brought to life in Opera Southwest’s production of Faccio’s Amleto by tenor Alex Richardson, he is awkward and disenfranchised, an adolescent catapulted into adulthood by events with which he seems scantily equipped to cope. That he is fully cognizant of his uncle’s misdeed and his mother’s complicity is never in question, and the evolution of Richardson’s Amleto is guided by his journey from brooding indignation to unhesitant brutality. That transformation is initiated in Act One with the tenor’s agitated statememt of ‘Ah si dissolva quest’abbietta forma di duolo e colpe! si dissolva in nulla.’ He reveals a wholly different facet of Amleto’s psyche with his reverent but robust ‘Gran Dio!... misericordia!... Vegliate su di me, santi del cielo!’ in the opening act’s second part. The ambivalence of Amleto’s monologue ‘Essere! o non essere!’—the equivalent of Shakespeare’s ‘To be or not to be’—is heightened by a restless cello obbligato and shifting tempi, but Richardson’s verbal fluidity and solid top A and B♭ confirm that this Amleto’s resolve is ‘to be.’ There is stinging irony in his singing of ‘Fatti monachella. Sì fatti monachella,’ and in the second part of Act Two the tenor’s performance misses none of the pointed meaning of ‘Osserva, Orazio, su quella fronte non vedi un funebre strano pallor?’ In Amleto’s scene with his mother, uncle, and Polonio in the first part of Act Three, it is obvious that the desire for vengeance has become an all-consuming obsession in which distinctions of right and wrong and good and evil are obscured. Richardson sings ‘Che rubi e insudici troni e corone’ powerfully, followed by an account of ‘Celesti spirti! O lugubre spettro del padre morto’ in which the singer’s voice is as resilient as the character’s mind is anguished.

Another of Hamlet’s most familiar scenes is that in which the prince ponders the transience of life whilst the gravediggers go about their work, and Richardson phrases ‘Ahimè! Povero Yorick! Me ’l rammento io pure’ in Faccio’s setting with an abiding aura of poetic wonder. Richardson’s vocalism is at its most refined in the opera’s final scene, but he is an Amleto who is more rugged than cerebral, one who actively rejoices in the pursuit of retaliation for his father’s murder. Like Alvaro in Verdi’s La forza del destino, Faccio’s Amleto needs both force and finesse, and Richardson, here an expressive but never ‘soft’ singer, approaches the rôle with commendable straightforwardness, avoiding the trap of over-acting. Faccio’s music wages war against the tenor’s upper register, but Richardson never surrenders, conquering the composer’s writing with corpuscular sturdiness that recalls Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. Though greater expressive nuance and dynamic shading would be welcome, Richardson genuinely sings music that many tenors would likely be inclined to shout, and he is a bold, heroic Amleto.

‘The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge,’ Shakespeare wrote in Act Three of Hamlet, and, thunderously projecting its voice via this recording, Faccio’s Amleto at last enjoys the satisfaction of reprisal. The score’s virtues are many, and it is intriguing to consider what a triumph an ensemble like La Scala’s celebrated 1962 ‘night of seven stars’ cast for Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots might have scored with Franco Corelli as Amleto, Dame Joan Sutherland as Ofelia, Giulietta Simionato as Geltrude, Nicolai Ghiaurov as Claudio, and Giorgio Tozzi as Orazio. It is not unrealistic to conjecture that Carlo Bergonzi would have been an Amleto of Shakespearean depth, and what dramatic infernos might Renata Scotto and Maria Callas have kindled in Ofelia’s and Geltrude’s music? That Amleto inspires such musing is a testament to the quality of Faccio’s score and to the probing performance that it receives from Opera Southwest on this recording. This Amleto is a brilliant vindication of the eminence of the music and its composer that, echoing Shakespeare’s words in Henry IV, Part One, is ‘like a comet of revenge, a prophet to the fall of all [their] foes!’

ANTONIO SALIERI (1750 – 1825): La scuola de’ gelosi—Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (Contessa), Emanuele D’Aguanno (Conte), Roberta Mameli (Ernestina), Federico Sacchi (Blasio), Milena Storti (Carlotta), Florian Götz (Lumaca), Patrick Vogel (Tenente); l’arte del mondo; Werner Ehrhardt, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during concert performances in Erholungshaus Leverkusen, Leverkusen, Germany, 17 – 20 December 2015; deutsche harmonia mundi 88985332282; 3 CDs, 161:14; Available from Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Before the dawning of the age of televised talent searches and real-time competitions, artists’ paths to recognition often wound through desolate landscapes of obscurity and indifference. An aspiring composer born in Legnago in the Veneto in 1750 did not have the luxury of posting samples of his work on Vimeo and YouTube and waiting for the world to watch and listen. For one precocious boy born in Legnago in 1750, the journey to widespread acclaim was arduous and even tragic but brief. Exposed by his violinist brother and his native town’s organist to the storied legacies of Giuseppe Tartini and Padre Martini, the young Antonio Salieri at the dawn of adolescence was first orphaned and then passed from the care of a Padovani friar to a Venetian aristocrat. Adopted as a foster son and disciple by composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, Salieri found himself at the age of fifteen in the musical Mecca of Habsburg Europe, Vienna, where his work would be received with enthusiasm for a half-century. It was therefore as a well-established, widely-esteemed master of Italian-influenced Viennese Classicism that Salieri composed one of his finest scores, La scuola de’ gelosi, for the 1778 Venetian Carnevale. The opera’s première in Teatro San Moisè on 27 December 1778, was one of the most complete successes of the first half of Salieri’s life, a triumph eventually repeated throughout Europe. It is a triumph recreated on l’arte del mondo’s deutsche harmonia mundi traversal of the score. Recorded during concert performances in Erholungshaus Leverkusen, this Scuola de’ gelosi is indeed educational. So much effort has been expended in the past two centuries on cataloging the ways in which Salieri was not Mozart that far too little attention has been granted to the extraordinary ways in which he was Salieri. La scuola de’ gelosi represents Salieri at his best, and this recording of the opera enables Twenty-First-Century listeners to establish or deepen a meaningful acquaintance not with the malevolent, mendacious Salieri of myth but with the real Salieri and one of the most appealing products of his prodigious talents.

A setting of a witty libretto by Caterino Mazzolà, court poet at Dresden and most known to modern observers for having adapted Metastasio’s text of La clemenza di Tito for Mozart, La scuola de’ gelosi must have seemed the zenith of modernity to Venetian audiences in 1778—and perhaps even more so to the Viennese, accustomed to the formalities of Maria Theresa’s reign, when the opera was first performed in the Habsburg capital in 1783. As played by l’arte del mondo and conducted by Werner Ehrhardt, the score retains a delightful ability to surprise. It cannot be claimed that Salieri was consistently Mozart’s equal as an orchestrator or a composer of operatic ensembles, but his work merits considerably greater respect than that afforded a mere craftsman. Conducting with a sure grasp of the opera’s carefully-planned rhythmic flow, Ehrhardt provides a solidly musical foundation upon which the many virtues of Salieri’s score are subsequently built. No composer active in the second half of the Eighteenth Century possessed theatrical flair superior to Mozart’s, but this performance of La scuola de’ gelosi confirms that the miraculous Salzburger could and undoubtedly did learn much from his Italian colleague. Much of the writing for orchestra in La scuola de’ gelosi recalls the finest efforts of both Haydns and the mature Mozart, and l’arte del mondo’s instrumentalists play every bar of their parts with concentration and virtuosity. Massimiliano Toni’s fortepiano continuo is cleverly enlivened with allusions to Mozart’s famous alla Turca Piano Sonata in A major (K. 331), perhaps composed as early as 1778 but most plausibly in 1783 and not published until 1784, contemporaneous with the first Vienna production of La scuola de’ gelosi. Propelled by this musical current, the performance engagingly circumnavigates Salieri’s score, providing the listener with alluring vistas of every musical port of call. Energetically paced by Ehrhardt and effervescently played by l’arte del mondo, this performance not only delights but also both legitimizes the esteem that Salieri enjoyed among his contemporaries and confirms the breadth of the influence that his music exerted on his own and future generations.

One of the unexpected surprises that La scuola de’ gelosi has in store for listeners is the gift for vivid musical characterization that the opera discloses. As in most aspects of his artistry, Salieri’s skill at creating musical portraiture is commonly deemed secondary to Mozart’s, but the denizens of La scuola de’ gelosi are worthy comrades of the finest of Mozart’s operatic personages. Each of the rôles in La scuola de’ gelosi possesses unique charms, and the wonderfully entertaining music for il Tenente is sung with keen intuition by tenor Patrick Vogel. Salieri’s ensemble writing in the Act One terzetto in which il Tenente spars with the Contessa and Conte makes no demands on the singer that are not well within Vogel’s technical compass, and he launches ‘La guerra s’incomincia, che diavolo ho da far?’ with unaffected humor. He then sings the aria ‘Ah, non siate ognor sì facili’ with vocal and dramatic immediacy. In Act Two, Vogel voices il Tenente’s aria ‘Chi vuol nella femmina trovar fedeltà’ brilliantly, the voice shimmering with a broad spectrum of colors. Singing with great flair, Vogel is always present in the drama, reveling in the bounty of Salieri’s musical ingenuity and establishing himself as a first-rate exponent of the composer’s idiom.

Bumbling charismatically without excessive bluster or buffoonery, baritone Florian Götz graces this performance of La scuola de’ gelosi with an ebullient, genuinely funny Lumaca. The character’s aria in Act One, ‘Una donna che affetto non sente,’ is sung with panache and expert comedic timing, every syllable of the text enunciated with obvious knowledge of both its literal meaning and its implications within the opera’s cumulative context. In Act Two, Götz delivers the aria ‘Lumaca, giudizio! Amor è un bel vizio’ with an ideal blend of poetry and pomposity. In his every appearance, the baritone’s vocal acting is no less astute in recitatives and ensembles than in arias. The range of Lumaca’s music poses few challenges for Götz, but a few instances of roughness and compromised intonation in his singing serve as reminders that, despite the ease with which he inhabits the rôle, this is not easy music.

Responding spiritedly to Götz’s Lumaca, mezzo-soprano Milena Storti is a fount of period-appropriate musical effervescence as the quick-thinking Carlotta. Bringing to Salieri’s music a voice of excellent quality over which she wields near-perfect control, Storti is a gifted artist whose restrained approach to comedy is so much more enjoyable than the efforts of singers who view comic rôles as a license to overdo buffo silliness. Though its sentiments are anything but silly, Storti maintains an entrancing lightness in Carlotta’s Act One aria ‘Gelosia d’amore è figlia,’ judiciously allowing the text to do the heavy lifting of fulfilling both the aria’s straightforward and its ironic purposes. The mezzo-soprano’s account of ‘Il cor nel seno balzar mi sento’ in Act Two pulses with honest emotion, the singer finding the character’s heart beating within the music and exposing it to the listener. As portrayed by Storti, Carlotta is no Carmen in Classical garb, hiding from Don José amidst minuets and periwigs. With a voice as attractive as her mind is sharp, Storti’s Carlotta is a lady of class and cunning who sings accordingly.

The Blasio of bass Federico Sacchi is a mercurial, silver-tongued fellow with much in common with Mozart’s Figaro and Don Alfonso. When he bellows, he does so with authority that not even the opera’s aristocratic couple can ignore, but there is sweetness in him, too—a trait used by Sacchi to give Blasio a nucleus of humanity that ultimately proves quite touching. Bursting into the Act One Introduzione with a statement of ‘Zitto! Alcun sentir mi parve’ that immediately captures both the listener’s and the other characters’ attention, Sacchi’s voice vaults through the music. The duettino with Ernestina draws from him a deluge of flawlessly-inflected comic singing, the sonorous mock-seriousness of his ‘Al gran Can di Tartaria’ fruitfully tapping the vein of zaniness in the score. Sacchi sings Blasio’s aria ‘Fate buona compagnia, trattenete il signor Conte’ strongly, and he articulates ‘Con mille smanie al core attendo qui mia moglie’ in the rollicking Act One finale—an ensemble that surely served as a model for similar scenes in Mozart’s mature operas—with hilariously overwrought intensity. Blasio’s aria in Act Two, ‘Adagio...allor potrei...è moglie, io son marito,’ is a gift to a talented basso buffo, a piece that presages Rossini’s writing for the Fach. Sacchi performs the aria with the brio of an accomplished Don Magnifico or Mustafà. Singers all too often succumb to the lure of resorting to over-emoting in comic rôles, exploiting rather than exploring the music, but in this performance Sacchi actually sings Blasio’s music; and very well, moreover, a few bumpy bars detracting nothing from his winsome portrayal.

The wily Ernestina emerges with abundant charm and musical finesse from the mind and throat of soprano Roberta Mameli, a singer whose expertise in Baroque and early Classical repertories render her an exceptionally well-qualified applicant to Salieri’s Scuola. From her first line of recitative, Mameli handles Salieri’s music with dexterity and dulcet tone. In the Act One duettino with Blasio, her Ernestina utters ‘Perdonate: amor è audace’ with beguiling demureness, and the joy that her singing of the aria ‘Se verrete a me vicino con le belle, con le buone’ evinces is infectious. Likewise, Mameli voices ‘Queste donne sussiegate che disprezzano gli amanti’ in Act Two with passion and precision. Musically and dramatically, the apogee of her performance is her account of Ernestina’s Act Two cavatina, ‘Cattivo sego, sposine amabili,’ one of the finest numbers in the score. In every scene in which Ernestina appears, however, Mameli delves deeply into the character’s motivations, seeking in the text causes for Salieri’s musical effects. Ever a wise singer who makes well-informed decisions about repertory, Mameli finds in Ernestina a rôle that might have been composed specially for her and sings her with insightful focus.

Taking no prisoners in his good-natured but uncompromising siege on the Count’s music, tenor Emanuele D’Aguanno gives unexpected depth and importance to a character who could all too easily be played as an arrogant, dim-witted fop. A noted master of bel canto, D’Aguanno traces the elegant line of the Conte’s Act One cavatina, ‘A me par che il mondo sia di ragazze d’ogni sorte,’ with natural grace. In the terzetto with the Contessa and il Tenente, the tenor’s voicing of ‘Eh via, saggia Penelope, non siate sì feroce’ emits a charge of satirical electricity: one can almost see the Conte rolling his eyes in bemused annoyance. In the aria ‘Chi può vedere oppresso un idolo d’amor,’ D’Aguanno’s technical prowess is put to use with astonishing fluidity. Here, too, in music through which otherwise capable singers might stammer, D’Aguanno’s bel canto training yields a performance of wondrous confidence. This alone heightens the nobility of the singer’s portrayal of the Conte. Joining with his Contessa in the Act Two duettino, this Conte delivers ‘Quel visino è da ritratto’ with the futile virility of a wasp trapped in honey. The aria ‘Più sereni quegli occhi volgete’ is sung with unapologetic romanticism, D’Aguanno again making magic with his negotiation of the vocal line. D’Aguanno is an expressive, communicative singer who deserves greater global recognition, and his performance on this recording is a compelling exhibition of his abilities.

A spiritual kinswoman of Beaumarchais’s, Mozart’s, and Rossini’s Rosina, Mazzolà’s and Salieri’s Contessa is a figure of intelligence and integrity. There is never any doubt that she is the headmistress of La scuola de’ gelosi, her emotional journey shaping the course of the opera in ways that clearly stoked Salieri’s imagination. Depicting the Contessa as an evocatively feminine force with an iron core, soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli reigns over this performance, her singing radiantly beautiful in cantilena and excitingly fleet in fiorature. Her rapt phrasing of the Act One cavatina ‘Ah, non è ver che in seno amor germogli amore’ is sustained with superb breath control, and she dispatches ‘Ridete pur, ridete, caro il mio bel Narciso’ in the terzetto with the Conte and il Tenente with a disarming giggle in the voice. All traces of mirth are suppressed in her heated performance of the aria ‘Gelosia, dispetto e sdegno lacerando il cor mi vanno,’ the contrasts among her pure vowels and sharp but unexaggerated consonants lifting the text off of the page and transforming it into audible thought. The Act Two duettino with the Conte discloses a more minxish facet of the Contessa’s personality, and the soprano rises to the occasion with an understated ‘Siete amabile e giocondo, ogni bella a voi l’attesta’ in which an almost ferocious competitiveness undulates beyond the serene façade. In the ingenious quintetto with the Conte, Blasio, Ernestina, and il Tenente, Lombardi Mazzulli leads her colleagues in a fabulous display of intricate vocal interplay, her voice always distinguishable from Mameli’s and shimmering with a golden hue at the top of the stave. The aria ‘Ah, sia già de’ miei sospiri sazio il fato e sazio il Ciel’ is sung with heart-warming lyricism that indelibly embodies the singer’s concept of her rôle. Impressive as Lombardi Mazzulli’s undaunted meeting of the punishing demands of the Contessa’s florid music invariably is, she impresses most with the untarnished beauty of her vocalism and the sincerity of her acting. In opera, simplicity is rarely the easiest but is often the best choice. For Lombardi Mazzulli, the simplicity of learning music and singing it as its composer intended it to be sung is not a choice but an organic component of her technique. There is no doubt that, when composing La scuola de’ gelosi, Salieri’s sympathies were dominated by the Contessa. When hearing this performance of the opera, Lombardi Mazzulli’s singing ensures that the Contessa wins listeners’ affection just as handily.

In the four-century history of opera, there have been a handful of composers whose work steered the genre’s development from its earliest Italian roots to the complex, many-branched organism that today spreads its canopy over the musical topography. Among those branches, composers with vastly different qualifications have created scores that meandered in and out of the international repertory. A particular wonder of the first seventeen years of the new century is the reappraisal that has been granted to a number of scores that in their infancy were rightly or wrongly deemed inadequate or insignificant. Still awaiting rediscovery are many operas that were welcomed with enthusiasm when first performed but have subsequently been supplanted by pieces that achieved greater popularity. In many cases, first impressions are as important in opera as on any of life’s other stages: a forgotten opera may have only one opportunity to plead its case before the discerning jury of today’s listeners. With this recording, distinguished by fantastic performances by cast, conductor, and orchestra, Antonio Salieri’s La scuola de’ gelosi makes an argument that could not fail to persuade even the most prejudiced juror to acquit the score of charges of musical inferiority. It is tempting to suggest that, without Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte, La scuola de’ gelosi might never have been forced from its place of prominence among the most revered operas from the second half of the Eighteenth Century, but one of the most profound lessons imparted by this school is that, without La scuola de’ gelosi, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte may never have reached the stage.

[1] TOMASO ALBINONI (1671 – 1751), FRANCESCO ANTONIO BONPORTI (1672 – 1749), ANTONIO CALDARA (1671 – 1736), EVARISTO FELICE DALL’ABACO (1675 – 1742), GIUSEPPE TORELLI (1658 – 1709), and ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678 – 1741): Venezia 1700– Chamber Works for Violin and Continuo—Les Accents (Thibault Noally, violin and director; Claire Sottovia, violin; Elisa Joglar, cello; Mathieu Dupouy, harpsichord; Romain Falik, theorbo and Baroque guitar) [Recorded in L’Église luthérienne de Bon Secours, Paris, France, 29 September – 2 October 2015; Aparté AP128; 1 CD, 68:38; Available from Aparté, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] SERGEY PROKOFIEV (1891 – 1953), MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937), and RICHARD STRAUSS (1864 – 1949): Polychrome– Violin Sonatas—Tobias Feldmann, violin; Boris Kusnezow, piano [Recorded in Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin, Germany, 8 – 10 March 2016; Alpha Classics ALPHA 253; 1 CD, 66:52; Available from Alpha Classics/Outhere Music, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Few if any actions have been more significant not only to traditional Western music but also to cultures throughout the world than those that transpired in luthiers’ workshops in northern Italy in the first decades of the Sixteenth Century, when these visionary craftsmen adapted ancient and recent Arabic, Asian, and European instruments into a new creature christened as the violin. From the benches of masters working in Brescia, Cremona, and Venice, this marvel in wood traveled to every corner of the globe, establishing an enduring presence in the lives of people of all social stations, accompanying peasants’ celebrations and the festive occasions of kings. Music being no less subject to Newtonian logic than physics, it is only natural that, presented with the uncharted sound world of a new instrument, composers’ equal and opposite reaction was to explore the violin’s capabilities, creating music tasked with exploiting every sound that can be cajoled from its strings. Doing just that, the violin was by the turn of the Seventeenth Century firmly entrenched by its earliest generations of composers and players as the melodic anchor of the burgeoning musical institutions that remain at the core of Western Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century. Exploring vastly different epochs in the history of music for the violin and thereby epitomizing the instrument’s broad stylistic flexibility, new releases from Aparté and Alpha, both of which were intelligently planned and beautifully recorded, offer dissimilar but equally distinguished views of the violin’s evolution. Moreover, these discs demonstrate the prodigious talents of a new generation of violinists, personified on these releases by Thibault Noally and Tobias Feldmann. Even when the music is not new, these discs divulge, today’s most gifted violinists continue to propel the advancement of the instrument.

Here turning his attention to Venetian music mostly from the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century, Noally and his ensemble Les Accents—violinist Claire Sottovia, Baroque cellist Elisa Joglar, harpsichordist Mathieu Dupouy, and Romain Falik on theorbo and Baroque guitar—offer a stunningly virtuosic and fabulously animated survey of pieces by some of Italy’s leading Baroque masters. Little Tribeca’s exceptional sound engineering allows Giuseppe Torelli’s Sonata in E minor for violin and continuo (GieT 60) to make a near-overwhelming impression in its first appearance on disc. Noally alternately exclaims and sighs in his limning of melodic lines, responding with an actor’s intuition to the music’s emotional intricacies. This integration of musicality with open-hearted expressivity is also integral to Noally’s approach to Francesco Antonio Bonporti’s 1712 Invenzione in C minor for violin and continuo. The violinist’s phrasing in the opening Lamentevole movement recalls Maria Callas’s long-breathed singing of bel canto cavatine, followed by a vivacious performance of the allegro Balletto that mimics the contrasting brilliance of Callas’s delivery of up-tempo cabalette. Marked comodo assai by the composer, the subsequent Aria is played hypnotically, Noally’s strings ‘singing’ with evenness and beauty of tone still rare in performances featuring period instruments and techniques. The concluding allegro non presto Fantasia explodes from the violinist’s bow, the complex figurations rippling from his fingers like firecrackers.

A pioneer who paved the way to success at the Habsburg court in Vienna for later Italian-born composers including Antonio Salieri, Antonio Caldara possessed one of the finest musical minds of the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries but has only recently begun to reclaim the esteem to which the fruits of his genius entitle him. Among the most satisfying of those fruits is his 1699 Ciaconna in B♭ major for two violins and continuo (Opus 2, No. 12), a piece in which Caldara’s faculty for interweaving writing for a pair of instruments rivals Bach’s and Mozart’s achievements in their respective Double Concerto (BWV 1043) and Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra (K. 364/320d). Noally and Sottovia braid their timbres with the organic rapport of snowflakes melting into one another. As they perform it, the Ciaconna is an intimate but impassioned dialogue upon which the scintillatingly-realized continuo discreetly comments. Also dating from 1699, Caldara’s Sonata in C minor for two violins and continuo (Opus 2, No. 7) is another work that exemplifies the merit of the composer’s oeuvre. The largo Preludio with which the Sonata opens is a starkly emotive piece in the playing of which the violinists accentuate the bold harmonic progressions employed by Caldara as a sentimental device. The thematic relationships in the andante Allemanda and allegro Corrente are pointedly but not excessively emphasized, heightening appreciation of the intelligence of Caldara’s musical designs. To the Tempo di Sarabanda, assigned the practical tempo non tanto allegro, Noally and Sottovia devote the focused energy of a geyser, their playing surging through the surface of the music and submerging the lilting sarabande rhythm in a flood of crisp exchanges between two insightful, ideally-matched virtuosi.

Joining the Sonata by Torelli, with whom its composer may have studied, in here being committed to disc for the first time, Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco’s 1716 Sonata in G minor for violin and continuo (Opus 4, No. 12) is revealed by Noally’s performance to be a work of substance and temperament equal to the composer’s better-known concerti. Spending time in France during the course of his career and eventually exiled in Munich, where he died in 1742, Dall’Abaco absorbed elements of the musical trends prevalent north of the Alps in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, fusing these with the examples of Torelli, Vivaldi, and Corelli. Italian models unquestionably exerted the strongest stylistic influence on the present Sonata, but the structure of the Largo that launches its journey, seductively performed by Noally and Les Accents, hints that the composer’s musical cosmopolitanism was already taking shape. The key of Tartini’s ‘trillo del diavolo’ sonata, alleged by the composer to have been written in 1713 but commonly attributed by modern scholarship to the 1740s, G minor had diabolical connotations in the Baroque era, and passages of demonic difficulty make Dall’Abaco’s Sonata a fiendish test for even very fleet-fingered fiddlers. Noally rockets through the Presto e spiccato movement as though the neck of his violin were covered with thorns. Perfectly judging its un poco vivace tempo, he offers a reading of the Passagaglio that both bustles with the music’s innate power and maintains the courtly sophistication of the dance. This is also true of Noally’s presentation of the allegro assai Giga: ribaldry and romance join hands in the wondrous whirlwind of sound that jigs from Noally’s violin.

Regrettably still known to many modern listeners for a popular piece that he did not write rather than for his own high-quality compositions, Tomaso Albinoni is represented on Venezia 1700 by his 1708 Sonata in G minor for violin and continuo (Opus 4, No. 5). A work of inventiveness not unworthy of comparison with the innovations of Bach and Telemann, the Sonata receives from Noally and Les Accents a performance of tremendous concentration and pinpoint accuracy. Utilizing alternating slow and fast movements, Albinoni created a sonata that exhibits comprehensive knowledge of both the musical forms of his age and their artistic possibilities. Noally imbues the first Adagio with the aura of an operatic prelude. The Allegro that follows brims with vitality that inspires the soloist and his continuo colleagues to playing of unbridled technical prowess. The second Adagio could be said to be the calm before the storm. As played by Les Accents, its sentiments seethe until released like a summer thunderstorm in the Presto that ends the Sonata. Noally’s playing flashes like lightning in the dark atmosphere of the minor-key music, and in every illuminating electrical discharge Albinoni’s creativity gleams.

Himself a violinist of wide-reaching fame, Antonio Vivaldi bequeathed to posterity some of the Eighteenth Century’s most enduringly popular music for violin. Igor Stravinsky’s infamous charge that Vivaldi essentially wrote the same concerto hundreds of times is a rare instance of shortsightedness on the part of the astute composer. To be sure, Vivaldi’s style of string writing was so consistent that virtually any of his pieces can be almost immediately identified as the work of Vivaldi, but their similarities do not obscure the wealth of diversity that his works contain. The Sonata in B♭ major for violin and continuo (RV 759) is typical of Vivaldi’s writing for the violin, its challenging passages for the solo instrument bolstered by supportive continuo, made doubly so in this performance by the marvelously cooperative playing by Les Accents. The subtleties of the Sonata’s sequence of dance movements that follow the opening largo Preludio, sumptuously bowed by Noally, are managed with finesse by both composer and violinist. The allegro Allemanda quickens the pulse, and the largo Sarabanda enraptures the heart. Noally and Les Accents relocate the allegro Corrente from the formal salons of France to the uninhibited piazze of Venice, highlighting the refinement of the Sonata’s internal architecture by executing every bar of the score with zeal.

Devised as set of increasingly-frenzied variations on the frequently-quoted Iberian folk tune ‘La Follia,’ Vivaldi’s 1705 Sonata in D minor for two violins and continuo (Opus 1, No. 12) was during its composer’s lifetime—and continues to be—one of the best-known musical products of the early Eighteenth Century. Sometimes judged by scholars to be inferior in ingenuity to Arcangelo Corelli’s work on the same subject, Vivaldi’s Sonata is nonetheless exhilarating when played well, and it is certainly played well in this performance. Even considering that each listener’s ears hear music with different goals and desires, it is difficult to imagine any listener objecting to recognition of this performance as the single most viscerally thrilling account of the Sonata ever recorded. The abandon with which Noally and Sottovia deliver their parts, attacking and parrying with the litheness of champion fencers, is breathtaking but always meticulously control. The ‘madness’ of their spontaneous-sounding recreations of Vivaldi’s quicksilver variations of the familiar theme mirror the well-planned turbulence of an El Greco canvas. So fresh is Les Accents’ performance of this music that this might be mistaken for a world-première recording. Only the finest artists can convince the listener as completely as Noally and Les Accents do with Venezia 1700 that the old adage applies as much to music as to people: age is only a number.

Leaping across two centuries of musical history from Venice at the dawn of the Eighteenth Century to the last decades of the Nineteenth and first decades of the Twentieth Centuries transports the listener to the artistic environment of Polychrome, Alpha’s magical disc featuring young German violinist Tobias Feldmann and Moscow-born pianist Boris Kusnezow in edgy but polished performances of music by Ravel, Prokofiev, and Richard Strauss. With Feldmann coaxing sounds of rounded beauty from the 1769 instrument by Neapolitan maker Nicolò Gagliano at his disposal, there is nothing metallic about the music making on Polychrome. The collaboration between the young violinist and pianist evokes great artistic partnerships of past generations, not least the musical relationship of Henryk Szeryng and Ingrid Haebler that produced memorable recordings of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas. Like that of those notable forebears, the communication between Feldmann and Kusnezow extends far beyond correct pitches and rhythmic synchronicity, reaching emotional depths that identify these artists as interpreters of great promise—promise eloquently fulfilled by the performances on this disc. Like Noally, Feldmann enriches the violin’s present and future by affectionately leading the listener into lesser-known niches of the instrument’s past.

Often accurately but misleadingly identified as his Sonate posthume, Maurice Ravel’s 1897 Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor (M. 12) is a score with which the composer honed his little-used talent for writing chamber music. A fastidious worker whose compositional process was often slow, Ravel at any point in his career was capable of infusing his music with elements that looked to the past and the future at once. Through-composed, the Sonata presents unique challenges of timing and ensemble to violinist and pianist. The apparent joy and camaraderie with which Feldmann and Kusnezow meet these challenges is one of Polychrome’s principal delights. Not surprisingly in music by Ravel, the Sonata straddles a tonal fault line, treading upon shifting harmonic sands. Musicians who do not listen to one another can easily go wrong in this music, but Feldmann and Kusnezow prevail with the kind of unshakable concentration that is all the more commendable for being wholly inconspicuous. Feldmann ‘reads’ Ravel’s writing for the violin as though it were as natural as speech, and his performance of the Sonata radiates a confident synthesis of the indomitable sunniness of youth and the meaningful shadows of experience.

Sergey Prokofiev’s 1944 Violin Sonata No. 2 in D major (Opus 94A) should be in the repertories of far more violinists, particularly good ones; violinists of the ilk of Prokofiev’s friend and champion David Oistrakh, at whose instigation the composer, living in virtual exile in Perm, metamorphosed a flute sonata written in 1942 into the present Sonata for violin. Prokofiev’s music can be as prickly as Ravel’s, but Feldmann and Kusnezow dig into this Sonata without hesitation, fully prepared to brave its snares. In the opening Moderato movement, the Classically-conceived discourse between violin and piano is conducted in tones of rapt intensity, the moods of the music flowing from the musicians’ fingers to the listener’s psyche. The breathless Scherzo introduces an ambivalence that complicates interpretation of the music. First impressions can be deceptive in Prokofiev’s music, but Feldmann and Kusnezow do not beleaguer their performance of the Sonata with self-righteous aural treatises on the metaphysical properties of the music. They play the Scherzo with a sense of fun that dispels the mists of doubt that enshroud the music. There is no doubt about the sincerity of the men’s respect for the music’s elegant solemnity, perhaps a reflection on the turmoil of the time in which the piece was written, in the Andante movement. The Allegro con brio finale fizzes with virtuosic flights of fancy for the violin and tricky passages for the piano. This is some of Prokofiev’s most extroverted, barnstorming music, and Feldmann and Kusnezow respond with dazzling virtuosity. Charlie Daniels and his fiendish fiddling intimated that ‘the devil went down to Georgia’: Feldmann and Prokofiev suggest that the infernal one had a musical hideout in the Urals, too.

