CD REVIEW: Béla Bartók – A KÉKSZAKÁLLÚ HERCEG VÁRA (D. Fischer-Dieskau, I. Seefried; Audite 95.626)

BÉLA BARTÓK (1841 – 1904): A kékszakállú herceg vára, Op. 11 / Sz 48 (sung in German as Herzog Blaubarts Burg)—Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Blaubart), Irmgard Seefried (Judith); Schweizerisches Festspielorchester; Rafael Kubelík, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in concert at the Kunsthaus, Lucerne, Switzerland, during the Internationale Musikfestwochen Luzern, 15 August 1962; Audite 95.626; 1CD, 60:41; Available from Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Except in the most extraordinary of circumstances, Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is an opera that is more effective in concert than in staged performances. Like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, it is a score in which the drama is primarily cerebral, but it is disserved by performances that treat the opera as straightforward Gothic melodrama. Bluebeard’s Castle inhabits the world of Kafka rather than that of Poe, and the best, most unforgettable performances are those that compel the listener to seek within his own imagination visual dimensions for the vistas to which Judith responds in music. Who is to say, after all, that the events of Bluebeard’s Castle are not manifestations of psychosis born solely of Judith’s obsession with her enigmatic new husband? Musically, there is no doubting the oppressive, claustrophobic mystery of Bartók’s score, but far too many performances of Bluebeard’s Castle force the impact of the music on the listener instead of allowing it to build naturally like a gathering storm.

Recorded in concert during the 1962 Internationale Musikfestwochen Luzern, this performance preserves Rafael Kubelík’s (1914 – 1996) rousingly unaffected approach to Bartók’s music. Now inexplicably regarded by many Classical Music enthusiasts as a Kapellmeister in the worst connotation of the term, Maestro Kubelík was an experienced, unfailingly capable leader of many of the world’s best orchestras, and his interpretations of his native Czech repertory—especially the music of Dvořák and Janáček—were expert. In opera, a genre in which he was active as both a conductor and a composer, his tenure as Musical Director of London’s Royal Opera House saw the first production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens in its entirety. Unfortunately, his time as Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera was very brief, but his Deutsche Grammophon recording of Verdi’s Rigoletto—featuring this performance’s Bluebeard in the title rôle, alongside the poetic Gilda of Renata Scotto and the poised Duca of Carlo Bergonzi—is sufficient evidence of Maestro Kubelík’s unconventional brilliance in operatic repertory. His affiliation with the Internationale Musikfestwochen Luzern led to his naturalization as a Swiss citizen following his marriage to his second wife, the Australian soprano Elsie Morison. In this performance of Bluebeard’s Castle, Maestro Kubelík’s command of the nuances of Bartók’s score is unmistakably refined. None of Bartók’s mature works presents a conductor with an easy task, and even in its brief duration Bluebeard’s Castle is among the most demanding operas for conductors, orchestras, and singers. The Schweizerisches Festspielorchester is not the Wiener Philharmoniker, but the standard of playing achieved—and, more importantly, sustained—by the instrumentalists is admirably high. Under Maestro Kubelík’s direction, the critical woodwind parts are emphasized without balances being distorted, and the string, brass, and percussion playing are laudably accurate. There are a few of the mistakes that are virtually inevitable in a live performance of such a taxing score, but the overall musical integrity of the performance is never jeopardized. Maestro Kubelík maintains taut rhythms throughout the performance, and the orchestral players respond to the clarity of his beat with alert, astute executions of their parts. Though led by a Czech conductor before a Swiss audience and sung in German without the spoken prologue, this performance is as exciting and stylistically valid a realization of Bartók’s music as any on disc.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s (1925 – 2012) Bluebeard is a familiar characterization. Having recorded the part in German in 1958 for Deutsche Grammophon with Herta Töpper and Ferenc Fricsay, participated in an acclaimed 1975 Suisse Romande performance (sung in Hungarian) featuring Brigitte Fassbaender and Wolfgang Sawallisch that was broadcasted by BBC Radio 3 in 1978, and returned to the opera for DGG in 1979—in Hungarian this time round—with his wife Júlia Várady as Judith and Sawallisch again on the podium, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau was a widely-traveled if infrequent exponent of Bartók’s opera. In truth, the rôle was not an ideal match for the baritone’s natural vocal gifts: Bluebeard’s vocal line rises often to E4, which accesses the most honeyed portion of Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s voice, but the line also descends to low notes that are beyond the singer’s comfortable range. This 1962 performance finds Mr. Fischer-Dieskau at the zenith of his powers as both a singer and an artist, however. Singing in his own language before an audience, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau is more spontaneous interpretively than in his studio recordings of Bluebeard’s Castle. His Bluebeard is an expectedly aristocratic creation, more sophisticated than sinister, but there is an engagingly inscrutable quality to his performance. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau brings an extraordinarily broad spectrum of verbal inflections to his singing, but the immediacy of his interactions with his Judith, Maestro Kubelík, and the audience preclude the preciosity that crept into many of his studio recordings of both operatic and Lieder repertories. Vocally, the lowest notes of Bluebeard’s compass understandably lack authority in Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s performance, but tones in the upper octave-and-a-half of the rôle are superbly resonant. The sadness that Mr. Fischer-Dieskau conveys in his performance lends Bluebeard greater humanity than he typically enjoys, and despite a few approximated passages Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s is an uncommonly thoughtful, emotionally involved portrait of one of opera’s most psychologically thorny characters.

