CD REVIEW: SOL Y LUNA–Sephardic Music performed by Brio (J. Lemos, S. Rosenberg, M.A. Ballard, D. Mallon; Dorian Sono Luminus DSL-92118)

 

SOL Y LUNA: Sephardic music performed by Brio – J. Lemos (countertenor), S. Rosenberg (guitars, recorder, Persian flute), M.A. Ballard (viola da gamba, rebec), D. Mallon (percussion) [recorded at Ayrshire Farm, Upperville, VA, 10 – 12 March 2010; Dorian Sono Luminus DSL-92118]

It is now to the mists of time and—perhaps worse—the dictates of conjecture that the precise origins of Sephardic music are lost.  Likely stemming from roots cultivated among the Jewish communities of medieval Spain and having as a primary impetus in its development the expulsion of Jews from Spain by the Inquisition in 1492, the tradition of Sephardic music developed during the five subsequent centuries to incorporate cultural elements from virtually the entire Mediterranean basin.  Scholars debate the influence of Muslim musical traditions on Sephardic music, especially in Turkey and north Africa, and recently some few scholars have postulated that much of the known Sephardic repertory may be inauthentic in the sense that the songs were composed to conform with perceptions of Sephardic tradition rather than having sprung organically from it.  This distinction is potentially of an historical significance, of course, but to what extent is the musical integrity of the Sephardic repertory undermined?  The concerti composed by the violinist Fritz Kreisler and initially presented as works by Vivaldi are now accepted and admired as Kreisler’s own work.  How many opera-goers cover their ears or flee the auditorium when, say, the arias in La Cenerentola that were not composed by Rossini are sung?  Should Brahms’s Symphonies be less important works of art were it discovered that they were actually composed by a struggling conservatory student rather than the master composer in his full maturity?  This is not to dismiss the importance of a work’s—or, in this case, a repertory’s—genesis, but the true value of music surely depends more upon its effect on those who hear it than upon the circumstances under which it was created.  Applying this criterion, the body of Sephardic music available to modern performers and listeners is especially deserving of preservation, presentation, and enjoyment, whether the individual songs were composed by men or women performing and writing in the shadows of cathedrals, mosques, or synagogues.

Founded in 2002 by Early Music specialist and Chairman of the Music Department of the College of Charleston Steve Rosenberg, Brio is a chamber ensemble dedicated to thoughtful performance of Sephardic songs and what might be called the medieval ‘troubadour’ repertory.  To this music, Brio bring both historical circumspection and decidedly modern perspectives, audibly putting forth the notion that, whatever their collective provenance, these songs are living, breathing organisms, not relics of antiquity that must be approached with gloves and hushed tones of reverence.  The philosophy employed by Brio would seem to be that Sephardic music is best celebrated by performing it full on, without the artificial shows of historical accuracy that pass for appropriate ‘style’ in many camps, and focusing on the emotional immediacy of each song.  The dividend paid by this investment of artistic resources is that most prized of traits: relevance of the musical experience to the Twenty-First-Century listener.  In Brio’s hands, these are not songs of medieval Spain, of expelled and reviled people, or of any specific times or places: these are songs of love and loss, beauty and pain, and the shared emotional reactions of humanity to common predicaments.  The validity and musical merit of this approach have never been more apparent than in Brio’s new disc of Sephardic songs, Sol y Luna.

From the opening notes of the first song on the disc, ‘Yo m’enamori,’ the listener is transported to Andalucía, the finely-detailed playing of the guitar, the rattling of the castanets, and the seductive cadence of the voice suggesting the whirl of the wind in the caves of Sacromonte.  It would be impossible to select any of the tracks on the disc, instrumental or vocal, for particular praise, so high is the quality of the performances in general.  Whether wistful or exuberant, the mood of each song is evoked through vocal and instrumental nuances derived unpretentiously from the text.  When performing music conveying such vital passions, there is always the danger of seeming quaint, of seeming to sing of these sentiments rather than from them.  In this recording, there is no doubt that the emotions of this music are felt, and thus the psychological environments of these songs are palpable to the listener.

Playing recorder, Persian flute, and an array of Renaissance guitars, Brio’s founder Steve Rosenberg shapes each song with ears, mind, and heart focused on reflecting the poetic twists of the texts in sound.  Each song is given a distinct profile, a ‘sound world’ that honors its origins, whether Spanish, Israeli, or Turkish, but also creates a refreshing vitality.  Mr. Rosenberg’s playing is technically astute and possesses the rhythmic ‘snap’ that is required to draw the listener into each song.  The bass lines of the songs are drawn with complementary intuition by Mary Anne Balllard, playing viola da gamba and rebec, a bowed instrument derived from Arab models and popularized in Europe during the Renaissance (a scene in Don Quijote depicts a shepherd’s serenade accompanied by a rebec).  To these ingredients are added the aromatic spices of the sounds made by a veritable orchestra of percussion instruments played by Danny Mallon, whose mastery of the castanets is particularly impressive.  The sounds created by this trio of exemplary musicians combine to create a dialogue that interacts with the vocalism rather than merely supporting it.

The voice of South American countertenor José Lemos is marvelously ambiguous: both smoky and almost celestially pure, the timbre of Mr. Lemos’s voice seems specially-tailored for the troubadour and Sephardic music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.  When expressing fervent piety, the voice glows with radiance.  Songs of sadness and loss inspire elements of darkness and heaviness despite the downy lightness of Mr. Lemos’s vocal technique.  Love songs draw from Mr. Lemos’s voice a smoldering, almost scandalous sensuality.  Singing in the ‘composite’ language (influenced by both Spanish and Jewish dialects, with contributions from hosts of other linguistic idioms) Ladino, the crispness of Mr. Lemos’s diction is very rewarding in this music, and only the absence of the distinctive consonant formations of Castilian reveals that he is not a native Spaniard.  Mr. Lemos’s accomplishments in operatic repertory, ranging from the operas of Lully and Händel to Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, are unfailingly memorable, and he brings the same vocal focus and dramatic precision familiar from his operatic roles to the music on this disc.  These songs are not conceived in his performance as operas in miniature, however: in complete accord with Mr. Rosenberg, Ms. Ballard, and Mr. Mallon, Mr. Lemos presents each song in this recording as a moment in life, some of them to be proclaimed in sunny plazas, some to be carried by the breeze on moonlit nights, and some to be whispered into ears under cover of darkness.

