CD REVIEW: HÉROÏQUE – French Opera Arias (Bryan Hymel, tenor; Warner Classics 0825646179503)

HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803 – 1869), ALFRED BRUNEAU (1857 – 1934), CHARLES GOUNOD (1818 – 1893), JULES MASSENET (1842 – 1912), GIACOMO MEYERBEER (1791 – 1864), HENRI RABAUD (1873 – 1949), ERNEST REYER (1823 – 1909), GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868), and GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Héroïque – French Opera Arias—Bryan Hymel, tenor; Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno; PKF – Prague Philharmonia; Emmanuel Villaume, conductor [Recorded in Smetana Hall, Prague, Czech Republic, 18 – 25 August 2014; Warner Classics 0825646179503; 1 CD, 72:54; Available from Amazon, fnac, iTunes, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Life, Art, and the intersections thereof have changed in confounding, unfathomable ways since the birth of recording technology, but one aspect of an artist’s life that is now perhaps irreversibly complicated but remains essentially undiminished is the critical importance of first impressions. Before her débuts in Chicago, New York, and Dallas, when in America only myopic competition judges and schoolmates had heard her sing, opera lovers knew the voice of Maria Callas from the fascinating recordings that had crossed the Atlantic in advance of her homecoming. By the time that she opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 1956 – 1957 Season in the title rôle of Bellini’s Norma, aficionados were already acquainted with the voice that could both scale the heights of Elvira's mad scene in Bellini's I puritani and imbue the vast expanses of Isolde's Liebestod with grandiose tone. Though not so long ago when measured by pages of the calendar, the age in which an artist's career in the recording studio was guided in large part by the merits of his artistry now seems separated from today's Classical recording industry by eternities of both philosophy and practice. Lost in maelstroms of promotion, production, and processing, too many artists of quality are now never granted the opportunity to record as they might have done in years part, despite a continuing, bewildering procession of recordings of dubious quality and for which there simply are no audiences. One of the principal joys of Héroïque is that it allows one of today’s finest singers a rare opportunity to preserve for posterity performances of a selection of arias representative of the niche that he has carved for himself in the often hostile sphere of opera in the Twenty-First Century. When he débuted at the Metropolitan Opera on 26 December 2012, in one of the most treacherous rôles in opera, Énée in Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens, tenor Bryan Hymel did not arrive at Lincoln Center with an extensive discography heralding the glories of his tremendous voice. With the names of a number of the finest singers of recent years conspicuously absent from lists of new releases, Warner Classics must be congratulated for taking a risk with Héroïque. With this disc, an important voice receives the belated solo introduction that it deserves, and a superb singer claims his own place in the legacy of artists whose début recital discs have given listeners cause to rejoice.

Ably partnered by the the PKF – Prague Philharmonia, the playing of which sometimes sounds recessed, and Strausbourg-born conductor Emmanuel Villaume, Mr. Hymel opens Héroïque with a roof-raising account of Arnold’s scene from Act Four of Rossini’s 1829 masterpiece Guillaume Tell—the bel canto tenor’s equivalent of Manrico’s ‘Di quella pira’ in Verdi’s Il trovatore. Originated by Adolphe Nourrit, who at the age of twenty-seven at the time of the première of Guillaume Tell had nearly three-quarters of his short life already behind him, the rôle of Arnold has some of the most daunting tessitura to which tenors have been subjected, his acuti famously catalogued by James Joyce. Mr. Hymel shapes the recitative ‘Ne m'abandonne point, espoir de la vengeance,’ with an apt suggestion of the character’s desperation, but his dramatic confidence grows steadily in the ascending phrases of the aria ‘Asile héréditaire, où mes yeux s'ouvrirent au jour.’ His musical confidence is never less than absolute. Seeming to genuinely interact with the excellent singers of the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno, Mr. Hymel projects stratospheric tones with ease and admirably sure intonation. The chest-beating bravado that he brings to the fearsome cabaletta, ‘Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance,’ its top Cs dispatched with exuberance, is thrilling. Mr. Hymel is one of the few tenors in the world today with not only the range and charisma but also the requisite elegance—for the rôle is not solely a study in producing pulse-quickening top notes—to sing Arnold convincingly, a qualification that his singing of the character’s most celebrated music rousingly validates.