Composed in 1887, Richard Strauss’s Violin Sonata in E♭ major (Opus 18/TrV 151) is, like Ravel’s Sonate posthume, an early work, a product of its creator’s early twenties, but hallmarks of Strauss the composer of Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Die Frau ohne Schatten are already present, especially in the unique melodic voice that emerges from the Sonata. The first movement, marked Allegro ma non troppo, inhabits the worlds of Strauss’s tone poems and early Lieder, and Feldmann and Kusnezow prove to be expert exponents of Strauss’s lush, late Romantic harmonies. The andante cantabile Improvisation is major Strauss on a minor scale: even at this early stage of his career, the wistfulness that reached its zenith in the Vier letzte Lieder was part of the composer’s artistic identity. Bringing to mind the long lines of ‘Befreit’ and ‘Zueignung,’ two of Strauss’s most beautiful and moving Lieder, the Improvisation is played by Feldmann and Kusnezow with the grace of a dove borne aloft by gentle breezes. Beginning at andante and transitioning to allegro, the Sonata’s finale is, like the closing movement of Prokofiev’s Sonata, a whirring banter between violin and piano. Feldmann and Kusnezow fire volleys of sound at one another with good-natured bellicosity, ending the Sonata with a pyrotechnics display that never threatens to outshine the pair’s glowing musicality.

The past century has witnessed a variety of trends in violin playing, ranging from the showmanship of Fritz Kreisler and sensitivity of Arthur Grumiaux to the stylistic versatility of Joshua Bell. At its core, though, the trend that has defined violin playing since the perfection of the instrument’s design is that of the pressure of a bow’s hair and human fingertips upon four strings and the reverberation of small wooden cylinders within a larger wooden torso. Almost anyone with patience can eventually accomplish the feat of making inoffensive sounds with a violin, but the production of pleasing sounds is not what makes a violinist’s work valuable. A violinist’s artistic merit is—or should be—determined by his sounds’ collective capacity to serve composers and listeners as a mediator, a catalyst for actions and reactions. By this measure, the actions of Thibault Noally and Tobias Feldmann and the reactions of their colleagues on Venezia 1700 and Polychrome qualify them as violinists with historically-significant virtues.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Messa da Requiem—Jill Bowen Gardner (soprano), Stephanie Foley Davis (mezzo-soprano), Daniel C. Stein (tenor), David Anderson Weigel (bass-baritone); UNCG Combined Choral Ensembles; UNCG Symphony Orchestra; Dr. Kevin M. Geraldi, conductor [UNCG Auditorium, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 24 February 2017]

The death of Gioachino Rossini on 13 November 1868, was a titanic loss to opera and to the musical institutions of his native Italy. Though his pen had been retired from service to the operatic muse since the completion of Guillaume Tell in 1828, it was Rossini’s music that defined opera in Italy during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. From the première of his first professional opera, La cambiale di matrimonio, in 1810 until the first Italian performances of Guglielmo Tell in 1831, the Pesaro-born maestro’s scores dominated the repertories of theatres large and small, his influence extending northward from Venice, Naples, Milan, and Rome to Vienna and Paris, where the composer resided from 1855 until his death. The tenets of bel canto that he refined having been taken up by composers whose names are no longer remembered, been espoused by innovators like Mayr, and paved the way for Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi, it is not surprising that the news of Rossini’s death turned the thoughts of Italy’s musical establishment to commemorating the padre del bel canto in a manner suitable for paying tribute to the legacy of a true pioneer. How else could a man of such enduring importance to an art form and the unique culture of his fatherland be appropriately honored except in the medium of which he was a world-renowned master?

It was Giuseppe Verdi who only four days after Rossini’s death proposed the preparation of a Requiem Mass for performance in Bologna to mark the first anniversary of the sad event. In a letter to the publisher Tito Ricordi, Verdi advocated commissioning components of a Requiem from a number of Italy’s leading composers—some of whom, incidentally, are now recalled by music history almost solely for having been selected to contribute to the Requiem—that could be cobbled together to produce a coherent score for performance in 1869 and, thereafter, permanent consignment to the archives of Pesaro’s Liceo musicale Rossini. Though the thirteen composers to whom portions of the Requiem were assigned submitted their scores by the end of the summer of 1869, the intervention of economics and egos ultimately sank the vessel before its maiden voyage. [The curious reader can become acquainted with the composite Messa per Rossini, rediscovered in 1986, via a generally fine recording on the Hänssler label, conducted by Helmuth Rilling, who led the first known performance of the complete score in 1988 and has since presided over other notable performances of the work.] Its intended use in homage to Rossini thus thwarted, Verdi’s ‘Libera me’ was left as an anchor without a ship until the death of another of Italy’s foremost artists again compelled Verdi to contemplate a Mass of remembrance.

Beyond Italy’s borders, especially among music lovers, the poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni is known principally for his death in 1873 having inspired Verdi’s Messa da Requiem. A leading figure in the Risorgimento movement that resulted in the unification of Italy, Manzoni was the author of I promessi sposi, a widely-respected work that is Italy’s equivalent to Don Quixote, Les miserables, and Moby Dick, as well as the source for a fine but forgotten opera by Amilcare Ponchielli. By the time of Manzoni’s death, Verdi had been acquainted with his work for most of his life, I promessi sposi having been published when the composer was in his early teens, and meeting Manzoni in 1868 intensified Verdi’s respect for the writer as one of the champions of Italian unity. When planning his musical farewell to Manzoni, Verdi’s vision included only his own voice expressing both his personal grief and the national sadness. Adapting his earlier ‘Libera me’ to function as the emotional dénouement of a Requiem reflecting his own individual concepts of death and mourning, Verdi readied his Messa da Requiem for performances in Milan in 1874, observing the first anniversary of Manzoni’s demise with the première in Chiesa di San Marco on 22 May 1874, and repeated at Teatro alla Scala less than a week later. Not least owing to the original soloists’ associations with Aida, it is not without reason that some observers have proclaimed the Messa da Requiem Verdi’s greatest opera. As Manzoni would surely have appreciated, there is no lack of drama in the music. In this epic spiritual drama, man’s soul is the protagonist.

In a broad sense, the Messa da Requiem is also the culmination of Verdi’s career-long internal and external struggles with religious authority. His earliest operas hint at suspicion of the true motivations of religious institutions, particularly in Nabucco, the clashes between Abrahamic and pagan beliefs suggesting an unmistakable element of personal conflict. Later, can it be coincidental that the Conte di Luna, the presumed guardian of Catholic morals in Il trovatore, does not balk at the notion of violating the sanctity of a convent in order to abduct the object of his desire? There can be no misunderstanding the contempt for unchecked religious power personified by the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos and Ramfis in Aida, the operas that occupied Verdi in the years just prior to his composition of the Messa da Requiem. Without joining Brahms in discarding the traditional Requiem, Verdi nonetheless created a compellingly original interpretation of the liturgy, focusing on spiritual trials and triumph rather than divine mercy. Verdi’s is neither a saint’s nor a supplicant’s Requiem. The Messa da Requiem is not a solemn plea for repose for a sinner’s soul: it is the battle with sin itself, a contest between will and temptation waged in music of exhilarating, often exquisite grandeur.

Performing the Messa da Requiem is a tremendous undertaking even for the best-funded and ​most ​impeccably-trained orchestras, choral societies, and opera companies. Frequent traversals by Italian opera houses, recent performances by Houston Grand Opera, and the inclusion of the Messa in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2017 – 2018 Season​ are evidence of the overtly operatic demands of the score. It is a ​testament to both the ambitions and the accomplishments of the School of Music in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s College of Visual and Performing Arts that performing the Messa da Requiem was considered within the department’s capabilities, but the true confirmation of the School of Music’s merits was the monumental, moving performance that the university’s musical personnel achieved. Under the direction of Welborn Young and Carole Ott, UNCG’s combined choral forces—the Chamber Singers, University Chorale, Men’s and Women’s Glee Clubs, and Women’s Choir—proved equal to the grueling demands of Verdi’s music—music that overwhelms some well-schooled professional ensembles. Likewise, the instrumentalists of the UNCG Symphony Orchestra impressed with their unwavering concentration on the notes and nuances of the score. Practicing what he preaches as Associate Professor of Conducting at UNCG, Dr. Kevin M. Geraldi provided the performance with the centralized sense of purpose that successful pacing of this mammoth piece must have. The Messa da Requiem is undeniably operatic, but it is not an opera, and it cannot be conducted like Stiffelio or Aida. Dr. Geraldi’s conducting was focused solely upon the score rather than externalized impressions of it: in his hands, the text was the lead character in the drama. The emotional muscle of Verdi’s operas is derived from the relationships among the people who populate them, but the potent force of the Messa da Requiem emanates from the composer’s musical responses to the words of the Requiem liturgy. Dr. Geraldi obviously understands this, and his animated but cleanly-articulated conducting ensured that both performers and audience shared his comprehension of the score’s singular requirements.

That the standards of excellence exemplified by the chorus and orchestra are not the exclusive property of UNCG’s current student body was affirmed by the quartet of well-qualified, wholly-prepared soloists assembled for the performance, all of them alumni of the university. A prize-winning veteran of Opera Roanoke’s Apprentice Artists program and San Francisco Opera’s prestigious Merola Opera Program, Asheville native bass-baritone David Anderson Weigel brought to Verdi’s Messa da Requiem the same towering presence and vocal solidity that he exhibited in his portrayal of Masetto in North Carolina Opera’s 2015 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Formerly an Opera Carolina Resident Artist, tenor Daniel C. Stein’s singing of Verdi’s music was no less effective than his acclaimed performances as tenor soloist in Händel’s Messiah and Chevalier de la Force in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites with the Winston-Salem Symphony. It was only a few weeks ago that mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis graced the UNCG Auditorium stage as a feisty Mercédès in Greensboro Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen, and her singing in the Messa da Requiem upheld the high caliber of her acclaimed Suzuki in Piedmont Opera’s Madama Butterfly. Her Cio-Cio San in that Winston-Salem recreation of Puccini’s little house overlooking Nagasaki’s harbor was soprano Jill Bowen Gardner, whose gallery of Verdi heroines contains lauded portraits of ladies as diverse as Lady Macbeth and Leonora in Il trovatore. Perhaps most admired in central North Carolina as a Puccini singer, not least in the wake of her triumphant Tosca for Piedmont Opera, Gardner deepened her Verdi credentials with poised, artfully-phrased vocalism in UNCG’s Messa da Requiem. Individually and in ensemble, the soloists’ work displayed an unflappable professionalism that made an extraordinary statement about the qualities that UNCG’s School of Music instills in its graduates. A credit to their alma mater, these four artists sang Verdi’s music more comfortably and effectively than many of the renowned singers whose names recur in the casts of exalted institutions’ and record labels’ performances of the Messa da Requiem.

Dr. Geraldi marshaled the choristers and orchestra with unaffected vigor in a stirring but appropriately-scaled account of the solemnly beautiful andante ‘Requiem æternam dona eis.’ Throughout the performance, the promise of the conductor’s management of the Messa’s opening pages was continually fulfilled, his thoughtful but unflinchingly propulsive tempi and command of an expansive—and obviously well-rehearsed—array of dynamics insightfully limning the music’s shifting light and shade. Plaintively intoning the yearning lines of ‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison,’ the soloists introduced themselves with vocalism that complemented the assurance of the choral singing. Their utterances of Verdi’s quietly anguished cries for mercy ringing with absolute sincerity, the mood of contrition was further heightened when Gardner rose to her formidable fortissimo top B.

The most familiar music in the Messa da Requiem is unquestionably the allegro agitato ‘Dies iræ, dies illa solvet sæclum in favilla,’ the anguished strains of which have been appropriated by Hollywood and Madison Avenue for virtually every imaginable cinematic and commercial purpose. The reason for this movement’s popularity beyond the context of the Messa is very simple: it is thrilling, immediately-recognizable music that compels attention even when its unapologetically ferocious depiction of the final judgment is ignored. The choristers’ singing here was astoundingly confident, the sopranos’ intonation especially commendable in the crucial chromatic writing with which Verdi evoked apocalyptic tumult. What in some performances is an embarrassing muddle was in this performance always music, the few mistakes among singers and instrumentalists quickly surmounted. Launched by the basses, ‘Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum’ exuded an aura of uncertainty that Weigel heightened with his sonorous delivery of ‘Mors stupedit et natura cum resurget creatura.’ Foley Davis voiced ‘Liber scriptus proferetur’ with broad phrasing and intrepid ascents to top F♯ and A♭, answered by the chorus with the organic communication of a celebrant and her congregation. The trio for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and tenor on ‘Quid sum miser tunc dicturus’ was sung by Gardner, Foley Davis, and Stein with textual and emotional clarity, the soprano’s top B like a beacon illuminating the darkest niches of the auditorium.

The soloists and choristers in turn created in the ‘Rex tremendæ majestatis’ an aural panorama of precisely the sort of omnipotent majesty evinced by the text and Verdi’s setting of it. Gardner’s shining, secure top C was not a diva’s ‘money note’ but an extension of the composer’s voice, employed with an apt sense of awe. Carefully navigating the intervals in Verdi’s sinuous writing in the ‘Recordare Jesu pie,’ Gardner and Foley Davis blended their voices sumptuously, maximizing the impact of the harmonic discord of the fusion of the soprano’s B♭₅ and the mezzo-soprano’s C₄. Stein then voiced the spellbinding ‘Ingemisco tamquam reus’ captivatingly, unleashing a climactic top B♭ worthy of a persuasive Radamès. The contrasting force and suavity with which Weigel subsequently sang ‘Confutatis maledictis’ and the dolce cantabile ‘Voca me cum benedictis’ enhanced appreciation of the sentimental acuity of Verdi’s treatment of the words. The soloists and choir shaped their performance of ‘Lacrymosa dies illa’ with tenderness, Foley Davis giving the passage marked ‘piangente’ a special outpouring of beautiful tone. As the movement progressed to its resolution, further top B♭s were demanded of the soprano soloist, and Gardner delivered with little discernible expenditure of effort.

What the ‘Dies iræ’ claims in widespread familiarity the ‘Offertorio’ matches in expressive substance. Overcoming faltering intonation from the cellos in the opening bars, the solo quartet phrased the pensive ‘Domine Jesu Christe’ with deeply-felt eloquence, infusing their singing of the open vowels with warmth. Entering on a long-held E at the top of the stave, Gardner exquisitely conveyed the time-halting magic of Verdi’s writing. The contrapuntal construction of ‘Quam olim Abrahæ promisti et semini ejus’ was managed with fleet flexibility by singers and conductor, each voice always audible. Beginning the sublime adagio ‘Hostias et preces tibi’ with raptly hushed singing, Stein displayed wonderful breath control and made respectable attempts at the trills that many tenors are all too eager to overlook. The reprise of ‘Quam olim Abrahæ’ brimmed with tested but resilient faith, the dialogue among the voices like the exchange of thematic material among the manuals and pedals of an organ.

The mighty fugue for double chorus that transforms the text of ‘Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Domine Deus Sabaoth’ into sounds that submerge the listener like a musical avalanche was sung with vigor and potency that were truly remarkable for a student ensemble. The few slips in ensemble were righted without disrupting the pulsing momentum of the music. In this, the choristers were backed with faultless synchronicity by the orchestra. The musicians’ playing also belied their youth, the high strings reliably—and refreshingly—in tune and the brasses and woodwinds conquering very difficult writing with fantastically vibrant results.

Epitomizing the unteachable simplicity that is the essence of the art that conceals art, Gardner’s and Foley Davis’s singing in octaves in the andante dolcissimo ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi’ provided a masterclass in genuine bel canto. The lesson was not lost on the chorus, their singing perpetuating the atmosphere of reverence instigated by the ladies’ vocalism. Verdi entrusted the first phrases of ‘Lux æterna luceat eis, Domine’ to the mezzo-soprano soloist, and it is difficult to imagine that he could have expected them to be sung more handsomely and incisively than Foley Davis sang them in Greensboro. Following her lead, Stein and Weigel offered their most subtle singing of the evening, joining with the mezzo-soprano in a reading of the music that truly shone with the glow of the eternal light of which they sang.

From a singer’s perspective, Verdi’s writing for the soprano soloist in the moderato, senza misura‘Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna’ that ends the Messa da Requiem is not unlike Mount Everest. For those capable of reaching its summit, the view from on high is wondrous, but the path to the craggy peak is strewn with the corpses of insufficiently-prepared voices. Supported by Dr. Geraldi’s sustainable tempo and the choristers’ attention to rhythmic and intonational accuracy, Gardner scaled the heights and the depths of the music with equal authority. Restoring tranquility after a reprise of the tempestuous ‘Dies iræ,’ the soprano’s top B♭ in the restatement of ‘Requiem æternam’ floated above the chorus with serene composure. The score’s final fugue was dispatched with zeal. After the ‘lunga pausa’ prescribed by Verdi, the ‘Libera me’ again resounded with fortitude, Gardner’s extended forte top C soaring heavenward. So much angst having been expended in the course of Verdi’s exploration of human mortality and the soul’s transition from life to whatever lurks beyond death, the score’s final bars are marked pppp, almost a murmur of exhaustion in the wake of the final struggle. In UNCG’s performance, these moments of peace were touchingly cathartic.

Had none of his operas endured until the Twenty-First Century, the Messa da Requiem would be sufficient proof of Verdi’s genius. In this phenomenal score, the composer both bade farewell to an artist of seminal importance and confronted personal demons that haunted his music from the beginning of his career. Verdi’s operas are filled with brilliant, difficult music, but the music of the Messa da Requiem possesses unique luminosity and demands. Framed by introspective projections created by the university’s School of Art, UNCG’s performance of the Messa da Requiem evinced that luminosity by meeting those demands with imperturbable musicality. This performance was not a lamentation of death and loss but a celebration of the countless victories of life.

Bravi, tutti: (from left to right): Soprano Jill Bowen Gardner, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Foley Davis, tenor Daniel C. Stein, bass-baritone David Anderson Weigel, and conductor Dr. Kevin M. Geraldi accepting the audience’s applause for UNCG School of Music’s performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, 24 February 2017
[Photo by the author]

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492—D’Ana Lombard (La Contessa di Almaviva), Steven LaBrie (Il Conte di Almaviva), Jennifer Cherest (Susanna), Tyler Simpson (Figaro), Jennifer Panara (Cherubino), Donald Hartmann (Dottor Bartolo), Alissa Anderson (Marcellina), Wade Henderson (Don Basilio), Derek Jackenheimer (Don Curzio), Kathleen Jasinskas (Barbarina), Eugene Galvin (Antonio), Gretchen Bruesehoff (Una contadina), Rachel Stenbuck (Una contadina); North Carolina Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Steven Jarvi, conductor [Laurie Rogers, harpsichord continuo; Scott MacLeod, Chorus Master; Matthew Ozawa, Director; Caite Hevner Kemp, Scenic Designer; Glenn Avery Breed, Costume Designer; Ross Kolman, Lighting Designer; North Carolina Opera, A.J. Fletcher Opera Theater, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Sunday, 26 February 2017]

The city’s status as the capital of the far-reaching Habsburg empire and an artistic center rivaled in the Western world only by London and Paris notwithstanding, there can have been very few people in Vienna in 1786 more widely traveled, experienced, and exposed to cultural currents than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Accustomed to the company of princes of church and state since his childhood, during which his ambitious father paraded him before the crowned heads of Europe as a child prodigy impeccably trained for their amusement, Mozart was among the few men of his age who could boast of having been privy to the sometimes complicated dynamics of Europe’s most powerful ruling families. What Freud might have concluded about the psychological effects of such an upbringing can only be imagined, but the benefits to Mozart as a mature composer are undeniable. By the time that he abandoned the oppressive atmosphere of his native Salzburg and established himself in Vienna in 1781, Mozart was personally acquainted with Johann Christian Bach, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Josef Mysliveček and knew the music and stylistic tendencies of many of the leading composers of his time. One of the most perfect syntheses of these influences and his own singular genius sprang to life on the stage of Vienna’s Theater an der Burg on 1 May 1786. With the première of Le nozze di Figaro, a setting of a controversial and oft-banned 1778 play by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais and the first of Mozart’s three momentous collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, the composer’s mature operatic voice enchanted first Vienna and then, via Prague, all of Europe. It is a voice that resounded enchantingly in North Carolina Opera’s visually appealing, engrossingly musical production of the opera; a voice still as potent in 2017 as it was in 1786.

It was in the turbulent milieu of pre-Revolution France that Beaumarchais’s La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro finally reached the stage of the Théâtre Français in 1784, six years after its completion and three years after the venerable Comédie Française accepted the play into its repertoire. Censorial objections prevented the play’s public première until intervention by Louis XVI paved the way for performance of a revised version of the script. Presented by London’s Theatre Royal, Covent Garden later in 1784, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro was ultimately the most fiscally successful French play of the Eighteenth Century. Perpetuating the difficulties suffered by the play in France, an imperial ban prohibited productions of the German translation of La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro. Royal prerogative again prevailed, however: Joseph II authorized Mozart’s setting of Da Ponte’s prickly but depoliticized libretto from its inception. From a modern perspective, it seems that either Joseph II was a magnanimously tolerant monarch or his appointed guardians of propriety could have benefited from Italian lessons. The social satire and class disparities that lurk within the jocular lines of Da Ponte’s poetry are unmistakable. Perhaps the Emperor merely trusted Mozart to create an opera focused on people and their emotions rather than on social stereotypes and their sardonic implications. This theoretical trust was not misplaced: Da Ponte’s caustic barbs are present in the opera, but Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is predominantly a study of the connections among people, not the contrasts among their social statuses.

Festooning the A.J. Fletcher Opera Theater stage with a colorful production shared with Opera Saratoga, where it premièred in June 2016, North Carolina Opera’s Le nozze di Figaro placed Beaumarchais’s, Da Ponte’s, and Mozart’s comedy of conflicting social and amorous ambitions in a deceptively posh environment in which appearances of affluence and propriety were more important than actual wealth and status–unless, of course, even that impression was yet another ruse. Dominated by a black and white checkered floor reminiscent of Notting Hill entrance halls and Graham Vick’s ill-fated 2000 Metropolitan Opera production of Verdi’s Il trovatore, Caite Hevner Kemp’s scenic designs were evocative more of South Kensington than of Spain but were notably successful at focusing the observer’s attention where Mozart intended it to be. The symmetry of the staging, reflected in Matthew Ozawa’s witty but sensible direction, suited the painstakingly-crafted equilibrium of Mozart’s score, the balance of frivolity and frankness maintained even in the opera’s most madcap moments. In Glenn Avery Breed’s mostly flattering costumes, created by Wardrobe Witchery, the uniformly attractive singers looked as though they emerged from a performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the Old Vic, dressed to the nines and ready for dinner at Simpson’s in the Strand. Ross Kolman’s well-considered lighting complemented Sondra Nottingham’s wig and makeup designs, as ever models of the elusive art of highlighting singers’ best features without impeding the physical requirements of singing. Producing any of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas in a manner that both honors the composer’s and librettist’s intentions and lures a modern audience into the drama is itself an elusive art, but it is one that North Carolina Opera’s production largely mastered.

In recent seasons, the North Carolina Opera Orchestra has gone from strength to strength, and the musicians’ playing of Le nozze di Figaro continued this trend. From the start of the sparkling Overture, all sections of the orchestra delivered their parts with spirited virtuosity throughout the performance, every trill crisply articulated and triplet perfectly in rhythm. Prepared by Scott MacLeod, the voices of the North Carolina Opera Chorus equaled the exemplary work done by their colleagues in the orchestra pit. In Act One, their singing of ‘Giovani liete, fiori spargete davanti al nobile nostro Signor’ charmingly brought the denizens of Almaviva’s court to life, injecting them into the production as participants in the drama rather than a decorative ensemble with pretty music to sing. The ladies made ‘Ricevete, o padroncina, queste rose e questi fior’ in Act Three a truly affectionate serenade to the Contessa, and ‘Cantiamo, lodiamo sì saggio Signor’ pointedly expressed his subjects’ desire for the Conte to acquiesce to pleas for the abolishment of the loathed droit du seigneur.

Leading his first production for North Carolina Opera, Steven Jarvi conducted with aptly youthful exuberance—Le nozze di Figaro is an opera about people in the primes of their lives, after all—and an abiding concentration that brought the emotional sincerity of the score’s serious passages to the surface without seeming coy or affected. He was aided in this by Laurie Rogers’s mercurial harpsichord playing, an inexhaustible source of inventive harmonic byways that guided secco recitatives with delightful expediency. ​​Only a momentary lapse in coordination between the keyboard, positioned in an orchestra-tier box, stage right, and the principal cellist in the pit disturbed the seamless flow that Rogers achieved. There is considerable debate in the musicological community about the true meanings of Mozart’s tempo markings in relation to modern notions of Eighteenth-Century pacing, but Jarvi’s choices invariably sounded right for the music and the personnel performing it. Combining something of Bruno Walter’s authority in Mozart repertory with dashes of Karl Böhm’s innate dignity and Sir Neville Marriner’s congeniality, Jarvi made a wonderful first impression on the North Carolina Opera podium. More significantly, he identified himself as a young conductor for whom Mozart operas are not a stepping stone along the path to ‘bigger’ repertory but a cherished destination of their own accord.

Pensieri sospetti: Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Figaro (left, behind hedge) and soprano Jennifer Cherest as Susanna (right) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, February 2017
[Photo by Curtis Brown Photography, © by North Carolina Opera]

The talent-laden depths of the pool of artists into which North Carolina’s musical institutions can dive when casting performances yielded an ensemble of singers whose work escorted this Nozze di Figaro into the company of the best productions of the opera to be seen and heard anywhere in the world. As the pair of blushing ‘contadine’ who extol the virtues of faithful lovers in Act Three, soprano Gretchen Bruesehoff and mezzo-soprano Rachel Stenbuck intoned ‘Amanti costanti, seguaci d’onor cantate, lodate sì saggio signor’ with sounds of blissful innocence. Coloratura soprano ​Kathleen Jasinskas was a girlish but surprisingly strong-willed ​Barbarina ​who was a perfect partner in mischief for Cherubino and whose melodiously melancholic andante cavatina in Act Four, ‘L’ho perduta, me meschina,’ was stylishly sung. The Antonio of bass-baritone Eugene Galvin was a grumbling grump who hurled out ‘Ah Signor! Signor!’ in the Act Two finale with such fervor that it seemed that he would have been content to see the unwitting destroyer of his beloved blooms hanged for his crime. ​One of the region’s most gifted young singers, tenor Derek Jackenheimer was similarly effective as the meddling stutterer Don Curzio, enunciating ‘Ei suo padre? ella sua madre?’ in the Act Three sextet with exasperated bewilderment and sonorous tone.

Hearing a voice of the caliber of ​tenor Wade Henderson’s instrument in a rôle like Don ​Basilio is like hearing Heddle Nash or Stuart Burrows sing Monostatos in Die Zauberflöte. The casting of Henderson as Basilio could be cited as the operatic definition of an embarrassment of riches, but the presence of such a singer is a vital component of North Carolina Opera’s success. In the Act One trio with the Conte and Susanna, Henderson sang ‘In mal punto son qui giunto’ with boundless charisma, the words spilling out with the irrepressible banter of a gurgling spring. Henderson’s account of ‘Voi Signor! che giusto siete’ in the Act Two finale was the work of a collaborative artist of exceptional finesse. With so capable a Basilio on hand, the omission of the character’s Act Four aria ‘In quegli anni in cui val poco la mal pratica ragion,’ still common practice, was particularly lamentable. Basilio was created in Nozze di Figaro’s première by Irish tenor Michael Kelly, who also sang Conte Almaviva in the first Viennese production of Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (and who created Curzio in Le nozze di Figaro, as well). Few modern stagings of Mozart’s opera uphold Kelly’s legacy as worthily as North Carolina Opera did by casting Henderson as Basilio.

​​Contralto Alissa Anderson was the rare ​Marcellina who was in no danger of retiring—or who sounded as though she should retire—before the end of the performance. In the hilarious Act One duet with Susanna, Anderson sang ‘Via, resti servita, madama brillante’ splendidly, the voice firm, focused, and filling the theatre with golden sound. Later, her entry with Bartolo and Basilio into the raucous ensemble of the Act Two finale had the force of a sudden tempest, her voicing of ‘Voi Signor! che giusto siete’ bursting forth like a thunderclap. Not even on the most acclaimed recordings of Le nozze di Figaro is Marcellina’s ‘Riconosci in questo amplesso una madre, amato figlio’ in the Act Three sextet sung as well as Anderson sang it in Raleigh. Like Henderson’s Basilio, Anderson’s Marcellina was unfortunately deprived of her Act Four aria, ‘Il capro e la capretta son sempre in amistà,’ but the singer garnered a spontaneous ovation with her adrenalized vow to defend her sex by warning Susanna of looming peril. Even without the aria, Anderson was an extraordinarily enjoyable Marcellina, one who truly sang the rôle. Without a singer of Anderson’s abilities in the part, how many audiences never fully appreciate how enchanting Marcellina’s music can be?

Fresh from boosting the sheer fun of Greensboro Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen with a fabulously flirtatious Zuniga, bass-baritone ​Donald Hartmann added decibels to the Raleigh audience’s laughter with a lovably ludicrous Dottor Bartolo in North Carolina Opera’s Le nozze di Figaro. Bartolo’s best-known music, the aria ‘La vendetta, oh! la vendetta,’ occurs in Act One, just after his first entrance, and as Hartmann sang it in this performance it was one of the afternoon’s musical and comedic peaks. His utterances of both ‘Voi Signor! che giusto siete’ in the Act Two finale and ‘Resistenza la coscienza far non lascia al tuo desir’ in the Act Three sextet generated sparks that ignited the ensembles. Despite the successful but unexpected outcome of his ‘case’ against Figaro, Hartmann’s Bartolo was neither a doctor nor a lawyer that any sane client would entrust with tasks of a life-altering nature, but North Carolina Opera could not have entrusted the task of portraying Bartolo to a better-qualified singing actor.

In his quirky way, Cherubino is as difficult a rôle to cast as any in the Mozart repertory. Clearly-categorized distinctions among soprano and mezzo-soprano and their various sub-Fächer were products of the Nineteenth Century, making Mozart’s designation of Cherubino as a rôle for soprano difficult to decipher in the context of today’s understanding—and, in some instances, misunderstanding—of voice types. More critical than basic tessitura in a singer’s deliberation about whether or not to sing Cherubino should be the question of comfort: does the music fit comfortably in the voice? For mezzo-soprano ​Jennifer Panara, North Carolina Opera’s Cherubino, the answer to that question was indisputably affirmative. Seeming to quicken the pace of the action whenever he was a part of it, this Cherubino was a predictably hot-blooded but disarmingly sweet-natured youth. The breathless Act One aria ‘Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio or di fuoco,’ Jarvi’s tempo for which was brisk but manageable for singer and orchestra, was superlatively sung, the range posing no difficulties for Panara. In Act Two, the nervousness that seized Panara’s Cherubino as he performed the canzone ‘Voi che sapete, che cosa è amor’ for his adored godmother, the Contessa, was at once genuinely funny and touching. The repeated Fs at the top of the stave were projected with absolute ease. The hapless lad in danger of being discovered in the Contessa’s quarters by the raging Conte, the mezzo-soprano’s brightly-hued vocalism exuded anxiety in the duet with Susanna, her cry of ‘Ahimè, che scena orribile’ amusingly anticipating life-threatening calamity. Similar apprehension shone in Panara’s singing of ‘Pian, pianin! le andrò più presso’ in the Act Four finale. Some Cherubinos are so annoying that audiences can be tricked into wondering whether Mozart’s genius failed him to a degree as he wrote the character’s music. Across the full range of the music, Panara’s singing was hearteningly confident, and she was a Cherubino who toyed with the affections, not the nerves.