That Sephardic music is an underexplored vein of artistic gold is evident from the splendid music-making on this recording.  Perhaps the greatest achievement of this disc, though, is the unique spontaneity of the singing and playing, making a tradition that may be as old as the Alhambra seem not just new but perceptibly evolving.  The performances by Brio brim with energy and the joy of uniting the threads of common cultural and emotional exchanges inherent in the diversity of music.  Stevie Wonder famously sang that ‘just because a record has a groove don’t make it in the groove.’  Whether heard as an expressive account of music in a centuries-old tradition or as a vital experience of a new, ever-changing genre, Sol y Luna is gloriously in the groove.

CD REVIEW: Antonio Vivaldi – ERCOLE SUL TERMODONTE (R. Villazón, R. Basso, P. Ciofi, D. Damrau, J. DiDonato, V. Genaux, P. Jaroussky, T. Lehtipuu; Virgin 6945450)

 

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678 – 1741): Ercole sul Termodonte, RV 710 – R. Villazón (Ercole), R. Basso (Teseo), P. Ciofi (Orizia), D. Damrau (Martesia), J. DiDonato (Ippolita), V. Genaux (Antiope), P. Jaroussky (Alceste), T. Lehtipuu (Telamone); Coro da Camera ‘Santa Cecilia’ di Borgo San Lorenzo, Europa Galante; Fabio Biondi [recorded in the Teatro della Pergola, Florence, 24 – 31 July 2008, 2 – 6 January 2009, 6 – 7 June 2010; Virgin 6945450]

It was in the summer of 2006 that Spoleto’s Festival dei Due Mondi seized the attention of opera lovers worldwide with a production of Vivaldi’s forgotten—and previously-lost, or at least disassembled—Ercole sul Termodonte by British director John Pascoe, a production in which some fine singing by a young cast was outshone by the startling visual concept of Mr. Pascoe’s design, which was reliant upon phallic imagery and nudity among the principal singers.  It was the ill fortune of the cast, and especially of those singers who took the lead roles, to look at least as handsome as they sounded, so despite a DVD release of the production the effect of Vivaldi’s musical score was decidedly secondary.  The Spoleto production was an adequate and effective introduction to Ercole, however, and rumors circulated almost immediately that a studio recording of the opera was planned, featuring Italian violinist and conductor Fabio Biondi (whose editorial work produced the score that is performed on the present recording) and Europa Galante.

It is a testament to the dedication of Maestro Biondi and the potential of his lead tenor, Rolando Villazón, that the making of this recording—sponsored by Rolex—went ahead in the troubled economic times during which the sessions were held.  As is often the case with operatic recordings, there was much gossip about which singers would accept the challenges of Vivaldi’s music for the recording.  Europa Galante presented concert performances of Ercole throughout Europe with a cast similar to that of the recording, with Italian tenor Carlo Allemano an idiomatic, suitably heroic Ercole.  When the news that Rolando Villazón, whose ‘experimental’ disc of Händel arias proved one of the most-discussed recital discs of recent years, would sing the title role in the Biondi recording was confirmed, interest in the recording expanded beyond the usual pool of connoisseurs of Baroque opera.  It was easy to suspect that the presence of Mr. Villazón would unbalance the performance, but Virgin have assembled as starry a cast for this recording of Ercole as, comparatively, has ever been fielded for any operatic recording.

The libretto of Vivaldi’s Ercole, the work of Antonio Salvi despite having long been misattributed to Giacomo Francesco Bussani, is obviously drawn from Greek mythology as recorded by the historians Apollodorus and Justin.  The basis of the plot is the ninth (as ordered by Apollodorus) of the labors assigned to Hercules by Eurystheus as the demi-god’s penance for having slain his own children, the theft of the magical girdle possessed by Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons.  Salvi’s libretto adapts the myth in a manner typical of Eighteenth-Century opera, incorporating amorous intrigues and shifting alliances.  Accompanied in the pursuit of his task by the Greek heroes Theseus, Telamon, and Alceste (a king of Sparta not to be confused with the princess employed operatically by Lully, Händel, and Gluck), Hercules and his band encounter the noble Amazonian women, and the conquerors become the conquered as the Greeks surrender their hearts to the beautiful, brave Amazons.  The plot is contrived, offering little that modern audiences might consider ‘relevant,’ but as with the libretti by Salvi that were set by Händel there are moments of dramatic tension and poetic conceits that possess genuine distinction.  For all that the score was constructed from component parts extracted from the composer’s other operas, Salvi’s libretto for Ercole provided Vivaldi with ample opportunities to exercise his fondness for simile arias.  The music of Ercole largely matches the moods of the libretto, whether martial or romantic, and the editorial notes in the booklet provided with this release are very detailed in their identifications of the sources from which Vivaldi drew his music for the opera and upon which Maestro Biondi relied for his edition of the score.  [The Spoleto production, conducted by Alan Curtis, used a different edition of the opera, reconstructed by Alessandro Ciccolini.]  The recitatives used in the recording are adapted or newly-composed by Maestro Biondi, a practice that is hardly bothersome considering that the composition of recitative was often left to apprentices, novice composers, or an opera company’s maestro di cembalo from Vivaldi’s time well into the Nineteenth Century.  It is very interesting to note that a Papal ban on female performers in Roman theatres at the time of the first performance of Ercole meant that Vivaldi’s female roles were sung by castrati: how ironic that these Amazons, the most fiercely feminist figures of antiquity, were impersonated by men!  The ladies in this performance might legitimately be said to make amends on behalf of their mythological counterparts, however.