A great singer earns that designation, in part, by displaying capacities for defying expectations and redefining herself as a vocalist and an artist according to the progress of the career and the development of the voice. Assessed according to those criteria and so many more, there is no doubt that German soprano Irmgard Seefried (1919 – 1988) was a great singer. Acquaintance with Bartók’s score raises doubts about the viability of Ms. Seefried’s voice for Judith’s music, but this performance offers indisputable evidence to support the notion that Ms. Seefried never took on a rôle without trusting her ability to make it her own. Musically and dramatically, this performance is a triumph of a deeply insightful artist approaching a part on her own terms. From her first line, Ms. Seefried portrays a Judith who is both perceptibly in love with Bluebeard and apprehensive about the life that awaits her as the consort of such an arcane man. Her characterization displays an endearing naïveté, but this Judith is no gullible shrinking violet. Upon the opening of each door, Ms. Seefried conveys wonder mixed with horror: the torture chamber, the arsenal, the garden, and the inescapable stench of blood unnerve but never unravel this Judith’s resolve, and the pity in Ms. Seefried’s interactions with Bluebeard complements the subtle nobility of Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s portrayal. The sheer difficulty of the music undermines Ms. Seefried’s diction, but she puts every note and every phrase—musical and textual—to engrossing use. Like her Bluebeard, Ms. Seefried faces obstacles that she cannot surmount solely on vocal footing, but the greatest accomplishment of her performance is the manner in which she transforms vocal weaknesses into dramatic strengths. She simply did not possess the explosive top C required for the opening of the fifth door, but her accurately-pitched scream is more effective than many resplendent negotiations of the tone by other singers. Crucially, Ms. Seefried approaches Judith’s craggy vocal lines with unassailable musicality. In the central octave of Judith’s music, Ms. Seefried’s voice is more mobile, focused, and beautiful than almost any other recorded Judith. Most remarkably, Ms. Seefried contributes to this performance what so many accounts of Bluebeard’s Castle lack: a sense of genuine resolution. Ms. Seefried imparts a strangely moving combination of resignation and persistent fascination in the opera’s finale scene, and her choice of extracting the drama from the music produces a probing, superbly-sung Judith representative of the work of one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest artists.

Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is one of the most powerful operatic masterpieces of the early Twentieth Century, but few performances in recent seasons are likely to have left audiences with this impression. Presented in best-possible sound via Audite’s new remastering by Ludger Böckenhoff, this 1962 concert performance of Bartók’s awe-inspiring score proclaims in every one of its sixty minutes that the opera is a benchmark of polytonalism and Freudian psychological drama. Rafael Kubelík, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Irmgard Seefried form an unlikely but uncannily potent team who offer a legitimate performance of Bartók’s music rather than a reaction to its reputation. As a document of its conductor’s mastery of a tricky score that has defeated many gifted musicians and an example of the feats of which great singers are capable even in music that overextends their vocal resources, this recording is a treasure: as an absorbing, imperfect but indispensable performance of Bluebeard’s Castle, it is one of the most welcome releases of 2014.

CD REVIEW: Félix Fourdrain – SONGS (Liliana Górska, mezzo-soprano; Piotr Ejsmont, piano; Acte Préalable AP0323)

FÉLIX FOURDRAIN (1880 – 1923): Songs—Liliana Górska, mezzo-soprano; Piotr Ejsmont, piano [Recorded in Studio Nagrań Akademii Muzycznej im. St. Moniuszki, Gdańsk, Poland, in 2013; Acte Préalable AP0323; 1CD, 47:13; Available from Gigant, jpc, Merlin, Presto Classical, major music retailers, and by emailing Acte Préalable]

It can surely be said without hyperbole that today’s inquisitive Lieder singer has more repertoire at his or her disposal than at any other time in the history of Art Song. Still, too few singers look beyond the ‘comfortable’ repertory of Lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and a few token composers in the English and French repertories when choosing songs for recitals and recordings. There is no doubting the importance of these composers to the development, refinement, and preservation of Lieder or the legitimacy of singers’ desires to commit their individual interpretations to disc, but who will have the courage to advocate for the overlooked songs of forgotten composers? In the case of the ignored Frenchman Félix Fourdrain, the Polish Acte Préalable label takes up this fascinating composer’s banner and unfurls it thrillingly with this disc of a selection of Fourdrain’s Songs. Every aspect of this recording, expertly produced by Jan A. Jarnicki and engineered by Cezary Joczyn, exudes the preparation and presentation that enable success in any repertory. The great success of this disc is not in its exploration of ignored music, however, but in the undeviating quality of the performances: in this recital of Fourdrain’s Songs, the focus is on making music, not making excuses for the neglect to which these jewels have been subjected.

Even by the standard of his generation, Fourdrain’s time on earth was brief. Born in Nice in 1880, Fourdrain was acclaimed as an organist, having studied at L’École Niedermeyer in Paris with the renowned organist and composer Charles-Marie Widor. Like his younger contemporary Pietro Mascagni, it was the first of Fourdrain’s operas, La légende du point d’Argentan, that was judged his finest work for the theatre and secured his reputation as a composer of opera. Following the 1907 première of La légende du point d’Argentan at the Opéra-Comique, Fourdrain’s subsequent operas were heard in most of Paris’s most prestigious theatres. Fourdrain also studied with Jules Massenet, the influence of whose gift for lyrical melody is apparent in the twenty-one songs on this disc. All but two of the songs offered here are settings of verses by André Alexandre (1860 – 1928), who provided the libretti for two of Reynaldo Hahn’s operatic compositions, and the literary continuity of the texts enabled Fourdrain to focus his talents on uniting his melodic inspirations with organic, often unexpectedly ambiguous accompaniments. Interestingly, though, two of the finest songs in this recital are the pair with words by other poets. Originally paired for publication with the song ‘Vénus’ [not included on this disc], ‘La belle aux yeux d’amour,’ dedicated to the memory of Marguerite Bernède, employs a text by Arthur Bernède (1871 – 1937), librettist of Fourdrain’s La légende du point d’Argentan and Massenet’s Sapho. Fourdrain made compelling use of the repeated couplets ‘Les bois ont des frémissements / Comme en ont les cœurs des amants’ (‘There are in the woods shudders / Just as there are in lovers’ hearts’), wistfully conveying the conjoined trembling of humanity and nature in both the piano and the vocal line. The text of ‘Noël de neige’ is the work of Jean Richepin (1849 – 1926), the poet and dramatist perhaps best remembered now for his liaison with the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. The irony of the text is bitingly enlarged by Fourdrain’s music. The unflaggingly high level of invention that pervades all of the songs on this disc proclaims that Fourdrain’s songs are far more musically substantial than the decorative ‘pièces de salon’ that flowed from the pens of many of his contemporaries.