Il conte e la sua contessa: Baritone Steven LaBrie as Conte Almaviva (left) and soprano D’Ana Lombard as Contessa Almaviva (right) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, February 2017
[Photo by Curtis Brown Photography, © by North Carolina Opera]

In generations past, America was a bastion of great baritone singing—the land of the free upper registers of singers like Leonard Warren and Sherrill Milnes and the home of the brave dramatic instincts of men like Lawrence Tibbett and Robert Merrill. More dashing than the young Clark Gable, as fit as Johnny Weissmuller, and as debonair as Rudolph Valentino, baritone Steven LaBrie upheld that tradition as a Conte Almaviva who was entirely credible as the man who so handily wins Rosina’s heart in the previous installment in Beaumarchais’s—and, on the operatic stage, Paisiello’s and, later, Rossini’s—continuing saga of amorous intrigue chez Almaviva. A vivid presence in recitative throughout the performance, the dramatic temperature soared whenever LaBrie was on stage. To the Act One trio with Susanna and Basilio he brought a reading of ‘Cosa sento! Tosto andate, e scacciate il seduttor’ that sizzled with erotic tension, and this was handily transformed into jealous aggression in the Act Two trio with the Contessa and Susanna, the baritone​’s exclamation of ‘Susanna, or via, sortite’ fired at the ladies like a shot from the hunting rifle he wielded. With a statement of ‘Esci omai, garzon malnato’ that trembled with testosterone-fueled frustration, LaBrie launched the magnificent Act Two finale, Mozart’s most extended through-composed movement and one of the Eighteenth Century’s greatest works of art. The raw strength of the baritone’s performance never overcame his unerring grasp of Mozart’s style: his most ferocious anger was suave.

At the start of Act Three, LaBrie’s clear diction lent the recitative ‘Che imbarazzo è mai questo!’ uncommon urgency. Allowing vulnerability to dim the sheen of his pride in the duet with Susanna, this Conte revealed a suggestion of loneliness that paralleled his wife’s isolation. The expressivity with which LaBrie phrased ‘Crudel! perchè finora farmi languir così’ was all the more absorbing for being unexpected: there, in those few moments, he was only a man, not a nobleman. With his enunciation of the recitative ‘Hai già vinta la causa’ he reclaimed his thorny insouciance, and his performance of the allegro maestoso aria ‘Vedrò mentr’io sospiro, felice un servo mio’ proved to be one of the afternoon’s musical and dramatic peaks. Neither the trills nor the top F♯ troubled LaBrie, and he delivered ‘Son smarrito, son stordito, meglio è assai di quà partir’ in the sextet with the desperation of a man at the end of his tether. LaBrie’s Conte prowled the garden in pursuit of his intended assignation with Susanna like a boy on the trail of a new toy, and in the opera’s finale he sang first ‘Partito è al fin l’audace’ and then ‘Gente! gente! all’armi! all’armi!’ with explosive excitement. Beaten at his own game, however, the Conte’s andante ‘Contessa, perdono’ was​, as voiced by LaBrie, astonishingly sincere, even heartbreaking. Beyond the licentiousness, the integrity that won Rosina’s love remained. LaBrie was not a Conte content to pose and croon: every note and word of the rôle received his undivided attention, and the audience received from the baritone as intriguing and sympathetic a portrayal of the Conte as has been seen in the years since Hermann Prey relinquished the rôle.

The music that he wrote for her leaves no doubt that Mozart was profoundly affected by Contessa Almaviva’s humiliation, loneliness, and sadness. Betrayed and ignored by her lecherous husband, the man who once wooed her so passionately, she suffers the shame of watching the man she still adores unapologetically romancing other women. Cool-headed even when the drama was at its most feverish, the Contessa of soprano D’Ana Lombard was the serene eye in this operatic hurricane. The Contessa’s entrance aria in Act Two, the larghetto cavatina ‘Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro al mio duolo, a’ miei sospir,’ is one of the most difficult pieces in the soprano repertory. Lombard sang it with excellent breath control and a lovely top A♭. She began to disclose the more volatile elements of her Contessa’s personality with her voicing of ‘Fermatevi! sentite! sortire ella non può’ in the trio with Susanna and the Conte. Interestingly, she rather than Susanna here sang the pair of ascending phrases cresting on top C. Then, in the Act Two finale, the soprano sang ‘Ah Signore, quel furore per lui fammi il cor tremar’ with a surge of defiance that seemed to surprise no one more than herself.

The Contessa’s scene in Act Three is one of Mozart’s most perfect creations, a tableau in which all artifice is stripped away and the audience is left alone with a lady and her purest emotions. Lombard sang the recitative ‘E Susanna non vien?’ timidly, almost tentatively, this Contessa hesitant to grapple with her truest feelings. The sublime andantino aria ‘Dove sono i bei momenti di dolcezza e di piacer’ received from Lombard a traversal distinguished by rounded tones and expertly-managed phrasing. The aria’s allegro second part, ‘Ah se almen la mia costanza nel languire amando ognor,’ was dispatched with growing commitment to rescuing her marriage, asserted with exhilarating top As. It is not without reason that the Contessa’s letter-writing duet with Susanna, ‘Che soave zeffiretto,’ is one of Le nozze di Figaro’s most popular numbers, and Lombard’s attractive singing wholly realized the hypnotic potential of the music. Reveling in the Contessa’s conspiratorial plotting in Act Four, Lombard deployed one of the most dangerous weapons in her arsenal: her smile. At last hearing from the Conte words of contrition, more precious to her than those of affection, Lombard gave voice to the Contessa’s magnanimity with a dulcet ‘Più docile sono, e dico di sì.’ Lombard’s voice was often stronger in the upper octave than in its lower reaches, but she was always audible and unfailingly musical. Dramatically, she was an intelligent, insightful woman who matured before the audience’s eyes from a pouting, self-pitying wife into a self-possessed, gracious, beguiling lady worthy of the title bestowed upon her by marriage.

Lo sposo e la sua sposa: Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Figaro (left) and soprano Jennifer Cherest (right) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, February 2017
[Photo by Curtis Brown Photography, © by North Carolina Opera]

​Details of her spirited portrayal of Zerlina in North Carolina Opera’s 2015 production of Don Giovanni​ lingering in the memory, soprano Jennifer Cherest expanded her Mozartian credentials with a dazzling portrayal of Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro. Susanna is one of Mozart’s most multidimensional characters, principled and minxish in equal measures, and she is a feast for artists hungry for opportunities to flex their musical and interpretive muscles. Joyously sparring with her groom-to-be, Cherest’s Susanna exercised her well-toned artistic physique in the Act One duet with Figaro with an elated ‘Ora sì ch’io son contenta,’ the sun-kissed sound of the voice communicating the meaning of the words. Debating the wisdom and practicality of a bridal chamber in such proximity to their employers’ respective quarters, Cherest’s Susanna countered Figaro’s arguments with a playful but forceful ‘Così se il mattino il caro Contino.’ The soprano riotously battled with Anderson’s Marcellina in their duet, Cherest making the venomous irony of ‘Non sono sì ardita, madama piccante’ unmistakable. The trio with the Conte and Basilio found her scrambling to regain the upper hand, her ‘Che ruina, me meschina!’ ringing with apprehension, but her victory was crowned with a glorious top A♭.

In the opera’s second act, Cherest sang the first of Susanna’s arias, ‘Venite, inginocchiatevi, restate fermo lì,’ with technical aplomb and consummate understanding of the character’s motivations. The boldness of her singing of ‘Cos’è codesta lite’ in the trio with the Contessa and Conte was terrific, and her vocalism in the duet with Cherubino, ‘Aprite, presto, aprite,’ twinkled with tonal beauty and perfect comedic timing. When Cherest verbalized ‘Signore! Cos’è quel stupore’ in the Act Two finale, the high stakes of the confused tangle of competing interests became startlingly apparent. She reacted to LaBrie’s ardor in their Act Three duet with an insinuating account of ‘Signor, la donna ognora tempo ha di dir di sì,’ and her incendiary ‘Alto, alto, Signor Conte! mille doppie son qui pronte’ in the sextet was phenomenal. The reluctance that shaded Cherest’s vocal acting in the Letter Duet was quickly swept aside by the Contessa’s confidence in the solidity of her plan, her perfectly-tuned singing in thirds with Lombard leading to an easy top B♭. The singer’s emotional engagement in the Act Four recitative ‘Giunse alfin il momento’ was palpable. The performance of the aria ‘Deh vieni, non tardar, o gioia bella’ that followed was mesmerizing, her unforced command of the music’s two-octave range, from A₃ to A₅, compelling admiration. In the aria’s final phrases, the silence that fell over the theatre was evidence of the expressive power of Cherest’s singing. Her voice glided through the opera’s finale, uniting with Lombard’s in a stirringly cathartic paean to forgiveness. Encountering a full, evenly-produced lyric voice with no weaknesses in any portion of the range of Susanna’s music was a sensational pleasure. Had Cherest’s virtues been solely vocal, she would have been a noteworthy Susanna, but the imagination and sensitivity of her performance made a distinctive Susanna an unforgettable one.

None of Mozart’s other eponymous operatic protagonists is blessed with music that rivals the unadulterated melodic fecundity that the composer lavished on his writing for Figaro. It is possible to pinpoint in the situations faced by the dutiful but disgruntled servant aspects of Mozart’s own unhappy relationship with the intractable Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, his dismissal from whose service precipitated the composer’s relocation to Vienna, but Mozart was too shrewd an artist to undermine his characterizations with anything but the most universal of sentiments. It was therefore wholly appropriate that bass-baritone Tyler Simpson depicted Figaro as a man recognized by every person on stage and in the audience as a familiar figure—the quintessential ‘factotum della città,’ to borrow Rossini’s description. Having contributed an affably scheming Bartolo to North Carolina Opera’s 2016 production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia​, Simpson was a Figaro whose expectation of conjugal bliss gleamed in the Act One duet with Susanna, his measurements of ‘Cinque, dieci, venti, trenta’ cited with glee. Subsequently, more troubling prospects crept into his singing of ‘Se a caso madama la notte ti chiama.’ The jaunty melody of the cavatina ‘Se vuol ballare, signor Contino’ was delivered with robust machismo and resonant top Fs. Establishing his Figaro as the lynchpin of the opera’s action, Simpson brought the curtain down on Act One with a performance of the aria ‘Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso’ that exuded the character’s innate goodness and joie de vivre.

Inserting himself into the fray in the Act Two finale, Simpson’s Figaro painted his proclamation of ‘Signori! di fuori son già i suonatori’ in primary colors that heightened the dramatic significance of the softer pastels of the sotto voce passage with the Contessa and Susanna, ‘Deh Signor, nol contrastate, consolate i miei desir.’ The broad humor with which Simpson limned Figaro’s reunion with his long-lost parents in the Act Three sextet was embodied by the bass-baritone’s delectably droll delivery of ‘Padre mio! fate lo stesso, non mi fate più arrossir.’ Here and in the animated tempo di marcia, ‘Ecco la marcia! andiamo! ai vostri posti,’ however, comedy did not preclude an underlying sobriety from emerging. His Act Four recitative ‘Tutto è disposto’ was phrased with honest feeling, and Simpson sang the aria ‘Aprite un po’ quegli occhi uomini incauti e sciocchi’ not as a hard-hearted indictment of feminine caprices but as an expression of his own wounded pride, the repeated top E♭s mimicking the blows to his love for Susanna. Simpson voiced the larghetto ‘Tutto è tranquillo e placido’ in the opera’s finale with growing anguish, and the relief that his singing of the andante ‘Pace! pace! mio dolce tesoro’ evinced when he realized that he was fooled into thinking Susanna unfaithful was therefore all the more effective. Simpson’s cunning but courteous Figaro was an ideally doting husband for Susanna, a shrewd ally for the Contessa, and a servant from whom the Conte might learn to be a better master of his own life. For the audience, Simpson was a Figaro who made his marriage an event of lasting felicity. Surrounded by colleagues on stage, in the orchestra pit, and behind the scenes whose love and respect for the score were apparent in every second of the performance, he was a Figaro whose nozze was a privilege to witness.

CARLO LENZI (1735 – 1805) and WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Sacred Music in Lombardy 1770-80—Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, soprano; Ensemble Autarena; Marcello Scandelli, conductor [Recorded in Nuova Chiesa di San Massimiliano Kolbe, Bergamo, Italy, in January 2015; Pan Classics PC 10364; 1 CD, 66:58; Available from Naxos Direct (USA), JPC (Germany), and major music retailers]

Lombardy in the eighth decade of the Eighteenth Century was a region both in the clutches of ancient dynasties and on the cusp of modernity. The gateway to the European continent, the region’s principal city, Milan, was already a bustling center of commerce and culture. By the decade’s end, Milan’s great temple of operatic worship, Teatro alla Scala, would be erected and inaugurated with a performance of Antonio Salieri’s aptly epic Europa riconosciuta. Milan was also the seat of archiepiscopal authority in and beyond Lombardy, the city’s Duomo—the Basilica cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria Nascente, incomplete in the 1770s despite construction having begun in the Fourteenth Century—a grandiose symbol of the importance of the Church in everyday life. In inimitable Italian style, Lombards have for countless generations craftily integrated the exercise of faith with celebration of the joys of living. From their inceptions, new forms of musical expression were utilized by Italian composers and composers fluent in Italy’s musical languages to transform the rituals of the Church into very personal works of art. From the polyphonic masterpieces of Palestrina to Puccini’s early Messa a quattro voci, liturgical music has played a prominent rôle in Italian musical life, nowhere more tunefully than in Lombardy. Focusing on the sacred music of one remarkable decade in the Eighteenth Century, this imaginatively-conceived and skillfully-engineered Pan Classics release presents music written for Lombardy by a visiting composer who needs no introduction, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, alongside works of superlative quality by an Italian composer awaiting the modern exposure his music deserves, Carlo Lenzi. That the music of the forgotten composer is as enjoyable as that of his eternally popular colleague is this disc’s most welcome surprise, but its greatest accomplishment is the captivatingly melodious recreation of a time and a place that are now perhaps preserved only in music.

Born in 1735 near Bergamo, the town some forty kilometers northeast of Milan that is now famous among music lovers for having also been the birthplace of Gaetano Donizetti in 1797, Carlo Lenzi benefited from the exceptional opportunities for musical education afforded by distant Naples, attaining an admirable level of mastery of the prevalent musical forms and trends of both his own and previous generations. His forty-year tenure at Bergamo’s Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, today perhaps the best-preserved church in the Lombard Romanesque style, earned him a wide exposure and some degree of celebrity within relative proximity to Bergamo. To what extent Lenzi and his work were known beyond Bergamo is largely a matter of conjecture. The reach of Lenzi’s reputation was sufficient to attract the young Bavarian Johann Simon Mayr to his tutelage. Three years before Lenzi’s death in 1805, Mayr relocated to Bergamo in order to succeed his teacher as maestro di cappella. [Most Mayr biographers identify the composer’s ecclesiastical employer as Bergamo’s Duomo, the Cattedrale di Sant’Alessandro, but, surely not insignificantly, both Mayr and Donizetti are buried in Santa Maria Maggiore.] Mayr’s teaching of Donizetti known to have been comprehensive, it is unlikely that the eventual composer of Lucia di Lammermoor and L’elisir d’amore was unacquainted with Lenzi’s music.

What cannot be ascertained with any measure of historical accuracy is how widely Lenzi’s musical output circulated among fellow artists of his time or how much of other composers’ work reached Lenzi in Bergamo. Though hardly a cultural backwater, Bergamo was no Naples or Venice. Still, the town’s proximity to Milan cannot have failed to yield some measure of musical cosmopolitanism. Delightfully played by Ensemble Autarena under the direction of cellist Marcello Scandelli, the Sonatas included on this disc strongly suggest that, in addition to a thorough knowledge of Italian music of previous generations gleaned from his studies in Naples, Lenzi was aware of the music of his north-of-the-Alps contemporaries. In the extended Sonata Prima, the influences of Durante, Jommelli, Pergolesi, Traetta, and other exponents of the Neapolitan school are apparent, but so, too, are kinships with the work of Abel, Johann Christian Bach, Boccherini, and the Haydn brothers. The Ensemble Autarena musicians revel in Lenzi’s part writing, their cleanly-articulated playing disclosing the excellent quality of Lenzi’s craftmanship. The Sonata Terza is a piece with considerable merits, as well, and Ensemble Autarena’s performance is an ideal introduction to Lenzi’s straightforward but eloquent style.

Both of the Lamentations for Holy Week exquisitely sung on this disc by Italian soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, two of the thirty-four settings of texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah Lenzi is known to have written, were likely composed for the soprano castrato Giovanni Tajana (1755 – 1829), a singer about whom little information survives. What little anecdotal evidence exists suggests that Tajana enjoyed a successful career in opera in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, his name appearing in conjunction with performances as far afield as London. Lenzi’s 1780 Lamentazione seconda per il Giovedì Santo is a work of tremendous histrionic power, the composer’s use of text revealing a poetic sensibility worthy of comparison with more renowned composers’ similar aptitude. Treating the ‘De lamentatione Ieremiæ prophetæ’ text with which settings of the Lamentations traditionally begin not as a formality but as a vital, emotionally significant portion of the lament, Lenzi wrote engrossing music to open the Lamentazione, and the soprano’s phrasing in this performance establishes an atmosphere of affectionate reverence. As the movement progresses, the grace with which Lombardi Mazzulli sings ‘Cogitavit Dominus dissipare murum filiæ Sion; tetendit funiculum suum, et non avertit manum suam a perditione: luxitque antemurale, et murus pariter dissipatus est’ transports the prophet’s words directly to the listener’s heart. Her technical acumen tames the difficulties of ‘Defixæ sunt in terra portæ ejus, perdidit et contrivit vectes ejus; regem ejus et principes ejus in gentibus: non est lex, et prophetæ ejus non invenerunt visionem a Domino,’ inspiring awe without disrupting the prevailing contemplativeness of the text.

The simple elegance of the largo setting of ‘Sederunt in terra, conticuerunt senes filiæ Sion; consperserunt cinere capita sua, accincti sunt ciliciis: abjecerunt in terram capita sua virgines Jerusalem’ that starts the second movement shimmers in the Mediterranean sunlight of the soprano’s warm timbre. The bravura demands of Lenzi’s allegretto ‘Defecerunt præ lacrimis oculi mei, conturbata sunt viscera mea’ are considerable, but Lombardi Mazzulli confronts every challenge unflinchingly. Her traversal of ‘Effusum est in terra jecur meum super contritione filiæ populi mei, cum deficeret parvulus et lactens in plateis oppidi’ in the Lamentazione’s final movement is characterized by ethereal tonal beauty and a nuanced but wholly natural handling of words that haunts with its immediacy. The resolution of musical incarnations of Lamentations is also governed by tradition, and Lenzi was no less astute in dealing with the final statement of ‘Ierusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum’ than in his approach to the prefatory text. Guided by the composer’s ingenuity, Lombardi Mazzulli’s singing of the Lamentazione’s conclusion is alert, focused, and attractive.

Dating from 1777, the Lamentazione prima per il Venerdì Santo is a work of intricacy even greater than that of its slightly older sibling. The composer having again devoted the best of his art to his setting of ‘De lamentatione Ieremiæ prophetæ,’ Lombardi Mazzulli responds with vocalism of the purest bel canto. The expressivity of her singing of ‘Misericordiæ Domini, quia non sumus consumpti; quia non defecerunt miserationes ejus’ reaches profound depths of spirituality, and the unexaggerated subtlety with which she shapes her reading of the melodic lines of ‘Novi diluculo, multa est fides tua’ is indicative of an artistic philosophy centered on respect for the music. The recitative ‘Pars mea Dominus, dixit anima mea; propterea exspectabo eum’ is sung with the communicative intelligibility of an accomplished Evangelista reciting Gospel in a Bach Passion. In the third movement, the contrasts engendered by Lenzi’s shifts in tempo are enhanced by the lucid playing of Ensemble Autarena. Lombardi Mazzulli voices both ‘Bonus est Dominus sperantibus in eum, animæ quærenti illum’ and ‘Bonum est præstolari cum silentio salutare Dei’ lustrously, and the incandescence of her vowels gives ‘Bonum est viro cum portaverit jugum ab adolescentia sua’ an added aura of religiosity. In her account of ‘Sedebit solitarius, et tacebit: quia levavit super se,’ it is the incisively-enunciated consonants that drive the vocal line. Epitomizing the vibrant stile galante that Lenzi adopted in his Lamentations, ‘Ponet in pulvere os suum, si forte sit spes’ and ‘Dabit percutienti se maxillam, saturabitur opprobiis’ in the Lamentazione’s last movement possess dramatic force of an operatic nature, and Lombardi Mazzulli sings the music accordingly, her performance bold but always exhibiting impeccable taste. Like its counterpart in the 1780 Lamentazione, the closing ‘Ierusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum’ is a resourceful, overtly theatrical setting of the text. The performance on this disc preserves a rare union of superb music and an artist technically and temperamentally ideally suited to singing it.

Well-chosen companions for Lenzi’s Sonatas, Mozart’s Church Sonatas in D major and A major (K. 245 and 225), composed in 1776 for inclusion between the readings of the Epistle and Gospel in Salzburg Masses, are performed by Ensemble Autarena with a sure grasp of Mozart’s idiom. Well-intentioned but wrongheaded attempts at convincing listeners that every piece that issued from Mozart’s pen is a masterpiece lead some performers to artificially inflate the Sonata’s significance. They are good music, but their appeal is too easily obscured by playing them as though they were symphonies in miniature. Ensemble Autarena​’s playing enables the listener to hear the Sonatas on an appropriate scale, sounding much as they must have done when played as interludes in their original liturgical context.

Composed in January 1773 for the Italian composer and soprano Venanzio Rauzzini (1746 – 1810), the creator of the rôle of Cecilio in Mozart’s 1772 opera Lucio Silla whose vocal range may have been a fortuitous accident of nature rather than a result of blade-wielding human intervention, the motet ‘Exsultate, jubilate’ (K. 165) is one of Mozart’s most familiar sacred works—and, considering its abundant melodic charm and imposing technical demands, rightly so. Singers of virtually every Fach with the range required by the music or a reasonable approximation thereof have recorded the motet. Among the fruits of their labors, it is Swiss soprano Edith Mathis’s lovely, eminently stylish account that Lombardi Mazzulli’s performance recalls. In the opening movement, ‘Exsultate, jubilate, o vos animæ beatæ,’ Lombardi Mazzulli executes the difficult bravura passagework with confidence undermined by only a few of the most dizzying passages, but she never engages in thoughtless grandstanding. Not yet seventeen years old when he composed this music, the young Mozart was already attentive to the ways in which music could be used to both convey and heighten the impact of text, and the vocal writing in ‘Exsultate, jubilate,’ undoubtedly tailored to Rauzzini’s florid technique, is a model of artful use of music to mirror the moods evoked by words. Lombardi Mazzulli is one of today’s most persuasive performers of vocal music composed before 1800, and the joy that her singing of ‘Exsultate, jubliate’ exudes is as important a component of her performance as her fleet coloratura and crystalline trills.

In this performance, the recitative ‘Fulget amica dies, jam fugere et nubila et procellæ’ is sung with the concentration that it deserves. The serene valley between two virtuosic peaks, the bewitching dolce ‘Tu virginum corona, tu nobis pacem dona’ is rarely the most memorable portion of a performance of ‘Exsultate, jubilate,’ but as sung by Lombardi Mazzulli it is a sequence of breathtaking pulchritude, the singer’s breath control as impressive when sustaining the long melodic lines of this movement as when hurtling through its companions’ fiorature. The motet’s culminating ‘Alleluia’ is in this performance what Mozart surely intended it to be: two-and-a-half minutes of elation that uplift the soul regardless of the listener’s faith. Particularly in performances of music composed before 1800, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli is one of today’s most capable young singers, but her singing on this disc illustrates the most precious of her gifts. As performed by Lombardi Mazzulli, music is not a distraction or even an diversion: it is a friend.

One of the most fascinating aspects of music is the series of relationships that link composers and their work. Whether north or south of the Alps, east or west of the Atlantic, or near to or far from the equator, music has developed in each successive generation of artists in ways that their forebears might never have imagined. One of the most fascinating aspects of music in the past half-century has been the rediscovery of an expanding phalanx of gifted composers whose works were for many years neglected. In addition to renewing the diffusion of his own music, the rediscovery of Lenzi deepens listeners’ understanding of Mozart and the cultural surroundings in which his enduring masterworks sprang to life. Supplementing the educational value of this release, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli and Ensemble Autarena perform this music with incontestable fondness. It is fondness that the listener is moved to reciprocate.

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924), et. al.: Vivere—Fernando Varela, tenor; Crouch End Festival Chorus [Vocals recorded at Phat Planet Studios, Orlando, Florida, USA; Deutsche Grammophon/Panorama 80026398-02; 1 CD, 50:58; Available from Deutsche Grammophon, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Almost eighty-two years ago, on the broadcast of 7 April 1935, the long-running, nationally-syndicated radio (and eventually television) talent show Major Bowes Amateur Hour, now principally remembered as an early showcase for the talent of Frank Sinatra, featured among the field of performers a young lady called Nina Foresti. This girl, whose speaking voice on the surviving broadcast tape sounds surprisingly mature, apparently identified herself in her initial communication to Major Bowes’s producer as Anita Duval. The nervous conversation during the broadcast prefaced an obviously little-trained but hardly embarrassing performance of Cio-Cio-San’s familiar aria ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ from Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, a performance rewarded by the show’s judging committee with a grade of D and the verdict of ‘faint possibility for future’ for the young singer. How might those judges have esteemed their powers of assessment had they been in Chicago’s Civic Opera House two decades later, when the woman they dismissed as unpromising as an eleven-year-old girl again sang ‘Un bel dì vedremo,’ no longer needing the anonymity of noms de guerre, Anita Duval and Nina Foresti transformed into Maria Callas?

The unnerving task faced by anyone given the responsibility of judging the merits of young voices is simultaneously hearing what is and what can be. It is difficult to discern in the four minutes of a Mozart aria what a voice might with study and preparation be capable of achieving in the four hours of a Wagner opera, but the critical ear must possess a degree of prescience, listening beyond the current state of the voice for glimpses of its true potential. Above all, the foremost duty of a pedagogue sitting in judgement of young singers is to provide encouragement. Yes, that encouragement must sometimes be to pursue non-musical paths, but even this should be approached as a process of discovering new talents, not as an exercise in demeaning individuals’ aspirations. Whatever their qualifications were, the Major Bowes Amateur Hour judges almost certainly could not hear the voice of eleven-year-old Nina Foresti hurling out Brünnhilde’s battle cry, scaling the heights of Lucia’s mad scene, or wielding Tosca’s defiant top Cs, but their discouragement undoubtedly poured fuel onto the fire that already crackled in the spirit of as formidably determined an artist as Maria Callas. It is, in part, an assault on the validity of his musical vision that has shaped tenor Fernando Varela’s journey, too. There is in the atmosphere of Varela’s new disc Vivere something of the sense of inexpressible triumph that Callas must have felt when Chicagoans’ ovations for her singing of ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ resounded in the Civic Opera House. Rather than contorting himself into others’ musical molds, Varela finds and refines the music within himself. Vivere is not a disc that aims to say ‘I told you so’ to harsh judges. Rather, the singer says to the listener, ‘I told me so.’

The compelling, operatic story of Vivere begins with the disc’s title track, and Varela’s singing of this uplifting paean to never settling for anything other than complete realization of one’s ambitions immediately reveals why the release of this disc on Deutsche Grammophon’s Panorama label is especially appropriate. Welcoming him into a world populated by fellow tenors of the caliber of Fritz Wunderlich and Ernst Häfliger, Vivere furthers the Universal Music Group’s mission of tearing down the boundaries that have for too long artificially separated popular music from the Yellow Label’s home territory of Classical repertory. To pronounce Vivere a ‘crossover’ disc is to altogether miss its point. Here, Varela is neither a meticulously-trained operatic tenor trying his hand at marketable material nor a pop singer having a go at opera: he is simply a singer who sings music that engages his emotions. The forthrightness with which he delivers the lyrics of ‘Vivere’ epitomizes his sentimental connection with the music, and ‘Gloria,’ the first of the disc’s songs to the writing of which he contributed, draws from Varela a performance of sonorous sincerity, the vocal line propelled with rounded vowels and well-managed breath control.

Studio-produced recordings of songs like ‘Per sempre ci sarò,’ an Italian version of Christina Perri’s ‘A Thousand Years’ from the Twilight soundtrack, can bury the raw impact of a human voice beneath layers of over-processed effects, but Varela maintains focus on the voice, singing as he might if he were performing the song before an audience of ten or ten thousand. The incisiveness of his singing of Stevie Aiello’s ‘I Believe in You’ pours from the music with absolute, unshakable confidence. ‘Shine’ is an apt description of what Varela’s voice does in this, another of his own songs, and the mature artistry that he discloses in ‘If We Fall’ gives the song a timelessness that heightens the impact of its message. ‘Ti amo per sempre’ is the powerhouse cabaletta to the dolce aria ‘If We Fall.’ Pealing through the music with the force of a Metallica-singing Manrico, Varela’s vocalism impresses and thrills in equal measures.

Popularized by Céline Dion, Eric Carmen’s ‘All By Myself’ gains a new dimension of languid Latino passion in Varela’s Spanish incarnation, ‘Solo otra vez.’ This singer’s seclusion is entrancingly sensual, but the open-hearted—and open-throated—honesty of the subsequent ‘No Longer on My Own’ appeals no less strongly. As a fusion of music, text, and feeling, ‘You’ll See My Face’ is unquestionably the finest song on Vivere. There are few human experiences more difficult to truthfully depict in song than what Dante identified as the pain of recalling joy in times of sorrow. Puccini mastered this facet of musical storytelling, not least in Mimì’s dying recollection of her first moments with Rodolfo in La bohème, and so, to a marked extent, has Varela translated the language of loss into an universal musical vocabulary. Crucially, however, Varela forces neither his voice nor the sadness of the lyrics. Rather, his singing imbues the song with comforting suggestions of unspoken forgiveness and acceptance, remembrance, and affection undiminished by death. Backed here and throughout the tracks on the disc with rhythmic vitality as galvanizing as their musicality by guitarists Tom Lodewyckx and Richard Craker, bassist Vincent Pierins, and drummers Herman Cambre, John “Jr” Robinson, and Ian Thomas, Varela voices both ‘Cuore’ and ‘Verità’ with unflinching directness, the words uttered with the clarity of speech and the enhanced meaning of song. Likewise, Patrick Hamilton’s work as arranger, pianist, and producer complements Varela’s musical sensibilities, facilitating an easy camaraderie that is as audible as the tenor’s ardent singing.

If there is in opera the sort of irrepressible ‘anthem’ that might in other realms be associated with Freddie Mercury or David Lee Roth, it is surely Calàf’s aria ‘Nessun dorma’ from Act Three of Puccini’s Turandot. The allure of the aria’s soaring melody has been lost on few tenors since Turandot’s first performance in 1926, its robust masculinity limned by Francesco Merli and Franco Corelli, its poetic fervor evinced by Carlo Bergonzi and Richard Tucker, and its Italian charisma unforgettably personified by Luciano Pavarotti. To his credit, Varela attempts to mimic none of the aria’s celebrated interpreters. He makes the aria his own, and in doing so he gets nearer to the heart of Puccini’s music than many tenors trumpeting the aria, intensely focused on the climactic top B, have managed to venture. This is music of perseverance, catharsis, and rejuvenation, and Varela’s vocalism rings with the assurance of a man—and an artist—who has conquered not by brute strength but by remaining true to himself. The stratospheric interpolation at the aria’s conclusion would rightly be condemned as poor taste in the opera house, but the virtual theatre of Vivere is not the venerated auditorium of Teatro alla Scala. This is pure showmanship, of which Puccini was an avid student, and it dazzlingly expresses the commitment to using song as a means of communicating with the listener that is the core of Vivere.