Musically, the recording begins on sound footing and maintains its gait until the final chord has sounded.  The choristers of the Coro da Camera ‘Santa Cecilia’ di Borgo San Lorenzo, eleven ladies under the direction of Andrea Sardi, sing incisively, bringing excitement to their limited contributions to the opera.  Europa Galante have emerged as one of the most consistently excellent period-instrument bands on the Early Music scene, and they play in this performance with the accuracy and power that are the marks of advocacy.  The continuo—consisting of harpsichord, theorbo, and ‘cello—is effectively deployed throughout, with especially eloquent shaping of contemplative secco recitative.  Being an earnest champion of Ercole, Maestro Biondi presides over the performance with obvious affection for the score, but he never allows zeal to distort the balance between egotistical heroism and tenderness that is at the heart of the opera.  Tempi are for the most part sensible, with nothing stretched beyond its breaking point and the singers reliably given paces at which they can approach their vocal hurdles comfortably.

Coping very comfortably indeed with his role as Telamone is Topi Lehtipuu, a rare tenor whose voice combines great flexibility with genuine beauty.  His role in Ercole does not give him a great deal to do, but everything that he does is accomplished with considerable aplomb and dramatic awareness.  Drama is likewise at the center of Patrizia Ciofi’s portrayal of Orizia, the belligerent sister of Antiope.  The slightly husky timbre of Ms. Ciofi’s voice, especially in its lower register, nicely contrasts her with the recording’s other high-voiced soprano.  Ms. Ciofi spits out her music with delightful vehemence, and when her lines soar above the ledger lines the voice soars brilliantly in tandem.  She seizes every musical opportunity and makes an indelible—and resolutely positive—impression.

The first pair of lovers is sung by soprano Diana Damrau as Martesia (who is made Antiope’s daughter by Salvi, rather than her sister) and countertenor Philippe Jaroussky as Alceste.  Ms. Damrau, whose typical repertory includes the bel canto heroines of Bellini and Donizetti, proves a very capable singer of Baroque music.  This is not to say that she alters her vocal technique to approximate the style of singing that is regarded by some scholars as appropriate to Baroque repertory: in fact, there is in this performance not the slightest hint of the white-toned honking and tweeting that is often deemed ‘stylish.’  Ms. Damrau approaches Martesia’s music with the same technical foundation with which she might sing Gilda or Lucia, and that is all to the good.  Also to her credit is the fact that the voice is uncommonly lovely throughout its range, and Ms. Damrau apparently has musical good sense in spades.  Whether shuddering with terror or tingling with new-found love, Ms. Damrau’s tone unfailingly conveys Martesia’s state of mind, and her phrasing is exemplary.  Mr. Jaroussky also masters some excellent, long-breathed phrasing, and his voice is also beautiful.  What it is not, alas, is masculine, and the dramatic profile of Alceste suffers.  Mr. Jaroussky is dramatically alert, however, and he works hard to bring to his performance the heroic fire and romantic ardor that his soft-grained voice lacks.  Musically, Mr. Jaroussky’s performance is superb, though occasional signs of stress in the upper register introduce a suspicion that Alceste’s music is, at least in part, slightly too high for Mr. Jaroussky (and, indeed, perhaps for countertenors in general).  United by their characters’ passions for one another, Ms. Damrau and Mr. Jaroussky sing compellingly.

The real firebrand of the opera is Antiope, the most overtly bellicose of Vivaldi’s Amazon queens, and her venomous hatred of the male sex is vividly portrayed in a take-no-prisoners performance from mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux.  The patina of Ms. Genaux’s voice is dark, like aged bronze, but there is a brilliant edge to her singing of coloratura passages, underpinned by what is by any appreciable standard an astonishing technique, that is thrilling.  Hercules was perhaps the ancient world’s greatest hero, but from her first note Ms. Genaux establishes that in Antiope he has encountered an equal.  Capable of executing the most fiendish and bizarre feats of vocal pyrotechnics with complete ease, Ms. Genaux impresses most when she softens the focus and allows the voice to glow with simmering passion.  As her Amazonian sisters yield to love’s persuasion, Antiope prefers to die rather than submit to men, and Ms. Genaux’s singing meaningfully conveys her character’s nobility and determination.  In a sense, Antiope is the most one-dimensional character in the opera, unbending in her quest to maintain the power of her race, but in a performance as wonderful as Ms. Genaux’s she is also the most interesting character.  It would be tremendously difficult to resist the allure of Ms. Genaux’s performance, for there is always the promise when she starts to sing that there is something spectacular to be heard.

The second pairs of lovers, Ippolita (Hippolyta) and Teseo (Theseus), is sung by mezzo-sopranos Joyce DiDonato and Romina Basso.  As suggested by her acclaimed explorations of the music composed by Rossini for Isabella Colbran, Ms. DiDonato is a singer whose voice is perfectly placed between the conventional ranges of mezzo-soprano and soprano.  She has complete command of a silvery lower register, but gleaming top Cs likewise hold no terrors for her.  Vivaldi’s music for Ippolita inhabits the higher end of this vocal spectrum (the role was first performed by the soprano castrato Farfallino, who was said to have a compressed range but a very beautiful high register), and the attractiveness of Ms. DiDonato’s tone in this portion of her voice is remarkable.  She also demonstrates an innate understanding of the art of using vocal coloration to make dramatic points.  Musically, she faces nothing to which her technique is not wholly equal.  Ms. DiDonato has developed the enviable habit of being the undoubted star of every recording in which she participates, and only the high level of overall achievement in this performance prevents her from running away with the laurels in Ercole.  Contributing powerfully to that overall achievement is Ms. Basso, a singer whose voice enthralls with its smoky beauty.  In this performance, Ms. Basso reveals herself to be what might be termed a ‘singers’ singer,’ one for whom complete mastery of her music is an expectation rather than an exception.  Nothing in Ms. Basso’s performance is showy or extravagant for its own sake, but the prevailing cumulative perception of her performance is that she has delivered as complete a performance of a Vivaldi operatic role as one is likely to hear.  There is a beguiling sensuality in Ms. Basso’s singing, along with a credible sense of Teseo’s masculinity, that suggests that this hero is one whose love-making is as legendary as his war-waging.  Ms. Basso’s intensity is the perfect foil for Ms. DiDonato’s gossamer femininity: these two singers, giving magnificent performances, prove that the sort of operatic passion that makes naïve young listeners blush was not an invention of the Nineteenth Century.