The title character’s ‘Invocation à la nature,’ ‘Nature immense, impénétrable et fière,’ from Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, first sung in the work’s 1846 première by Gustave-Hippolyte Roger, is one of its composer’s most entrancingly beautiful inventions, and, aided by Maestro Villaume’s unrushed but flowing tempo, Mr. Hymel sings it passionately. Revisiting music in which he has triumphed both at the MET and at Covent Garden, where he has also been acclaimed as Don José in Bizet’s Carmen, the Prince in Dvořák’s Rusalka, and the title character in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, the tenor devotes both febrile intensity and suavity of line to his singing of ‘Inutiles regrets’ from Les Troyens, the anguish of Énée’s predicament evinced by Mr. Hymel’s almost exaggeratedly immediate enunciation of the words and rocketing top C.

Jérusalem, Verdi’s adaptation of his 1843 opera I Lombardi alla prima crociata, was first performed in Paris in 1847, when the rôle of Gaston was sung by Gilbert Duprez, whose storied career encompassed pioneering use of the do di petto and creation of no fewer than five rôles for Donizetti. Gaston’s aria ‘Je veux encore entendre ta voix’ receives from Mr. Hymel a powerful performance that serves as a brilliant homage to Duprez, his phrasing disclosing a mastery of Verdi’s melodic lines that is sure to prove especially beneficial as his career progresses. Verdi again devoted his talents to competing with French composers of Grand Opéra on their own turf with his 1855 Les vêpres siciliennes, still more familiar to audiences in its Italian incarnation. Henri in Les vêpres siciliennes is another part in which Mr. Hymel has shone in London, his participation in the Royal Opera House production having been documented by Warner Classics in new DVD and Blu-ray releases. He here sings Henri’s ‘Ô jour de peine et de souffrance’ stunningly, both his rhythmic precision and accuracy of intonation unerring. From this point, however, the abundance of interpolated top notes, though generally effective and unfailingly exciting, becomes rather wearying. The profligacy of Mr. Hymel’s excursions into his upper register brings to mind Beverly Sills’s over-enthusiastic ornamentation and flights of fancy on high in bel canto repertory: as with Sills’s trills, roulades, and interpolations in alt, there is no doubt of Mr. Hymel’s singular comfort in his voice’s upper extremities, but the high notes sometimes distract from the thoughtful molding of melodic lines of which he is capable when not focusing primarily on preparing for the next vault above the staff. Mr. Hymel is too good a singer to be showcased principally as a vocal high-wire act.

Adoniram’s magnificent ‘Inspirez-moi, race divine!’ from Gounod’s 1862 La reine de Saba provides Mr. Hymel with a direct connection to the city of his birth, the music’s first interpreter, Louis Guéymard, having found time in a busy career of creating rôles for Gounod, Halévy, Meyerbeer, and Verdi to sing in Mr. Hymel’s native New Orleans in the 1873 – 1874 Season. The esteem in which he was held by the important composers of his time indicates that Guéymard was a fantastic singer, but could he possibly have matched his Twenty-First-Century successor’s singing of ‘Inspirez-moi, race divine’? In this performance, Mr. Hymel fashions a heady, appropriately visionary traversal of the aria, his tones placed with the exactness of the blows of a sculptor’s chisel.

Throughout the history of recorded sound, Vasco da Gama’s ‘Ô paradis sorti de l'onde’ from Meyerbeer’s 1865 epic L'Africaine has been a favorite piece of tenors stepping before microphones. Enrico Caruso was among the first singers to record the number, his 1907 recording—sung in Italian, naturally—setting a standard challenged but never surpassed in subsequent decades by Pertile, Gigli, Bergonzi, and other singers. Richard Tucker, Plácido Domingo, and Franco Bonisolli are among the few renowned tenors of the past half-century to have sung Vasco on stage, but Mr. Hymel’s sonorously heroic singing of ‘Ô paradis’ raises the hope that he, too, will have opportunities to sing the rôle in full. Massenet’s 1881 biblical extravaganza Hérodiade is fortunately slightly more frequently performed than L'Africaine, but the superb aria for Jean, ‘Ne pouvant réprimer les élans de la foi,’ is seldom sung as rhapsodically as Mr. Hymel sings it on this disc, his legato highlighting the fluidity of Massenet’s melodic writing.