Perhaps the most pernicious danger faced by the Performing Arts in the Twenty-First Century is the perception that art is the exclusive property of those with the resources and influence required to be its custodians. It is a perception that is in some cases fostered by those custodians themselves at the expense of artists’ creative liberty and audiences’ rights to experience and analyze the resulting works. There are right pitches and wrong pitches which no wealths of persuasion can convert from one to the other, but there are too many ways of singing and hearing those pitches to number. Franz Joseph Haydn once remarked that the geographical and cultural isolation of his employment at Eszterháza engendered involuntary originality. The isolation wrought by musical genius such as Maria Callas possessed might be said to yield a similar outcome. In a sense, Fernando Varela’s artistic isolation was born of dreams that those who might have helped him reach them proved too shortsighted to share. In reality, though, no one’s endorsement of his gifts matters as much as the singer’s own belief in his capacity for bringing music to life. This is what Vivere ultimately conveys most arrestingly: these are the sounds of a modern troubadour living through music.

JULIANA HALL: Love’s Signature– Songs for Countertenor and Soprano—Darryl Taylor, countertenor; Susan Narucki, soprano; Juliana Hall and Donald Berman, piano [Recorded at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, New York, USA, 17 – 19 September 2015 (Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush and Propriety) and 7 – 8 August 2016 (O Mistress Mine); MSR Classics MS 1603; 1 CD, 71:00; Available from MSR Classics, Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Had he endured it, Thomas Paine would surely have agreed that 2016 was a year to try men’s souls. Whether troubled by matters global or personal, by politics or unspoken perfidies, by losses widely mourned or unnoticed, few sensitive spirits were untouched by the year’s tribulations. It was a year in which Shakespeare’s likening in The Merchant of Venice of a lone candle blazing in the night to the gleam of a good deed in a naughty world shone with its own illuminating truth. In the same scene in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare wrote of the man affected by life’s vices that ‘music for the time doth change his nature.’ The first quarter of 2017 has introduced new challenges and realities almost too fantastic to be believed—and, with them, pitifully little of the common sense that Thomas Paine identified as the hallmark of an enlightened free society. The power of music to change the natures of oppressor and oppressed is now more critical than ever before, the universal language of song needed to close the ever-widening gaps among neighbors and nations. When joining words with music, gifted American composer Juliana Hall perhaps does not consciously set out to create songs that close the circuits via which emotional currents flow from the individual to the universal, but the three song cycles recorded for MSR Classics’ new disc Love’s Signature reveal her extraordinary talent for crafting music that translates the meanings of texts into sounds that can be felt as well as heard. Whether handling the words of William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, or Marianne Moore, Hall exhibits an uncanny faculty for amplifying the innate musicality of poets’ diction. Placed by MSR Classics’ engineering within an aural ambiance that recalls a small recital hall, the sound both intimate and ideally spacious, the performances that inscribe Love’s Signature upon the listener’s conscience restore faith in music’s still-potent force for positive change even in troubling times.

Written for countertenor Brian Asawa, whose untimely passing in April 2016 was a tremendous loss to the Arts community, O Mistress Mine is that rarest of achievements in Art Song: a true cycle of songs that both convey a cumulative narrative and are individually effective. Settings of texts by William Shakespeare, the twelve songs guide the listener along an emotional journey in which gentle humor and pathos thrive in one another’s company. Though a composer’s creative process is a marvel of nature that no mind but her own can fully comprehend, the songs of O Mistress Mine permit the listener to appreciate the meticulous craftsmanship of Hall’s work. The distinctive strains of ‘Greensleeves,’ presented in counterpoint to an original melody, and faint echoes of the lute songs of John Dowland provide aural glimpses of the musical environment into which Shakespeare and his works were born. Hearing all of the songs on this disc, it is apparent that Hall does not compose with the goal of steeping her music in a purposefully-concocted brew of modernity: rather, she follows the texts, responding to the inherent music of the words and conjuring sound worlds appropriate to each passage from an economy of means. Each of Hall’s notes has a purpose as clearly defined as that of each of Shakespeare’s words. The songs’ novelty is wholly organic, never contrived, and the composer perpetuates the American Art Song tradition of Beach, Barber, and Bolcom with music of ingenuity and integrity.

The performance that O Mistress Mine here receives from Hall and countertenor Darryl Taylor is a wonderful tribute to Brian Asawa, a subtle but intense exploration of music that would have perfectly suited both his voice and his musical personality. Though his basic timbre is very different from Asawa’s, Taylor shares his colleague’s uncompromising approach to song repertory. From the opening bars of ‘Lawn as white as driven snow,’ Taylor lavishes on the words from The Winter’s Tale articulation worthy of the stage of the Globe—an integral component of his artistry rather than artifice. With the opening bars of ‘O happy fair!’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), an astonishing transformation is achieved, revealing another facet of the singer’s chameleonic musical temperament. In some moments bringing to mind Russell Oberlin’s unforgettable timbre and in others sounding uncannily like a lyric mezzo-soprano in her prime, Taylor adapts his platinum-hued voice to the emotional temperature of each phrase. There is a sense of determination in his utterance of the sonnet ‘If love make me forsworn’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost that hints at blush-worthy sultriness, and the unaffected passion of his singing of Hall’s brilliant setting of ‘Who is Silvia?’ from Two Gentlemen of Verona enhances the impact of Shakespeare’s famous words.

Hall’s cycle takes its name from ‘O, mistress mine’ from Twelfth Night, and her dulcetly tuneful handling of the text makes the song the rightful centerpiece of the cycle. As she and Taylor deliver the song, it also assumes a position of prominence in the context of this disc, their partnership never bearing more alluring fruit than in this piece. ‘If music be the food of love’ and ‘Come away, come away, death’ are among the best-known passages in Twelfth Night, a gem among Shakespeare’s plays that remains too infrequently performed beyond England’s borders. Hall’s music preserves the kinship between the speeches without accentuating their similarities at the expense of each song’s individuality. Utilizing skills he has honed through operatic experience, Taylor masterfully characterizes the songs’ implicit narrator, bringing understated elements of the play from which they are drawn to his readings of the texts. The countertenor’s keen intelligence notwithstanding, the joys of his performances of ‘Take, o take those lips away’ (Measure for Measure) and ‘Tell me where is Fancy bred’ (The Merchant of Venice) are principally musical, his gift for matching every bar of Hall’s music with apposite tonal colors arrestingly employed. When music and text communicate darker thoughts, Taylor does not shrink from producing anguished sounds, and his performance of O Mistress Mine is thus all the more beautiful and emotionally powerful.

Taken from lines spoken by Stephano in The Tempest, the text of ‘This is a very scurvy tune to sing’ is delightfully piquant, but there is nothing distasteful about the performance that the song receives from Taylor and Hall. Perhaps it seems slightly ridiculous to state that Hall plays her own music splendidly, but this cannot be taken for granted. For all their troves of interpretive felicities, wartime broadcast recordings of Richard Strauss’s accompaniment of singers including Maria Reining and Anton Dermota in performances of the composer’s Lieder are littered with small mistakes, after all. Hall’s playing unites rhythmic precision with elasticity of phrasing, however: her pointed pianism seems neither goaded nor blunted by the singer. The psychological significance of the shifting harmonies of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ (As You Like It) is made apparent by the close collaboration between singer and pianist, Taylor’s vocalism soaring above the dynamic topography of Hall’s playing. Few passages in all of the Shakespeare canon match the serenity of ‘Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun’ from Cymbeline, a quality gloriously captured in settings by Gerald Finzi and Roger Quilter. Hall is no less successful than her English counterparts at conveying the tranquility of the text, and her playing of the piano part is suffused with simplicity and depth of feeling, traits that Taylor answers with singing of focus and finesse. Anyone who doubts the health of the Art of Song should hear this performance. In it, composer, poet, singer, and pianist uphold the standards established when Schubert made songs of the words of Goethe and Heine and when Pears and Britten performed them.

Songs with prose texts are far fewer in number—and, by extension, importance—than settings of poetry, perhaps because patterns of thought and emotion are less compartmentalized in prose and therefore less conducive to musical treatment. Still in many ways an enigma to Twenty-First-Century readers and scholars, Emily Dickinson might be said to have embodied Rodolfo’s famous characterization of himself and Mimì in Act Two of La bohème: a poet by vocation, she was in her singular manner of living a personification of poetry. It is hardly surprising, then, that Dickinson’s correspondence is nearly as compelling as her verse. How fascinating it must have been to receive letters that issued from an intellect as sensitive, prophetic, and comprehensive as Dickinson’s! Composed in 1989, Hall’s Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush utilizes excerpts from a selection of Emily Dickinson’s letters, the contents of which hold innumerable insights into the daily existence of both the poet and the woman. Hall’s kaleidoscopic music movingly evokes the spirit of the poet’s well-known lines, ‘This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me.’ This, Dickinson might have written, is her serenade to a world that, in her relative seclusion, she only partly knew but that she understood with extraordinary perspicacity.

Like Taylor and Hall in O Mistress Mine, soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman are ideal interpreters of this music. Hall’s adaptations of Dickinson’s words in ‘To Eudosia C. Flynt’ are articulated as eloquently by the pianist as by the singer, and the composer’s profoundly sympathetic reactions to the poet’s stream of consciousness in ‘To T. W. Higginson’ are reflected in the crystalline sheen of the soprano’s singing, her artful phrasing complemented by the elegance of Berman’s playing. The pianist forges a path into the heart of ‘To Emily Fowler (Ford)’ that Narucki travels without one misstep of breath control, tonal production, or interpretive nuance. Examined from the perspective of today’s knowledge of details of Dickinson’s life, even her most innocuous banter can reveal layers of meaning that draw the reader into the poet’s very private but startlingly vivid world. Hall lures the listener into the specific atmosphere of ‘To Samuel Bowles the younger,’ and Narucki and Berman reward the attention with music making of the highest order. It is as surely Dickinson’s voice as Narucki’s that resonates in this traversal of ‘To Eugenia Hall,’ a song in which the like-surnamed composer discloses the best of her art as a musical poet. In the spirit of the title heroine’s paean to fidelity unto death in Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe being termed the ‘Leadville Liebestod,’ Hall’s pairing of ‘To Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) I’ and ‘To Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) II’ as the closing sequence of Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush might reasonably be said to constitute an Amherst Anthem. Here, Dickinson seems to speak directly to the listener, not through a third party but with her own voice, demure but demonstrative. This is not decades-old literature dryly set to music but living art, born anew with each playing.

A product of 1992, Hall’s song cycle Propriety makes use of verses by American poet Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972), an artist whose scant renown among her countrymen is markedly disproportionate with the great quality of her work. As in their performances of Hall’s Dickinson settings, Narucki and Berman are expert exponents of these Moore songs. Narucki’s singing of ‘Mercifully’ resounds with enthusiasm for both words and music, an impression bolstered by Berman’s mercurial playing. With her vibrant setting of ‘Carnegie Hall, Rescued,’ Hall made a valuable contribution to the rescue of American Art Song. Here and in ‘Dream,’ the composer’s tone painting is remarkably attuned to the subtexts of Moore’s words, the composer’s sensibilities engendering songs in which text and music become veritably inseparable. One of the finest songs written in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, ‘Propriety’ receives from Narucki and Berman a performance that realizes all of the piece’s potential to challenge and thrill. The cycle’s last words are entrusted to ‘Melchior Vulpius,’ and soprano and pianist pronounce them with complete conviction. Like Taylor, Narucki is not a songbird for whom beautiful but emotionally blank sounds are the ultimate goal—and neither, for that matter, is Hall. These are artists—and these are performances—that aim for the heart and the mind at once, and they do not hide behind polite façades when the truths of which they sing are ugly.

Art in any of its forms is never further than a single generation from extinction. Man’s nature is to fear, ridicule, and reject the unknown, all of which actions are seemingly far less strenuous than seeking to understand, accept, and embrace new concepts, cultures, and individuals. Fashions change, styles evolve, and affections wane, and in music these currents sometimes flow especially swiftly and devastatingly. Händel still breathed when almost all of his operas were interred in tombs of neglect, for instance, and Mahler never enjoyed in his own lifetime the universal recognition of his genius that subsequent decades have bestowed. Stasis is fatal to the survival of art, making the work of an artist like Juliana Hall crucial not only for the continued freshness of serious music but for its very life. Love’s Signature is a breath of life that fills the lungs with the air of song and the soul with the joy of recognizing a compositional voice of acuity and ingenuity. Insecurity, instability, and indecision abound, but the common sense of good music performed well still prevails. These are times to try men’s souls, but Juliana Hall has invented sounds that silence the din of discord.

SIR JOHN STAINER (1840 – 1901): The Crucifixion—Mark Wilde (tenor), Graham Trew (baritone); The Choir of St. Marylebone Parish Church; Thomas Allery, organ; Gavin Roberts, Director of Music [Recorded in performance at St. Marylebone Parish Church, Marylebone, London, UK, on 25 March 2016; Herald A V Productions HAVPCD 399; 1 CD, 70:14; Available from Herald A V Productions, MDT (UK), and major music retailers]

Queen Victoria was perhaps not a woman of any particular religious fervor, but outward shows of piety were an integral aspect of the rigid public morality of the era in British history to which she lent her name. Innate English stoicism precluded the sorts of processional outpourings of faith that enthralled Catholic Mediterranean communities, but British society during Victoria’s long reign was a precise ordering of responsibilities large and small in which it was one’s duty whether in Belgravia, Birmingham, or Brighton to don one’s smartest clothes and finest manners on Sundays and receive from the Church of England’s rectors the verbal keys to Paradise. In his little-remembered 1852 work The History of Henry Esmond, William Makepeace Thackeray succinctly expressed the moral attitude of the age, a time in which the Queen’s adored consort was celebrated as a veritable martyr for the cause of the advancement of European political reform and Victoria herself was depicted—not always flatteringly—as the paragon of grieving widowhood. ‘'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard...'tis the living up to it that is difficult,’ a character in Thackeray’s book philosophizes to the eponymous protagonist. This sentiment illustrates a crucial element of the enduring emotional power of the narrative of Christ’s Passion. It is one thing to surrender one’s life in service to one’s cause but another thing entirely to live according to the ethos of one’s beliefs, and in the Gospel accounts of Christ’s Passion can be gleaned the quintessential tenets of what might be termed faith in action. Setting words by W. J. Sparrow Simpson, British composer Sir John Stainer continued the tradition of Renaissance and early Baroque music for Holy Week, Bach’s and Telemann’s Passions, Händel’s Messiah, and Liszt’s Christus with The Crucifixion, a concentrated exploration not solely of Christ’s death and resurrection but equally of the final acts of life that transformed a brutal execution into a transfiguration that has throughout two millennia influenced the course of human history in ways that perhaps even the man upon that cross did not foresee.

First performed on 24 February 1887, in London’s St. Marylebone Parish Church, the venue in which the present performance was recorded, Stainer’s ‘Meditation on the Sacred Passion of the Holy Redeemer’ epitomizes the Victorian affection for ceremony on an intimate scale. Proportioned for the musical forces of the village parish church rather than those of the grand cathedral, The Crucifixion advocates the grandeur of simplicity. Wholly eschewing pomposity, Stainer conceived a contemplative work in which, as in Bach’s Mathhäus-Passion, individual reflection is the central focus. There is abundant drama in the music for the soloists, but the action is primarily intellectual. Perhaps reacting to the shifting mores of his younger colleagues, Stainer himself disavowed his Crucifixion later in his career—an unfortunate and ill-deserved fate for so fine a work. When performed on an appropriate scale, as is done on this disc, The Crucifixion is no less compelling in its profoundly unaffected statement of faith than are Bach’s Passions in the magnificent expansiveness of theirs.

Led by Marylebone’s Director of Music Gavin Roberts with unfailing understanding of the score’s dimensions and the handling that they necessitate, this performance of The Crucifixion dispels any notions of Stainer’s score being merely a curiosity, a souvenir of Victoria’s England with limited appeal to Twenty-First-Century performers and audiences. Complementing Roberts’s pacing, the playing of organist Thomas Allery is an invaluable component of the success of this performance. Even organists as talented as Allery sometimes succumb to the temptation to approach The Crucifixion as a tone poem for organ with vocal obbligati. As he plays here, not least in the Processional to Calvary, Allery is neither willful soloist nor unambitious accompanist: he is a participant in the performance, the voices of his instrument contributing as compellingly to the momentum and impact of the storytelling as those of the soloists and choristers.

Declaiming his recitatives with unerringly clear diction and emotional forthrightness that never obscure the natural beauty of the voice, tenor soloist Mark Wilde movingly fulfills his evangelical duties. In the work’s opening recitative, ’And they came to a place called Gethsemane,’ and The Agony, the tenor, united in the latter with his baritone colleague, conveys the breathless tension of the events described whilst maintaining superb breath control. Wilde employs his silver-clad tones to sublime effect in The Majesty of the Divine Humiliation. There are in the strains of ‘Jesus said, Father, forgive them’ senses of magnanimity and inevitability, a benedictory acceptance of the fulfillment of destiny. The sadness that pervades Wilde’s reading of ‘When Jesus therefore saw His Mother’ is all the more affecting for seeming so personal. ‘After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished’ is sung with absolute commitment and unforced tonal beauty. In this performance, Wilde is a fantastic singer with none of the manifestations of ego that often compromise the integrity of singing at this level. Compared with previous recorded interpreters of this music, Wilde is more comfortable with Stainer’s idiom than the overtly operatic but bronze-voiced Richard Crook and possesses a timbre more attractive than Robert Tear’s. Wilde sets a new standard for the performance of the tenor solos.

In his every utterance as recorded here, baritone Graham Trew provides the authority that the music needs without hectoring or ignoring the humanity of the text. The character that he creates is a sensitive but strong-willed man, neither broken nor bullying. Musically, Trew is a powerful presence, his still-potent voice losing focus and resonance only on a pair of notes at the very top of the range. Like Wilde, he wastes not one sound on vocal display: his singing impresses because it serves the composer, librettist, and subject rather than the singer. Whereas Wilde touches the heart, Trew rouses the senses, depicting an unflappable hero certain to stir English pride. There is a suggestion of stark apprehension in Trew’s enunciation of ‘And when they had come to the place called Calvary,’ the directness of his elocution conveying the fateful implications of Christ’s arrival at Calvary. ‘He made Himself of no reputation’ is sung with touching dignity, the evocation of Christ’s humility inspiring the baritone to singing of special grace. Both ‘And as Moses lifted up the serpent’ and ‘And one of the malefactors’ are delivered with stirring fortitude. Trew joins with Wilde in a poetic traversal of the duet ‘So Thou liftest Thy divine petition.’ Stainer captured the essence of the uniquely English art of getting at the heart of a matter without frivolity or melodrama with his utterly unpretentious setting of ‘Is it nothing to you?’ Trew responds to the sincerity of Stainer’s expression with a nuanced articulation of the text that is completely free of artifice. The baritone’s vocalism captivates on its own terms, but it is his gift for acting with the voice that makes his singing in this performance of The Crucifixion intensely engaging.

With ‘Fling Wide the Gates,’ the Marylebone choristers enhance the performance with an encouraging exhibition of the continuing health of the storied English choral tradition. Roberts and the chorus never endeavor in this performance to sound as though they aspire to the Covent Garden stage, instead dedicating their considerable abilities to singing Stainer’s music as the score dictates. In ‘God so loved the world,’ the choir’s attention to balance among registers is gratifyingly apparent, and the composer’s part writing in The Appeal of the Crucified provides the choristers with an opportunity to exercise their thorough training—an opportunity that they seize with gusto. Basses Mark Chaundy and Andrew Copeman deliver solo lines with solid tone, further revealing the efficacy of the choir’s preparation. Stainer’s music is not of extraordinary difficulty, but it is astounding to note how often ‘easy’ music is badly performed. Honoring the legacy of their forebears who first sang this music 130 years ago, today’s St. Marylebone Parish Church choristers sing Stainer’s carefully-crafted choruses as though premièring The Crucifixion were entrusted to them.

So organic a part of this performance are the sounds of the congregation rising to sing the hymns that Stainer might have scored them. The Crucifixion’s five congregational hymns—The Mystery of the Divine Humiliation, Litany of the Passion, The Mystery of Intercession, The Adoration of the Crucified, and ‘For the love of Jesus’—cannot be expected to be perfectly sung when the oratorio is performed in its intended liturgical context, but the Marylebone parishioners acquit themselves splendidly. As sung here, the hymns are as enjoyable and involving cornerstones of Stainer’s score as the chorales are of Bach’s Passions.

The wonderful quality of the music making notwithstanding, the greatest joy of this performance of The Crucifixion is hearing this music truly live. Lacking very little of the polish made possible by the takes and retakes of recording in studio, this performance has all of the vitality that Stainer surely meant his work to engender. Immaculately engineered without being over-processed, this recording invites the listener into the rapt atmosphere of St. Marylebone Parish Church for an uplifting performance of a work that retains its potential to transcend its Victorian provenance. The recording label to be thanked for this release is very appropriately named, for this Crucifixion indeed heralds a revitalization not only of Sir John Stainer’s score but also of the exalted lineage of English choral music of which it is a part.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828), JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833 – 1897), and DAVID DEL TREDICI (born 1937): Bright Circle—Beth Levin, piano [Recorded at Peter Karl Studio, Brooklyn, New York, USA, in July and August 2016; Navona RecordsNV6074; 1 CD, 77:41; Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), iTunes, and major music retailers]

Whether the landscapes that they create are in oil or pastel, bronze or marble, song or symphony, great artists are born, but great artisans are nurtured. Far more plentiful are significant artists and impeccably-trained artisans than those remarkable creatures in whom exceptional natural ability and acquired refinement are combined. One admires the temperament that explodes from a Goya canvas whilst appreciating the technique that maintains the decorous equilibrium of a scene by Velázquez, but the controlled chaos of a work like Pablo Picasso’s Guernica displays a command of form that coincides with an astonishing interpretive depth. The foundation established by the former attribute allows the latter quality to be honed to the greatest extent permitted by the artist’s imagination. In music, the profundity of Bach’s and Mozart’s humanistic insights are so easily perceived by even the casual listener owing to the extraordinary, almost mathematical equilibrium of their compositions.

In that vein, the artistry of pianist Beth Levin possesses both the unteachable gift for solving music’s emotional riddles and the technical accomplishment required to present those solutions in a manner that enables listeners of all levels of musical sophistication to feel as though we, too, have discovered music’s innermost secrets. Playing music by Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, and David Del Tredici, Levin ignites the blank canvas of her new Navona Records disc Bright Circle with mesmerizing landscapes that metamorphose the sounds of the composers’ music into visual and tactile sensations that transport the listener into the resplendent core of her singular artistic sphere.

Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 20 in A major (D.959), one of the three remarkable final sonatas with which he fully explored the breadth of his genius for writing for the piano, was likely completed in its final form in September 1828, only two months before the young composer’s death. Contemporary accounts suggest that Schubert was a sensitive but imperfect pianist, a characterization that seems strange to the modern observer acquainted with the formidable demands of his mature music for the piano. Perhaps his mastery of the instrument was incomplete, but the A-major Sonata confirms that his understanding of composing for the piano equaled Beethoven’s and Chopin’s.

The complex thematic development of the Sonata’s opening Allegro movement is steered by modulations through a traditional circle of fourths, evoking the ‘bright circle’ of the disc’s title, and Levin plays the music with impressive technical acumen. In music from the last year of Schubert’s life, virtuosity is never a piece’s sole destination, however, and Levin is uncommonly clear-sighted in navigating the Sonata’s labyrinthian emotional byways. This is not melancholy music of a man anticipating death: in this music, Schubert clings passionately to life. The rhythmic tautness of Levin’s playing, consistent but never constricting, ideally serves the movement’s innate buoyancy. Some pianists bloat this music by trying to generate profundity where it already exists, but this pianist focuses on following the emotional threads that Schubert wove into the score. Recalling the basic structure of the haunting Lied ‘Pilgerweise,’ the Sonata’s Andantino movement is steeped in a poised tranquility that, as realized in this performance, is subtly disquieting. Levin phrases with a great Lieder singer’s intuitive handling of melodic lines, and she highlights the nuances of Schubert’s harmonic progressions with the skill of an expert organist emphasizing the inner voices of Bach counterpoint. To the Allegro vivace Scherzo the pianist brings a renewed commitment to finding within the composer’s carefully-constructed score the sentiments that Schubert wished to convey. Here and in the Allegretto Rondo final movement, its thematic profile bringing to mind the Lied ‘Im Frühling,’ Levin veritably transforms the piano into a full orchestra, extracting from both music and instrument an arresting array of colors. Still, even when her playing is most boldly extroverted, this is not a performance of the Sonata for the coldly cavernous expanse of a concert hall. Rather, the listener is given the gift of experiencing what seems like a private conversation with Schubert. The creatively-manipulated formal architecture of the Sonata provided the composer a framework within which he fabricated an intriguingly personal tonal narrative, and Levin’s retelling of it utilizes the inherent formality of the Sonata’s skeleton as a vividly-contrasted backdrop for the adventurous musical discourse. Many of the most celebrated pianists of the past century have recorded and included the D.959 Sonata in their recital repertories, but not even renowned interpreters of Schubert’s piano music such as Alfred Brendel and Mitsuko Uchida have exposed the authentic voice of Schubert as compellingly as Levin does in the performance on this disc.

A noted champion of contemporary music, Levin finds in American composer David Del Tredici’s Ode to Music an ideal outlet for her unique talents. A reworking of an earlier adaptation of Schubert’s touching Lied ‘An die Musik’ for wind quintet, Ode to Music develops the principal subject of ‘An die Musik’ after the manner of Schubert’s brilliant Wanderer-Fantasie, with, as Del Tredici indicates in his description of the piece, Lisztian and Wagnerian pretensions. Taking both performer and listener on a magical journey in eleven-and-a-half minutes, Del Tredici’s writing marvelously intertwines with Schubert’s familiar melody, the younger composer’s work exhibiting Ralph Vaughan Williams’s aptitude for assimilating existing thematic material into his own original music. Levin’s heart is clearly as captivated by Ode to Music as her fingers are energized by it. As she plays the piece, the listener immediately shares her enthusiasm.

Schubert’s A-major Sonata is the work of a youthful composer at the height of his powers but already at the end of his foreshortened career, but Brahms’s Opus 24 Variations and Fugue on the Air from Georg Friedrich Händel’s 1733 Suite for Harpsichord in B♭ major (HWV 434), completed in September 1861, are the product of a still-young genius in the morning of an extensive tenure as one of the greatest guardians of genuine musical Classicism. Dedicated to Clara Schumann, the muse of the first phase of his career, the twenty-five variations and concluding fugue constitute the zenith of Brahms’s writing for solo piano, an instrument for which he also wrote superlative concerti and chamber music. Bach and Händel bequeathed the basic musical forms of Classicism to Haydn and Mozart, who perfected and passed them on to Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, but it was often the conservatively revolutionary Brahms who reaped the most exotic blossoms grown from the old seeds. As Händel’s B♭-major Suite constituted an encyclopedic survey of writing for the keyboard in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, Brahms’s Variations and Fugue advanced the progress of compositional techniques from the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth.

What Levin achieves in her performance of the Variations and Fugue is exemplary. Singling out her playing of any of the Variations for special praise would distract from appreciation of her keenly intelligent approach to the work. Lest her technical prowess be taken for granted, it must be stated that she plays this challenging music with the ease of a promising conservatory student breezing through Hanon exercises. Nevertheless, it is her grasp of the near-miraculous continuity of Brahms’s writing that compels awe. As she proceeds through the Variations, delivering each with uncommon attention to the composer’s tempi and dynamics markings, the propulsive homogeneity with which the composer varied Händel’s theme is stunningly apparent. In Levin’s hands, the Variations and Fugue rightfully assume the monumental scale of a Strauss tone poem or a Mahler symphony. This results not from artificial inflation of the music but from playing it as Brahms wrote it, looking not beyond the score but squarely into it. Levin adheres to Brahms’s direction of ‘ma non più’ in the Larghetto thirteenth Variation without exaggerating the lilting quality of the music. As in her performance of the Schubert Sonata, Levin’s pianism expands the instrument’s timbral spectrum, her playing of Brahms’s music at once recreating the crisp cascading of Händel’s harpsichord and unleashing the full panoply of the Romantic orchestra. Amongst German-speaking composers of the Nineteenth Century, only Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Bruckner rivaled the contrapuntal acuity that Brahms lavished on the fugue that resolves his Händel variations. The analogy of an accomplished organist playing one of Bach’s fugues is as valid in the context of Levin’s playing of Brahms’s fugue as in that of her traversal of Schubert’s Sonata. She performs this music with the drive of an artist connecting with a fellow genius. Brahms’s score deserves nothing less.

The clarity of articulation and gossamer touch at all levels of dynamics that are the hallmarks of her playing on Bright Circle resemble the style of Julius Katchen, but Beth Levin’s artistry mimics no other pianist’s. It has been said, not without cause, that self-made men tend to think too highly of their makers. In an artist, though, originality is incalculably precious, and, though they well knew and loved the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms hewed their own paths from the bedrock of Classicism. By pioneering Neoromanticism, Del Tredici has pursued his own course, as well. Closing the bright circle that connects the three dissimilar composers whose music is performed on this disc is Beth Levin, a pianist whose interpretive sincerity affirms C. S. Lewis’s assessment in Mere Christianity of originality among artists. ‘No man who bothers about originality will ever be original,’ he wrote, ‘whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.’ Hearing Bright Circle, failing to notice Beth Levin’s originality, manifested in performances that are works of art as important as the pieces played, is impossible.

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): La fanciulla del West—Kristin Sampson (Minnie), Marcello Giordano (Dick Johnson), Aleksey Bogdanov (Jack Rance), Jason S. McKinney (Ashby), Gianluca Bocchino (Nick), Giovanni Guagliardo (Sonora), Johnathan White (Joe), Joshua Wild (Bello), David Clark (Happy), Noah Rice (Harry), Michael Francis Stomar (Jim Larkens), Donald Hartmann (Billy Jackrabbit), Carl DuPont (José Castro), Dan Boye (Sid), Nicholas Nestorak (Trin), Jeffrey McEvoy (Jake Wallace), Anna Harreveld (Wowkle), John Harmon (Un postiglione); Men of the Opera Carolina Chorus; Charlotte Symphony Orchestra; James Meena, conductor [Ivan Stefanutti, Director; Stefano Nicolao, Costume Designer; Michael Baumgarten, Digital Projection Designer; Opera Carolina, Belk Theater, Blumenthal Performing Arts, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA; Sunday, 23 April 2017]

In his biography of the man of dubious morals who was purported to be the model for the irreproachable protagonist of Owen Wister’s genre-defining novel The Virginian, John Watson wrote that ‘Los Angeles has never been a truly civilized place.’ Many of the Easterners who trekked to the Bear Republic in search of fame or fortune would surely have agreed that all of California could be a land of misery and misfortune, its beauties at once seductive and inhospitable. Whatever chivalry existed in the early California of Spanish missionaries, haciendas, and rancheros was quickly obliterated by the coarse manners and lawlessness that poured over the Sierra Nevada with prospectors in search of quick fortunes to be extracted from the celebrated lodes of the romanticized West. Careful study of history dispels the notion of California’s near-mythical Forty-Niners having been mostly a poorly-educated, hard-living lot, but the fraternity of work-wearied miners who populate David Belasco’s 1905 play The Girl of the Golden West owe what education and humanity of which they can boast to the eponymous Girl, the disarmingly unsophisticated but intriguingly complex proprietress of the Polka Saloon. That Belasco’s Girl was an unlikely sister for Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Mimì, Tosca, and Cio-Cio San, the last of these another lady to whom the Italian composer was introduced by a Belasco dramatization, made her all the more tantalizing. The musical characterization that resulted is one of Puccini’s most endearing, but the difficulty of the music that the Girl of the Golden West and her fellow residents of the Cloudy Mountain mining camp makes her an infrequent visitor to the world’s stages. Again treading into territory avoided by many of America’s regional opera companies, Opera Carolina brought La fanciulla del West to Charlotte with seismic passion befitting the opera’s fault-straddling setting. Why Fanciulla is neglected when Puccini’s other mature operas maintain prominence in the international repertory was obvious, but Opera Carolina’s performance fired Fanciulla’s virtues into the theatre with the accuracy of Annie Oakley’s rifle. Anyone in the audience who failed to take a shot to the heart wore armor impervious to opera at its best.