If he is not the principal raison d’être for this recording of Ercole, the presence of Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón is sure to be the foremost focal point of interest in this recording.  Mr. Villazón’s vocal problems have been widely debated in recent seasons, and his disc of Händel arias conducted by Paul McCreesh proved divisive, both among aficionados of Baroque music and in the wider opera-loving public.  What is immediately apparent when hearing his performance in Ercole is that, if Mr. Villazón’s has recently been a voice in crisis, that crisis was largely abated during the sessions that produced this recording.  The voice is arrestingly dark and baritonal, yet there is also the suggestion—especially in secco recitative—that Ercole’s vocal lines take Mr. Villazón slightly beyond the lower boundary of his vocal comfort zone.  The voice is not large as recorded, but the dark tone makes an imposing, bitingly heroic effect.  Anyone who did not hear the Händel recital disc will likely be surprised by Mr. Villazón’s faculty for negotiating Ercole’s bravura passages, which are approached full-on and without hesitation.  The highest notes often sound disconnected from the rest of the voice, but the tone is secure throughout the range required by Ercole’s music.  Mr. Villazón’s performance is not a paragon of historically-appropriate singing as it is presently understood, but he sings in a manner that meets the demands of Vivaldi’s music without ever condescending to it and, all things considered, offers a performance that is a credit to himself, his colleagues, and the composer.

It is only rarely that Vivaldi achieved the exalted level inhabited by Händel as a musical dramatist.  Vivaldi’s operas are enjoyably innovative and musically rich without reaching the depths of emotion that are present in Händel’s best operas.  It would be dishonest to suggest that Ercole is one of the scores in which Vivaldi genuinely rivaled Händel, but the Italian composer was an adept man of the theatre who knew how to make a vivid impression.  It is a vivid impression indeed that is made by Ercole, one that has been carefully reconstructed and lovingly rearticulated by Maestro Biondi.  He is extraordinarily fortunate to have been joined in his task of breathing new life into Ercole by a cast without a single weak link.  Ercole does not leave the listener with the sort of cathartic experience that is possible when hearing one of Händel’s best operas, but this recording leaves one with the gratification of having heard a marvelous performance of an opera with many moments of fascinating beauty and power.

CD REVIEW: Gioachino Rossini – STABAT MATER (A. Netrebko, J. DiDonato, L. Brownlee, I. D’Arcangelo; EMI 6 40529 2)

 

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Stabat Mater for Soloists, Choir, and Orchestra – A. Netrebko (soprano), J. DiDonato (mezzo-soprano), L. Brownlee (tenor), I. D’Arcangelo (bass); Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; Antonio Pappano [recorded in Sala Santa Cecilia, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome, 20 – 23 July 2010; EMI 6 40529 2]

When Rossini completed Guillaume Tell, his final opera, in 1829, he was in the thirty-eighth year of a life that would extend for seventy-six years.  Compared with the scores of its composer’s youth, Guillaume Tell was virtually a revolutionary score: running for more than four hours without cuts, the opera was typically Rossinian—which is to say Italianate—in its melodic grace and flamboyant orchestration, but the French Grand Opera of Meyerbeer and Halévy was equally in evidence in the music.  Perhaps sensing the transition in Italian music from bel canto to the Romanticism that would hold sway by the middle of the Nineteenth Century—the premiere of Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, was only a decade in the future at the time at which Rossini was composing Guillaume Tell,—the composer of Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Tancredi, pinnacles of their genres, ceded the field to his younger colleagues, principally Bellini and Donizetti.  From the time of the first production of Guillaume Tell in 1829 until his death in 1868, Rossini composed no more operas.

It was early in this self-imposed retirement, however, that Rossini began composition of his Stabat Mater, a setting of the Thirteenth-Century versified evocation of the sorrow of the Virgin Mary as she observes the crucifixion of Christ.  Drawing inspired settings from both Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Joseph Haydn, and even Schubert, the Stabat Mater commanded an influence in liturgical music that was propelled through the Nineteenth Century by settings by Rossini, Verdi, and Dvořák.  Commissioned in 1831 by an official of the Spanish government to compose his setting of the verses, Rossini set to work almost at once but was ultimately prevented by illness from completing the score in fulfillment of the commission.  At Rossini’s request, the Italian composer Giuseppe Tadolini (husband of Eugenia Tadolini, one of Donizetti’s favorite sopranos) completed the score, and it was in this composite version that the work was first performed in Madrid in 1833.  After a legal fracas resulting from what Rossini deemed an unauthorized publication of the composite score, Rossini composed replacements for the movements composed by Tadolini, publishing the score in the now-familiar form, with all movements by Rossini, in 1841.  Announcement of the first performance of the completed score, which took place in Paris on 7 January 1842, drew mixed responses from critics throughout Europe, one of the most vitriolic in expressing his disapproval being Richard Wagner.  Both the Parisian premiere in January and the Italian premiere in Bologna in March, conducted by Donizetti, were tremendously successful, however, and the Stabat Mater has remained among Rossini’s most enduringly popular works.

It is not now and should hardly have been surprising to critics and audiences in 1842 that Rossini’s Stabat Mater is, though far removed from his operas, an operatic work.  The negative response of Teutonic musicians and critics to this aspect of Rossini’s work is slightly perplexing, especially considering that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach—the Titan among Germanic composers of liturgical music—was largely forgotten until the middle of the Nineteenth Century.  Several of Händel’s oratorios are very similar in form and substance to his operas and indeed are now often performed in staged productions with great success.  The mature liturgical works of both Haydn and Mozart employ the same concertato techniques familiar from their own operas and the religious compositions of contemporary Italians such as Cimarosa and Salieri.  Whatever charges were made against Rossini’s Stabat Mater at the time of its creation and in subsequent generations, the score contains music of great quality, worthy of its composer at his best.  Verdi’s Requiem—said by some critics to be Verdi’s greatest opera—builds upon the foundation laid by Rossini in the Stabat Mater; a not inconsiderable legacy for a work by a composer in retirement.