Perhaps the richness of Fourdrain’s creativity would not be so apparent in performances less fluid, fluent, and impeccably-delivered than those by mezzo-soprano Liliana Górska and pianist Piotr Ejsmont on this disc. Ms. Górska’s voice is an ideal instrument for Fourdrain’s music, the beautiful, bronzed timbre bolstered by an imposing core of iron that permits the singer to cover the emotional spectrum of the songs without over-stretching the voice. The contrasting styles of ‘Les petites communiantes,’ ‘Le papillon,’ ‘Il neige des fleurs,’ ‘Carnaval,’ ‘Le vieux moulin,’ ‘Edelweiss,’ ‘Chanson Norvégienne,’ ‘Lettre d’adieu,’ and the Bernède and Richepin settings are differentiated with charming subtlety by Ms. Górska, and she is unafraid of indulging a judiciously-deployed sentimentality in the most overtly Romantic songs. The exciting, slightly seedy exoticism of ‘Alger le soir’ tingles in Ms. Górska’s singing, and the buzzing brilliance of ‘Les abeilles’ is cunningly evinced without caricature. The quiet japonaiserie of ‘Fleurs de paravent’ gives way in Ms. Górska’s glowing performance to subdued despondency, and the differing passions of ‘Les mouettes’ and ‘Sainte Dorothée’ are portrayed with equal faculty. Ms. Górska’s depiction of the galloping breathlessness of ‘Chevauchée Cosaque’ is thrilling, but she finds precisely the right interpretive attitude for each song. Along the way, she encounters a few phrases that lie awkwardly for her voice, but she noticeably maintains secure intonation and good diction even when the vocal lines are least comfortable. Mr. Ejsmont’s accompaniment gives Ms. Górska canvases on which to recreate the vibrant pictures that Fourdrain drew in music. Sometimes with the lilting sophistication of a Chopin Nocturne and at others with the unfettered virtuosity of a Liszt Étude, Fourdrain’s accompaniments often approach the nuances of the texts from different angles than the vocal lines. Solely as pianism, Mr. Ejsmont’s playing is tremendously impressive, but as a display of collaborative interplay with Ms. Górska it is truly masterful.

Marcel Proust wrote that ‘the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.’ New ears are the vessels that chart unknown musical waters, and this disc of Félix Fourdrain’s Songs gives the listener the artistic equivalent of a cochlear implant. In the liner notes that accompany the disc, Liliana Górska writes that her encounter with Fourdrain’s Songs was an instance of ‘love at first sight,’ a notion easily expressed in words but communicated in sound only with the greatest skill. Each of the twenty-one Songs on this disc is performed with affection and musical mastery that confirm the veracity of the singer’s assertion. The performances on this disc also confirm Fourdrain’s value as a ‘new’ composer of beguiling, invigorating songs. Dziękuję, Acte Préalable! Now, if only other accomplished Lieder singers will take note…

CD REVIEW: Gioseffo Zamponi – ULISSE ALL’ISOLA DI CIRCE (F. Zanasi, C. Scheen, M. Flores, D. Visse, F. Schofrin, F. Guimarães, Z. Wilder, M. Bellotto, S. Foresti; Ricercar RIC 342)

GIOSEFFO ZAMPONI (circa 1615 – 1662): Ulisse all’isola di Circe—Furio Zanasi (Ulisse), Céline Scheen (Circe), Sergio Foresti (Nettuno), Fernando Guimarães (Euriloco, Tritone secondo, Statua prima, Marte), Zachary Wilder (Mercurio, Apollo), Mariana Flores (Venere), Dominique Visse (Argesta), Fabián Schofrin (Satiro), Matteo Bellotto (Giove), Caroline Weynants (Lisetta, Pallade), Alice Foccroulle (Dorinda), Benoît Giaux (Tritone primo), Philippe Favette (Statua seconda); Chœur de chambre de Namur; Clematis; Leonardo García Alarcón, conductor [Recorded in the Salle philharmonique de Liège, Belgium, in February 2012; Ricercar RIC 342; 2CD, 138:11; Available from Amazon, ClassicsOnline, fnac, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

For composers active in the century of opera’s infancy, aristocratic weddings presented extraordinary opportunities of lavish spectacles, almost limitless budgets, and captive audiences of deep-pocketed potential employers and benefactors. There are in the history of opera in the Seventeenth Century countless instances of the marriages of forgotten nobles inspiring forgotten operas by half-remembered composers. When the nuptials of Philip IV of Spain and his second wife, Mariana of Austria, were celebrated in the Spanish Netherlands in 1650, the occasion was marked in Brussels by the première of a new opera by Gioseffo Zamponi, a composer whose life and career are now obscured by the impersonal ignorance of time. Likely born in Rome sometime before 1619 [competing theories date his birth to circa 1600, 1610, and 1615], Zamponi entered the service of Archduke Wilhelm Leopold, the Hapsburg Governor of the Spanish Netherlands and son of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, in 1648, following a tenure at the archiepiscopal court of Cardinal Pietro Maria Borghese in Rome. Seemingly a genuinely appreciative patron of the arts, Wilhelm Leopold assembled a near-legendary coven of renowned artists at his court in Brussels, and the caliber of his colleagues in the visual arts suggests that Zamponi’s reputation among his contemporaries must have been exalted. Despite the lack of reliable information about his achievements as an artist, it is certain that it was Zamponi’s Ulisse all’isola di Circe that introduced Brussels to Italian opera, then still a novelty, and that the opera’s first performance was a success considerable enough to prompt a second performance, as well as a further pair of performances five years later to honor the Swedish Queen Christina Alexandra’s visit to Brussels. Solely for inaugurating operatic traditions in Brussels, where they remain strong 364 years later, Zamponi deserves to be remembered, but this recording of his pioneering Ulisse all’isola di Circe reveals that he and his work are far more than historical curiosities: this is a score that earns its composer a place of honor among the geniuses of his time and one that has more to offer the modern listener than many similar scores that have been convincingly rehabilitated in the Twenty-First Century.