Mr. Hymel closes the chronologically-ordered programme of Héroïque with three arias from less-familiar exemplars of Grand Opéra’s transition from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century. ‘Esprits, gardiens de ces lieux’ from Reyer’s 1884 Sigurd, an opera based upon the same source material as Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, is a sprawling number that combines the power of Wagner’s Siegmund with the range of Gounod’s Faust. Though the two men were contemporaries, Reyer’s compositional idiom could hardly be more different from Wagner’s, but Sigurd is a work of considerable histrionic power that deserves to be performed more frequently. Like Wagner’s operas, though, Sigurd is a score so demanding that casting it with singers capable of doing it justice is almost unimaginable. Mr. Hymel is more than capable of delivering a sterling account of the hero’s ‘Esprits, gardiens de ces lieux,’ but he does much more than that here. Likewise, he gives Dominique’s ‘Adieu, fôret profonde’ from Bruneau’s 1893 L'attaque du moulin—like Massenet’s Hérodiade, a work in the inaugural performance of which the famous tenor Edmond Vergnet participated—a sensitive but red-blooded performance, phrasing with elegance that injects Gallic poise into even the most brawny passages. The vivid imagery in ‘Chante, vieux jardin, ta chanson de cigales’ from Rabaud’s 1934 Rolande et le mauvais garçon is illuminated by the warm glow of Mr. Hymel’s singing, this forgotten piece ending the disc with a display of genuine vocal distinction.

One of the foremost pleasures of Héroïque is hearing French texts sung so unaffectedly. Many native speakers of French do not sing the language as well as Mr. Hymel does in the selections on this disc. Both in this regard and in his ability to maintain the purity of French vowels at all dynamic levels and in all registers, he is the obvious successor to such esteemed Francophone singers as Georges Thill, Albert Lance, and Alain Vanzo. Having been acclaimed in New York in the seasons since his triumphant MET début in Les Troyens as Puccini’s Pinkerton and Rodolfo—a rôle to which he is scheduled to return in the MET’s 2015 – 2016 Season—and being rumored to be engaged for the 2016 – 2017 Season to sing Arnold in the first MET performances of Guillaume Tell since 1931, Bryan Hymel is an artist who is building a remarkable career on his own terms. Héroïque is a reflection of this, but the disc’s most valuable attribute is the quality of the singing. Héroïque is a sadly unusual instance of promise resplendently fulfilled.

Voix d’or: American tenor Bryan Hymel, a true ténor Héroïque [Photo by Dario Acosta, © 2015 by Warner Classics]

CD REVIEW: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – COSÌ FAN TUTTE (S. Kermes, M. Ernman, C. Maltman, K. Tarver, A. Kasyan, K. Wolff; Sony Classical 88765466162)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Così fan tutte, K. 588—Simone Kermes (Fiordiligi), Malena Ernman (Dorabella), Christopher Maltman (Guglielmo), Kenneth Tarver (Ferrando), Anna Kasyan (Despina), Konstantin Wolff (Don Alfonso); MusicAeterna (Orchestra and Chorus of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre); Teodor Currentzis, conductor [Recorded in the P.I. Tchaikovsky State Opera and Ballet Theatre, Perm, Russia, 9 – 19 January 2013; Sony Classical 88765466162; 3 CDs, 176:54; Available from Amazon, iTunes, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Since the first time that I heard Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1790 masterpiece Così fan tutte, the opera has exerted tremendous power on my imagination; power that extends far beyond the extraordinary beauty of the music. Though Mozart's and Lorenzo da Ponte's complex tale of amorous intrigue, disguised identities, and imperiled morals was anything but controversial in the late-Eighteenth-Century Vienna embodied by the progressive policies of Emperor Joseph II, by the first decade of the subsequent century debate raged about the suitability of the opera for the delicate sensibilities of audiences then accustomed to the conjugal rectitude celebrated in Beethoven's Fidelio. [The moral ambiguities of the Rossini opere buffe that enjoyed widespread popularity in Vienna in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century were presumably deemed too frivolous to be truly threatening.] Well into the Twentieth Century, productions of Così fan tutte in German-speaking Europe continued to ‘adjust’ the opera's plot to render it more palatable to the austere scruples of evolving societies. Why was Così fan tutte subjected for so many years to the damaging effects of ex post facto ‘moralization,’ the true result of which was the meaningless reverse-gentrification of Mozart’s uniquely noble explorations of the durability and perversity of attraction and devotion? In Don Giovanni, the lecher is a known quantity, but in Così fan tutte who are the perpetrators, and who are the victims? Who is the puppeteer, and who are the puppets? Far too few performances of Così fan tutte contend with these questions: it is easier for both performers and audiences to approach the opera as a progression of pretty music to be sung prettily. In my view, what makes Così fan tutte one of the greatest works of art created for the operatic stage is its oracular synthesis of danger and delight. That is a difficult amalgamation to successfully effectuate in performance, but there is potential for incredible artistic growth in the attempt. Sony Classical’s new recording of Così fan tutte, preceded by a scintillating Le nozze di Figaro [reviewed here] and to be followed in autumn 2015 by what is likely to be an incendiary Don Giovanni, seeks to provide new solutions to the opera’s quandaries. In this context, it is pretty music sung prettily, but it is also a journey through emotions that are often glaringly ugly.