Expectations for this new recording of the Stabat Mater have been very high, not least because of the accomplishments of its conductor, Antonio Pappano, in his native Italian repertory at the Royal Opera House.  It is, in fact, Maestro Pappano’s conducting that is the recording’s first obvious attraction.  His pacing of the score is deliberate but thoughtful, especially in the sense of approaching the music on its own terms: Maestro Pappano leads a performance that reveals the grandeur of Rossini’s music without seeming calculated to redeem an unjustly-criticized masterpiece.  Maestro Pappano is fortunate in having at his disposal a quartet of vocal soloists for whose sake no allowances must be made in choices of tempi, with the result that the paces at which individual numbers progress seem natural and well-judged.  Cumulatively, though, the performance lacks cohesion, a condition that is more damaging to the dramatic effectiveness of the piece than to the music.  A wonder of Maestro Pappano’s musical work is the excellent singing and playing that he draws from the choristers and instrumentalists of the Chorus and Orchestra of Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the ensembles that in decades past sometimes struggled to maintain basic levels of professionalism in made-on-the-quick opera recordings.  Singing and playing in this performance with precision and passion that would withstand comparison with La Scala forces, both Chorus and Orchestra—recorded with excellent clarity and balance by EMI’s engineers, it should be said—contribute thrillingly.

In her first phrases, the beautiful Russian soprano Anna Netrebko seems ill-suited to this music.  The voice sounds blowsy and slightly wobbly, which can likely be attributed to the actual sound of the voice rather than to its use or condition.  Little is made of the Latin text.  In ensembles, Ms. Netrebko does not consistently blend well with the other soloists.  She improves in the duet with the mezzo-soprano, ‘Quis est homo,’ however, the voice taking on greater focus.  In her aria with chorus, ‘Inflammatus et accensus,’ Ms. Netrebko comes into her own, relishing the opportunity to take command as her vocal line ascends over the choir and providing top notes that ring out brilliantly.  In the closing movement, Ms. Netrebko adapts her singing more sensitively to that of her colleagues in the solo quartet, ending the performance with greater feeling and fluidity.

Undermining Ms. Netrebko’s effectiveness in ‘Quis est homo’ to a degree is the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who approaches even the most stringent demands of her music with complete assurance.  With floods of warm tone, a florid technique equal to the greatest coloratura singers past and present, and a trill seemingly inherited from Dame Joan Sutherland, Ms. DiDonato sings with easy splendor throughout this performance.  Blending beautifully with her colleagues, Ms. DiDonato’s contributions to ensembles are touching, and the security with which she sings her cavatina, ‘Fac, ut portem Christi mortem’ is extraordinarily impressive.  It is solely in the sense that the work of a truly great singer is invariably all the more apparent in the company of merely very good colleagues that Ms. DiDonato distorts the equilibrium in ‘Quis est homo.’  It has been the mezzo-soprano soloist who has let down many performances and recordings of the Stabat Mater, a misfortune completely avoided in this recording.

The most familiar movement of the Stabat Mater is the tenor’s ‘Cujus animam gementem,’ an unapologetically operatic aria that, with its climactic top D-flat, has proved irresistible to virtually every tenor capable of singing it—and to more than a few incapable of singing it.  Though his lines in ensembles are a credit to Rossini’s skill as a composer of four-part polyphony, the aria is the tenor’s only opportunity to emerge from his surroundings, as it were, and with singing of bright, soaring immediacy the American tenor Lawrence Brownlee emphatically claims his moment.  The fluency of Mr. Brownlee’s bel canto technique is compellingly displayed in ‘Cujus animam,’ the lilting principal theme of the aria delivered smoothly and with deceptive ease.  Bravura passages managed handily, the aria is capped with a lovely top D-flat that is sustained comfortably but not long enough to seem vulgar.  Throughout the performance, Mr. Brownlee sings with the sort of finesse that confirms his reputation as one of the leading Rossini tenors of his generation.

The Italian singer Ildebrando D’Arcangelo impresses in his aria, ‘Pro peccatis suæ gentis.’  Though billed in this performance as a bass, Mr. D’Arcangelo is decidedly more of a bass-baritone than a true bass, and his tone weakens significantly at the bottom of his range, risking inaudibility in the descending lines of ‘Eja, Mater, fons amoris.’  Mr. D’Arcangelo’s instrument is sturdy and attractive, however, and his singing exhibits a native understanding of Rossini’s idiom.  Despite the limitations of his lower register, Mr. D’Arcangelo provides an effective foundation in ensembles.

Considering the poor quality of so many performances and recordings of operatic and concert music in recent years, it is encouraging that a recording of this quality has been devoted to Rossini’s Stabat Mater.  Though neither infrequently-recorded nor poorly-served on records, the Stabat Mater is a work of which there is no single definitive recording: many recordings have inimitable qualities that are balanced or even undone by weaknesses.  The present recording is not perfect.  There are recorded performances that explore the drama of the Virgin Mother’s sorrow with greater immediacy and emotional impact despite weaker singing, for instance.  Especially with the performances given by Ms. DiDonato and Mr. Brownlee, however, this recording documents a standard of Rossini singing that makes this performance one that should be heard by all who treasure the rarefied art of bel canto.

CD REVIEW: Jorge Martín – BEFORE NIGHT FALLS (W. Mason, J. Blalock, J. Garcia, S. Mease Carico, J. Abreu, J. Hall, C. Ross; Albany Records TROY 1226/27)

 

JORGE MARTÍN (1959 – ): Before Night Falls – W. Mason (Reinaldo Arenas), S. Mease Carico (Victor), J. Garcia (Ovidio), J. Hall (Mother, the Sea), C. Ross (the Moon), J. Blalock (Lázaro), J. Abreu (Pepe), C. Trahan (Port Official, Visa Official); Fort Worth Opera Chorus, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra; Joseph Illick [recorded in Fort Worth, TX, during Spring 2010; Albany Records TROY 1226/27]