Commissioned during the managerial administration of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, La fanciulla del West was composed to order for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, by which company the opera was premièred on 10 December 1910, with Arturo Toscanini conducting and a cast including Emmy Destinn as Minnie, Enrico Caruso as the ‘road agent’ Dick Johnson (né Ramerrez), and Pasquale Amato as Sheriff Jack Rance. Immediately recognized as a work of exemplary musical craftsmanship, Fanciulla nonetheless failed to attain the level of popularity enjoyed by La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot. The demands exacted on singers, musicians, and conductor by Fanciulla are as imposing as the Sierra Nevada themselves, but, like the backbreaking work of the miners, the toil is richly rewarded.

Conducting with firm grasps on both the opera’s unflinching directness and its uncanny emotional impact, Opera Carolina’s General Director and Principal Conductor James Meena provided the focus and propulsion that a performance of Fanciulla needs without neglecting any of the score’s meticulously-wrought details. There was an abiding cinematic expansiveness to Meena’s approach, but this was not a Fanciulla that seemed like a film score with voices. The conductor’s gift for inspiring the Opera Carolina Chorus and the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra was much in evidence in the excellence of the ensembles’ work. Fanciulla is a daunting score for even the best-trained musicians, and the Charlotteans marvelously rose to the challenge. Harpist Andrea Mumm earned particular praise for her beautiful playing. Perhaps American musicians feel for this score something like the pride that Italians feel for Nabucco and the Viennese for Der Rosenkavalier, but the choral singing, orchestral playing, and conducting in Charlotte would distinguish a production of Fanciulla in any of the world’s great opera houses. The drama progressed at a near-ideal pace: nothing lingered beyond its capacity to captivate, and successive events had clarity and cohesion. Narratively, Fanciulla is arguably Puccini’s most tautly-constructed work, with no offstage madrigals or farewells to overcoats to delay the resolutions of scenes, and Meena insightfully steered the performance through the few pages of the scores that can present problems with momentum. During his seventeen-year tenure with the company, Meena has been on the podium for many of Opera Carolina’s greatest successes, among which was an unforgettable Turandot in 2015. This performance of La fanciulla del West raised the bar for future Opera Carolina seasons and for the quality of productions of Fanciulla throughout the world.

A native Californian, David Belasco worked before his theatrical aspirations took him to New York as stage manager at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada, a bustling town enriched by the high-quality silver extracted from the Comstock Lode. The experience that he gained in this bastion of the legendary Old West served him well throughout his career, which encompassed not only Broadway success and collaborations with Puccini but also nurturing the development of talented young actors, one of whom, Barbara Stanwyck, would eventually portray one of the foremost heroines of American television Westerns, Victoria Barkley on The Big Valley. In Opera Carolina’s production of Fanciulla, an ambitious joint venture with Teatro di Giglio in Lucca, Puccini’s hometown, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, and the revitalized New York City Opera, it looked as though at any moment in the performance the Cartwrights of the Ponderosa, the Graingers of Shiloh, or any of the familiar figures of America’s fictionalized West might have strode onto the stage. Historical accuracy was not among Puccini’s foremost goals when creating a score, but his operatic excursion into the American West, guided by the first-hand knowledge that enlivened Belasco’s play, is distinguished by a magnitude of realism rare even in verismo.

Fanciulla takes place circa 1850, not long after the first large-scale discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Mexican California in 1848 [the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally ceded modern California to the United States of America, was not signed until nine days after the initial discovery at Sutter’s Mill], and conjuring an atmosphere reflecting the opera’s physical and temporal settings was a central focus in Opera Carolina’s production. Rather than frequently-encountered depictions as a cigar-store Indian and his daft squaw, for instance, Billy Jackrabbit and Wowkle were here credible representatives of California’s indigenous peoples; in the case of those in proximity to gold-mining country, perhaps the Modoc. Nevertheless, theatricality was not lost amidst the visual verisimilitude embodied by Atelier Nicolai’s costumes, Ivan Stefanutti’s production designs, and the sets and digital projections, supervised by Opera Carolina’s Director of Production Michael Baumgarten and built in the company’s Gastonia workshop. Granted access to the company’s San Francisco archives by the Charlotte office of Wells Fargo, the production team brought to the Belk Theater stage a California mining camp as authentic as any that has existed in the century since the cessation of mining transformed once-vibrant boom towns into dusty, deserted ghost towns. The stenches of whiskey and cigar smoke veritably wafted from the interior of Opera Carolina’s Polka Saloon, a raucous establishment tamed in an instant by its Girl and her Bible lessons—and her six shooter. Instead of the Halloween-cowboy pageants often imposed upon Puccini’s opera, this was a Fanciulla so absorbing that it was surprising not to hear the jangling of spurs and shot glasses during the interval.

Ciao, ragazzi: the cast of Opera Carolina’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, April 2017
[Photo by Mitchell Kearney, © by Opera Carolina]

The degree to which Puccini and his librettists, Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini, were faithful to Belasco’s play is remarkable, not least in the subtly-characterized vignettes of Cloudy Mountain’s miners and patrons of the Polka Saloon. Amidst the perils of Belasco’s mining camp, where missteps can send the careless plummeting into the abyss and misspeaks might be rewarded with gunfire no less fatal, thoughtfulness is a precious commodity, and the tender hearts amongst the hardscrabble denizens of Puccini’s Cloudy Mountain therefore beat still more perceptibly. As the Postiglione—not, as Belaso (but not Puccini) and Opera Carolina’s playbill and supertitles indicated, a Pony Express rider, as the Pony Express only rode for nineteen months, a decade after Fanciulla takes place—who electrifies the Polka with the fateful message from the treacherous woman of ill repute, Nina Micheltoreña [she loses her tilde in Italian, pobrecita], indicating her willingness to betray the bandit she loved to Wells Fargo, John Harmon delivered his lines with equal expediency and effectiveness. The miners Joe, Bello, Harry, and Happy, each having his moment in the spotlight, were brought to life with good singing and acting by Johnathan White, Joshua Wild, Noah Rice, and David Clark. Bass-baritones Jason S. McKinney and Carl DuPont as Wells Fargo agent Ashby and his quarry José Castro, a member of Ramerrez’s party of stagecoach robbers, deployed firm, focused voices in Puccini’s congenial lines and clearly enjoyed playing their parts in the drama.

Mezzo-soprano Anna Harreveld opened Act Two with a portrayal of Minnie’s Native American domestic Wowkle that was laudably free of caricature, her singing of ‘Il mio bimbo è grande e piccino’ unusually attractive. Her shy glances at her mistress as she entertained Johnson spoke volumes about the girl’s attachment to Minnie. An operatic Buster Keaton with the vocal resonance of Nazzareno De Angelis, bass-baritone Donald Hartmann set the wooden Billy Jackrabbit, Wowkle’s intended consort, ablaze with aptly earthy vocalism. Affability boomed from his singing of ‘Tua padrona mandare. Dice: Billy sposare.’ Special care was expended in lessening the pejorative implications of Wowkle’s and Billy’s frequent articulations of ‘Ugh.’ Communicative rather than offensively indicative of savagery in this performance, the monosyllables were neither more nor less than the knowing private language of a community of two.

As Sid, Belasco’s ‘Sidney Duck,’ bass-baritone Dan Boye protested his punishment for cheating at cards without overdoing the histrionics, and, like all of his fellow citizens of Cloudy Mountain, the sincerity of this Sid’s devotion to Minnie could not be questioned. Tenor Nicholas Nestorak was a stylish, sympathetic Trinidad, and baritone Jeffrey McEvoy made the minstrel Jake Wallace’s Andante tranquillo ballad ‘Che faranno i vecchi miei là lontano’ an interlude of moving but not overwrought nostalgia. Michael Francis Stromar voiced the broken Jim Larkens’s longing to return home, ‘Non reggo più, non reggo più, ragazzi,’ heartbreakingly, legitimizing the magnanimous reaction of his friends, whose collection of funds for Larkens’s homeward journey is as poignant in its way as Mimì’s and Cio-Cio San’s deaths in La bohème and Madama Butterfly. Tenor Gianluca Bocchino sang appealingly as Nick, the Polka’s wily barkeep, the character’s concern for Minnie’s welfare as palpable as his boundless affection for her, but he sometimes struggled to project over Puccini’s orchestrations. Baritone Giovanni Guagliardo was a tough but tender Sonora, singing ‘Le tue parole sono di Dio’ in Act Three eloquently. In the opera’s final scene, the miners’ repetitions of ‘Mai più ritornerai, no, mai più, mai più’ were profoundly touching, their sadness at Minnie’s departure from Cloudy Mountain as expansive as the California landscapes that surrounded them.

The lady and the law: (from left to right) Bass-baritone Jason S. McKinney as Ashby, soprano Kristin Sampson as Minnie, and baritone Aleksey Bogdanov as Jack Rance in Opera Carolina's production of Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West, April 2017
[Photo by Mitchell Kearney, © by Opera Carolina]

In terms of the leading rôles in Puccini’s operas, only Turandot is as difficult to cast as La fanciulla del West. Rance and Johnson demand vocal and dramatic resources at least as great as those wielded by the best interpreters of their counterparts in Tosca and Il tabarro. Ideally, Minnie requires a voice poised between Tosca and Turandot, allying a reliable lower octave with an upper extension capable of scaling the formidable heights of the tessitura and soaring in her Act One aria to one of opera’s most ferocious exposed top Cs. The ranks of great Toscas and Turandots are hardly overpopulated, but great Minnies are still fewer. Two of the finest American exponents of the rôle, Eleanor Steber and Dorothy Kirsten, would likely have been advised by competent vocal coaches to avoid the part, which since it was recorded by Birgit Nilsson has often been assigned to singers with credentials in Wagner and Richard Strauss repertories rather than Puccinians—if, that is, bonafide Puccinians have existed in the years since Renata Tebaldi sang her final Minnie. In the seasons since the opera’s centennial in 2010, Fanciulla has been performed more often than in decades past, but the casting of Rance, Johnson, and Minnie in a number of productions has reaffirmed the near-impossibility of manning a production of Fanciulla with singers capable of more than basic survival in the lead rôles. Here, too, Opera Carolina succeeded astonishingly, giving the Charlotte audience a central trio by no means unworthy of music first sung by Amato, Caruso, and Destinn.

Jack Rance, Cloudy Mountain’s rugged lawman, is, perhaps in spite of himself, one of Puccini’s most three-dimensional characters. Duplicitous, jealous, and merciless, even he is ennobled to some extent by his interactions with Minnie. As portrayed by baritone Alexsey Bogdanov in Opera Carolina’s Fanciulla, he was conniving but conflicted, lust never wholly overwhelming an inherent decorum. At the start of Act One, his singing of ‘Che terra maledetta, quest’occidente d’oro!’ evinced bitterness, but there was sly humor in the calm professionalism of ‘Andiam, ragazzi; un po’ di calma’ and his handling of Sid’s transgression. The rancor between Rance and Ashby in Belasco is muted by Puccini, and Bogdanov’s Rance presented his counterpart to the Polka’s customers with a hearty account of ‘Ragazzi, fate largo! Salute a mister Ashby, dell’Agenzia Wells Fargo.’ The utter conviction with which he referred to Minnie as ‘Mistress Rance, fra poco’ was both arrogant and strangely vulnerable, the sardonic gambler suddenly revealing his hand. As much sweetness as such a man can muster was infused into the baritone’s singing of ‘Ti voglio bene, Minnie,’ and Bogdanov phrased the lovely Andante sostenuto ‘Minnie, dalla mia casa son partito ch’è là dai monti’ with awkward but affecting feeling. None too happy about a stranger’s interruption of his floundering wooing of Minnie, Rance’s frustration burgeoned in Bogdanov’s virile singing of ‘Mister Johnson, voi m’avete seccato!’ and ‘Ragazzi! Uno straniero ricusa confessare perchè si trova al campo!’

Stealing like the howling blizzard into Minnie’s cabin in Act Two, the boyish glee with which Bogdanov’s Rance voiced ‘Abbiamo detto che il tuo perfetto Johnson di Sacramento,’ disavowing Minnie of her imperfect acquaintance with her ‘dandy,’ was disgustingly smug. Later, returning in search of the injured Johnson, he corrected Minnie with a brutal reading of ‘Non son Jack...Son lo Sceriffo, a caccia del tuo Johnson d’inferno.’ Bogdanov’s body language conveyed the tension of the poker game for Minnie’s and Johnson’s freedom as grippingly as his flinty singing. Conceding defeat, he departed with a growled ‘Buona notte’ that imparted far more than a crestfallen goodbye. The full force of Rance’s anger and disenfranchisement exploded in Act Three, and Bogdanov recalled Louis Quilico with a startlingly vehement account of ‘Or piangi tu, o Minnie, or piangi tu!’ Throughout the performance, Bogdanov’s top Fs were perfectly-pitched and powerful, and he filled the theatre with exhilaratingly masculine sound without shouting. The irony that radiated from his singing of ‘E così, Mister Johnson, come va?’ was as stinging as the blow he dealt his captured rival for Minnie’s love, and his tones when he hurled ‘Basta, donna, alle tue parole!’ at Minnie were those of a man already past the point of no return—a man who declared in Act One that he fears no destiny but is shattered by circumstances that he cannot manipulate. Clad in a suit of a hue that seemed drawn from the depths of Lake Tahoe, Bogdanov was a thrillingly-sung Rance who was all the more dangerous for being so debonair.

Passion at the Polka: Tenor Marcello Giordani as Johnson (left) and soprano Kristin Sampson as Minnie (right) in Opera Carolina’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, April 2017 [Photo by Mitchell Kearney, © by Opera Carolina]

With a career that has taken him to the world’s most celebrated opera houses for performances of a wide repertory encompassing many of the most difficult rôles written for the tenor voice, Marcello Giordani is among the few truly qualified heirs to the legacy of Bergonzi and Corelli. Bergonzi and Corelli were very different singers, of course, and at his best Giordani has exemplified the finest qualities of both of his forebears, combining aspects of Bergonzi’s grace and musicality with Corelli’s unbridled intensity. Although he unwisely ventured the title rôle in Verdi’s Otello very late in his career, Bergonzi never sang Johnson, but Puccini’s bandito was a good fit for Corelli, not least opposite Dorothy Kirsten’s feminine but fearless Minnie in the 1966 MET revival of Fanciulla. When the MET celebrated the opera’s hundredth anniversary in the 2010 – 2011 Season, it was to Giordani that Johnson’s music was entrusted. Solely as singing, the tenor’s performance of the rôle was in many ways more successful in Charlotte than in New York. The voice’s lower octave was slow in coming under control and could turn unruly at any time throughout the afternoon, but pitches were mostly placed accurately and solidly. Most notably, Giordani left sobbing and other Italian tenor mannerisms to other singers, preferring simply to sing the music. Strutting into the Polka’s barroom, ready to face the threatened ‘hair curling’ he garnered by ordering whiskey with water, Johnson was stopped in his tracks by recognizing Minnie as the enchanting girl he once met on the road to Monterey. Giordano’s voice lacked the youthful vigor needed for ‘Chi c’è, per farmi i ricci?’ but exuded the bashful wonder of ‘Vi ricordate di me?’ His voicing of ‘Non so ben neppur io quel che sono’ flowed organically to a brilliant top B♭, and the tenor’s dulcet phrasing of the beautiful Andante mosso moderatamente ‘Quello che tacete me l’ha detto il cor’ revealed his instinctive comprehension of Puccini’s style.

The ardor of ‘Un bacio, un bacio almen!’ in Act Two surged without vulgarity, and Giordano lent his singing of ‘Minnie! Che dolce nome!’—a line that, largely owing to supertitles, inexplicably prompts laughter from today’s audiences—romantic restraint that heightened the significance of the sentiment. Giordani joined his Minnie in an incandescent performance of their unison ‘Dolce vivere e morir e non lasciarci più’ in which they soared with few hints of effort to the top B♭s and C. Revealed as Ramerrez, the bandit being pursued by Wells Fargo, Johnson’s explanation of the circumstances that precipitated his criminal enterprise fell on ears too consumed by pealing anger to fully hear and process his words, but Giordani sang ‘Ma non vi avrei rubato!’ and discharged Johnson’s repeated top B♭s with enthralling enthusiasm. Giordani sang Johnson’s aria in Act Three, the emotionally-charged Andante molto lento ‘Ch’ella mi creda libero e lontano,’ with a stream of glowing, easily-projected tone, rising to the pair of top B♭s strongly. The quiet relief and honest gratitude with which he voiced ‘Grazie, fratelli’ after Sonora and the miners freed him from the noose and reunited him with Minnie succinctly disclosed the essence of the complicated but honorable character Giordani had personified throughout the performance. Bidding farewell to the land of Johnson’s youth, Giordani addressed ‘Addio, mia dolce terra’ as much to the peaks and valleys of his life as to the California topography, the top B a cry of rebirth. Having an artist of Giordani’s reputation in Charlotte is an accomplishment of which the city should be proud, but having a Johnson of the quality provided by Giordani in Opera Carolina’s La fanciulla del West was a priceless gift to opera lovers.

A performance of La bohème can overcome poor singing from its Mimì, but Minnie in Fanciulla faces the most daunting fate of any Puccini heroine: survival. The vocal sins of an inadequate Mimì are easily forgiven when she breathes her last in the company of her friends, but Minnie, whose resilience is the backbone of Fanciulla, has no tragedy behind which to hide. Upon her shoulders, the opera soars or sinks, and soprano Kristin Sampson, a diminutive Atlas with a voice of satin and steel, lofted Opera Carolina’s Fanciulla into the endless California sky with an imaginative but delightfully straightforward portrayal of Minnie. Though reinforced by a shot from her pistol, this Minnie’s entrance was sufficient to end the fracas among Rance, Sonora, and their factions in Act One, her pointed query ‘Che cos’è stato?’ reducing the burly men to stuttering embarrassment. Beginning the miners’ coveted Bible lesson, Sampson voiced the Andantino ‘Dove eravamo? Ruth...Ezechiel’ and the plaintive ‘Lavami e sarò bianco come neve’ girlishly, laying the foundation of belief in redemption and rejuvenation upon which the opera’s final scene is built. Derisively describing Nina Micheltoreña when the Postiglione brought news of the harlot’s proposed meeting with Ashby, her voice assumed an air of coquetry as she insinuated ‘È una finta spagnuola nativa di Cachuca.’ Sparring with Rance, for whom the respect she invoked was genuine, was for Sampson’s Minnie sport without the slightest indication of ill will. The surprise and hurt of Rance’s betrayal of the cordiality of their relationship were therefore heightened.

Sampson approached Minnie’s Andantino aria ‘Laggiù nel Soledad, ero piccina’ not as a showpiece but as a rare reverie in which the girl allowed herself to reminisce about the distant joys of her childhood. The soprano ascended to a bright, secure top C, but this was a component rather than the goal of her performance of the aria. Energized by Johnson’s unexpected arrival at the Polka, Sampson’s Minnie vouched for him with an ‘Io lo conosco! Innanzi al campo intero...sto garante per Johnson!’ of inviolable integrity. When invited to dance, the innocence at the core of Sampson’s mirthful reading of ‘Io? Scusatemi: voi non lo crederete, non ho mai ballato in vita mia’ was enchanting. Guarded surrender to new feelings emanated from her singing of ‘Mister Johnson, siete rimasto indiestro a farmi compagnia per custodir la casa?’ Her well-schooled vocalism notwithstanding, it was impossible to doubt this Minnie when she asserted ‘Io non son che una povera fanciulla’ and punctuated the declaration with a shining top B. There is no more bewitchingly self-effacing remark in opera than Minnie’s ‘Non v’aspettate molto! Non ho che trenta dollari soli d’educazione,’ in which she ashamedly warns Johnson of the dullness of her conversation owing to her education amounting to only what thirty dollars can buy, and Sampson sang the lines without a trace of artifice. Remembering Johnson’s parting words, she caressed each syllable of ‘Come ha detto? Un viso d’angelo,’ ending Act One with a sigh of reawakened love.

Few characters in opera experience greater personal upheaval than Minnie endures in Act Two of La fanciulla del West. Preparing the mountainside cabin—and herself—to host Johnson, Sampson’s Minnie proclaimed ‘Voglio vestirmi tutta come in giorno di festa’ with boundless joy, her top B♭ like a beacon to guide Johnson along the craggy path to her welcoming abode. As in her aria in Act One, she phrased ‘Oh, se sapeste come il vivere è allegro!’ in a manner in which her stunning top B was an extension of the line rather than its own destination. Sampson’s fortissimo top C when Minnie awarded her first kiss to Johnson left no doubt about the breadth of her elation. Having embraced these new sensations, the upending of her world when Rance brusquely informed her that her lover was deceiving her was devastating. Sampson vaulted ‘Vieni fuori, vieni fuori, vieni fuor!’ into the theatre with abandon, her top B♭ glinting. The rising tide of her desperation crested on the soprano’s incendiary voicing of ‘Vigliacco! Ah! Via di qua, vigliacco!’ She gamely touched the top C♯ that Puccini cruelly requested, the roar of a wounded soul. The scene in which Minnie challenges Rance to a life-or-death game of poker is nothing short of genius, and Puccini’s orchestration, reducing the soundscape to percussion amplifying the palpitations of Minnie’s heart, is the work of a keen theatrical sensibility. Sampson suggested ‘Una partita a poker!’ with pluck that tempered her anxiety. Having distracted Rance and produced the winning hand from the folds of her skirt, this Minnie’s ‘Vi sbagliate. È la gioia! Ho vinto io! Tre assi e un paio!’ brandished the brawn of Brünnhilde’s battle cry. The string of top As as Minnie entered in Act Three streaked across the gloomy scene like lightning, and even at the foot of the scaffold the miners’ faces were illuminated with the happiness that Minnie brought to them. Sampson sang ‘Di qual giustizia parli tu?’ potently, and with ‘Non vi fumai chi disse: Basta!’ she scolded the society into which she introduced the concepts of compassion and forgiveness. This was her final lesson to her beloved friends: as Hermann Hesse put it, there are situations in which letting go requires greater strength of character than holding on. Sampson’s Minnie was a fighter without enmity, in voice as much as in spirit a true Girl of the Golden West.

Puccini is often conceded to be an important composer of opera but is seldom if ever cited as a great composer in a broader sense. On the whole, it is difficult to dispute the validity of such an assessment, but hearing a persuasive performance of La fanciulla del West can convince an open-minded listener that Puccini was far more than a purveyor of pretty tunes and weepy melodramas. Much has been written about the shadows of Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even Wagner that stretch across the rocky vistas of La fanciulla del West, but the voice that emerges most viscerally from the score is Puccini’s. Opera Carolina’s production of La fanciulla del West let Puccini’s voice be heard without obstruction, not just putting on a marvelous show but reclaiming the hope of a time in which prosperity was measured not by bank balances and possessions but by hard work, honesty, and fairness. This was a Fanciulla del West that rekindled the famous words of Walt Whitman: in this performance, one could hear America singing.

Revolver to the rescue: Tenor Marcello Giordani as Johnson (left) and soprano Kristin Sampson as Minnie (right) in Opera Carolina’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, April 2017
[Photo by Mitchell Kearney, © by Opera Carolina]

CARL HEINRICH GRAUN (1703 or 1704 – 1759): Opera Arias—Julia Lezhneva, soprano; Concerto Köln; Mikhail Antonenko, conductor [Recorded in Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal, Köln, Germany, 17 – 18, 26 – 27, and 29 – 30 September 2016; DECCA483 1518; 1 CD, 65:12; Available from Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), iTunes, Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

In the summer of 1966, an ensemble of singers including Lauris Elms, Monica Sinclair, and Dame Joan Sutherland gathered alongside the Ambrosian Singers and London Philharmonic Orchestra in London’s Kingsway Hall to record excerpts from a pair of operas that by the middle of the Twentieth Century had been dormant for more than two hundred years. The subject of the first of these curiosities, a storied paragon of patience and virtue immortalized in literature by Giovanni Boccaccio, was one of the most popular operatic heroines of the Eighteenth Century, an inspiration to Antonio Maria Bononcini, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Antonio Vivaldi. Rather than the work of any of these acknowledged masters, it was Giovanni Battista Bononcini’s 1733 London opera Griselda that Sutherland’s husband Richard Bonynge resurrected for the studio microphones. Griselda’s unlikely companion in the eventual DECCA compact disc reissue was another of Baroque opera’s most widely-traveled characters, Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, the ruler of the Aztec empire at the time of Spanish conquest. Like Griselda, Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin was given an operatic outing of excellent quality by Vivaldi, but it was to a setting of the Aztec emperor’s encounter with Hernán Cortés by Carl Heinrich Graun that Bonynge turned his attention. First performed at Berlin’s Hofoper in 1755, Graun’s Montezuma was distinguished by a libretto adapted from Voltaire’s Alzire, ou Les Américains by Friedrich der Große, the music-loving King of Prussia at whose court the composer served as Kapellmeister for nearly two decades. A half-century after Sutherland and Bonynge devoted their considerable powers to exposing the beauties of Graun’s Montezuma, a DECCA release is again the vehicle for a riveting rediscovery of wonderful music by this still-neglected composer. Backed by acclaimed period instrument ensemble Concerto Köln, young Russian soprano Julia Lezhneva lends her pellucid timbre and quicksilver technique to performances of eleven arias from seven of Graun’s operas, not one of which has been revived in modern times. A fascinating journey through music that deserves to be heard, this disc creates a compelling portrait of Graun as both composer and dramatist. Likewise, it introduces Julia Lezhneva as not only a superb vocalist, in which rôle she has earned plaudits throughout the world, but also as a surefooted musical spelunker, able and willing to descend into the cavernous recesses of archives and libraries in search of scores awaiting a modern interpreter to reawaken them.

The presence of a question mark after the date of a composer’s birth often indicates a lack of reliable information about the education and experience that contributed to his mature artistry. Carl Heinrich Graun was born in Wahrenbrück in Brandenburg; whether in 1701, 1703, or 1704—the years put forth as contenders by most sources—has not yet been definitively established. The young Graun and his brother are documented as having been members of the famous Dresdner Kreuzchor, and Graun’s musical studies were likely divided between voice and composition. In the years prior to his engagement as Kapellmeister at the court of Friedrich der Große, Graun was a respected chorister, tenor soloist, and composer in theatres in Dresden, Braunschweig, and Rheinsberg. It was in the last of these cities that he likely made the acquaintance of his future royal employer, having been commissioned to write an opera in celebration of then Crown Prince Friedrich’s 1733 nuptials. Despite Friedrich’s obvious fondness for his work, which some evidence suggests was secondary in the king’s affection to his singing, Graun’s music was seemingly quickly forgotten after the composer’s death in Berlin in 1759. Like his near contemporary Johann Adolf Hasse, Graun’s works were not unknown to fellow artists and connoisseurs like Mozart and his staunch supporter in Imperial Vienna, Baron van Swieten, but only the 1755 Passion cantata Der Tod Jesu and a few instrumental pieces preserved Graun’s name from complete oblivion until the Twentieth Century’s revival of interest in Montezuma, Cesare e Cleopatra, and other of the composer’s works.

Concerto Köln’s acquaintance with Graun’s operatic style extends back more than two decades. In 1995, following a production first heard at the Festival Baroque de Versailles in 1992 and later staged at Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, the orchestra and a fine cast conducted by René Jacobs recorded a sterling account of Graun’s 1742 opera Cesare e Cleopatra, the work commissioned by Friedrich der Große two-and-a-half centuries earlier to inaugurate Berlin’s newly-built Königliches Opernhaus. Here sharing concertmaster duties under the direction of conductor Mikhail Antonenko, Dmitry Sinkovsky and Emilio Percan lead today’s Concerto Köln in pursuing the same goals of historically-informed and emotionally-engaged playing that have been hallmarks of the ensemble’s performance since the group’s formation in 1985. Guided by the emotional contexts of the music, the tempi enacted on this disc are consistently intelligent, those for extroverted utterances excitingly challenging and those for contemplative passages beguilingly lilting. The stylish, imaginative playing of lutenist Luca Pianca further enhances the appeal of the disc’s instrumental substratum. The orchestra’s performance of the Sinfonia from Graun’s opera Rodelinda, regina de’ Langobardi, a subject familiar from Händel’s 1725 setting of a revision of the Antonio Salvi libretto that inspired both Giacomo Antonio Perti in 1710 and Graun in 1741 [in fact, Graun employed an adaptation by Giovanni Gualberto Bottarelli of the revision of Salvi’s libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym set by Händel], is an ideal example of the aesthetic that Concerto Köln’s playing on this disc exemplifies: sounding wholly appropriate for music composed in the first half of the Eighteenth Century to the extent that practices of that era are now understood, the orchestral textures are full-bodied, fully convincing backdrops for the emotional tableaux of the arias.

Unlike Gluck’s and Bertoni’s later operatic treatments of the Orpheus myth, Graun’s 1752 opera L’Orfeo included a dramatis personæ expanded beyond the lyre-wielding hero, his ill-fated bride, and an amorous deity. The aria ‘Sento una pena’ is sung by Aspasia, the Thracian queen who vies with Euridice for Orfeo’s love, and Lezhneva responds to the aria’s despondent sentiments with vocalism of unnerving immediacy, the forward placement of vowels enabling her to darken the sound to suit the text without distorting or dulling her naturally gleaming timbre. Frightened by the potential consequences of Aspasia’s jealousy, Euridice incites Orfeo to flee with her in ‘Il mar s’inalza e freme,’ a virtuosic simile aria comparable in quality to the best of Vivaldi’s writing in this vein. The ease with which Lezhneva meets the music’s bravura demands is flabbergasting, but there is content in her coloratura. The soprano’s vocal fireworks are dizzyingly impressive, but she does not allow the listener to ignore the dramatic events that light the fuses of Graun’s rockets of notes. A touching lament for the fallen Euridice sung by Orfeo’s brother Aristeo, ‘D’ogni aura al mormorar’ receives from Lezhneva a traversal of limpid melancholy, the gravity of the words intensified by the deftness with which the singer extends the line.

Most familiar to modern listeners in her later Gluckian guise, Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra—or, according to some writers, of Theseus and Helen—and sister of Orestes and Electra, is another figure who was popular with composers throughout the Eighteenth Century. Graun contended with the unfortunate girl’s plight in his 1748 opera Ifigenia in Aulide. Lezhneva offers an aria for Ifigenia’s father, the Greek king Agamemnone, ‘Sforzerò l’avverso mare.’ Her singing here exudes the much-tested monarch’s authority, as well as the psychological toll of his tribulation. The soprano is often at her best when dispatching fiorature at breakneck velocity, but in this music she makes an equally cogent impression with her handling of rests and verbal cadences. Her Italian diction is not that of a native speaked but is generally accurate without being exaggerated. Dating from 1749, Volunnia’s aria ‘Senza di te, mio bene’ from Coriolano is sufficient to establish Graun’s reputation as a significant composer of opera, and Lezhneva finds in its expressive phrases a splendid outlet for her musical and dramatic sensibilities, her account of the aria glistening with ornaments that complement her nuanced handling of the text.