As a study of cause and effect, whether Greek-born conductor Teodor Currentzis consciously strives to instigate controversy with his unconventional performance philosophies or this is merely the product of his endeavors is a matter for debate, but there is no denying that, further pursuing the path initiated with his recording of Le nozze di Figaro, this recording of Così fan tutte is unlike any other on disc. Firstly, there is the continuo—decidedly bizarre, historically inappropriate, and sometimes over the top but great fun and brilliantly executed by lutenist Vasily Antipov, fortepianist Maxim Emelyanychev, cellist and gambist Alexander Prozorov, and hurdy-gurdy—yes, hurdy-gurdy!—player Irina Pyzhyanova. There are the extreme tempi, almost farcically fast in some numbers and exaggeratedly slow in others. Interestingly, though, the Ouvertura—a representative example of Maestro Currentzis’s approach—seems hectic, being dispatched in less than four minutes, but is only a few seconds briefer than recorded accounts paced by Sir Charles Mackerras and Sir Simon Rattle. [Not surprisingly, performances conducted by Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, and Otto Klemperer have longer durations: very surprisingly, Rinaldo Alessandrini lingers more than thirty seconds longer over the Ouvertura than does Maestro Currentzis.] There are instances in which the conductor’s dictates seem to push the singers in directions that are contrary to their own musical and dramatic instincts. This is a thought-provoking Così fan tutte, however, and, though idiosyncratic, Maestro Currentzis’s choices rarely seem superfluous or intended merely to shock. He is fortunate to have a cast of singers whose technical acumen enables them to follow his lead, their natural inclinations notwithstanding, and Perm’s MusicAeterna orchestra and chorus collaborate with Maestro Currentzis with complete commitment. The choristers meet Mozart’s demands with confidence to spare, and the instrumentalists play the score with effervescent energy and eagerness. The brass and woodwind players do not shrink from the raucousness to which Maestro Currentzis spurs them, but even at its most tempestuous the performance maintains a captivating sense of being a faithful rendering of an opera premièred in 1790. This may not be Così fan tutte as Mozart might have expected to hear it, but it is neither a disappointingly featherweight Baroque reading of the score nor an over-Romanticized travesty. Maestro Currentzis makes no apologies for Mozart’s enigmatic score or his singular relationship with it.

In this performance, Don Alfonso’s wit has an especially cutting acidity, his manipulation of the people and situations in the opera suggesting a rapacious appetite for victory at any cost. This quality renders this an atypically hostile Così fan tutte: there is a sense of far more than good-natured wagers being at stake in these amatory entanglements. Bass-baritone Konstantin Wolff is an aloof, vaguely unnerving Don Alfonso who seems to materialize in moments of tension like a vexatious specter. The voice is a burly instrument that its owner uses with suavity, and Mr. Wolff brings an understated slyness to recitatives. He sings Don Alfonso’s aria in Act One, ‘Vorrei dir, e cor non ho,’ sonorously, seizing the opportunity to elucidate the character’s cynicism. The absence of the buffoonery of many performances in this Don Alfonso’s comic frugality is certainly not lamented, but Mr. Wolff sings so well that the restraint imposed by Maestro Currentzis’s concept seems to blunt the force of his intelligent portrayal.

Like Mr. Wolff’s Don Alfonso, the Despina of soprano Anna Kasyan is an unusually sober, unexaggerated persona. The silliness that has traditionally passed for a characterful interpretation of Despina is mostly avoided in this performance, but Ms. Kasyan’s impersonation stops just sort of compensatory sincerity. In both of her arias, ‘In uomini, in soldati’ in Act One and ‘Una donna a quindici anni’ in Act Two, Ms. Kasyan sings charmingly and far more capably than many Despinas, but the prevailing mood of the performance rounds the edges of the character. Ms. Kasyan creates a Despina who is pert and pretty, but her sarcasm seems snarky but rarely genuinely insolent. She is as aware as any Despina on records that her mistresses are rather foolish but is atypically reluctant—more hesitant, in truth, than Mozart and da Ponte would have her be—to say so.