There are in virtually every age of humanity those individuals and situations that capture the popular imagination, whether within the limited scope of specific places or on a global scale.  Through oral traditions and, eventually, the endeavors of artists, these figures of collective importance are subjected to a kind of etherized immortality in which they are indefinitely preserved but are not unchanging: as the years pass, there are many cases in which the ideals for which a person is remembered become more important in the context of mythological consciousness than the facts that contributed to the legend.  There was, for instance, Cleopatra VII Philapator, the Greek queen who was Egypt’s last fully legitimate Pharaoh regnant, a woman who during her life wielded as much power and influence as did any woman on earth.  Within a century of her death, however, she was rather than an exceptional woman a figure in fanciful histories, a character in the drama that was Rome in the years before its collapse.  To a generation of American opera-lovers, Cleopatra was Beverly Sills, her Hellenic authority taking the form of brilliant displays of coloratura and interpolated top notes that shone like the summer sun on the surface of the Nile.  For lovers of cinema, Cleopatra was Elizabeth Taylor, a beguiling seductress whose lavender eyes could bend the will of Rome.  Before either Georg Friedrich Händel or Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted Cleopatra to their artistic ends, William Shakespeare had endowed his Antony and Cleopatra with a female heroine so monumental as to seem almost caricatured and scornful but whose suicide was depicted with extraordinary tragic grandeur, an Elizabethan Liedestod.  Though undoubtedly an exceptionally cunning and educated woman to whom Homer would have been as familiar as to the greatest scholars of the European Renaissance, Cleopatra VII Philapator was almost certainly neither the graceful consort nor the timeless beauty artistic depictions of her have introduced into pseudo-historical perceptions.  The extent to which these well-intended artistic prevarications have affected the cultural legacy of Cuban dissident poet Reinaldo Arenas, the subject of Cuban-born composer Jorge Martín’s opera Before Night Falls (taken from the English title of Arenas’s posthumously-published 1992 autobiography Antes que anochezca) whose life has already been explored in a film with the same title that featured an Academy Award-nominated performance by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, is perhaps more difficult to ascertain than with a figure from the distant past like Cleopatra.  The best sources of information about Arenas, who took his own life in 1990 after a draining battle with AIDS, are his own writings, many of which are at least allegorically autobiographical and decry the atrocities of Fidel Casto’s Cuba.  The libretto of Before Night Falls, the work of the composer and Dolores M. Koch, is commendably faithful to Arenas’s own writings.  Determining whether the Reinaldo Arenas we meet in Mr. Martín’s opera is the man as he actually was can only be left to history, but what the poet’s writings and the opera establish is that Arenas was one of those men whose life, whatever the gilding of legend will make of it, was both of his own time and for all time.

Mr. Martín’s and Ms. Koch’s libretto must be commended at the start for never getting mired in the post-Revolution politics of Cuba in the Twentieth Century.  This is an opera built upon the foundation of a compelling central figure rather than an abstract political manifesto.  Politics lurks in every dark corner of the drama, of course, but the listener’s attention is focused on the impact of the political machinations faced by Arenas and the other characters in the opera.  Equally essential to the psychological construction of the opera is the issue of Arenas’s homosexuality, something that was especially dangerous in his native Cuba and remained contentious even in the United States during the final years of his life.  Mr. Martín as both composer and librettist, along with Ms. Koch, is to be praised for approaching the subject of Reinaldo Arenas with a sensitivity and honesty that elude many directors of recent productions of operas such as Billy Budd and Peter Grimes, in which characters’ implicit or presumed homosexuality has been artificially given greater importance than their humanity.  It is of considerable significance to his legacy that Arenas was a gay man, and as an aspect of his cultural genesis this story should and must be told.  As with the untold numbers of gay artists who were tortured and killed by the Holocausts wrought by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russian, though, what is most important, indeed most poetic, about Arenas is that he was, all else aside, a man, equally remarkable and unremarkable.  The lasting meaning of Arenas’ plight as an artist is in his humanity, not his sexuality, and the valiance with which he bore his own persecution and the exasperating sorrow with which he witnessed the suffering of his fellow men.  Arenas would likely have agreed that his sexuality was an element of his life rather than its impetus, and Mr. Martín integrates Arenas’s sexuality into the opera in a manner that, without politicizing any aspect of the drama for the sake of sermonizing, honors the sense of love as an abiding necessity in the life of any man, regardless of his sexuality.  Before Night Falls is not a social treatise in operatic form charged with altering perceptions: operating within the parameters of traditional forms, Mr. Martín’s opera examines Arenas’s struggles as those of one man united with Everyman, like Rigoletto’s, Wotan’s, or Boris Godunov’s.  The libretto of Before Night Falls is, like Arenas’s own writings, colloquial and unfailingly eloquent.  One hears the voice of a beautiful, tormented man in words that he might have written himself.

Musically, Mr. Martín’s score is tonal without ever seeming dated and makes clever, understated use of many rhythms native to Reinaldo Arenas’s Cuba.  Rey’s first extended solo is sung over an engaging habanera, and even contemplative passages benefit from thoughtful rhythmic underpinning.  Unlike many of the operas written during the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, Before Night Falls is unquestionably an opera after the models of history, its tonal palette expansive and far removed from contemporary musical theatre.  It is audibly an opera of its time but none the worse for that.  There are, in fact, many passages of great beauty in the score, not least in the first-act trio for Ovidio, Rey, and Pepe, ‘Oh, our unhappy island,’ and the Epilogue, Rey’s death scene.  There is often an almost Mozartean grace in the ensemble writing, and Mr. Martín shares with Benjamin Britten the skill for making male voices, even when dominant within the aural landscape, individual and sharply characterized.  The composer largely leaves musical evocations of Cuba in the orchestra, contrasting the often-complex dance rhythms with vocal lines that are both melodically appealing and conducive to pointed delivery of the text.  Successful both musically and dramatically, Before Night Falls is among the sadly few genuine operas composed during the first decade of the new millennium that not only deserved a studio recording of its premiere production but also deserves a place in the repertories of the world’s important opera houses.