Perhaps the most frequently-mined lode of operatic source material during the Eighteenth Century was Torquato Tasso’s 1581 epic Gerusalemme liberata. Even before Händel composed Rinaldo, the first Italian opera written exclusively for the London stage, in 1711, Tasso’s Armida had already served as the heroine of a tragédie en musique by Lully, and she would go on to collect operatic homages from Haydn, Rossini, and Dvořák. In 1751, Graun’s Armida brought the pagan sorceress and her romantic tangle with the Christian knight Rinaldo to Friedrich der Große’s Hofoper. Lezhneva first sings the knight Ubaldo’s entreaty to Rinaldo to seek glory in righteous conflict rather than pleasure in the company of Armida, ‘La gloria t’invita.’ This spirited exhortation makes formidable technical demands, but the soprano’s negotiations of the difficult passagework and carefully-managed breath control conquer the aria’s pitfalls. Of a vastly different but no less daunting nature is Armida’s aria ‘A tanti pianti miei,’ in her singing of which Lezhneva, persuasively impersonating the legendary enchantress, invokes her own dazzling musical wizardry, casting an unbreakable spell with her scintillating upper register.

The eponymous protagonist of Graun’s 1750 opera Il Mithridate is familiar as the hero of the fourteen-year-old Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto, but the aria selected for inclusion on this disc, ‘Piangete, o mesti lumi,’ belongs to Rosmiri, a character not present in Mozart’s opera. The evenness of Lezhneva’s singing throughout the range of the music highlights the faculty with which Graun wrote for voices, whether those of castrati or female singers. The potency of the soprano’s limning of Rosmiri’s despair is touching, all the more so for her vocalism being cleanly articulated. With a libretto in which his royal patron had a hand, Graun’s Silla from 1753 visited territory covered in Händel’s little-remembered Lucio Cornelio Silla, as well as in the young Mozart’s Lucio Silla. Ottavia’s vehement recitative ‘Parmi...ah no!’ and aria ‘Venga pure, e ardita, e forte’ are performed by Lezhneva and Concerto Köln with histrionic fire that ignites the intricacies of the composer’s part writing. The incisiveness of the singer’s phrasing of Postumio’s aria ‘No, no, di Libia fra l’arene’ spurs appreciation of Graun’s great talent for musical storytelling. Lezhneva’s discovery of Agrippina’s aria ‘Mi paventi il figlio indegno’ from Graun’s 1751 opera Britannico is cited in George Loomis’s concisely informative liner notes as the catalyst for the soprano’s interest in the composer’s music and the impetus for this recording project. As she sings the aria here, Graun could hope for no more eloquent, committed, and purely beautiful a starting point for the modern listener eager to explore his music.

Even when recorded with the technological finesse achieved in the engineering of this disc, voices can be difficult to analyze and assess in the context of studio recordings. Julia Lezhneva’s illustrious predecessor in the DECCA Graun discography is a perfect case study. Among Dame Joan Sutherland’s many recordings for the label, almost all of which are worthwhile documents of the continuous development of one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest voices, her recording of Puccini’s Turandot comes nearest to faithfully capturing the remarkable amplitude and sheer aural impact of Sutherland’s instrument in the opera house. In terms of tonal heft, Lezhneva is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Sutherland, but her voice, too, tests recording technicians’ skills. Tending to sound brittle and monochromatic if recorded in unsympathetic acoustics, Lezhneva’s voice is an instrument of innumerable shadows and overtones, the bright sheen of the timbre extending from a gossamer mezza voce to clarion tintinnabulation that projects with power surprising for a voice of modest dimensions. In the performances on this disc, Lezhneva’s voice is placed in an aural space in which her tones have ample resonance, possessing just enough of a metallic edge to oblige the listener to devote as much attention to the musical and dramatic details of Graun’s arias as the singer has done. With this welcome disc, Lezhneva absorbingly refines her artistry and adds Graun’s voice to the growing conversation about the important operatic innovators of the first half of the Eighteenth Century.

VINCENZO BELLINI (1801 – 1835): Adelson e Salvini—Simone Alberghini (Lord Adelson), Enea Scala (Salvini), Daniela Barcellona (Nelly), Maurizio Muraro (Bonifaccio), Rodion Pogossov (Colonel Struley), David Soar (Geronio), Kathryn Rudge (Fanny), Leah-Marian Jones (Madama Rivers); Opera Rara Chorus; BBC Symphony Orchestra; Daniele Rustioni, conductor [Recorded in BBC Maida Vale Studios, London, England, in May 2016; Opera Rara ORC56; 2 CDs, 153:29; Available from Opera Rara and major music retailers]

If the repertories of the world’s most prominent opera houses were reliable criteria for judging the musical development of the greatest composers of opera, it would be easy to conclude that these composers emerged, Athena-like, from their respective places of origin as fully-formed artists with complete dominion over their faculties. The notable exceptions are Mozart, whose pre-Idomeneo operas have retained at least a measure of curiosity value among opera lovers, and Verdi, whose early scores still cling to the periphery of the international repertory despite performances that more often than not mishandle the music. The performance diaries of the world’s leading theatres would have one believe that Rossini’s career began with Il barbiere di Siviglia, Donizetti’s with Lucia di Lammermoor, Wagner’s with Der fliegende Holländer, Puccini’s with Manon Lescaut, and Richard Strauss’s with Salome. Some composers disavowed the scores via which they honed their talents and established their reputations, of course, but only a decidedly imperfect understanding of an artist can be gleaned from an examination of his œuvre that ignores formative works.

The quest to place Vincenzo Bellini’s bel canto masterpieces Norma, La sonnambula, and I puritani in the context of their creator’s artistic development begins in Naples in February 1825, when the young Sicilian composer, an eager pupil at the Real Collegio di Musica—today’s Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella—under the conservative supervision of Niccolò Zingarelli, introduced himself to the opera-loving Neapolitans with Adelson e Salvini. A setting of a Gothic-leaning libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola based upon a novella by François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud, a little-remembered author whose great popularity in late-Eighteenth-Century France offers insight into the later French appreciation for Edgar Allan Poe, Bellini’s first opera was a graduation exercise that was staged in accordance with the Real Collegio’s practice of giving especially deserving matriculants opportunities to wade in the tumultuous operatic waters of Naples in the relatively safe harbor of the Conservatory. Tailored to the abilities of the musical forces at the composer’s disposal, Adelson e Salvini offers intriguing glimpses of the genius of Norma attired in the fashion of Rossini. A source of great novelty for modern listeners, it was likely the assimilation of disparate elements—flashes of Bellini’s mature style, Rossinian bravura writing, and rollicking passages in Neapolitan dialect—that endeared Adelson e Salvini to Bellini’s fellow students at the Conservatorio, where the opera was performed every Sunday for a year! The opera’s conquest did not extend beyond the Conservatorio, but the informed enthusiasm of his peers surely boosted the young Bellini’s confidence.

Recorded in conjunction with a concert performance in London’s Barbican Centre, Opera Rara’s studio recording provides listeners almost two centuries after the opera’s first performance with a chance to hear Adelson e Salvini in a faithful reconstruction of the form in which it was first performed. Like a number of composers, Bellini later returned to his first opera, both to revise it, assisted by a friend, for future performances that never transpired and to plunder its best material for reuse in later scores. As performed here, the quality of the young Bellini’s craftsmanship is consistently apparent, but this traversal of Adelson e Salvini is anything but a scavenger hunt for tunes heard in later, ostensibly better scores. Though his innate melancholia dulled Bellini’s response to the plot’s comedic elements, Adelson e Salvini is unmistakably a young man’s opera, and the exuberance of conductor Daniele Rustioni’s pacing of the music emphasizes its vitality and continuity. With the crisp, characterful singing of the Opera Rara Chorus, expertly led by Eamonn Dougan, and the controlled but corpuscular playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra as the agents of his mastery of Bellini’s score, Rustioni shapes a performance enjoyable both as a harbinger of the composer’s future operas and as its own entity. The libretto of Adelson e Salvini cannot be praised for its literary calibre, but Rustioni’s keenly-judged tempi and unapologetic Romantic fervor enable the singers to make the most of the dramatic potential afforded by Bellini’s setting. Bolstered by the choristers’ and instrumentalists’ dedicated work, Rustioni and the cast generate more tension than the opera has any right to wield. With its overlong stretches of dialogue, mostly handled very capably by the cast, Adelson e Salvini is an unevenly-proportioned score, but Rustioni meticulously effectuates a balance between true bel canto and a novice composer’s moments of uncertainty.

This recording of Adelson e Salvini splendidly perpetuates Opera Rara’s legacy of filling supporting rôles with talented artists. As Madama Rivers, the Adelson estate’s seemingly inescapable housekeeper, a rôle sung in the opera’s première by a male singer, mezzo-soprano Leah-Marian Jones is never heard without enjoyment but is at her absolute best in the Act Three finale, voicing ‘Ed in giubilo l’affano in ogni alma si cangiò’ with zeal and a captivating hint of irony. Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge’s fretful Fanny, Madama Rivers’s niece and Salvini’s adoring pupil, jump-starts Act One with her forthright singing of ‘Immagine gradita del ben che tanto adoro.’ Both ladies ably lend their voices to ensembles. Bass David Soar delivers Bellini’s music for the guileful Geronio with delectably malevolent glee. His account of ‘Oh fortunati istanti’ with the chorus in Act One rings out strongly, his timbre attractive and his intonation secure throughout the range of his part. Soar’s singing in Geronio’s Act Two duet with Struley bursts with energy and dramatic purpose but always adheres to a bel canto line.

Filling the lungs of Colonel Struley with air of an aptly martial swagger, baritone Rodion Pogossov sings Bellini’s music with attractive, easily-produced tone and dramatic instincts befitting one of today’s best-qualified exponents of Mozart’s Papageno in Die Zauberflöte. Struley would benefit greatly from a dose of Papageno’s amiability, but Pogossov manages to make the dastardly colonel unexpectedly sympathetic, his machinations a means to an end rather than evidence of irredeemable villainy. The baritone sings his Act One aria ‘Tu provi un palpito per la dimora’ suavely, every note of the range in the voice and projected evenly. In the Act Two duet with Geronio, Pogossov equals Soar as a bel canto stylist, phrasing even foursquare passages with imagination. The virility of the baritone’s voicing of ‘D’inutili querele questo non è l’istante’ in the Act Two finale electrifies the scene more palpably than the offstage gunshot that is erroneously believed to have ended the life of the opera’s heroine. Throughout the performance, Pogossov enacts Struley’s intended vengeance for having once been exiled from Ireland with vocalism of polished bravado, extracting from Bellini’s writing the histrionic essence of a part that in many ways prefigures Ernesto in Il pirata and Riccardo Forth in I puritani.

An acclaimed interpreter of comic bel canto rôles including Bartolo in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Sulpice in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment, bass-baritone Maurizio Muraro brings to his performance of Bonifacio, Salvini’s Napulitano-spouting servant, extensive experience in music of Adelson e Salvini’s vintage. In truth, Bonifacio’s effusions go on rather longer than Bellini’s invention could sustain them, but Muraro devotes a magnificent display of comedic artistry to making the character engaging and, on the whole, succeeds impressively. The Act One cavatina ‘Bonifacio Voccafrolla? Lei l’ha in faccia, eccolo ccà’ is sung with brio, and Muraro’s affability perfectly complements his Santini’s impenetrable seriousness in their duet, ‘Vi, comme se storzella.’ The bass-baritone anchors the Act One finale steadfastly. Muraro performs Bonifacio’s Act Two aria ‘Ora vi’, lo caso è bello!’ with indefatigable brilliance, and his singing of ‘Miette l’esca vicin’a lo ffuoco’ in the Act Three duet with Adelson bristles with guarded insinuation. The microphone occasionally emphasizes an unsteadiness in Muraro’s voice that is markedly less discernible in the theatre, but steadiness is the hallmark of the dramatic trajectory of his performance. Bonifacio could easily be a buffoon: as sung by Muraro, he is a practical, pragmatic figure willing to play the fool in order to defuse explosive situations.

The Adelson of bass-baritone Simone Alberghini, like Muraro a renowned Rossinian, not least in parts like Figaro and Dandini in Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, is a man of appropriately aristocratic bearing, one whose innate benevolence is sorely tested by the opera’s madcap twists of fate. At his entrance late in Act One, Alberghini declaims ‘Obliarti? Abbandonati!’ powerfully, leaving no doubt that the lord of the manor has returned to oversee his realm. Not suspecting the cause of his friend’s agitation, Alberghini’s Adelson sings ‘Torna, o caro, o questo seno’ in the Act Two duet with Salvini mellifluously, confident that his imminent happiness will restore to the artist his own tranquility. Believing that he is ensuring Salvini’s future joy by presenting Fanny to him as a bride, Adelson launches the Act Two finale in earnest, and Alberghini sings ‘Ecco alfin quel caro oggetto’ jovially. Thereafter, bewildering events sweep over him like an avalanche, and the bass-baritone’s refined portrayal of Adelson reflects every emotional pivot that the character experiences without hectoring or hysterics. In the Act Three duet with Bonifacio, this Adelson’s scheming does not conceal his sorrow. The subsequent confrontation with Salvini inspires Alberghini to a stirring reading of ‘L’amico! Ah! Più non è...tu l’uccidesti!’ The singer’s bel canto credentials are put to excellent use in this performance of music for which his voice is virtually ideal.

In Adelson e Salvini’s Neapolitan première, the rôle of the painter Salvini was entrusted to Leonardo Perugini, a singer whose technical acumen is proved by the music that Bellini wrote for him to have been equal to the accomplishments of the finest tenors of his era. Opera Rara’s cast for this recording of Adelson e Salvini is graced by a tenor who answers to the same description among singers of his own time, Enea Scala. Intoning ‘Speranza seduttrice, fuggi da questo cor!’ in Salvini’s Act One duet with Bonifacio with eloquence and expressivity, Scala immediately confirms that bel canto is in his blood. In the duet with Nelly, the woman he loves despite her relationship with Adelson, that bel canto blood boils in Scala’s singing of ‘Ah! L’oppresse il dolor!’ and ‘E quest’alma lacerata da un affetto il più furente.’ The Act Two duet with Adelson is one of the opera’s climaxes, and Scala rivals Alberghini as a dramatic firebrand with his heartfelt voicing of ‘In seno al bel riposo fa l’alma ormai ritorno.’ In the Act Two finale, the tenor’s effervescent ‘È il Ciel, in questa guisa’ cuts through the scene like a lightning bolt. The beauty of Salvini’s Act Three aria with chorus and Adelson ‘Si cadrò....ma estinto ancora’ approaches that of Bellini’s writing for Elvino in La sonnambula and Arturo in I puritani, and Scala’s account of the aria intensifies the scene’s emotional potency. Indeed, the singer’s portrayal of the spirited artist heightens the persuasiveness of the performance as a whole. As recorded, there is a slight tightness in Scala’s singing, but this contrasts with the awesome freedom in this and other recorded performances of his ascents to top C. This recording has many virtues, but any listener hearing Scala for the first time in this performance of Adelson e Salvini would not be unjustified in thinking that the greatest of them is making the acquaintance of this phenomenal tenor.

The most surprising aspect of Adelson e Salvini’s 1825 première is that the rôle of the opera’s heroine Nelly was portrayed by Giacinto Marras, an adolescent male singer—and apparently rather a good one!—whose voice at that time was centered in the contralto register. Rossini wrote the rôle of Arsace in his 1813 opera for La Scala, Aureliano in Palmira, for the famous castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti, but the age of bel canto and the Elizabethan custom of casting young men in female rôles are not commonly thought to have intersected. [In 1825, the year of Adelson e Salvini’s Neapolitan première, Velluti’s London début in Aureliano e Palmira was little short of a fiasco, signaling the end of Europe’s prolonged obsession with castrati.] It is difficult to imagine even the composer of the travesti rôle of Romeo in I Capuleti ed i Montecchi intending any of his heroines to be sung by a male singer, and history unfortunately does not preserve a detailed account of how Marras came to be Bellini’s Nelly. Whether it was an instance of the youngster being in the right place at the right time, as it were, or of more controlled circumstances, Bellini’s music reveals that, like his colleagues in the first performance of Adelson e Salvini, Marras was—or was expected to be—a thoroughly capable singer.

Handsomely statuesque of figure and voluptuous of voice, mezzo-soprano Daniela Barcellona is in no danger of being mistaken for an adolescent boy; nor is her Nelly in this recording of Adelson e Salvini apt to be mistaken for the work of one. The Act One romanza ‘Dopo l’oscuro nembo’ is the score’s best-known number, and Barcellona’s performances of both Bellini’s original setting and a later revision of the aria pulse with the heart of the Bellini familiar from Norma’s ‘Casta diva.’ The mezzo-soprano’s singing in this performance is fulsome and flexible, her intonation unshakable. In the duet with Salvini, she exclaims ‘Infelice, in te rinvieni!’ with vehemence tinged with fear, and her articulation of ‘Di piacer la voce echeggi!’ in the Act One finale evinces the upheaval of Nelly’s predicament. In a misstep that he would not repeat in the operas that followed Adelson e Salvini, Bellini gave Nelly little to do in Acts Two and Three, but Barcellona’s Nelly is noticed even when she is not the center of attention. Her distinctive voice emerges from the ensemble in the opera’s final scene as it should, the long-suffering girl’s peace of mind finally restored. Nelly’s music poses few challenges to Barcellona’s technique, but her performance is by no means small-scaled. Nelly is not Norma, but in this performance she achieves the stature that her music commands.

No one would object more vigorously to proclaiming Adelson e Salvini an unjustly-neglected masterpiece than Bellini himself, but, typical of the label’s endeavors, Opera Rara’s recording presents the opera so winningly that its importance in both its composer’s artistic development and the evolution of opera in the Nineteenth Century cannot be denied. The value of any performance or recording must ultimately be determined by its musical merits, however, and on these terms Opera Rara’s Adelson e Salvini is a complete success. Even amidst the lofty milieux of opera, this Adelson e Salvini asserts, education can sometimes be wonderfully entertaining!

GIACOMO MEYERBEER (1791 – 1864): Grand Opera—Diana Damrau, soprano; Pei Min Yu and Pascale Obrecht, sopranos; Joanna Curelaru and Kate Aldrich, mezzo-sopranos; Charles Workman, tenor; Laurent Naouri, baritone; Orchestre et Chœur de l’Opéra national de Lyon; Emmanuel Villaume, conductor [Recorded at Opéra national de Lyon, Lyon, France, 28 August – 4 September 2015; ERATO0190295849016; 1 CD, 81:27; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

A generation of Americans, artistic or otherwise, grew to adulthood with the notion that ‘When you wish upon a star / Makes no difference who you are’ singing in their minds and hearts. Perhaps such optimism is warranted in the world of animated crickets and marionettes that are transformed into boys of flesh and blood, but darker realities prevail in the unenchanted realms of mortal men and their societies. The ugly, exasperating, confounding truth is that in opera, as in most aspects of life, who you are makes a difference. That Marian Anderson was a woman of color made a difference when she requested use of DAR Constitution Hall for a concert in 1939. That Henriette Gottlieb, one of the most promising Brünnhildes of the interwar years, was Jewish made a difference when her voice was lost to the death chamber at Auschwitz rather than resounding in the Bayreuther Festspielhaus. What differences the circumstances of his upbringing in one of Berlin’s most affluent and influential Jewish families made when Jacob Liebmann Beer wished upon his star—l’étoile du nord, surely—are now difficult to ascertain, but the effects wrought upon the posthumous reputation of the composer he became, Giacomo Meyerbeer, are all too apparent. Even now, more than 150 years after the posthumous première of his final opera, L’Africaine, the enduring effects of the disapprobation of Richard Wagner and his disciples, a betrayal of Meyerbeer’s early endorsement of Wagner and his ideals that may have been fueled in part by antisemitism, and the wholesale suppression of the composer’s music by the Nazi regime shape the narrative of Meyerbeer’s artistic afterlife. With ERATO’s disc Grand Opera, a new star appears in the firmament of Meyerbeer’s fortune: German soprano Diana Damrau. One recording cannot make amends for a century-and-a-half of ignorance and aspersion, but wishing upon a star with Diana Damrau’s artistic luminosity cannot fail to brighten the future for Meyerbeer’s music.

Born near the Prussian capital on 5 September 1791, three months to the day before the death of Mozart, Meyerbeer was, like his younger countryman Felix Mendelssohn, the son of a family of significant German Jewish artists and intellectuals. Unlike the childhoods of many celebrated composers, Meyerbeer’s youth was one of extraordinary privilege, his musical activities devoted to study of the piano under the tutelage of teachers including Muzio Clementi. Turning his attention to composition, Meyerbeer was a pupil of both Antonio Salieri and Abbé Vogler. Like Händel a century earlier, the young Meyerbeer endeavored to hone his gifts for vocal writing by immersing himself in the headwaters of the bel canto stream gradually broadening its floodplain to encompass all of Europe, arriving in Italy in 1816 and promptly making the acquaintance of his near-contemporary Rossini. Not unexpectedly, the German composer’s early Italian operas made liberal use of elements that endeared Rossini’s operas to audiences in Naples and Venice. By the time that Meyerbeer relocated to Paris a decade later, he was asserting his own unique voice, constructing upon the foundations built by Gluck, Grétry, Spontini, and Cherubini the monumental edifice of genuine French Grand Opera. On this disc, Diana Damrau retraces the course of Meyerbeer’s musical development, sampling operas representative of the composer’s evolution from imitator to innovator.

Beginning her survey of Meyerbeer’s astonishingly diverse operatic landscapes with Berthe’s aria ‘Mon cœur s’élance et palpite’ from Le prophète, first performed in 1849, at the height of the composer’s fame, Damrau lays claim to music still associated in the minds of many opera lovers with the very different voice of Renata Scotto, by whom Berthe was sung in both John Dexter’s still-discussed Metropolitan Opera production in the 1976 – 1977 Season and the CBS Masterworks studio recording of the opera. When the Dexter production was revived in the 1979 – 1980 season, Prophète’s last outing at the MET to date, Berthe was sung by Rita Shane. In her performance of ‘Mon cœur s’élance et palpite’ on this disc, Damrau’s vocalism places her on middle ground between Scotto and Shane, her approach lighter than that of the former and her timbre darker than the latter’s. It is apparent from the first bars—and especially when the line first takes her above the stave—that Damrau is on good form, with commendably few suggestions here of the effortful tonal production and insecurity that have sometimes affected her singing since the births of her sons in 2010 and 2012. In this traversal of Berthe’s aria, the confidence that marked the soprano in the early years of her career as one of her generation’s finest singers resounds anew, the reliability of her ascents into her rounded, carefully-projected upper register largely unimpaired. She articulates French text with the intuition of an artist born on the left rather than the right bank of the Rhine, and she manages in four minutes to create an uncannily complete characterization of the tormented Berthe, an emotionally complex woman undone by a convoluted power struggle between civil authority and religious fanaticism.

Only fitfully prefiguring Berthe in her vocal and dramatic demands, Isabelle in the masterful 1831 Robert le diable—refashioned for audiences beyond France’s borders as Roberto il diavolo—was another rôle in which Scotto made a lasting impression. Declaring her Isabelle’s trepidation to her beloved, tenor Charles Workman’s Robert, in an impassioned but eloquently-phrased reading of ‘Robert, toi que j’aime,’ Damrau touchingly evinces the character’s emotional turmoil whilst maintaining complete control over the vocal line. In this and all of the selections on Grand Opera, Damrau is elegantly aided in reaching musical and dramatic goals by the Orchestre et Chœur de l’Opéra national de Lyon and conductor Emmanuel Villaume. Much of this music was likely new to the Lyon musicians, but Meyerbeer’s stylistic spectrum is anything but foreign to them. Villaume conducted Damrau in Massenet’s Manon at the MET in March 2015, and the rapport honed in those performances persisted in the making of this disc a few months later. In his pacing of Meyerbeer’s music, the conductor supports Damrau instinctively, but the symphonic splendors of the composer’s orchestrations are not neglected. Alternately ebulliently Italianate, ruggedly Teutonic, and gracefully Gallic, the choral singing, orchestral playing, and conducting exhibit the same commitment to avoiding any semblances of business as usual that Damrau’s singing exudes. This emphatically is not assembly-line music making.

In the two centuries since its unsuccessful première in Vienna in 1814, when the composer was still in his early twenties, Meyerbeer’s opera Alimelek, oder Die beiden Kalifen has been completely forgotten, a destiny instigated by Viennese audiences’ hostile reception of the opera, a reworking of Wirth und Gast, a score written for Stuttgart in 1813. Damrau makes her account of Irene’s aria ‘Nur in der Dämm’rung Stille’ a masterclass in the art of singing Rossinian bel canto, her German diction as conducive to placing vowels on the breath as her unaffected Italian. In a potent scene from the 1844 Singspiel Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, a score from which Meyerbeer later extracted material for reuse in L'étoile du nord, Damrau’s Therese interacts with the vibrancy of a staged performance with mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich’s Vielka. The singers enliven the sisters’ lines in the recitative ‘Oh Schwester, find’ ich dich!’ by maintaining the naturalness of conversation. The sparkle of Damrau’s German in the Alimelek aria is complemented by the fluidity of her delivery of Therese’s aria ‘Lebe wohl, geliebte Schwester.’ The first Therese, Karlsruhe-born soprano Pauline Marx, was respected on the Continent for her portrayals of Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the heroines in Bellini’s Norma, La sonnambula and I puritani, Abigaille in Verdi’s Nabucco, and even Ortrud and Venus in Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. Otto Nicolai composed the rôle of Frau Reich in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor for her, and, in addition to Theresa, her Meyerbeer repertory consisted of Fidès in Le prophète, Alice in Robert le diable, and Valentine in Les Huguenots. Marx’s voice was clearly an uncommonly versatile instrument, perhaps a competitor for the singular voice of Cornélie Falcon, for whom Meyerbeer wrote Valentine in Les Huguenots. The question of whether any current or past singers are or were heirs to Falcon’s mantle invariably prompts some of opera’s most heated debates. Damrau is unlikely to ever be seriously proposed as a legitimate Falcon, but the increasing fullness of her lower register and the authority with which she negotiates the tessitura of ‘Lebe wohl, geliebte Schwester’ elicit fascinating speculation about future paths in Damrau’s judicious choices of repertory.

Though successfully staged at London’s Camden Festival in 1975 and at Ireland’s Wexford Festival twenty-one years later, L’étoile du nord has not regained the acclaim that greeted its 1854 première. The opera’s libretto is a liability for modern productions, but the score is among Meyerbeer’s most appealing. Damrau voices Catherine’s recitative ‘Ah, mon Dieu!’ with unbreakable focus, establishing an atmosphere in which her tonal colorations shimmer. Accompanied by the hypnotic playing of flautists Julien Beaudiment and Catherine Puertolas, she lofts the sensual line of ‘C’est bien l’air que chaque matin’ with sounds that evoke the refreshing air of which she sings. L’Africaine, first christened by its creator as Vasco da Gama, did not reach the stage until 28 April 1865, four days short of the first anniversary of Meyerbeer’s death. In the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, L’Africaine has clung to a tenuous place on the fringe of the international repertory, contributing invaluably to the slow rehabilitation of its composer’s reputation. The ruminative depictions of L’Africaine’s dual heroines, Sélika and Inès, are among the most admirable accomplishments of Meyerbeer’s career. The focus on making beautiful sounds that heighten the emotional reverberations of the words gives Damrau’s performance of Inès’s recitative ‘Là-bas, sous l’arbre noir’ and aria ‘Fleurs nouvelles, arbres nouveaux’ a directness that transcends typical operatic artifice. Joined by Aldrich as Inès’s confidante Anna, Damrau makes ‘Anna, qu’entends-je’ a genuine discourse. Her poised ‘Adieu, mon doux rivage’ is Grand Opera’s sentimental dénouement: implicitly trusting the lucidity of Meyerbeer’s word setting, Damrau allows the music to communicate its allure to the listener rather than encumbering it with unnecessary contrivance.

It was with Il crociato in Egitto, first performed at Venice’s storied Teatro La Fenice in 1824 and notable for being one of the latest scores by a major composer to feature secco recitatives and a leading rôle written for a castrato, that Meyerbeer expanded his fame over all of the European continent. Recorded in studio by Opera Rara and in performance at La Fenice by Naxos, Il crociato in Egitto has a more robust presence on disc than many of Meyerbeer’s operas, but this hardly equates with familiarity. Her Palmide contending with bass Laurent Naouri’s Aladino in the rousing ‘D’una madre disperata,’ Damrau unleashes a thunderous display of temperament, tellingly contrasted with her limpid, urbane singing of ‘Con qual gioia.’ An example of the melodramma eroico genre popular in Italy in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century, Emma di Resburgo enjoyed a phenomenal success at its 1819 première in Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto, its first run extending to more than seventy performances and leading not only to productions in other cities but the publication of the score, making it the first of Meyerbeer’s scores to appear in print. Already largely forgotten by the time of Meyerbeer’s death, Emma di Resburgo was likely unheard for 150 years until a 2010 concert performance in Vienna. Damrau’s performances of Emma’s recitative ‘Sulla rupe triste, sola’ and aria ‘Ah questo bacio’ reveal this to be music equivalent in quality to the best of Rossini’s contemporaneous work. [Two months prior to the première of Emma di Resburgo, Meyerbeer’s first Emma, Italian soprano Rosa Morandi, created the rôle of Cristina in Rossini’s now-forgotten Eduardo e Cristina, also at the Teatro San Benedetto.] Damrau’s bravura technique remains one of the wonders of the operatic world, but she separates herself from the ranks of singers with similar repertoires by pinpointing the dramatic purposes of coloratura cyclones.

Despite being the source of an aria intermittently popular as a concert piece for coloratura sopranos, 1859’s Le pardon de Ploërmel—more commonly known under the name of its goat-loving heroine, Dinorah—until recently shared Il crociato in Egitto’s fate of being available on compact disc in note-complete form only in an Opera Rara recording, a rumored studio recording with Sumi Jo never having materialized. Though singers as renowned as Luisa Tetrazzini and Amelita Galli-Curci espoused Dinorah, few sopranos active after the early decades of the Twentieth Century have explored the score beyond the famous aria ‘Ombre légère.’ Delivering the prefatory ‘Comme cette nuit est lente à se dissiper!’ with elocution worthy of another operatic heroine, Adrienne Lécouvreur, Damrau discloses psychological depth in the strains of ‘Ombre légère’ that most coloratura songbirds have failed to perceive. Damrau’s sopracuti now lack some of the freedom that they possessed in seasons past, but their impact is enhanced by the interpretive insight with which they are deployed.

It is almost exclusively to Les Huguenot, his epic and still grippingly topical 1836 tale of religious strife in Sixteenth-Century France, that what recognition Meyerbeer enjoys among most opera lovers is owed, thanks in no small part to Dame Joan Sutherland’s performances and studio recording of the opera. It was not without justification that Les Huguenots was described in the 1890s, when Lillian Nordica appeared as the opera’s regal heroine Marguerite de Valois in performances at the Metropolitan Opera, as the ‘night of seven stars’: only a constellation of great singers can present the mammoth score with the grandeur with which the composer infused the music. Backed by the Urbain and Coryphée of sopranos Pei Min Yu and Pascale Obrecht and the Dame d’honneur of mezzo-soprano Joanna Curelaru, Damrau brings to Marguerite’s well-known ‘Ô beau pays de la Touraine’ a voice likely resembling that of Belgian soprano Julie Dorus-Gras, by whom the rôle was first sung, more than either Nordica’s or Sutherland’s. Though compromised by sporadically faltering intonation, Damrau’s performance is in some ways revelatory, not least in the emphasis on extending the melodic line across the long spans desired by the composer. The soprano’s breath control enables her to achieve niceties of phrasing that many singers can only approximate through trickery. In the aria’s cadenza, here bizarrely reminiscent of the Air des clochettes in Act Two of Delibes’s Lakmé, Damrau resolves phrases uncertainly, movingly depicting the enmity that upends Marguerite’s tranquility. The trills in the de facto cabaletta, ‘Sous mon empire on ne respire,’ are crisply executed, and the expected interpolated top D is hurled out bravely. It has been widely reported that Damrau is slated to sing Marguerite opposite Bryan Hymel’s Raoul de Nangis at Opéra de Paris in a future season: her performance of ‘Ô beau pays de la Touraine,’ a sizeable portion of Marguerite’s music, on this disc shows her well on her way to conquering the rôle.