Combining an extraordinary technique honed through uncompromising dedication to the art of bel canto with a timbre of honeyed beauty, Kenneth Tarver easily surpasses every recorded Ferrando except George Shirley and Richard Tucker, whose studio-recorded souvenir of his participation in Alfred Lunt's Metropolitan Opera production of Così fan tutte—sung in the much-traveled English translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin—is a splendid and still-undervalued piece of singing. From a technical perspective, Mr. Tarver possesses as perfect a voice for Ferrando's music as might be found today. The foremost distinction of his performance on this recording is the manner in which he sings stylishly without preening and prancing through the music. Ferrando is rarely convincing in his Albanian disguise, which is played by many tenors solely for laughs, but Mr. Tarver succeeds at inspiring smiles by refusing to condescend to the comedy rather than indulging in ridiculous antics. It is the voice that provides greatest pleasure, however. It is not just that he has a voice for which Mozart’s music might have been tailor-made: in addition to that quality, Mr. Tarver knows how to sing the rôle, shaping every phrase with a naturalness and grace that elude even very accomplished Mozarteans. Ferrando’s Act One aria ‘Un'aura amorosa’ is one of Mozart’s most gorgeous inspirations, and it has never been more lovingly and gracefully sung on records than by Mr. Tarver in this performance. To this he adds a glistening account of the cavatina in Act Two, ‘Tradito, schernito,’ that sharpens his character’s dramatic profile. Even with a Ferrando capable of conquering its considerable difficulties at hand, the aria ‘Ah! lo veggio’ is lamentably cut, depriving Mr. Tarver of the opportunity to fully realize Mozart’s vision for Ferrando. Most tenors either sing the music or play the part: Mr. Tarver manages both aspects of the rôle in his performance, and his is a Ferrando who is both magnificently-sung and engagingly three-dimensional.

Alongside Mr. Tarver’s Ferrando, the Guglielmo of baritone Christopher Maltman is a brusque, less-sophisticated fellow who nonetheless occasionally reveals endearing vulnerability in spite of himself. Finding in Mozart’s music for Guglielmo tessitura in which he is completely comfortable, Mr. Maltman sings more securely and handsomely than he sometimes has in recent seasons. He has at his disposal a ruggedly attractive timbre bolstered by a laudable degree of flexibility, qualities that make him an artist capable of seizing control of a performance and inviting an audience into the specific environment that he conjures. In his singing of Guglielmo's Act One aria, 'Non siate ritrosi,' Mr. Maltman is the very model of the self-confident, slightly arrogant young man sure of his paramour's fidelity: how could any woman fail to be faithful to such a swaggering, debonair man? A totally different facet of the character shines in his Act Two aria, 'Donne mie, la fate a tanti,' and Mr. Maltman rips into the words with ferocity. In martial guise, this Guglielmo is an ancestor of Belcore in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, but Mr. Maltman takes the character's duties as a lover very seriously. His suddenly crestfallen demeanor when it becomes apparent that Don Alfonso’s plan has worked all too well makes the shift from an amicable gentlemen’s bet to a life-altering situation unusually apparent. Mr. Maltman makes the pain of the injury to Guglielmo’s pride stingingly sincere, and his robust, dapper singing provides as much enjoyment as his piquant dramatic portrayal.

Singing Dorabella with cool, focused tone, mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman depicts a very proper young lady whose decorum suppresses a burgeoning desire for adventure. In her Act One aria, ‘Smanie implacabili che m'agitate,’ Ms. Ernman molds the melodic line with a sculptor’s perceptiveness, the text used as a chisel to carve phrases with flair. When she sings ‘È amore un ladroncello’ in her Act Two aria, she is one of the few recorded Dorabellas who sounds fully at ease with the range of the music. Ms. Ernman is an insightful, intelligent singer, and she proves to be a wily, winsome Dorabella. Still, though it is difficult to pinpoint what her well-sung performance lacks, something stands between her and consistent, unadulterated realization of the rôle. She sometimes seems at the brink of surrendering herself to the part, but she hesitates, thwarting her good intentions. This is a viable reading of the rôle but also one that keeps the listener at a distance. Vocally, Ms. Ernman is a world-class Dorabella: emotionally, she misses the involvement that makes the character so lovably human. She is a Dorabella who impresses but does not enthrall.