Musically, Ulisse all’isola di Circe replicates the Venetian models of Zamponi’s generation, its stylistic kinship with the operas of Cavalli manifested both in the alteration of recitative with mellifluously melodic arioso and the introduction of comedic characters into an otherwise serious mythological epic. Though Zamponi’s adherence to the traditions of Venetian opera as he knew it is marked, the formulaic elements of Ulisse all’isola di Circe are remarkably unobtrusive, and the listener for whom Seventeenth-Century opera in general is hard going can rejoice in the complete lack of doldrums throughout the opera’s duration. The breadth of Zamponi’s skills as a musical dramatist is evident, but much of the credit for the sheer excitement of this recording must be given to the team of performers who invest such lavish gifts in this venture. Opera is a lurid genre of base emotions and sordid passions, after all, and virtually any composer might well have colluded and conspired to enjoy the advocacy of musicians as gifted and stylistically aware as those of Cappella Mediterranea, Clematis, and Argentine conductor Leonardo García Alarcón. It was Maestro García Alarcón who rediscovered Ulisse all’isola di Circe and supervised its introduction to the Twenty-First Century in 2006, and his return to the score—with many of the same soloists, members of Cappella Mediterranea—in 2012 produced this recording, superbly engineered in a flattering acoustic by Ricercar. As displayed by the singing of sopranos Caroline Weynants and Alice Foccroulle, baritone Benoît Giaux, and bass Philippe Favette in solo rôles, the musical standards of the Chœur de chambre de Namur are exceptionally high, and each of these singers contributes winningly to the performance. Guided by concertmaster Stéphane de Failly, the execution of Zamponi’s score by the virtuosi of Clematis is nothing short of perfection. The musicians’ mastery of ferociously difficult period instruments is extraordinary, but their inalienable technical wizardry never blunts the sharp edges of Zamponi’s spiky music. As in many scores of its time, the manuscript leaves much in terms of instrumentation to the imagination, and Maestro García Alarcón fills in the blanks with an orchestral complement that nods to what is known of the instrumental forces of contemporary Venetian theatres, augmented by winds and percussion appropriate to a celebratory event at a Hapsburg court. The wind playing is a particular glory of this performance, but Maestro García Alarcón’s foremost achievement is his realization of the continuo. Provided by Lionel Desmeules on organ and spinet, Ariel Rychter on gut-stringed harpsichord and organ, Quito Gato and Thomas Dunford on theorbo and guitar, Marie Bournisien on harp, Margaux Blanchard on bass viol, and François Joubert-Caillet on bass viol and lira, the continuo is the throbbing heart of this performance, the life force that gives the performance thrust and, honoring the roots of its definition as few groups of musicians have managed to do, continuity.

At the center of a superb cast is the magnificent countertenor Dominique Visse, an artist whose significance to Early Music parallels that of Callas to bel canto. His histrionic powers are such that, even in the context of an audio recording, the broadest comic antics can disclose an intensely touching vulnerability, and his talents as a singing actor are at their zenith in this performance of Ulisse all’isola di Circe. The voice was never a conventionally lovely instrument, but there is a strange beauty in virtually every note that he sings. In his performance as Argesta, the full panoply of Mr. Visse’s magic is unleashed. His delivery of zinging lines like ‘Vol un amante vigoroso e altiero / E meglio in un Porchetto’ (‘She seeks a vigorous, heady lover / A piglet would do better’) is great fun, and the irony of his singing of Argesta’s monologue at the start of Act Two, ‘Non è maggior tormento,’ admits both humor and poignancy. In ‘Destin magiche note,’ the abyss of hell itself resounds in Mr. Visse’s voice. A revival of the Baroque practice of male singers impersonating female characters has taken hold in recent years, but no one manages it more artfully than Mr. Visse: indeed, it is difficult to imagine singers in the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Centuries proving more effective in a rôle like Argesta. Not every pitch is perfect, not every tone falls graciously upon the ears, but every note and every word issue from the imagination of an uncommonly perceptive artist.

Countertenor Fabián Schofrin is a worthy colleague for Mr. Visse, and his performance of Satiro’s ‘Huom superbo’ at the close of Act One is as alert, pointed, and musical as could be desired. Bass Matteo Bellotto is an aptly grandiose presence as Giove in ‘Dal mio Trono,’ his phrasing conveying the authority that he cannot command solely on vocal terms. More baritone than bass in vocal colorations, Sergio Foresti nonetheless launches the opera powerfully as Nettuno, his voicing of ‘O voi del vasto Oceano’ shaped by excellent diction and firm, focused tone maintained across the full range of his music.

Singing the rôles of Euriloco, Marte, the Tritone secondo, and the Statua prima, tenor Fernando Guimarães cleverly differentiates his performances with subtle vocal inflections. What is consistent is the freshness of his approach and the resonant musicality of his singing. In Euriloco’s exchanges with Ulisse, especially ‘Già spirano si lieti’ in Act Three, he combines thoughtful dramatic involvement with attractive vocalism, the spontaneity of his performance suggesting that he is genuinely responding to his colleagues’ utterances. In the music for Apollo and Mercurio, the voice of tenor Zachary Wilder surges through the performance like lava. The melting beauty of his singing floods every scene in which he appears, culminating in an interview with Venere in the penultimate scene of Act Two—‘Ancor non resti’—that pulses with surprisingly modern sensibilities. His performance of the beautiful ‘Scender del ciel viddi io’ is exquisite, the line caressed with an unforced grasp of these first flowerings of bel canto, and the contrasting poise and emotional directness of his scenes with Ulisse and Venere in Act Three are captivating. The timbres of Mr. Guimarães and Mr. Wilder are sufficiently dissimilar to prevent confusion over which gentleman is singing, but their levels of accomplishment in Zamponi’s music are well matched. If only similar equality could be heard in performances of Pedrillo and Belmonte, Flavio and Pollione, Ruiz and Manrico, and Loge and Mime!