That premiere production, the result of espousal of the opera by Fort Worth Opera General Director Darren K. Woods, led to a recording that, as a document of the creation of an important opera by a cast of committed, talented young artists, is superb.  Produced for Albany Records by John Ostendorf, himself one of America’s finest singers and a veteran of many excellent recordings, the recording has excellent sound quality that preserves theatrical ambiance without sacrificing tonal or verbal clarity to reverberation.  The effect is similar to being in the first tier of an acoustically bright house, with the balance among orchestra, chorus, and soloists ideally achieved.  Mr. Martín employs the chorus almost as they would be used in a Greek tragedy: the chorus of Rey’s embittered Aunts, though tonally distant, is not unlike choruses of Furies in the operas of Gluck.  Whether as these complaining crones, as jubilant revolutionaries, or as oppressed prisoners, the Fort Worth Opera choristers, thirty-one in number, sing very well throughout the performance.  Likewise, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra play with precision and verve.  Presiding over the performance is conductor Joseph Illick, Fort Worth Opera’s Music Director.  Conducting with the zeal of advocacy that never gets in the way of the kind of straightforward music-making that lends a genuine sense of occasion to the performance, Maestro Illick brings extensive experience in mainstream repertory to his pacing of Mr. Martín’s opera.  Maestro Illick is the sort of conductor whose quiet mastery of operatic timing and the difficult balance between stage and pit is so welcome in America’s regional opera houses and, with only a few notable exceptions, so conspicuously absent in America’s larger houses.  It is evident in every note on this recording that Maestro Illick, Mr. Woods, and the Fort Worth Opera forces were as committed to Mr. Martín’s opera as the composer was to honestly and touchingly portraying his subject.

In the opera’s female roles, sopranos Janice Hall as Rey’s mother and the Sea and Courtney Ross as the Moon bring firm, lovely voices to their music.  Ms. Hall is especially moving in the aria for Rey’s mother, ‘Promise me, child.’  Mr. Martín’s music for the Sea and the Moon, symbolic figures who essentially serve as Rey’s muses, is often ethereally beautiful, reminiscent in spirit of Richard Strauss’s music for the nymphs in Ariadne auf Naxos.  The lullaby sung by the Sea and the Moon in the final moments of the opera, following Rey’s death, also conjures the Strauss of the final trio of Der Rosenkavalier and the final scene of Capriccio.  As the Port and Visa officials, Corey Trahan discloses a lovely, light tenor voice of the type that, since the heady days of Hugues Cuénod and Michel Sénéchal, has become steadily rarer.

A quartet of gifted young singers take the roles of the four men whose lives intersect most meaningfully with Rey’s in the opera.  As Victor, a commandant in the revolutionary force that ousted Fulgencio Batista and swept Fidel Castro into power in Cuba, bass-baritone Seth Mease Carico sings with the dark authority required to convey in vocal terms alone the oppression imposed upon Rey and other Cuban dissidents.  Mr. Carico is especially commanding and powerful in the Interrogation Scene that occurs after Rey has been imprisoned at the infamous Castillo el Morro, a scene that in its dramatic effectiveness and emotional impact brings to mind the scene for the title heroine and the Zia Principessa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, as well as the tense Interrogation Scene with piano accompaniment for Giordano’s Fedora and Ipanov.  Vocally and dramatically, Mr. Carico’s Victor is rather like a young, very dangerous Scarpia.

Rey’s deliverance unto Victor and the revolutionary forces is accomplished when he is betrayed by Pepe, his childhood friend.  Sung by Puerto Rican tenor Javier Abreu, Pepe emerges as a conflicted figure whose denunciation of Rey is an act of self-preservation rather than one of direct malevolence.  Mr. Abreu possesses a lovely lyric tenor voice that brings a suggestion of sadness to even his most exuberant lines and blends beautifully with the voices of his colleagues in ensembles.  Though Pepe’s actions set in motion the horrors that pursue Rey during his last years in Cuba, Mr. Martín’s music portrays Pepe in a largely sympathetic way, and Mr. Abreu’s vocal elegance shapes a Pepe who is a decent but scared young man.

Mr. Martín and Ms. Koch elected to create a composite character to serve as Rey’s poetic mentor, a figure whose role draws upon the qualities of several important artistic influences in Arenas’s life.  This role, Ovidio, is sung by tenor Jesus Garcia, whose performances as Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann’s Broadway production of La Bohème were widely acclaimed.  Mr. Garcia brings to Ovidio, a role that in its determined and stern but benevolent philosophizing is not unlike Seneca in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, a voice that is both youthful and suggestive of experience: there is the resignation of knowledge and understanding in his singing, a quality reinforced by Mr. Garcia’s world-weary inflection of the text.  The vigor of Mr. Garcia’s singing makes an apt impression in his role, the burnished tone with which he sings his lines suggesting the very essence of poetry.

Rey’s companion during his final years in New York is Lázaro, a man whom he befriended before his successful escape from Castro’s Cuba.  It is to Lázaro that Rey makes the shattering revelation that he has been diagnosed with AIDS, and it is Lázaro who cares for Rey during his illness.  Compared with the other characters in Rey’s life, Lázaro is a simpler man, his motives clearer and more emotional than cerebral.  As sung by young tenor Jonathan Blalock, however, Lázaro is as central to Rey’s development and ultimate transfiguration as an artist as any of the other influences in his life.  The tenderness with which Mr. Blalock sings in his scenes with Rey is immensely moving, as is the despair that floods his voice in the final scene, when his final statements of ‘Farewell’ as he is seen casting Rey’s ashes into the sea have the impact of Rodolfo’s singing of the dead Mimì’s name in the final moments of La Bohème.  Mr. Martín infuses Lázaro’s role with music of lyrical grace, and the ardent beauty of Mr. Blalock’s singing gives his performance an abiding authenticity.  With excellent diction and a voice that shimmers with a bright patina, Mr. Blalock’s performance as Lázaro gives Before Night Falls and its depiction of Rey’s isolation and decline what is finally needed for the opera to truly work: the profound expression of love, even when it is unspoken, that is required as the impetus of genuine tragedy.