German soprano Simone Kermes is a singer known for blowing through a performance like a tornado, uprooting conventions and turning expectations on their heads. In that sense, her Fiordiligi in this performance is surprisingly conservative. Her ornamentations and resolutions of cadences are predictably inventive but stylish, and she phrases with sensitivity and bashful femininity, utilizing straight tone as an expressive device. Fiordiligi’s arias are two of the most demanding soprano arias in the repertory, the first asking for a top B♭ and the punishing interval of a tenth and the second taking the singer to top C. In Act One, Ms. Kermes sings ‘Come scoglio immoto resta’ poignantly, employing the lightness of her timbre to suggest the character’s psychological detachment from her surroundings. ‘Per pietà, ben mio, perdona’ in Act Two is the outburst of a Baroque heroine after the fashion of Händel’s rôles for Francesca Cuzzoni with which Ms. Kermes is so closely acquainted. The soprano’s technique is equal to the music, but she does not endeavor to hide the effort involved in singing the rôle: there is no parody in this Fiordiligi, no farcical pomposity, and singing of such expressivity should not be easy. Ms. Kermes’s unwavering seriousness introduces the suggestion that the opera’s happy ending may not include any real happiness for Fiordiligi. Like everything that she does, Ms. Kermes’s Fiordiligi is a very personal creation, an uncommonly vivid portrait of a flawed woman. Ethereally voiced, it is a provocative, heartbreaking performance.

More than any of Mozart's other operas and, in truth, almost any other opera in the international repertory, Così fan tutte is an ensemble work. The arias are expertly-crafted pieces, but a performance of the opera can transcend poor singing of the arias. The ensembles in Così fan tutte are microcosms in which virtually every aspect of human interactions is dissected, examined with near-scientific scrutiny, and reassembled in music of surpassing beauty. Beginning with lively accounts of the series of trios for Ferrando, Guglielmo, and Don Alfonso in Act One, ‘La mia Dorabella capace non è,’ ‘È la fede delle femmine,’ and ‘Una bella serenata,’ the lovers’ rejoinders to the affront of Don Alfonso’s suggestion that their ladies’ affections are transitory palpably relayed, the ensembles receive lucid treatment from both cast and conductor. Ms. Kermes and Ms. Ernman duet alluringly in ‘Ah guarda, o sorella,’ matched by Mr. Tarver’s and Mr. Maltman’s fluent singing in their ‘Al fato dan legge,’ and the superb quintets ‘Sento, oh Dio, che questo piede’ and ‘Di scriverni ogni giorno’ are frolicsomely sung, foreshadowing the comic ensembles in Rossini’s operas and even those in Verdi’s Falstaff. The foremost misjudgment in Maestro Currentzis’s leadership of this performance is his dirge-like tempo for the exquisite terzettino ‘Soave sia il vento.’ The singers are encouraged by the conductor’s plodding to croon melodramatically. Consequentially, the trio seems neither ironic nor profound: it is merely purposelessly slow. Both the sextet ‘Alla bella Despinetta’ and the trio for Don Alfonso, Ferrando, and Guglielmo, ‘E voi ridete,’ are more appropriately paced, and the singers gambol through the Act One Finale with evident joy and a flurry of fetching sounds.

In Fiordiligi’s and Dorabella’s duet in Act Two, ‘Prenderò quel brunettino,’ the sisters draw strength from one another, Ms. Kermes and Ms. Ernman savoring their exchanges. Their swains boldly trade their own barbs with the chorus in ‘Secondate, aurette amiche.’ Ms. Kasyan and Mr. Wolff join the beleaguered siblings in a charming singing of the quartet ‘La mano a me date.’ Uncertainty gives way momentarily to uncomplicated ardor in Ms. Ernman’s and Mr. Maltman’s soaring ‘Il core vi dono,’ which Ms. Kermes and Mr. Tarver complement with a dulcet-toned exhibition of genuine bel canto in ‘Fra gli amplessi in pochi istanti.’ The opera’s extended finale is a cooperative affair in which singers, musicians, and conductor listen and react to one another intuitively. Everyone rises to the occasion with singing, playing, and conducting of exuberance.