Soprano Mariana Flores announces in her first scene, the fantastic ‘E pur sei giunto al fine,’ that Venere is a potent participant in the drama and that the singer portraying her is a compelling exponent of Zamponi’s musical idiom. In Venere’s scene with Circe in Act Two, Ms. Flores gives a stirring account of ‘Da lo strale d’Amor fugga chi può,’ and in the subsequent scene with Mercurio her singing fumes with defiance and indignation. Dramatically, Ms. Flores argues and acquiesces with great integrity and absolute stylistic adroitness. Again, though, it is the unaffected pulchritude of the singing that impresses most, and Ms. Flores’s voice is a world-class instrument only just beginning to unlock its potential.

The title couple, Ulisse and Circe, are archetypes of the errant hero and ruinous temptress that have persisted throughout the four-century progress of opera, but Zamponi’s gifts for sensitive musical portraiture ensure that they are considerably more than an Early-Music Tannhäuser and Venus. As sung by baritone Furio Zanasi, Ulisse is a domineering but amiable fellow who can hardly be faulted for falling victim to the beauty of a Circe as alluring as Céline Scheen. The element of toughness in Ms. Scheen’s performance is wonderfully compatible with the rugged masculinity of Mr. Zanasi’s suave but swashbuckling Ulisse. Mr. Zanasi establishes the nuances of Ulisse’s character immediately in ‘Il mondo non ha più fieri terrori,’ which he voices expansively, and the insinuating indecision of his singing of ‘Credo sì, o no’ is both intelligent and seemingly artless. He and Ms. Scheen unite in a deliciously sensual account of ‘Languisco; Mi moro,’ a duet that rivals the celebrated ‘Pur ti miro’ in its depiction of languorous sexuality. In both their scenes with one another and those with other characters, Mr. Zanasi and Ms. Scheen sing with passion and precision, and their performances are exhibitions of technical prowess that extends to every niche of period-appropriate stylishness without ever seeming confined by conscious effort. Mr. Zanasi, one of the finest and most-recorded luminaries of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century opera here gives one of his best performances, and Ms. Scheen matches him point for point, tone for ravishing tone.

Far too many performances of ‘early’ operas are tepid affairs in which the singers’ singing and musicians’ playing are muted by their noses being lodged in books lest they commit the perceived-to-be-unpardonable sin of doing something that has not been deemed historically accurate. Whether the score is by Zamponi or Zandonai, taking the notes on the page at face value and singing or playing them full-on, without compromising musicality in pursuit of elusive authenticity, is never out of style, and every note on these discs confirms it. It is apparent in this recording of Ulisse all’isola di Circe that Leonardo García Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea view a work like Zamponi’s not as a vintage puzzle with missing pieces that must be replaced with carefully-fabricated replicas but as a spectacular chandelier that merely needs to be wired for electricity. Switch on this performance of Ulisse all’isola di Circe, and every musical light dazzles. It is not an old opera given new life: it is a fresh current in the spring of invention that has gushed uninterrupted since words and music first bathed together.

CD REVIEW: Giacomo Puccini – LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST (E.-M. Westbroek, C. Ventre, A. Holland; Oehms Classics OC 945)

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): La fanciulla del West—Eva-Maria Westbroek (Minnie), Carlo Ventre (Dick Johnson), Ashley Holland (Jack Rance), Peter Marsh (Nick), Alfred Reiter (Ashby), Simon Bailey (Sonora), Michael McCown (Trin), Bálint Szabó (Sid), Sungkon Kim (Bello), Hans-Jürgen Lazar (Harry), Beau Gibson (Joe), Nathaniel Webster (Happy), Björn Bürger (Larkens), Carlos Krause (Billy Jackrabbit), Elisabeth Hornung (Wowkle), Franz Mayer (Jake Wallace), Cheol Kang (José Castro), Francisco Brito (Pony Express rider); Chor der Oper Frankfurt; Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester; Sebastian Weigle, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during staged performances at Oper Frankfurt, Germany, in May and June 2013; Oehms Classics OC 945; 2CD, 130:42; Available from Amazon, ClassicsOnline, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

La fanciulla del West is the score that should silence doubts about Giacomo Puccini’s importance as a composer of opera. At the time of its première at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1910, when the Minnie of Emmy Destinn, the Johnson of Enrico Caruso, and the Rance of Pasquale Amato tangled under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, the quality of the music was evident, an anonymous New York critic writing of the opera after its first performance that ‘the first act is the best Puccini ever wrote’ and the second ‘a more passionate evolution of the musical ideas of the first.’ In praising the indefatigable eloquence of Destinn’s performance, however, the same writer disclosed the debacle that has plagued La fanciulla del West in the century since she first tended the emotional needs of the denizens of the Polka Saloon: at the center of a formidably demanding score stands Minnie, whose music is ‘extremely difficult, so much of it very high with long sustained notes and little support from the orchestra.’ At first acquaintance, Minnie seems a world apart from the emblematic ‘piccole donne’ of most of Puccini’s operas, but had Mimì, Tosca, or Liù survived her own circumstances and immigrated to Gold Rush-era California might she not have evolved into the hardship-toughened Minnie? There are also elements of Greek and even Wagnerian dramas in La fanciulla del West, Minnie emerging as an Iphigenia or a Brünnhilde whose symbolic sacrifice enables literal and figurative redemption. At its core, La fanciulla del West is Puccini’s treatise on loneliness, and in it he insightfully explores the notion that the deprivation of Manon Lescaut, the jealousy of La bohème, and the lust of Tosca pale in comparison with the loneliness of La fanciulla del West as impetus for desperation. Ever a savvy man of the theatre, Puccini knew that melodic fecundity alone was inadequate to express the complex emotions of La fanciulla del West, not least because the fates of every major and minor character in the opera are intertwined and interdependent as in none of the composer’s other operas, so he filled the pages of his setting of David Belasco’s Girl of the Golden West with music that throbs with Italianate Romanticism translated into the tonal language of the Twentieth Century. The novelty of La fanciulla del West also translates into vocal demands that have virtually made the piece an operatic ghost town. Even when its musical edifices are found in varying states of dilapidation, La fanciulla del West offers vistas of one of the finest composers of opera at his best.