In order to bring the troubled, terrific man at the center of this work to life, a singer of great charisma is required, and the premiere production was fortunate to have engaged Wes Mason, one of America’s most promising young baritones.  From his first note, Mr. Mason simply becomes Rey, enveloping himself in the role in a way that is refreshingly uncomplicated.  This is not a trick of method acting applied to singing: for two hours, Mr. Mason uses his voice to communicate Rey’s thoughts and words as though Reinaldo Arenas were taking the stage himself.  This Mr. Mason achieves not with histrionics or suspect melodramatic devices but with open-hearted, open-throated singing.  Mr. Mason’s is a powerful voice, the focused tone and vibrato sounding destined for leading roles in large houses, but this singer is also capable of disarming intimacy without seeming precious.  Vocally, Rey’s music is especially demanding in what is, overall, an arduous score, and Mr. Mason not only copes but excels.  In his exchanges with his colleagues, and particularly with Mr. Blalock, Mr. Mason is alert to the nuances of his own text and to the changing moods of the opera in general.  Mr. Mason possesses the vocal charisma necessary to impersonate Mr. Martín’s Rey, and he recreates in sound the poetry that Arenas constructed of words.

It is likely that, had he contemplated an opera about his life premiering twenty years after his death, Reinaldo Arenas would have been surprised that this musical legacy would greet a world in which Cuba remains under the fists of Castro and in which a man’s sexual preference and manner of exiting this life are still controversial.  Though he is sixteen years Arenas’s junior, perhaps Jorge Martín also would not have envisioned this in 1990, five years before he acquired the rights to set Arenas’s memoirs musically.  What Mr. Martín accomplishes in Before Night Falls is a sterling example of the fact that, no matter how horrific, debilitating, and unscrupulous the human and inhuman obstacles a man faces are, it is the dignity of the man as he faces them that are of permanent value.  It is human nature that a man who dies bravely is remembered whilst a man who lives weakly is forgotten, and there is no doubt that Reinaldo Arenas lived courageously, loved extravagantly, and died resolvedly.  All of this is evident in Mr. Martín’s score, in which the ugliness of oppression, pain, and terminal illness is omnipresent, but as an environment in which life goes on until it simply cannot go on any longer.  Mr. Martín has composed a wonderful opera that never preaches or wallows: it merely sings of what there is to be sung about a man who, like Tosca, suffered for art and for love.  It also reminds the listener of how rare this is, to focus even in art on the integrity of a man’s life rather than the choices he made in living it.  It is too soon to hypothesize about whether future generations will remember Javier Bardem or Wes Mason as Reinaldo Arenas rather than remembering the man himself, but it is to the credit of Jorge Martín, Dolores M. Koch, Wes Mason, Jonathan Blalock, Joseph Illick, Darren K. Woods, and all who were involved with the creation and recording of this opera that Before Night Falls is an experience that will not soon be forgotten.

IN MEMORIAM: American mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett, 1931 - 2010

 

Shirley Verrett

31 May 1931 – 5 November 2010

Again, so soon, another of the greatest voices in recent memory has been silenced by the passing on 5 November of American mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett, one of those brilliant but humble artists whose career both redefined and obliterated boundaries.  Moving with resilience between mezzo-soprano and soprano roles, she was both a celebrated Carmen and the definitive Lady Macbeth (in Verdi’s Macbeth) of her generation.

A child of the American South, Ms. Verrett was among the ranks of pioneering African-American artists—an impressive assemblage of singers that included Martina Arroyo, Grace Bumbry, Mattiwilda Dobbs, Reri Grist, Leontyne Price, and George Shirley—who followed the example of Marian Anderson by both thrilling audiences and changing perceptions in recital and concert halls and in opera houses.  When Ms. Verrett made her Metropolitan Opera début as Bizet’s Carmen on 21 September 1968—a week to the day before the MET début of Plácido Domingo, with whom she would memorably sing Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila for the Company more than twenty years later—she had already participated in the first Live from Lincoln Center and Young People’s Concerts broadcasts.

The racism that Ms. Verrett faced in her native land proved no match for the grace and wit of her personality and the abiding sincerity of her artistry.  She was content to allow the natural beauty of her voice and the uncompromising dignity of her carriage convey the activism that the adversity that she faced inspired.

During her first season at the MET, Ms. Verrett’s assignments included Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo, a role that she made her own and on which she left an indelible impact through several ‘live’ performances preserved on records and a critically-acclaimed studio recording.  In the 1973 – 74 season, one of the defining moments of her MET career came when, owing to Christa Ludwig’s indisposition, Ms. Verrett sang not only Didon (her scheduled role) but also Cassandre in Berlioz’s Les Troyens under the baton of Rafael Kubelík.  Ms. Verrett’s Didon had been heard four years earlier in a Roman concert performance conducted by Georges Prêtre and recorded for broadcast by RAI.  Along with her Eboli and her eloquent Carmen for RAI, superbly partnered by Albert Lance’s idiomatic Don José, the RAI Didon remains as a fittingly monumental legacy of Ms. Verrett’s career.

In a career at the MET that encompassed successes in such roles as Judith in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Ms. Verrett also sang Neocle in the production of Rossini’s L’Assedio di Corinto in which her friend Beverly Sills made her long-awaited MET début and is perhaps the only singer in the history of the Company to have sung both Adalgisa and the title role in Bellini’s Norma on the MET stage.  She was also widely, if not unanimously, praised for her MET performances of Tosca, in a production directed by Tito Gobbi.  Appreciation was near universal for Ms. Verrett’s portrayal of Azucena in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, of which William Bender wrote in Time in 1976, ‘One would hate to see a woman as lovely as Verrett consigned forever to play a hag like Azucena, but hers is one of the memorable interpretations of the role, both visually and vocally.’

Throughout the world, Ms. Verrett was celebrated for the beauty and strength of her voice and for the intensity of her performances.  It was for the beauty and strength of her spirit that she was loved by audiences and colleagues, however.  Fine recordings, both studio-made and ‘pirated,’ are testaments to the work of an exceptional artist: a long, happy marriage and a loving family are testaments to the life of an exceptional woman.  It was as Azucena that Shirley Verrett bade farewell to the MET twenty years ago, on 2 May 1990, and it is with a joyous gratitude tinged with sadness that Verdi conveyed so well in his music that she will be remembered.