No performance of Così fan tutte could hope to answer all of the questions that the opera poses, but Teodor Currentzis presides over a traversal of the score that in both essence and execution is unusually confrontational. It asks the listener to become part of the drama, eavesdropping on whispered conversations and choosing which characters’ motives are to be respected and which are to be rejected. This recording will not be to everyone’s liking, but anyone who appreciates the opera and Mozart’s music in general should spend three hours getting to know it. Even the performance’s defects are evidence of a consuming determination to illustrate the significance of every note and word. I love Così fan tutte, and I found much to love—and to put my understanding of this wonderful score to the test—in this recording.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Paul Hindemith – WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOOR-YARD BLOOM’D (M. G. Greene, L. Poulis; Choral Society of Durham; 8 February 2015]

PAUL HINDEMITH (1895 – 1963): When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d: A Requiem ‘For Those We Love—Mary Gayle Greene, mezzo-soprano; Lee Poulis, baritone; Choral Society of Durham; Rodney Wynkoop, conductor [Duke University Chapel, Durham, North Carolina – 8 February 2015]

Though the composer’s achievements as both innovator and teacher continue to influence musical life in his adopted country, the music of Paul Hindemith is not heard in the United States with anything like the frequency that its quality merits. Neither of his most important operas, Cardillac and Mathis der Maler, has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, and his symphonic works, several of which are among the finest scores of the Twentieth Century, are rarely heard in America’s concert halls. Hindemith’s tenure at Yale University and his rôle in the development of a talent as brilliant as that of German-American composer Lukas Foss notwithstanding, even a work as quintessentially American in scope as When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd, his Requiem ‘For Those We Love,’ is rarely performed in the country that inspired it. Commissioned by Robert Shaw in response to the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945, Hindemith’s mammoth, seventy-minute score is a setting of the full text of the Walt Whitman poem from which it takes its title. Transplanting the ethos of Whitman’s very personal response to the 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the national grief following the death of FDR in the final days of World War II in the European Theatre was hardly daunting, the universality of Whitman’s verses expressing the dichotomy of public and private grief with timeless eloquence. Whitman’s text is perhaps the most glaring problem with Hindemith’s work, however: setting the complete poem resulted in verbosity that threatens to upset the balance between words and music and, thereby, to compromise the score’s impact. A product of Hindemith’s full maturity, his twelve-tone compositional idiom taking conventional tonality to its limits, When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd is a lavishly-scored work closer in spirit to late Mahler and early Schönberg than to Stravinsky, to whose neo-Classical works Hindemith’s post-immigration music is often—but not altogether insightfully—likened. Hindemith’s musical signature is woven into the distinguished motivic writing with which he gave the work’s eleven movements an appreciable measure of continuity. Like all of the monumental choral masterworks from Bach’s Passions and Händel’s oratorios to Schmidt’s Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln and Britten’s War Requiem, When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd is a piece that transcends its topical context and possesses the capacity to engage the imagination of any listener alert to its musical and textual imagery. Hindemith’s unique Requiem was an unexpected choice for the enterprising Choral Society of Durham, but it was an indisputably rewarding one. Above all, it was another sign of the vigorous health of the Performing Arts in North Carolina, as well as a much-welcomed opportunity to hear an important score by a composer who seems to have loved America far more than the American musical establishment now honors him.

Duke Chapel on Duke University’s West Campus is unquestionably one of America’s grandest houses of worship, but it proved a decidedly imperfect venue for performance of Hindemith’s When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd. A more fittingly beautiful, reverent setting for the performance of such deeply emotional music could hardly be imagined, but the vaulted space robbed the sound of much of its immediacy. A layered, coarsely-textured score like Hindemith’s is heard to greatest advantage in the carefully-controlled aural environment of a concert hall. In Duke Chapel, the sonic impact of the work’s climaxes was compromised by the reverberant ambiance: neither the orchestra nor the chorus at top volume had the clarity needed to enable complete appreciation of Hindemith’s harmonic palette and the ingenuity of his tone-painting. Still, what the Choral Society of Durham orchestra and singers were able to achieve under the direction of Rodney Wynkoop despite the problematic sonics was astonishing. The orchestra’s playing was consistently accurate of both rhythm and intonation, and each of the musicians exhibited complete commitment to the score. The percussion parts were played particularly well, as was bugler Alexander Fioto’s shaping of ‘Taps,’ but all of the instrumentalists responded to Maestro Wynkoop’s leadership by giving performances that revealed the depths of Hindemith’s reactions to the text—an especially laudable feat under the acoustical circumstances.