Turandot is perhaps Puccini’s most imaginatively-orchestrated score, but La fanciulla del West is unquestionably his most progressive, musically advanced opera. Led by the remarkably versatile and unfailingly musical Sebastian Weigle, the Oper Frankfurt forces involved in the production that produced this recording exhibit awareness of the importance of the music before them. Whatever technical niceties it entails, the ‘Oper Frankfurt Recording System’ employed by Oehms Classics for this recording and other productions recorded for commercial release is a model that should be studied and replicated by other venues and labels endeavoring to record opera in performance. Produced by Christian Wilde, Felix Dreher, and Peter Tobiasch, this recording places Puccini’s score in an acoustical atmosphere in which the natural balance between stage and pit is effectively equalized. In general, stage noises contribute to rather than detracting from the dramatic vitality of the performance, and distractions by the audience are laudably few. Perspectives are occasionally imperfect, an inevitable complication of recording staged productions, but only the too-distant placement of the off-stage beginning of Jake Wallace’s song is truly regrettable. The Chor der Oper Frankfurt choristers are challenged but never defeated by Puccini’s formidable demands, and the gusto that they convey in their singing is bracing. The Frankfurter Opern- und Museumorchester’s experience in Wagner repertory—including a compelling and superbly-recorded Ring des Nibelungen also available from Oehms—enables the instrumentalists’ precise but impassioned performance of Puccini’s score. Maestro Weigle maintains rhythmic sharpness in the music’s many changes of mood, and his shaping of lyrical episodes closely follows the needs of the principal singers. The acquaintance of Oper Frankfurt’s personnel with Twentieth-Century music is also apparent in their collective realization of the striking modernity of La fanciulla del West: while the post-Impressionistic, Stravinskian elements of Puccini’s music are restrained in many performances, Maestro Weigle and the orchestra revel in them in this account of the opera. The slight deficiencies in authentic Italianate morbidezza are mitigated by the uncommon precision of the orchestral playing and the vigor of Maestro Weigle’s conducting. This is an age in which sloppy playing by opera house pit orchestras is no longer accepted as a necessary evil, but the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumorchester musicians could give their counterparts in some of the world’s most prestigious pits lessons in adaptability and cooperation.

Puccini succeeded in La fanciulla del West as in none of his other operas at creating a cast in which every character, major and minor, has a defined place in the drama and is musically three-dimensional. Minnie, Johnson, and Rance are the truly significant players, of course, but the inhabitants of the mining town in which their destinies intersect provide far more than the ‘local color’ at which Puccini was expert; or, that is, there are opportunities for the singers in secondary rôles to create memorable characters. Few performances seize those opportunities as impressively as this one, in which the deep roster of Oper Frankfurt provides an ensemble of artists who are dedicated to portraying individuals within Puccini’s thriving community of disenfranchised miners. In many performances, Wowkle seems little more than a second-string Suzuki, but mezzo-soprano Elisabeth Hornung gives her tenderness and tenacity, singing strongly. The smarmy insouciance of the slightly dangerous Sid courses through the sinewy singing of bass Bálint Szabó, and Peter Marsh, Alfred Reiter, Simon Bailey, Michael McCown, Sungkon Kim, Hans-Jürgen Lazar, and Nathaniel Webster portray Nick, Ashby, Sonora, Trin, Bello, Harry, and Happy with distinctive quirks, all realized with firm, steady-toned singing. Carlos Krause’s Billy Jackrabbit is an intriguing figure, and Cheol Kang and Francisco Brito make the most of their appearances as José Castro and the Pony Express rider. Franz Mayer’s singing of Jake Wallace’s nostalgic song is beautiful and all the more effective for being truly sung rather than crooned. Particularly impressive is tenor Beau Gibson’s golden-toned Joe, but the uniformly high quality of the performances—not just the singing—of all of the supporting cast greatly enriches this recording.

In demand throughout the world for a wide variety of rôles ranging from the dramatic bel canto of Enrico in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor to the stark modernity of Doktor Schön in Alban Berg’s Lulu, British baritone Ashley Holland reveals in his performance of Jake Rance a dark-hued, slightly throaty voice of considerable authority and stamina—what, in the context of Puccini repertoire, might be termed an ideal ‘Scarpia voice.’ Puccini can rightly be accused of having underserved the dastardly Sheriff in La fanciulla del West, Rance being granted few moments to do more than bawl and bray threateningly. There is great affection in Rance’s interactions with Minnie in Act One, however, not least in ‘Ti voglio bene, Minnie,’ and Mr. Holland digs deeply into the underlying psychology that shapes Rance’s personality and inspires his actions. This Rance’s desire for Minnie is the need of a man crippled in his prime by loneliness rather than lust. Unlike many Rances, the man portrayed by Mr. Holland accepts his loss of Minnie with a modicum of the dignity of a trickster admitting that he has been tricked. Still, Mr. Holland’s singing lacks none of the snarling brawn of traditional Rances, and even without the benefit of seeing his performance his persona displays welcome components of a larger-than-life, power-mongering Western lawman. Vocally, Mr. Holland encounters little trouble with Rance’s music, which is a remarkable feat in its own right, but the greatest accomplishment of his performance is the degree to which he matches his vocal mastery with an atypically insightful portrait of one of Puccini’s most chameleonic characters.