In her ‘personal and heartfelt preface’ to Grand Opera, Diana Damrau wrote that recording a disc of arias by Giacomo Meyerbeer was an ambition that formed during her studies, when she was discovering the magnificent variety of music available to a young artist with her incredible capabilities. With funding for the Performing Arts so dishearteningly imperiled, few of today’s singers are granted opportunities to bring their recording ambitions to fruition. In those rare instances in which artists’ goals and record labels’ resources intersect, those singers whose aspirations are denied are owed the recompense of the recordings that reach listeners wholly deserving that luxury. In the case of Grand Opera, both recording and hearing the disc are undertakings that are lavishly rewarded. Disney’s Jiminy Cricket also sings—with regrettable grammar—in ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ that ‘when a star is born, they possess a gift or two. One of them is this: they have the power to make a wish come true.’ In fact, with Grand Opera Diana Damrau makes two wishes come true: her own and that of listeners eager to understand why Giacomo Meyerbeer dominated opera in the Nineteenth Century to an extent rivaled only by Verdi and Wagner.

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): Madama Butterfly—Ermonela Jaho (Cio-Cio-San), Brian Jagde (Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton), Troy Cook (Sharpless), Kristen Choi (Suzuki), Ian McEuen (Goro), Timothy J. Bruno (Lo zio Bonzo), Michael Adams (Il principe Yamadori), Allegra De Vita (Kate Pinkerton), Andrew Bogard (Commissario imperiale), James Shaffran (L’ufficiale del registro), (Lo zio Yakusidé); Washington National Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Philippe Auguin, conductor [Leslie Swackhamer, Director; Jun Kaneko, Production Designer; Gary Marder, Lighting Designer; Adam Noble, Choreographer; Anne Ford-Coates, Hair and Makeup Designer; Cindy C. Oxberry, Assistant Director; Lynn Krynicki, Stage Manager—Washington National Opera, Opera House, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.; Saturday, 6 May 2017]

In the struggle to cling to the precipice of survival as the Twenty-First Century drags the Performing Arts into the abyss, only poetry is compelled to endeavor as heroically as opera to justify continued support of its existence by exhibiting that Holy Grail of intangible necessities: relevance. What need has the modern world for rhyming couplets and sonnets laden with meanings readers must think in order to understand? Of what practical use is setting those couplets and sonnets to music and paying people in garish costumes to sing them in languages only spoken by specific communities? Perhaps such questions never occurred to John Luther Long, who heard his sister’s and brother-in-law’s tales of Methodist ministry in late-Nineteenth-Century Japan and recognized a poetic story that deserved to be told. Published in 1898, his short story ‘Madame Butterfly,’ an anecdote of a delicate Japanese woman lured into a contractual marriage with an American naval lieutenant, attracted the attention of stage director and playwright David Belasco, whose adaptation of the story reached the New York stage in 1900. Scenes of the Spanish-American War still fresh in audience’s minds, the play’s success was indicative of the resonance of one of humanity’s intrinsic fascinations: the labyrinths of love, fidelity, and honor. Men have likely sought companionship among the denizens of distant lands as since martial ventures first forced them into proximity, and who can deny the relevance in today’s society of the counterparts of Long’s and Belasco’s Butterfly and Pinkerton, American GIs and their exotic brides—and now their children and grandchildren?

It was in London, where Belasco’s play opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End only seven weeks after its Broadway début, that Puccini encountered the subject that he would bring to the operatic stage as Madama Butterfly. By his own admission, the native of Lucca, his international reputation already made with Manon Lescaut, La bohème, and Tosca, spoke even less English that the heroine of Belasco’s ‘tragedy of Japan,’ but Cio-Cio-San’s dramatic profile seized Puccini’s imagination as completely as that of Victorien Sardou’s Floria Tosca had done a few years earlier. First performed at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala on 17 February 1904, Puccini’s original, two-act version of Madama Butterfly was hissed, the hostile audience vociferously accusing the composer of having aped his own La bohème in an effort to repeat that opera’ s success. Despite an opening-night cast that included singers of the calibre of soprano Rosina Storchio, tenor Giovanni Zenatello, and baritone Giuseppe de Luca, who would also create the title rôle in Gianni Schicchi for Puccini in 1919, the opera’ s first production fell victim to insufficient rehearsal, the composer’s completion of the score having been delayed. Dismayed but perhaps not wholly surprised by the Milanese audience’s antipathy, Puccini withdrew the score and quickly reworked it, enlarging the opera’s structure with, in part, the addition of a third act and the Humming Chorus. Thus modified, Madama Butterfly reintroduced herself in Brescia on 28 May 1904, and was given a welcome worthy of her inherent nobility.

Though the opera’s Metropolitan Opera première in February 1907 was famously anchored by Geraldine Farrar as Cio-Cio-San, Enrico Caruso as Pinkerton, Antonio Scotti as Sharpless, and Louise Homer as Suzuki, with Puccini in attendance, Madama Butterfly in fact received its first American production in Washington, D.C., in October 1906. Washington National Opera’s 2017 production is therefore a homecoming of sorts. Having received more than 800 performances at the MET in the 110 years since it was first performed there, Madama Butterfly remains one of opera’s most enduring works, one that can exert its emotional force in virtually any staging that treats the story with respect. In Washington National Opera’s production, shared with Opera Omaha and San Francisco Opera, Japanese-born artist Jun Kaneko’s primary-color sets, projections, and costumes provided a two-dimensional backdrop against which the three-dimensional, pastel-hued narrative of Cio-Cio-San and her tribulations played out. Kaneko’s vivid color scheme sometimes seemed borrowed from a comic strip, making it seem as though Pinkerton’s home ship was the Enterprise rather than the Abraham Lincoln and bringing Lo zio Bonzo and his attendants into perilous proximity with Ku Klux Klansmen, but the production’s simple, sketch-based imagery was often effective. Even if it was less cumbersome than it appeared, hampering Cio-Cio-San with a butterfly headpiece was unnecessary, especially with a Julie Taymor-esque butterfly kite hovering above her: anyone who failed to realize that she was Madama Butterfly was not likely to appreciate the significance of the too-literal symbolism. The staging never impeded the relationship between the music and the listener, however, and the abiding unpretentiousness of Kaneko’s vision outshone the few flashes of affectation. The production’s most unforgettable tableau was that of the final moments of Butterfly’s life. The rising sun of Japan’s flag appearing on a projection that isolated Cio-Cio-San, the cut of her blade caused blood to stream from the familiar solar icon. Clearly, Kaneko intimated, it was the honor-at-any-cost culture of Japan as much as Pinkerton’s betrayal that claimed Butterfly’s life.

Un nozze a Nagasaki: (from left to right) Soprano Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio-San, baritone Troy Cook as Sharpless, and tenor Brian Jagde as Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton in Washington National Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, May 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

The efforts of Director and Assistant Director Leslie Swackhamer and Cindy C. Oxberry, choreographer Adam Noble, and stage manager Lynn Krynicki yielded movement and blocking that were stylized but never nonsensical. The principal goal of traditional Japanese geisha culture has never been the comfort of its practitioners, but the recreation of Nagasaki’s social order on the Kennedy Center stage was mindful of the physical demands of singing, generally avoiding postures and positions that interfered with vocal projection. Under Gary Marder’s deftly-managed lighting, Anne Ford-Coates’s hair and makeup designs were handsomely unobtrusive, her ingenuity asserted by the ease with which the singers assimilated into the milieu of a fanciful but reasonably authentic Nagasaki. So much of the psychological depth of Madama Butterfly is woven into the shimmering silk of the music that a production team can achieve greatest success in staging the opera by looking to the score. Restraint is the measure of integrity in Cio-Cio-San’s world, and this production largely allowed her the dignity of singing without silliness or overwrought gesticulation.

On the podium, WNO Music Director Philippe Auguin led the company’s choral and orchestral ensembles in a taut, sinewy traversal of the music. La fanciulla del West and Turandot are Puccini’s most aggressively modern scores, but Madama Butterfly, still too often dismissed as a weepy melodrama, is an inventive work. Under Auguin’s baton, the busy figurations that open the opera had, after a hectic, scrambled start, the acerbic bite of music by Stravinsky, suggesting the seedy underworld hidden by the colorful bustle of Nagasaki. Throughout the performance, Auguin liberated the score from saccharine sentimentality, magnifying details of the opera’s progressive harmonies without shifting focus away from Puccini’s trademark lush melodic lines. Though its tonal language is essentially late-Romantic, Madama Butterfly speaks a decidedly Twentieth-Century dialect, and it proved to be an accent of which Auguin is a master. The WNO choristers, directed by Steven Gathman, sang sweetly as Butterfly’s companions, zealously as the judgmental wedding guests, and heartily as the offstage sailors. Their performance of the Humming Chorus, a piece that captivates despite its banality, was hauntingly lovely, evocative of the unspoken thoughts that upend Cio-Cio-San’s optimism. Spurred by Auguin, the WNO musicians refused to be an uninvolved pit band. Why some musicologists and opera lovers persist in scoffing at Puccini’s skill as an orchestrator when there are so many embarrassingly sloppy performances of his operas is baffling, but WNO’s orchestra did Puccini and the audience the service of approaching Madama Butterfly’s difficulties with clear-sighted dedication to overcoming them. Clarity was the hallmark of this performance: at all volumes and all levels of dramatic intensity, Auguin and his musical collaborators were attentive to the patterns and textures of the music, neither accompanying nor commenting on the performance but fully, feelingly participating in it.

Capitalizing on the fantastic asset of the group of talented singers assembled in WNO’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, this Madama Butterfly was populated with performers whose well-prepared singing portended even finer work in future productions. As L’ufficiale di registro and the Commissario imperiale, baritone James Shaffran—the sole member of the supporting cast who is not a current Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist—and bass-baritone Andrew Bogard voiced their lines vigorously, representing Nagasaki’s civic administration with sonorous pronouncements. Connecticut native mezzo-soprano Allegra De Vita portrayed Kate Pinkerton as a haughty late-Victorian figure with few outward signs of sympathy for Cio-Cio-San. De Vita sang ‘Glielo dirai?’ appealingly but coldly. The contrast with Cio-Cio-San could not have been more perceptible, but the similarities were also striking: following the path upon which the production guided her, De Vita explored the darker recesses of the formality and moral rectitude imposed upon women by their societies. Yamadori, the doting prince relentlessly pitched to Cio-Cio-San as a suitable husband after Japanese custom has recognized Pinkerton’s long absence as abandonment, was portrayed with interesting ambiguity by baritone Michael Adams, ostentatiously clothed in a gold jacket and spats in occidental fashion. The character’s frustration with Cio-Cio-San’s irrational rejection of his suit was unmistakable, but there was also a suggestion of sympathy in his singing of ‘Tra le cose più moleste è l’inutil sospirar.’ Bass Timothy J. Bruno raged chillingly as Lo zio Bonzo, exhibiting a solid top F in his declamation of ‘Cio-Cio-San! Cio-Cio-San! Abbominazione!’

Un bel dì, vedremo: Mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi as Suzuki (left) and soprano Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio-San (right) in Washington National Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, May 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Every tenor who sings Goro faces a bevy of decisions to be made about his interpretation of the part. That Goro represents an unsavory stereotype is unmistakable, but that stereotype is as much—perhaps more—Western as Eastern. He is pragmatic and insouciantly opportunistic, but is he truly predatory? In this performance, tenor Ian McEuen gave the character a sardonic edge but stopped short of outright villainy. In Act One, McEuen’s recital of the virtues of the arrangements Goro has made for Pinkerton was brightly voiced. His utterance of ‘Vanno e vengono a prova a norma che vi giova’ exuded the high spirits of a man certain of being generously paid, but his expansive phrasing of ‘Una stella dai raggi d’oro’ hinted at pride deeper than that of a salesman praising his wares. McEuen’s confident vocalism lent ‘Ecco! Son giunte al sommo del pendìo’ particular allure. The heartless laughter with which Goro mocks Cio-Cio-San’s innocent querying of Sharpless in Act Two about robins returning to roost was in McEuen’s performance like a thunderbolt: Butterfly was suddenly awakened to the reality of the outside world’s perception of her honorable fidelity. His ‘Il ricco Yamadori’ was more confiding than conspiring, and his ‘Dicevo...solo...che là in America’ rang with honesty rather than intentional cruelty. Possessing absolute security throughout the range of Goro’s music, McEuen had no need to resort to silly vocal effects or exaggerated enunciation, and he continues to refine his surprisingly subtle, intelligent interpretation of this often-loathsome character.

Cio-Cio-San’s maid and confidante Suzuki’s loquacious effusions in the Act One scene in which she meets her mistress’s fiancé were delivered by mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi with the excitement of a curious young girl eager to make a good impression. Tact is not foremost among Suzuki’s graces, but her lack of the demureness so carefully cultivated by her countrywomen is remedied by the breadth of her affection and concern for Cio-Cio-San. Choi voiced ‘Sorride Vostro Onore? Il riso è frutto e fiore’ with effervescent charm, not quite knowing what to say increasing rather inhibiting the flow of words. A palpable shift in demeanor overtook her as she uttered the prayer ‘E Izaghi ed Izanami sarundasico,’ the words still cascading from her tongue but the intent profoundly altered. It is also with prayer that Suzuki began Act Two, and her plea for the gods to end Cio-Cio-San’s weeping was touching. There was nothing malicious or coy in Choi’s singing of ‘Mai non s’è udito di straniero marito che sia tornato al suo nido,’ but her Suzuki rounded on the eavesdropping, gossiping Goro with blistering anger, her cry of ‘Vespa! Rospo maledetto!’ sung rather than shouted but slashing like a samurai’s sword. Choi delivered her part in the flower duet with rounded, attractive tones meticulously matched to those of her Cio-Cio-San. The simplicity with which she announced ‘Già il sole’ in Act Three touchingly conveyed the character’s physical and emotional exhaustion, and the tenderness evinced in her whispered ‘Come una mosca prigioniera l’ali batte il piccolo cuor!’ was heartbreaking. So engaging was this Suzuki that, as she slowly walked away in the opera’s final scene, separating Cio-Cio-San from her son for the final time, the gravity of the maid’s grief and uncertain future was overwhelming. Has she family of her own? Where will she go? How will she survive? Singing and acting with absolute submersion in the rôle, Choi was a Suzuki who mattered.

Equally dashing and drearily dutiful in the rôle of Sharpless, the American consul in Nagasaki, baritone Troy Cook gave this cog in the wheel of American diplomacy unusual dramatic significance and specificity. How could even the most callow Pinkerton who could ignore this Sharpless’s warnings about the dangers of toying with the affection of a girl as trusting as Cio-Cio-San? The opening phrase of the consul’s entrance in Act One, ‘E suda e arrampica,’ takes the singer to top G, and Cook ascended to the tone rousingly. The top Fs in ‘Ier l’altro, il Consolato sen’ venne a visitar!’ also resounded stirringly, but it was the ardor of his description of Cio-Cio-San’s naïveté that truly soared. Skeptical of Pinkerton’s intentions from the start, Cook’s Sharpless was a moral compass that his seagoing friend seemed incapable of reading. When Cook sang ‘Miss Butterfly...Bel nome, vita a meraviglia,’ it was genuine admiration rather than flattery. The consul’s Act Two visit to Butterfly with Pinkerton’s letter is a descendent of Violetta’s painful discourse with Giorgio Germont in Act Two of La traviata and a precursor of the poker scene in Act Two of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West. Cook voiced ‘Egli non vuol mostrarsi’ and ‘Ora a noi’ agitatedly, but the pity and sadness that shaped his rendering of ‘Io scendo al piano. Mi perdonate?’ radiated uncorrupted goodness. The ambivalence of the consul’s actions in Act Three weighted heavily on the man portrayed by Cook, his ‘Io so che alle sue pene non cì ono conforti!’ resolute but contrite, the consul’s gentle spirit crippled by the tragedy and his part in it. Cook’s mahogany-timbred, masculine singing occasionally seemed cautious, but he was an uncommonly thoughtful, introspective Sharpless.

Whilst singers with greater name recognition amongst casual operaphiles prance and preen upon the world’s stages, peddling their tired warbling and wobbling as bona fide artistry, tenor Brian Jagde is in the trenches, battling to preserve and perpetuate the legacy of important American tenors epitomized by Richard Tucker. Jagde’s Pinkerton in WNO’s Madama Butterfly was a burst of raw virility, his boyish fervor tellingly complementing Butterfly’s childlike reticence. Goro’s demonstrations of the funny little house delighted him, and the febrile joy with which he sang ‘Dovunque al mondo lo Yankee vagabondo,’ hurling his golden top B♭ into the auditorium, was arresting. Then, his ‘Amore o grillo, dir non saprei’ was the libidinous credo of a young man who had not yet learned of love’s capacity to injure, the three top B♭s produced with giddy freedom. Pinkerton’s attraction to Cio-Cio-San is unquestionably primarily carnal, but Jagde sang ‘Vieni amor mio!’ with such open-hearted kindness and defended her against her family’s denunciation with such a heated ‘Sbarazzate all’istante. In casa mia niente baccano e niente bonzeria’ that he in those moments seemed not merely the owner of a bride but a husband. The tenor’s finesse gave his singing of ‘Bimba, bimba, non piangere’ and ‘Dammi ch’io baci le tue mani care’ a softness that his use of dynamics, generally preferring forte, lacked. Jagde opted to join his Butterfly on the top C that ends their love duet, thrillingly expressing the lieutenant’s uncontainable desire. Returning in Act Three not as Cio-Cio-San’s savior but as the instrument of her final humiliation, Jagde’s Pinkerton grasped the enormity of the consequences of his actions, albeit too late to alter them. Pinned between the unspoiled girl who so earnestly deserved his love and the ‘sposa americana’ who demanded it, only flight could restore his peace of mind. The voice throbbed with emotion as he sang ‘Datele voi qualche soccorso.’ Pinkerton’s aria ‘Addio fiorito asil di letizia e d’amor’ is undeniably self-indulgent, but Jagde imbued it with self-recrimination, damning his own crassness instead of wallowing in self-pity. Pinkerton never reappearing as Cio-Cio-San writhed in the agony of her last breaths, his offstage calls of ‘Butterfly!’ tormented the girl as life deserted her. Jagde’s excellent diction compensated for what his voice lacked in Italianate morbidezza, and his nuanced acting and superb singing transformed his Pinkerton from a hedonistic rake into a man sensitive enough to recoil from the blood on his conscience.

Una sposa giapponese: Soprano Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio-San (left) and tenor Brian Jagde as Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton (right) in Washington National Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, May 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

It is indicative of the significance of the appearance of Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio-San in Washington National Opera’s staging of Madama Butterfly that, to date, the MET career of this artist, celebrated for both bel canto repertory and rôles as demanding as Puccini’s Suor Angelica, is confined to a single performance of Verdi’s La traviata—a disgrace that will thankfully be partially remedied when she takes her portrayal of Cio-Cio-San to New York in the 2017 – 2018 Season. Kennedy Center gained the prestige of hosting her first Butterfly in the United States, and she débuted at Washington National Opera with a performance of wrenching individuality and insight. Vocally, Jaho’s place on the Butterfly spectrum is somewhere between the extremes of the lyric coloratura Toti dal Monte and the heavier voices of Clara Petrella and Renata Tebaldi. Svelte and breathtakingly beautiful, her performance as Cio-Cio-San recalled the best singing of Anna Moffo. Whereas Moffo sang Butterfly only for Italian television and studio microphones, Jaho has found her own unique solutions to the rôles vocal riddles, shirking nothing. Dramatically, she was in this performance the equal of the best Butterflies on stage and on disc. She sang the entrance music in Act One, ‘Ancora un passo or via,’ gorgeously, ascending without strain to the top B♭s and crowning the passage with a secure sustained D♭₆ that hung over the house like the fog that glides along the Potomac. Writers and listeners have marveled for a half-century at the ‘little-girl voice’ that Maria Callas adopted in Act One of Madama Butterfly, but the voice that sang ‘Siam giunte. F. B. Pinkerton. Giù’ and ‘Gran ventura’ in Jaho’s performance was that of a fifteen-year-old child transitioning into adulthood. The vocal colorations with which the soprano emphasized the very different sentiments of ‘Nessuno si confessa mai nato in povertà’ and ‘Morto’ made the text come alive: in a single word, the dishonor endured by Butterfly’s father changed the mood of the scene. Jaho’s expansive phrasing of ‘Ieri son salita tutta sola in secreto alla Missione’ evinced the profundity of her conversion to Christianity. Devastated by her family’s reject, this Butterfly clung to the comfort offered by Pinkerton, Jaho voicing ‘Non piango più’ with heartbreaking timidity. The floating melody of ‘Vogliatemi bene’ poured from the soprano like a ray of light, and her incredible pianissimi were matched by the pealing top B♭ to which she rose in ‘Dicon ch’oltre mare se cade in man dell’uom,’ asking Pinkerton whether it is true that men in other lands pin butterflies to boards and encase them in glass. The glistening top C with which she surrendered to Pinkerton’s ardor rushed from the soul of the character, not from a diva’s throat.

Butterfly’s assertion that ‘L’americano Iddio son persuasa’ was greeted with laughter despite the seriousness with which it was presented, another instance of well-intentioned supertitles meddling with audiences’ comprehension of the contexts of words. The volcanic anger directed at Suzuki was tempered in Jaho’s portrayal by the realization that Butterfly has no one else upon whom to rely. In this performance, ‘Un bel dì, vedremo’ was not an interlude in the action but an organic advancement of it, the top B♭s determined and defiant. In the scene with Sharpless, the girlish playfulness returned in ‘Io son la donna più lieta del Giappone’ and ‘Yamadori ancor le penne dell’amor’—Butterfly was still no older than eighteen, after all. It was a woman and a frightened mother who voiced ‘Che tua madre dovrà prenderti in braccio,’ however, and, reminiscent of Callas’s Butterfly, this was the towering summit of Jaho’s performance. The bile that she largely swallowed when braving Suzuki’s doubts was unleashed on Goro, poignantly at odds with the maternal affection lavished on her son in ‘Vedrai, piccolo amor’ and the frenzied ecstasy of her sighting of Pinkerton’s ship. Showering her son in flower petals, Jaho’s Cio-Cio-San intoned ‘Scuoti quella fronda di ciliegio’ enchantingly, blending lusciously with her Suzuki and reaching the three top B♭s effortlessly.

The dramatic juggernaut of Act Three progressed from a lovingly-voiced ‘Tu Suzuki che sei tanto buona’ to an exquisitely poised ‘Sotto il gran ponte del cielo non v’è donna di voi più felice’ that was disturbing in its eery serenity. Droning ‘Con onor muore chi non può serbar vita con onore’ on Fs at the bottom of the stave as she read the inscription on the blade that once feasted on her father’s blood, the warmth of life was already gone from this Butterfly. As Jaho sang it, ‘Tu? tu? tu? tu? tu? tu? piccolo Iddio!’ wielded the cataclysmic impact of Isolde’s Liebestod and Brünnhilde’s immolation. Those heroines are not mothers, and there was in Jaho’s almost unbearable depiction of Cio-Cio-San’s death a sense that it was the dishonor of being parted from her child rather than that of being abandoned by her husband with which she could not live. Some singers mistake Cio-Cio-San for a dragonfly, majestic but inert, and others for a moth, industrious but indistinct. Jaho’s Cio-Cio-San was truly a butterfly, one so real that it seemed that, if touched, her wings would leave stains of their incandescence on the molesting hands.

More than a century after the première—or, rather, premières—of Madama Butterfly, audiences continue to weep for Cio-Cio-San, sometimes without knowing or acknowledging why. Admittedly, the opera’s narrative is simplistic and formulaic. From an academic perspective, audiences know that what transpires upon the stage is only artifice, designed to manipulated the emotions, yet audiences feel a connection to the opera’s heroine. Bountiful as the ranks of those who seem immune to it are, compassion is a basic human compulsion, and to witness the thoughtless destruction of a being as bewitching as Cio-Cio-San, even in an incarnation who does not sing well, without responding on some level to her tragedy is virtually inhuman. Still, a Butterfly without a compelling Cio-Cio-San is like an empty cage: it is possible to be trapped, but escape is easily achieved. Even within the expanse of Kennedy Center, escaping the wingspan of Ermonela Jaho’s sublime Butterfly was impossible. Portrayed by a great artist, the death of that precious creature wounded with the sting of a personal loss. Whether in verse or in verismo, is there anything more relevant than that?

I dolori di una madre: Soprano Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio-San in Washington National Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, May 2017
[Photo by Scott Suchman, © Washington National Opera]

On 22 November 1963, the city of Dallas entered the national conscience with an enduring legacy rivaled by few other American cities. When an assassin’s bullets ended the life of President John F. Kennedy in the streets of Dallas, this large small town in the heart of Texas sprang to the forefront of the nation’s attention and has now remained there for more than half a century. An internationally-recognized Mecca in the worlds of oil and professional sports, Dallas has also been a port of call in cultural channels, hosting events as significant as some of the most successful of Maria Callas’s appearances in the United States and the American débuts of Montserrat Caballé and Plácido Domingo, Dames Joan Sutherland and Gwyneth Jones, and Magda Olivero and Jon Vickers. The 2010 opening of The Dallas Opera’s magnificent Winspear Opera House solidified a relationship as important as the greatest cultural milestones in the city’s rich history. With the world première of his groundbreaking—perhaps sea-parting would be a more apt description—opera Moby-Dick in Winspear’s inaugural season, American composer Jake Heggie became an indelible participant in the musical life of Dallas, to which he further contributed with the opera Great Scott, commissioned by The Dallas Opera and first performed in 2015. Captain Ahab’s legendary obsession and Arden Scott’s Wolfe-esque homecoming are now parts of Dallas’s narrative as integral as the tragedy in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963. Further strengthening that bond with Imagine a World – Music for Humanity, Jake Heggie joins other artists and Dallas Street Choir and Credo Community Choir in bringing poignant elements of the Dallas experience to the East Coast.

In 2008, a few hours southeast of Dallas in Houston, the first version of Heggie’s operatic paean to family dynamics and dysfunction, Three Decembers, premièred with mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, a beloved presence on Texas stages since her unforgettable Elena in Houston Grand Opera’s 1981 production of Rossini’s La donna del lago, in the central rôle of Madeline. Eight years earlier, von Stade, one of America’s most gifted vocalists and singing actresses, sang the pivotal rôle of a condemned murderer’s anguished mother in the world première of Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at San Francisco Opera. With Imagine a World – Music for Humanity, the relationships among Heggie, von Stade, and the city of Dallas assume new vitality as they expand to encompass appearances alongside acclaimed soprano Harolyn Blackwell and noted Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz in performances charged with embodying the meaning of the words spoken by President Obama in eulogizing Dallas police officers slain in July 2016: ‘Character is not found in putting others down: it is found in raising others up.’

Guided by conductor and music educator Dr. Jonathan Palant’s philosophy of sharing culture with individuals and communities of all levels of privilege, Dallas Street Choir and Credo Community Choir are ensembles that celebrate diversity in both their membership and their singing. The performances in their eight-day East Coast tour bring the choirs’ message of ‘Homeless, not Voiceless’ to New York’s Carnegie Hall, where they will achieve the sad but triumphant distinction of being the first ensemble comprised entirely of displaced individuals to grace that institution’s legendary Perelman stage, and Washington National Cathedral in the nation’s capital.

The presentation of Imagine a World – Music for Humanity in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium at 8:00 PM on Wednesday, 14 June 2017, will feature the world première of Jake Heggie’s arrangement of George Hubbard Miller’s 1976 ‘Spinning Song,’ accompanied on the piano by the composer. Dedicated to Dallas Street Choir, the piece rejuvenates a melody familiarized in its original form by soprano Carol Webber. In addition to performances by Blackwell and von Stade, the event will feature selections from the hit musical Wicked performed by its creator, Schwartz. All tickets are priced at only $25, and proceeds from the concert will benefit organizations that work to alleviate and eliminate homelessness. For more information and to purchase tickets for the Carnegie Hall concert, please visit Carnegie Hall’s website or phone CarnegieCharge at 212.247.7800.

The performance in Washington National Cathedral at 7:30 PM on Thursday, 15 June 2017, will focus on sacred choral music by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Mack Wilberg, Ola Gjeilo, and Elaine Hagenberg, alongside traversals by von Stade of pieces by Georg Friedrich Händel, Francis Poulenc, and Franz Schubert. Admission to the National Cathedral event is free.

Dallas is a city of extraordinary challenges, outstanding accomplishments, and tremendous promise exemplified by the individual stories, struggles, and successes of the 1.3 million people who call the city home. Looking beyond its sparkling skyline, Dallas is far more than Lee Harvey Oswald, Mary Kay, J. R. Ewing, and the Cowboys, Mavericks, and Rangers. Dallas is a city in which vast wealth dwells alongside devastating poverty. Lacking the basic human right of permanent shelter, the singers of Dallas Street Choir and Credo Community Choir reveal that the poorest in possessions are often the richest in spirit. In the Twenty-First Century, not one man, woman, or child in Dallas, Damascus, Doha, or Dublin should be compelled to only ‘imagine a world’ in which no one is denied the safe harbor of a home. Please support these artists in their efforts to share the wisdom gleaned from the streets of Dallas: music for humanity should be a validation of our unity, not a plea for recognition of the worth of strong, gifted people too many of us would rather exclude and forget.

EMERSON EADS (born 1980): Mass for the Oppressed, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, and De profundis—Tess Altiveros (soprano), Toby Newman (mezzo-soprano), Barry Banks (tenor), David Miller (bass-baritone) – Mass for the Oppressed; Jaunelle Celaire (soprano), Emorja Roberson (bass-baritone) – He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands; Victoria Fraser and Isabella Burns (sopranos), Gabriela Estephanie Solis (contralto), Matthew Kelly (tenor) – De profundis; Concordia Choir and Ritornello Orchestra of the University of Notre Dame; Emerson Eads, conductor [Recorded in concert in St. Joseph Chapel, Holy Cross College, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, on 13 November 2016; Emerson Eads Music EE-1701; 1 CD, time; Available from Emerson Eads Music, Amazon (USA), and iTunes]

In his remarks at a 1962 dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy famously said that he believed the assemblage before him to be ‘the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ In the exalted history of choral music, increasingly marginalized by today’s secular society, one can seek parallels for Kennedy’s characterization in the choir gallery of the Cappella Sistina, where Josquin des Prez refined his craft, or England’s Chapel Royal, where in his brief life Pelham Humfrey defined Restoration choral traditions. There is in the congress of composer, text, and the art of writing for massed voices a power that is unique in music, an energy that pulses through notes, words, and voices with a directness that can be neither duplicated nor diminished. It is this creative electricity that charges through the strains of des Prez motets and Humfrey anthems—and through every bar of American composer Emerson Eads’s Mass for the Oppressed. President Kennedy understood the isolation of inspiration, but he also knew that one can transcend one’s own society only by embracing and fully participating in it, enduring tragedies with hope for triumphs. In Mass for the Oppressed, Eads transforms reflections on inhumanity into sounds of great beauty not by commenting on misfortune but by communing with it. This is music that ignites emotional wildfires, fueled by the ingenuity of an artist who, like Jefferson, engages his world with a keen mind and uncommon depth of feeling.

Distressingly, from innumerable atrocities inflicted upon Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans to the internment camps to which Japanese Americans were exiled during World War Two, virtually every page of the history of the United States of America is stained with betrayals of the ideals of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ upon which the cornerstones of modern American society were laid. Perhaps prejudice, divisiveness, and violence were to be expected of a nation conceived in hypocrisy, but the better nature of her people has prevailed so often that its failures are all the more sickening. The tragic 1997 murder of fifteen-year-old Alaskan John Hartman, a vicious crime in the investigation of which the victim suffered disdainful scrutiny of his life and the hours before his death, was followed by a gross miscarriage of justice in which four young men—George Frese, Kevin Pease, Marvin Roberts, and Eugene Vent—were convicted of and imprisoned in punishment for a crime they were all too readily believed to have committed. Their true crime was diversity: Alaska Natives and a Native American, this quartet looked as people of privilege felt—and persist in feeling—that criminals look. Founded in 2006, the Alaska Innocence Project was conceived with liberating the Fairbanks Four as its foremost initiative, but even their eventual exoneration was tainted by impropriety, the agreement via which their freedom was secured depriving them of the right to seek any form of compensation for the two decades stolen from them.

Responding both to this travesty and to its resolution, Fairbanks native Eads created in his Mass for the Oppressed a work in which the humanistic profundity of the Ordinary of the Mass is heightened by contrasts with sensitive verses by the composer’s brother, Evan Eads, and excerpts from youthful writings of Pope Francis. Musically, the score’s predominant idiom is unabashedly tonal, but Eads employs harmony with boldness that proclaims the music’s modernity without piling on dissonances for the sake of feigning originality. Unafraid of memorable melodies, the composer achieves intoxicating density of sound with surprisingly transparent orchestrations. As exhibited in the performances of his imaginative settings of the Spiritual ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ and ‘De Profundis’—the former beautifully and stirringly fronted by soprano Jaunelle Celaire and baritone Emorja Roberson and the latter by sopranos Victoria Fraser and Isabella Burns, contralto Gabriela Estephanie Solis, and tenor Matthew Kelly—that complement this recording of Mass for the Oppressed, Eads wields particular skill at constructing musical syntax with finished phrases, his melodic sensibility distinguished by a gripping and now rare linearity. Melodies have genuine beginnings and endings, and the currents of thematic development upon which they journey display affectionate familiarity with choral traditions extending from the Renaissance unto the Twenty-First Century.

In Mass for the Oppressed, Eads’s shaping of choral passages recalls in some moments the intricacy of Vaughan Williams’s manipulations of the sixteen voices in the first version of his Serenade to Music and in others the Brobdingnagian contrasts of Mahler’s Second Symphony. The writing for solo violin, poignantly executed in this performance, is reminiscent of Beethoven’s music for the instrument in the Benedictus of his Missa solemnis. There are bars that reflect aspects of Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem and Hindemith’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: A Requiem for those we love, and the music for the solo voices in Mass for the Oppressed unites bel canto with modernity in a manner reminiscent of the music of Jake Heggie. These glimpses of Eads’s absorption of the choral traditions that informed and inspired his work notwithstanding, it is the individuality of his compositional voice that sings most resoundingly in every bar of Mass for the Oppressed. There is an expressive purpose for every harmonic progression, and each phrase has its own internal logic that determines its function within the Mass as a whole. With Mass for the Oppressed, Eads makes bold statements not only about the rôles that music plays in spotlighting and soothing the wounds men inflict upon one another but also about his own rôle as one of the Twenty-First Century’s most prescient musical healers.

From the opening bars of the thought-provoking Kyrie, the performance that Mass for the Oppressed receives from the University of Notre Dame’s Concordia Choir and Ritornello Orchestra and soloists soprano Tess Altiveros, mezzo-soprano Toby Newman, tenor Barry Banks, and bass-baritone David Miller is as awing as Alaska’s landscapes. The choristers’ singing evokes the grandeur of Denali, fluttering with the grace of a single snowflake and roaring with the cataclysmic might of an avalanche, and the instrumentalists’ playing shimmers like the Aurora Borealis. There is nothing more moving in Monteverdi’s Vespers, Bach’s Passions, Mozart’s Requiem, or Elgar’s oratorios than the heartbreaking sincerity with which Eads’s music asks the listener, ‘Is there no help for the widow’s son?’ Voices and instruments intertwine with unforced fluidity. Here, the statements of ‘Kyrie eleison’ are not supplicants’ pleas for mercy: rather, these are the demands of the abused. The voices of the oppressed are lifted in song by the soloists. The duet for the male soloists is some of the finest music in the score, and Banks and Miller sing it with lustrous tone and verbal clarity. Whether singing in Latin or English, choristers and soloists focus as intently on elocution as on intonation, their delivery of words propelling their rhythmic precision.

It is significant that Eads devised the Gloria in three scenes, meaningfully codifying the dramatic impetus of both music and text. In the first scene, ‘Paul and Silas in Prison,’ it quickly becomes apparent that glory celebrated brings recognition of glory denied, and a Job-like questioning of the validity of Providential prerogative in a world pockmarked by suffering and inequality is enacted in music of disquieting simplicity. It is not with the mind of a theologian but with the heart of an ordinary man that the cascading vocal lines ponder understanding and reconciliation. In the liturgical Gloria of the second scene, the music again conveys rejoicing and reluctance, the hesitation to extol divine magnanimity like an ostinato that pulses within the composer’s part writing. ‘Domine Fili unigenite’ is set as a pavane of impassioned elegance that Ravel might have borrowed from Rameau, and Altiveros scales its heights with security and haunting, ethereal sound. The third scene, founded upon a theme of ‘Remember Me!’ that conjures the atmosphere of the dying lament of Purcell’s Dido, partially resolves the ambivalence of the Gloria with a beguilingly uncomplicated conceit: to glorify the eternal is to claim a share of immortality. Whenever the soloists sing in the Mass, their voices face daunting technical challenges, universally met with preparedness and charisma. With music ranging in stylistic ancestry from Bach’s Evangelists to Loge in Wagner’s Das Rheingold and the tenor solos in Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, Banks is gruelingly tested: the quality of the performance as a whole is markedly enhanced by the splendors of his singing.

As in the Gloria, Eads turns the simple faith of the Credo on its head, his setting of ‘I Wish to Believe’ throbbing with painfully direct uncertainty, the honesty of the text’s sentiments highlighted by the uncanny intelligence of the composer’s writing for the orchestra. Rarely in recent years have new choral compositions demonstrated handling of the symbiotic relationships among words and music as adroit as Eads’s in Mass for the Oppressed. ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of Hosts’ in the Sanctus is equally effective in this regard, the music seeming to emerge from rather than merely accompanying the words. Like the spurious but electrifying top Cs in Allegri’s ‘Miserere mei,’ the meandering melodic lines in ‘Echoing King’ immediately carve their likenesses into the listener’s memory, soaring to striking heights of expressivity without affectation. Eads shares with Poulenc an ability to accurately judge the musical needs of a word, a phrase, or a feeling: like the other sequences of the Mass, neither the Credo nor the Sanctus contains a superfluous note or rest.

It is in the final movement of the Mass, the Agnus Dei, that the narrative that Eads has relayed throughout the work is most ambivalent. At the core of Mass for the Oppressed is a quest for expiation of the sins of the world, not by the intercession of a symbolic Lamb of God but by the errant lambs of the flock. Catharsis might seem to be at hand, but this ‘Dona nobis pacem’ is no passive philosophical exercise in seeking, receiving, and accepting an external gift of peace. This is music of hewing one’s own peace from unforgiving circumstances, and Eads demands and in this performance receives resilience from all of the musical personnel. The composer’s conducting is nowhere more impressive than in the score’s final pages, in which the excruciatingly slow pace of the Fairbanks Four’s path to freedom figuratively accelerates with the momentum of truth. In every minute of this performance, the choir’s singing is heroic, at once intimate and intimidating. Eads tells the Fairbanks Four’s story with the effectiveness of a great novelist whose language is music, but the performance on this disc confirms that Mass for the Oppressed is not an occasional work. Exasperatingly, oppression is a seemingly ineradicable human condition, and the moral essence of Eads’s music is unmistakably universal.

Little more than eighteenth months after he fêted Nobel Prize recipients at the White House, President Kennedy was dead, his life ended by an act of calculated evil and cowardice that even now lacks fully credible explanation. His assassination was a manifestation of the now-all-too-common disconnect between espousal of a cause and respect for the sanctity of human life, a disconnect that in different ways claimed the lives of five young men in Fairbanks in 1997. A disconnect no less troubling can be observed in the reality that many of the people who lament the death of President Kennedy would likely deem neither the plight of the Fairbanks Four nor the life of the youth they were falsely convicted of murdering worthy of remembrance. Great is the boon to music but still greater are the rewards for mankind that Emerson Eads disagrees.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841 – 1904): Stabat Mater, Opus 58—Eri Nakamura (soprano), Elisabeth Kulman (mezzo-soprano), Michael Spyres (tenor), Jongmin Park (bass); Prague Philharmonic Choir; Czech Philharmonic; Jiří Bělohlávek, conductor [Recorded in Dvořák Hall, Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic, 23 – 25 March 2016; DECCA483 1510; 2 CDs, 83:06; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Likely penned either by Jacopone da Todi, a Thirteenth-Century lay brother of the Order of Penance of Saint Francis and one of the earliest writers to dramatize events from the Gospels for the stage, or by Innocent III, whose papacy straddled the turn of the Thirteenth Century, the ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’ had by the beginning of the Fourteenth Century achieved widespread use in Marian novenæ and other liturgical rites. Its masterfully-crafted trochaic tetrameter movingly evincing the Virgin Mary’s sorrow as she observes Christ’s crucifixion, compellingly humanizing the Blessed Mother, the verses’ innate musical potential rapidly expanded beyond the hymn’s initial service in devotions to Our Lady of Sorrows. One of the earliest surviving settings of the text, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s circa 1590 arrangement for double chorus, likely commissioned by Pope Gregory XIV during the final year of his papacy, exerted influence on generations of composers including Richard Wagner, who published his own edition of the piece in 1877, and continues to be studied and admired today. Reflecting the increased exposure that Palestrina’s motet lent the text, musical treatment of ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’ reached a zenith in the Eighteenth Century with admired settings by Antonio Vivaldi, Domenico and Alessandro Scarlatti, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Joseph Haydn, and Luigi Boccherini.

The secularism that surged throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution curtailed the fascination with Marian texts, but the legacy of Palestrina was advanced in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries by well-known ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’ settings by Gioachino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Francis Poulenc, and Arvo Pärt. Among the most momentous adaptations of the words in the Nineteenth Century was one by Antonín Dvořák, whose Stabat Mater was completed in 1877 and first performed in 1880. Possessing the imaginative orchestration of his symphonic music and prefiguring the melodic fecundity of Rusalka, Dvořák’s Stabat Mater did much to broaden the composer’s reputation outside of his native Bohemia, particularly in England. The appreciation that the Stabat Mater garnered in its 1883 English première in Royal Albert Hall led to a commission for a work for the 1891 Birmingham Festival that became his setting of the Requiem Mass and aided the establishment of the forty-two-year-old Dvořák as a composer of international fame and importance.

The Stabat Mater was composed in an especially difficult time in Dvořák’s life. In 1876 and 1877, during which years the piece was written and orchestrated, the composer and his wife Anna lost all three of their eldest children, first their daughters Josefa and Růžena and later their son Otakar [the Otakar Dvořák whose book Antonín Dvořák, My Father is an invaluable source of information about the composer was a second son with the same name, born in 1885], tragedies that shaped Dvořák’s creative impulses and tested the limits of his devout faith. The Stabat Mater’s 1880 Prague première employed relatively modest numbers of performers, only partially revealing the grandeur of Dvořák’s score, the most expansive known setting of the text. When Dvořák’s friend and colleague Leoš Janáček conducted the Stabat Mater in Brno in 1882, both the quality and the majesty of the music began to be universally recognized. The continuity that Dvořák wrought among the ten movements of the Stabat Mater is remarkable in a work of eighty minutes’ duration in which only the first and final movements are thematically linked. Comparable in dimensions to Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, Dvořák achieved similar if markedly softer dramatic tautness with virtually none of Verdi’s motivic writing. Despite—or perhaps because of—the sad circumstances of its genesis, the Stabat Mater was a seminal juncture in Dvořák’s artistic development: he would have been a great composer had he never written the Stabat Mater, but he is a greater one for its existence.

It is unlikely that there is any conductor active today whose credentials are better suited to leading performances of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater than those of Prague-born maestro Jiří Bělohlávek. A noted interpreter and champion of the music of his native land, Bělohlávek has continued the tradition of Rafael Kubelík, further widening the familiarity and appeal of Czech repertory. Dvořák’s Stabat Mater has been considerably more fortunate in recording studios than many scores by Czech composers, and the work’s extensive discography, which already contains two accounts conducted by Bělohlávek, one with the Prague Symphony Orchestra on Supraphon and one on Chandos with the orchestra heard on the present release, is a compendium of competitive recordings that any of Janáček’s operas—or Dvořák’s, for that matter—might envy. Still, Bělohlávek’s handling of the score in this expertly-engineered DECCA recording reaffirms the legitimacy of his reputation as a Dvořák interpreter of the first order. Here leading the Czech Philharmonic, by which ensemble his contract as Chief Conductor was recently extended through the 2021 – 2022 Season, Bělohlávek presides over a near-ideally-paced performance. The conductor’s tempi allow both soloists and choristers to articulate pitches and words with accuracy and clarity. This music flows through the veins of the Czech Philharmonic musicians, but heritage alone is not sufficient to ensure a successful performance. Bělohlávek emphasizes the score’s lyricism, and the instrumentalists respond with playing of poise and subtle intensity. When Dvořák requests larger-scaled sounds, the musicians provide them without sacrificing the carefully-assembled balances among sections. In passages that look back to Baroque models, conductor and orchestra adopt appropriate but never anachronistic phrasing that, like the greatest conductors’ and orchestras’ handling of Tchaikovsky’s homages to Mozart, highlight the ingenuity with which Dvořák absorbed the lessons of the past. Affirming his inclusion alongside Václav Talich, Karel Ančerl, and Kubelík amongst the most gifted Czech conductors, Bělohlávek exhibits with this Stabat Mater that his originality is born of the union of comprehension of tradition with alertness to the singular needs of each unique performer and performance.

The polished maturity and strength of his singing on these discs belies the youth of South Korean bass Jongmin Park. Singing ‘Quæ mœrebat et dolebat’ in the first movement with wonderfully steady, freely-produced tone, he supplies the sonorous foundation that solo quartets often lack in performances of the Stabat Mater. In the second movement’s quartet, Park voices ‘Quis est homo’ handsomely, his timbre like unblemished teak. The young bass projects a stream of gilded, perfectly-weighted, well-integrated sound in the fourth movement, singing ‘Fac ut ardeat cor meum’ with emotional warmth, and his voice resounds alluringly in the final quartet with chorus. In recent years, several promising basses have emerged from Asia, and Park here proves himself to be one of the best of them. The names of many accomplished basses appear in the Stabat Mater’s performance history, not least that of Franz Crass, who sang the piece with Kubelík for Bayerischer Rundfunk in 1964. As he sings on this recording, Park is a fully-qualified successor to Crass and the foremost basses who preceded him in performance of this music.

Anyone familiar with his singing of rôles like Arnold in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Polyeucte in Donizetti’s Les martyrs is aware that American tenor Michael Spyres is one of the preeminent singers of his generation, but his singing of Dvořák’s music in this performance of the Stabat Mater might surprise even his most ardent admirers. The security and smoothness of his repeated ascents to F♯ and G at the top of the stave in the opening ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’ are not unexpected, but the exceptional beauty of the sounds that he emits surpasses even his own best efforts. Dvořák offers Spyres none of the stratospheric top notes that are his métier in bel canto repertory, but his top As in the Stabat Mater have tremendous impact. The tenor artfully blends his distinctive voice with his colleagues’ instruments in the second movement’s quartet. It is in the sixth movement that Spyres’s singing impresses most. His phrasing of ‘Fac me vere tecum flere’ rivals his finest negotiations of Rossini and Donizetti cantilene. Dueting with the soprano in the eighth movement, Spyres voices ‘Fac ut portem Christi mortem’ eloquently, and here and in the final quartet with chorus the sheer attractiveness of his timbre enchants. Each of Spyres’s appearances on recordings to date has been enjoyable, but his singing on this recording of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater is exquisite.

German mezzo-soprano Elisabeth Kulman is a performer who garners attention not with flamboyance but with firm, focused singing and unaffected artistry that hearkens back to the best years of Ernestine Schumann-Heink’s career. In this recording of the Stabat Mater, she is consistently on excellent form, singing Dvořák’s music with impeccable control. Her lines in the quartet in the first movement are delivered with flexibility, and she fills her traversal of ‘Quis est homo qui non fleret’ in the second movement with even, warm tone. With its tuneful ritornello and deftly-deployed ground bass, the ninth movement could be taken for an arrangement of an aria from a sacred work by J. S. Bach, Händel, or Telemann, but Kulman never forgets that Dvořák’s name is on the cover of her score. The unexaggerated sobriety of her account of ‘Inflammatus et accensus’ exudes total understanding of the text, and, like Spyres and Park in their solos, she makes the caliber of the music all the more apparent by singing it so radiantly. Her part in the final quartet with chorus benefits from her commendably straightforward singing. Kulman seems in some ways to have come from a different era, her work wholly free of idiosyncrasies and mannerisms. This is especially welcome in performances of sacred music, and her singing of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater is as unostentatiously poignant as it is pretty.

When first heard in ‘O quam tristis et afflicta’ in the opening movement, the voice of Japanese soprano Eri Nakamura is marginally unsteady, her vocalism sounding tentative and possibly under-rehearsed and compromised by uncertain intonation. Thereafter, her innate musicality quickly restores her confidence, guiding her rise to a superb top B. In the second movement, the quartet ‘Quis est homo,’ she sings sweetly but with the power necessary to soar above the ensemble. Nakamura splendidly complements Spyres in the eighth movement duet ‘Fac ut portem Christi mortem,’ matching the gracefulness of his singing with her own silver-toned elegance. The soprano’s dulcet tones in the closing quartet recall Edith Mathis’s singing of this ingratiatingly-written but deceptively difficult music. After a slightly tenuous start, Nakamura builds a performance that captivates and communicates the profundity of Dvořák’s score.

Dvořák’s writing for the soloists in the Stabat Mater is distinguished, creating abundant moments of serenity, but it is for the chorus that many of the score’s most touching pages were conceived. In this performance, the prepared, stylish singing of the Prague Philharmonic Choir is rightly the resilient pedestal by which Dvořák’s portrait of the Holy Mother’s despair is supported. Like their orchestral counterparts, the choristers are linked to this music as if by genetics, but feeling this piece like an extension of an artist’s own psyche does not lessen its difficulties. The monumental Andante con moto ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’ with which the work begins, practically a full-length cantata in its own right, receives from the choir a reading of stark luminosity, the contrapuntal passages managed with beguiling naturalness. Because nothing about the fugal singing seems feigned or pedantic, the barrier between the listener and Dvořák’s deeply personal evocation of a parent’s grief is surmounted. The third movement, ‘Eja, mater, fons amoris,’ reincarnates the spirit of Renaissance motets in a Romantic body, the choir’s unerring intonation heightening the emotional gravity of the composer’s simple but potent harmonic progressions.

Park and the chorus are equal partners in this performance of ‘Sancta mater, istud agas,’ the soloist engaging in dialogue with the choir rather than giving the impression of seeking to project over them. Only in the otherwise lovely pianissimo singing in the fifth movement, ‘Tui nati vulnerati,’ are there almost imperceptible flaws in the blends among vocal registers. Spyres, too, interacts with the chorus organically, their collaboration in the sixth movement marked by a common commitment to making the meaning of the words evident even to listeners with no knowledge of Latin. The choristers’ declamation of ‘Virgo, virginum præclara’ rings with sincerity, and their rousing singing of the complex counterpoint of ‘Quando corpus morietur’ with the soloists resolves the Stabat Mater with a suggestion of optimism. Chorus master Lukáš Vasilek clearly shares Bělohlávek’s intimate understanding of Dvořák’s score, and his training of the Prague Philharmonic Choir yields a performance worthy of the music.

It is easy to discern parallels between the ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’ text’s study of Mary’s mourning and the pain of Dvořák’s loss of his children in the months in which his setting of the centuries-old words took shape. Originally structured as a work in seven movements with piano accompaniment, it was likely the deaths within a month of his daughter Růžena and son Otakar that prompted Dvořák to revise the score, adding three additional movements and orchestration. His surviving correspondence offers few clues about the composer’s innermost reactions to the success that his Stabat Mater ultimately enjoyed, but he was surely gladdened by audiences’ affection for this musical panegyric to a parent’s bereavement. 137 years after the work’s première, this marvelous recording perpetuates that affection with a performance of integrity and genuine devotion.

Trading Voices– The 2017 WNO Opera Gala—Jordan Donica (Broadway star), Cynthia Erivo (Broadway star), Renée Fleming (soprano), Denyce Graves (mezzo-soprano), Solomon Howard (bass), Brian Stokes Mitchell (Broadway star), and Leslie Odom Jr. (Broadway star); Washington National OperaChorus and Orchestra; Philippe Auguin and Steven Mercurio, conductors [Washington National Opera, Opera House, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.; Saturday, 3 June 2017]

Whether the genre is opera, symphony, chamber music, musical theatre, jazz, pop, or any other, an impresario’s most fervent prayers are surely for the vision to devise audience-pleasing programming and financial resources extensive enough to make that vision reality. In America’s Twenty-First-Century Performing Arts environment, that sort of vision is rare, but funding pledged to the Arts without agendas is what Rodolfo in La bohème might include among the ‘castelli in aria’ of which he sings, a fiscal stability that exists in the poet’s verse but not in his pocket. Which task could be more daunting for the enterprising impresario than planning a company’s season within the boundaries of a finite budget, within the confines of which a near-infinite number of audience expectations must also be met? This is the challenge faced by every opera company in America, now more than ever. Criticizing companies’ failures to meet these quixotic goals has become almost a contact sport among opera lovers, but there are notable successes amongst the widely-discussed missteps, one of the most extraordinary of which resides along a beautiful stretch of the Potomac River in the nation’s capital. As exhibited by the company’s fantastic recent production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly [reviewed here], Washington National Opera has thrived in recent seasons under the leadership of Artistic Director Francesca Zambello and Music Director Philippe Auguin. The efforts of a team of talented and dedicated artists have made WNO an oasis of culture and humanity amidst the tumultuous conflicts of today’s Washington, and the 2017 WNO Opera Gala was a thrilling, touching, and thought-provoking homage to the past, present, and future of opera at Kennedy Center—and a spectacular answer to any impresario’s prayers.

Celebrating the conclusion of the company’s 2016 – 2017 Season, the centennial of Kennedy Center’s namesake, President John F. Kennedy, and the tenure of the retiring Chairman of the company’s Board of Trustees (and now, fittingly, the Chairman Emeritus), philanthropist and indefatigable friend of the Arts Jacqueline Badger Mars, WNO’s 2017 Opera Gala, Trading Voices, the first such event in the company’s history, brought together seven artists of different backgrounds and experiences under the direction of conductors Auguin and Steven Mercurio, the former presiding over the evening’s operatic excerpts, including a sparkling performance of the Overture from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and the latter pacing the Broadway standards. The WNO Chorus and Orchestra were on fantastic form, the instrumentalists proving to be the hippest ensemble in the District with their playing of the musical theatre pieces. Auguin conducted with his usual flair, sensitively accompanying the vocalists whilst always preserving the integrity of the music at hand. Mercurio emphasized the nuances of each number entrusted to his baton without sacrificing rhythmic precision or stylistic identity. Unlike some similar events, this gala possessed unflagging continuity and energy, captivatingly paying tribute to both the company’s artistic achievements and the remarkably generous lady who has contributed so much to their realization.

WNO assembled a quartet of phenomenal performers to represent the world of musical theatre in Trading Voices. A relative newcomer to the Great White Way, Jordan Donica has already established himself as one of his generation’s brightest stars with his performances of Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera and the dual rôle of the Marquis de LaFayette and Thomas Jefferson in the national tour of the most successful show in recent Broadway history, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. For his first number in WNO’s gala, Donica sang ‘Feeling Good’ from Anthony Newley’s and Leslie Bricusse’s 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. Equal parts Sam Cooke, Sidney Poitier, and James Bond, he delivered the song with the solid foundation of an operatic baritone and the suave swagger of a jazz singer. Revisiting The Phantom of the Opera, Donica later sang the title character’s signature song, ‘The Music of the Night.’ The young singer’s phrasing honored the melodic line’s indebtedness to the principal theme of the Act One love duet in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, but neither the falsetto top A♭ nor the repetition of the tone in full voice was produced with ideal freedom. These were the only minute flaws in an otherwise galvanizing performance. This music may be forever associated with Michael Crawford, but Donica owned it, along with the audience’s appreciation.

Recipient of the 2016 Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical Tony^® for her portrayal of Celie in The Color Purple, Cynthia Erivo had the unenviable assignment of substituting for a beloved singer who withdrew from the show. With a smile as electrifying as her voice, she wholly conquered the audience within seconds of her first entrance, however. Her soaring performance of Fantine’s ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ from Les Misérables roused the audience to a frenzy of excitement, her changing of the pronouns from singular to plural—the dreams we dream—in the song’s final bars unmistakably conveying her belief in the universality of the rights to dream big and achieve even bigger. Erivo returned to end the gala with a performance of ‘Nessun dorma’ from Puccini’s Turandot. She rushed ahead of Mercurio and the orchestra in a few phrases, but her traversal of the aria was anything but a crossover stunt. She approached the piece with the respect that it deserves, and her musicality was irreproachable. Unlike Calàf, she did not have to wait until dawn to enjoy her triumph. It was a sad irony that, as Erivo sang, news of terrorist attacks in her native London was breaking, but her performance embodied the spirit of community, compassion, and mutual understanding possible through music that is the foremost countermeasure against violence and intolerance.

A true Broadway leading man in the tradition of John Raitt and Jerry Orbach, Brian Stokes Mitchell brought to his singing in Washington the same unforced charisma and heroic vocalism that defined his portrayals of Coalhouse Walker, Jr. in Ragtime, the title rôle in Man of La Mancha, and Frederick C. Graham in Kiss Me, Kate, for which he garnered the 2000 Tony^® award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical. His account of Sportin’ Life’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was a true performance, Mitchell’s polished-silver vocalism complemented by expert comedic timing and light-footed dance steps worthy of Rudolf Nureyev. In addition to his performance, Mitchell emceed the event with humor and class. The sole regret of the evening was that he was not allowed another song. It was apparent that, to paraphrase Eliza Doolittle, he and his audience could have sung all night.

Another bona fide star of the Broadway stage and 2016 recipient of the Tony^® award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical for his no-holds-barred depiction of Aaron Burr in Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. is one of musical theatre’s most distinctive performers. Like Mandy Patinkin’s, his voice is an unique, immediately-identifiable instrument, and he uses it with complete control. The principal marvel of his singing of Sportin’ Life’s ‘There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York’ from Porgy and Bess was the control with which he evinced improvisatory abandon. Were all drug dealers’ sales pitches so sensually persuasive, the battle against addiction should be virtually unwinnable! For his second number, Odom Jr. performed the song that has become emblematic of his career to date, Burr’s ‘Wait For It’ from Hamilton. One of the choicest fruits of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius, the number unfailingly stops the show in performances of Hamilton, and, owing to the ardor of Odom Jr.’s delivery, it ignited the atmosphere inside Kennedy Center’s Opera House. The intensity of his vocal acting was thoroughly at home in the room, and his singing hit the target as surely as Aaron Burr’s bullet in his fateful 1804 duel with Alexander Hamilton.

Easily avoiding being outshone by such high-wattage colleagues from the world of musical theatre, bass Solomon Howard offered a thunderous but stylish voicing of Banco’s romanza ‘Come dal ciel precipita’ from Act Two of Verdi’s Macbeth. An alumnus of WNO’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, Howard is one of the company’s most popular artists and will likely further hone his musical magnetism when he portrays Il re d’Egitto in WNO’s production of Aida at the start of the 2017 – 2018 Season. His already-refined Verdian credentials were sonorously verified by his handling of Banco’s music. There was no cheating at either extremity of the range, and Howard shared the Broadway performers’ ability to bring the character to life even in the context of a concert.

It was divulged during the course of the gala that Lauretta’s ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi is Jacqueline Badger Mars’s favorite aria, and it was a testament to the Arts community’s esteem for her that internationally-admired soprano and Kennedy Center Artistic Advisor At Large Renée Fleming was on hand to serenade her with the aria. Fleming’s recent Boston Symphony, Covent Garden, and Metropolitan Opera farewells to the rôle of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, a part that she sang to great praise in concert with the National Symphony Orchestra at Kennedy Center in 2014, have been the topic of much actual and virtual conversation during the first half of 2017. The discussion prompted by her singing of ‘O mio babbino caro’ in WNO’s gala could focus only on the superlative condition of Fleming’s voice. The lyricism of Puccini’s vocal line was lovingly maintained, but the soprano’s expansive phrasing evocatively hinted at an elusive kinship between this music and the Czech song repertory of which she is an important exponent. Legions of sopranos include ‘O mio babbino caro’ in their repertories, but very few of them could ever hope to sing it as simply and alluringly as Fleming sang it for the WNO gala’s honoree and audience.

A native Washingtonian, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves is one of America’s most influential ambassadors for opera. Now sharing her expertise with students at Peabody Conservatory in addition to performing, she shared with her hometown audience a display of the artistry that has endeared her to opera lovers throughout the world. For her ‘typical repertoire’ selection, Graves offered a languid reading of Dalila’s ‘Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix’ from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila that seemed capable of seducing the varnish off of the auditorium’s woodwork. Both her legato and her intonation were exemplary in the sinuous lines of ‘Ah! réponds à ma tendresse.’ The most surprising repertory choice of the evening was Graves’s singing of ‘Ol’ Man River’ from Jerome Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Showboat. Hearing a female voice in music typically sung by basses and baritones like Paul Robeson and Bruce Hubbard was a novelty; and an effective one. Anyone who has heard Graves sing African-American Spirituals or Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’ is acquainted with the otherworldly depth and richness of her lower register: it is as though the voice of Helen Traubel were inverted, with the might from the top of the stave to top B♭ extended below the stave. The burnished quality of her lowest tones lent her performance of ‘Ol’ Man River’ an emotional gravitas that few male singers could match. In a matter of moments, Kennedy Center was relocated from the banks of the Potomac to the humid Mississippi delta, and one of the nation’s preeminent musical storytellers unaffectedly defined the evening’s theme of ‘trading voices.’

At least since the invention of recording technology, the concept of artists ‘crossing over’ to perform music from different genres has wielded an undeniable though frequently-condemned commercial enticement. Purists work diligently at preserving their frowns, but is it really possible to hear Dame Joan Sutherland, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dinah Shore giggle and chirp through a classic Gilbert and Sullivan number without smiling? Can one hear Thomas Hampson sing Stephen Foster ballads and not think that, though hardly Schumann or Brahms, this is significant music? Can one hear Brian Stokes Mitchell sing Man of La Mancha’s ‘Impossible Dream’ and not feel that opera is close at hand? This is the essence of trading voices: singing someone else’s songs enlarges an artist’s understanding of his own music. Washington National Opera’s Trading Voices gala was an evening for expressing gratitude, but the artists’ committed performances also revealed the undiminished potential of one of life’s fundamental sources of hope. When we trade voices and open our ears to new, diverse, and unfamiliar music, it is difficult to avoid opening our hearts, as well.