Ramerrez the Mexican bandito is Puccini’s most enigmatic tenor hero—and not merely because he spends much of the opera masquerading as Dick Johnson. Like Rance’s, his infatuation with Minnie is motivated as much by a quest for deliverance from the solitude of his life as by romantic love, but he has all the trappings of a traditional operatic lover from the start. In this performance, Uruguayan tenor Carlo Ventre enacts the rôle with imagination and brute strength. The grainy, somewhat monochromatic timbre of his voice sets him apart from his first entrance, and he is consistently convincing as a gregarious Latino suitor. In the love duet that ends Act One, Mr. Ventre sings expansively, his phrasing gaining ardor as Johnson’s affection for Minnie develops and the tessitura of his music rises. Johnson’s music lacks the lyrical effusions of Puccini’s other tenor heroes, but the level of musical distinction is very high. Mr. Ventre’s singing in Act Two is thrilling, musically and dramatically, and the raw intensity of his vocal delivery does not impede a broad eloquence. He is a coarse-mannered bandito to the life, but even his vocal mannerisms soften when he is in Minnie’s presence. In ‘Ch’ella mi creda libero e lontano,’ Johnson’s one true aria, Mr. Ventre tempers the despondence of a man about to die with an almost visionary serenity born of sparing Minnie the pain of his real fate. Solely on vocal terms, Mr. Ventre cannot compete with the burliness of Mario del Monaco, the resilience of Richard Tucker, or the refulgence of Franco Corelli, but his success as Johnson on this recording is first-rate. More than almost any other Johnson heard in recent seasons, Mr. Ventre manages to generate genuine vocal and dramatic presence rather than merely surviving the music.

Like her sisters in the Puccini repertoire, in many performances Minnie can become a cliché, in her case the hard-as-nails frontier lass with a heart of gold. This is a valid interpretation of the rôle, but a thoughtful singing actress can broaden the dimensions of the woman by exploring nuances of her character. By singing Minnie, the spirited Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek treads on sacred ground. The ranks of great Minnies are very sparse: the vocal demands of the part require a voice, poised somewhere between a Tosca and a Turandot, that is as rare as the teenager with the voice of Isolde that Richard Strauss wanted for his Salome. Historically, some of the finest Minnies—singers like Eleanor Steber, Dorothy Kirsten, and Marie Collier—have been those who excelled in the music despite rather than because of their natural vocal suitability for the rôle. Having triumphed in parts as diverse as the title rôle in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole and Sieglide in Wagner’s Die Walküre, Ms. Westbroek brings to this performance the same combination of familiarities with Classical, Wagnerian, and Twentieth-Century repertoires that facilitates the fantastic performance by the orchestra. In her scenes with the miners in Act One, it is obvious that this Minnie loves and cherishes them like brothers, and even when her voice is under greatest stress Ms. Westbroek exudes affection and uncomplicated sincerity. This is a Minnie who understands Rance: she identifies with his isolation rather than pitying or feeling threatened by him. His pursuit of Johnson is a betrayal of their bond, and the inwardness of Ms. Westbroek’s performance suggests that this is the stimulus for Minnie’s eventual duplicity. Its tessitura and fearsomely exposed top C make ‘Laggiù nel Soledad,’ Minnie’s aria in Act One, one of the greatest challenges in the soprano repertoire, and Ms. Westbroek responds with focused, unhesitant singing, rising to a bright, secure top C that crowns an excellent account of the aria. When she joins Johnson in the love duet, one more reminiscent of that in Act One of Verdi’s Otello than those in Puccini’s other operas, Minnie’s tessitura becomes even more daunting, and Ms. Westbroek’s performance soars. Here and in the subsequent acts, there are moments of strain, but Ms. Westbroek is a shrewd artist who puts these to telling dramatic use. There is never any doubt about who will prevail in the fateful poker game, but Ms. Westbroek’s vocal radiance makes the moment of her victory uniquely cathartic. In Act Three, when Minnie appeals to the miners she loves on behalf of the bandit who has stolen her heart, Ms. Westbroek’s voice glows with purity, and she rides the crests of Puccini’s orchestrations with consummate flair. There is more steel than silk in Ms. Westbroek’s voice, but she sings beautifully and—more importantly—sensuously as Minnie, ultimately portraying a woman with the wild determination of Brünnhilde and the demure delicacy of Mimì.

The sad truth of the recent history of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West is that few performances have deserved the expense of their staging, and even fewer have offered the public or the composer the musical and dramatic excellence that the score merits. Compiling a recording from what was surely an admirable production of the opera, Oehms’ engineers provide the listener with a performance of La fanciulla del West that amounts to considerably more than the sum of its parts. Those parts, headed by the skilled Minnie of Eva-Maria Westbroek, are refreshingly adept in a score in which basic competence has become exceptional. This performance says to the Twenty-First Century that Puccini, so maligned by many musicologists in the second half of the previous century, was an important composer and that La fanciulla del West is one of the greatest artistic achievements of his career.

Good day for a hanging: Puccini’s La fanciulla del West in its première at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910 with, from left to right, Enrico Caruso as Johnson (strung up under the tree), Emmy Destinn as Minnie, and Pasquale Amato as Rance [Photo by White Studio, © the Metropolitan Opera]

CD REVIEW: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi – STABAT MATER (J. Schenkel, A. Potter, Zürcher Sängerknaben; Tudor 7166)

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI (1710 – 1736): Stabat mater and GIOVANNI LORENZO GREGORI (1663 – 1745?): Concerti grossi, Op. 2 Nos. 9 & 10—Jonah Schenkel (boy soprano), Alex Potter (countertenor); Zürcher Sängerknaben; Barockorchester Capriccio; Alphons von Aarburg, conductor [Recorded in Kirche Neumünster, Zürich, Switzerland, 24 – 27 January 2013; Tudor 7166; 1CD, 43:56; Available from Tudor, Amazon, ClassicsOnline, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

​The Stabat mater of the short-lived but prolific Giovanni Battista Pergolesi remains one of the most familiar but frustratingly enigmatic liturgical compositions of the Eighteenth Century. Perhaps more than almost any of his contemporaries, Pergolesi has been the subject of waves of accepted and discredited scholarship: now, in 2014, little more is known with any degree of certainty of the circumstances of the musical genesis of the Stabat mater than was known a century ago. It is likely that the Stabat mater was composed in the friary at Pozzuoli in the Campania where Pergolesi resided in the last months of his life, as disease—likely consumption—eroded his health. Commissioned by the Confraternità dei Cavalieri di San Luigi di Palazzo, the progressive gallant style employed in the Stabat mater, which is among the relatively few scores that can be proved to be wholly Pergolesi’s work, captivated listeners and composers throughout the Eighteenth Century, inspiring respectful retoolings by artists as diverse as Johann Sebastian Bach and Giovanni Paisiello. Perhaps because of the modest performing forces the work requires and the deceptively uncomplicated appeal of its melodies, the Stabat mater is one of the few larger-scaled vocal works of the Eighteenth Century to have clung to a place in the international repertory throughout subsequent generations. Even a cursory acquaintance with the music cannot fail to disclose the justification of that place.

Since the infancy of recorded sound, Pergolesi’s Stabat mater has been a frequent guest in recording studios, the score having amassed an extensive discography of recordings that range in performing ethos from the barest-boned historically-informed Early Music approach to the largesse of Victorian and Edwardian practices. Tudor’s new recording places the Stabat mater in the context of an Italian tradition familiar to those who know Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus: expanding Pergolesi’s vocal distribution to include chorus, this recording offers a full vista of the convention glimpsed in the cinematic depiction of the funeral for Antonio Salieri’s father. This performance also maintains tremendous fidelity to details of period-appropriate practice, however. If this suggests something of a hybrid concept of the score, it is one that ultimately proves more coherent, dramatically fulfilling, and musically distinguished than almost any other on records. This is authenticity at its best: no minute detail of execution is permitted undue prominence, and the cumulative impact of the work as a whole is enhanced rather than undermined by the brilliant sparkle of the musical facets of this performance.

The Italianate sunlight in which this jewel of a performance coruscates is provided by the playing of Barockorchester Capriccio and especially the continuo of organist Yves Bilger and theorbist Mirko Arnone. Along with exemplary performances of two Concerti grossi by the little-remembered Giovanni Lorenzo Gregori, whose compositions for his native Lucca included liturgical music that was greatly admired in the early Eighteenth Century. Though the playing of every member of Barockorchester Capriccio radiates virtuosity and vitality, the organ and theorbo continuo is delivered with unobtrusive genius, every phrase of Mr. Bilger’s and Mr. Arnone’s playing not only perfectly complementing the vocalists but also highlighting nuances of the text with uncommon eloquence. This collaboration reaches its zenith in ‘Sancta mater, istud agas,’ in which Mr. Bilger’s organ lines are rendered with incomparable beauty. Under the direction of Alphons von Aarburg, the performance pulses with energy and sincerity.

The instrumental glories of the performance are matched by the singing of the youngsters of the Zürcher Sängerknaben, whose numbers are similar to those that historical records suggest were typical of choirs in Italian parish churches during Pergolesi’s lifetime. From their first entrance in the opening ‘Stabat mater dolorosa,’ the boys of the Zürcher Sängerknaben sing with polish and precision foreign to all but the very best ensembles of child singers. The urgency of their singing in ‘O quam tristis et afflicta’ exudes surprising maturity, and their poise in the final bars of ‘Quis est homo, qui non fleret’ is superb. The forthrightness and depth of expression in the boys’ performance of ‘Fac ut ardeat cor meum’ is arresting: there is in the simplicity of their delivery of the text a compelling—and very moving—sense of a true desire to share the Holy Mother’s transfiguring sorrow. The contrapuntal elements of the final ‘Amen’ pose no challenges that the choristers are not fully capable of meeting, and their singing brings the performance to a close with tremendous grace. Particularly before the advent of the focus on historically-informed performance practices, there were occasional performances of Stabat mater featuring choirs, but the boys of the Zürcher Sängerknaben are among the few choristers on records whose singing is a genuine advantage to the performance at hand.

Boy soprano Jonah Schenkel quite simply possesses the finest treble voice recorded in Pergolesi’s Stabat mater to date, and he allies his natural vocal abilities with technical acumen that is exceptionally rare for such a young singer. Trills are not a common weapon in a boy soprano’s arsenal, but Mr. Schenkel consistently makes credible efforts, even on the extraordinarily demanding trills on top G in ‘Cujus animam gementem.’ The technical hurdles of ‘Vidit suum dulcem natum’ are cleared with the alacrity of an Olympian, and Mr. Schenkel’s musical precision is admirable throughout the performance. In the ascending lines of ‘Inflammatus et accensus’ and ‘Quando corpus morietur,’ Mr. Schenkel sings with complete assurance, and the whole of his performance is marked by beautiful, focused, and absolutely secure tone. When his voice combines with that of countertenor Alex Potter, the magic of this performance is at its most potent. The evenness of Mr. Potter’s tone in ‘Quae moerebat et dolebat’ is refreshing, and he, too, takes the many trills in his music in stride. In ‘Eja mater fons amoris,’ too, the integration of Mr. Potter’s vocal registers is wonderful, not only as a musical achievement but equally as a dramatic device enabling telling use of text. Mr. Potter’s technique is most tested in ‘Fac ut portem Christi mortem,’ in which he delivers a splendidly musical and effective cadenza, and he proves a complete master of the music. The power of Mr. Potter’s tone in the lower reaches of his part, where the voices of many countertenors are weakest, is deployed unforgettably in passages in which he sings in duet with Mr. Schenkel, especially in ‘Inflammatus et accensus.’ Both singers employ straight tone to great effect in the crucial chromatic passages of Pergolesi’s music, but they do not indulge in artificial whitening of their timbres. It is the naturalness of the singing of both soloists that is the greatest achievement of this performance: free from posturing and the strutting of egos, Mr. Schenkel’s and Mr. Potter’s singing is exceptionally enjoyable in its consummate but unforced stylishness.

Some of the greatest pleasures to be had from music arise from hearing familiar works performed in unexpected ways, and many of the most perceptive innovations of recent years have been derived from restoring works of the Eighteenth Century to musical milieux that replicate the contexts of their first performances. This recording of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater resurrects a tradition with which the composer was likely acquainted, but its lasting value is in the merit of the achievement. The comprehension of period-appropriate performance practices displayed in this recording is appreciable, but it is the manifest understanding that beauty is—or should be—the foremost goal of any performance that makes this a Stabat mater that mesmerizes.