A beloved presence on the faculty of Appalachian State University’s Mariam Cannon Hayes School of Music, Mary Gayle Greene sang the mezzo-soprano solos in When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d with firm, attractive tone and expert dignity of declamation. Unfortunately, the full effect of her excellent diction—and that of her colleagues—could not be enjoyed, too many words being lost in the Chapel’s soaring space, but the concentration of her singing was unmistakable. The strength of her lower register was apparent in her stirring singing of the Requiem’s second movement, the arioso ‘In the swamp, in secluded recesses.’ She conveyed tremendous wonder in her singing of the lines ‘The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, / Sings by himself a song. / Song of the bleeding throat! / Death’s outlet song of life.’ Ms. Greene’s ascent to top F♯ on ‘The star, my departing comrade’ in the arioso ‘Sing on, there in the swamp’ was commanding, and she filled her lines in ‘Sing on! you gray-brown bird’ and the work’s finale, ‘Passing the visions, passing the night,’ with vibrant tone. The quiet intensity of Ms. Greene’s singing was revelatory: in music that invites over-singing, she allowed her ruby-hued timbre and the inherent expressivity of the music itself to shine without forcing the voice or the interpretation.

Singing music still associated in many listeners’ minds with George London, young baritone Lee Poulis made a powerful impression, his resonant voice filling Duke Chapel with burnished sound. His top Es on ‘I mourn’d and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring’ and ‘With ev’ry leaf a miracle’ in the opening movement rang out splendidly, and his alternations with the chorus in ‘Over the breast of spring’ and ‘O western orb’ were evocative of the lections and responses of a liturgical service. There was an almost sensual intimacy in his utterance of ‘Here! coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.’ Mr. Poulis blended his voice with Ms. Greene’s beautifully in ‘Sing on! you gray-brown bird’ and ‘Passing the visions, passing the night,’ and the understated eloquence of his delivery of the hymn, ‘And I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death’ was potently expressive. In both ‘O how shall I warble’ and ‘To the tally of my soul,’ the singer’s ardently masculine vocalism convincingly intoned the grief of a nation, his climactic top F on ‘With pure, deliberate notes, spreading, filling the night’ and easy negotiation of the high tessitura of ‘Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them’ and ‘And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them’ conveying the horrors of war all the more meaningfully by contrasting the stark imagery of the text with the rounded allure of his tone. The hallmark of Mr. Poulis’s singing was vocal and sentimental fluency, and his articulate phrasing lent Hindemith’s angular melodic lines an unexpected appeal.

The superb singing done by Ms. Greene and Mr. Poulis was matched by the fantastic choral singing. Hindemith placed the foremost demands in When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d on the chorus, and the Choral Society’s personnel rose to the occasion with preparedness and audible conviction. Both the opening movement and the March, ‘Over the breast of spring,’ drew refined singing from the choristers, and their singing in ‘O western orb’ and ‘O how shall I warble’ was admirably focused. The towering central fugue, ‘Lo! body and soul,’ was majestically done, and the Death Carol, ‘Come, lovely and soothing Death’ was phrased with the rousing essence of a true invocation. The bleakness of ‘To the tally of my soul’ was capably evinced, and the subdued emotional lucidity of the final movement inspired the chorus to movingly hushed singing. In passages taking their voices to peaks of volume and range, the choristers produced walls of sound that credibly suggested the waves of anger and anguish depicted in Whitman’s text. That the choristers managed to sing so demonstratively even when under the duress occasionally imposed by the music was indicative of the singers’ impeccable training and talent.

It is disheartening that a place is only rarely found amongst the profusion of performances of Bach’s Passions, Händel’s Messiah, Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem, and Verdi’s Messa da Requiem for presenting Paul Hindemith’s When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d. The bounties of Hindemith’s score are less easily won than those of Bach’s, Händel’s, Brahms’s, or Verdi’s music, but a competent performance of When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d is a memorable experience, one with special significance for American audiences. The Choral Society of Durham’s performance—the Society’s first—attained a level of execution far beyond mere competence. Triumphing over a flawed aural setting, the performance was an unforgettable homage not only to Hindemith, the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln assassination, and the legacy of FDR but to the most basic principles of American recovery and resilience. Whether Hindemith, Händel, or Hildegard von Bingen, is this not the most awe-inspiring potential of music?

ARTS IN ACTION: San Francisco-based ARS MINERVA restoring Venetian incarnation of Cleopatra to her throne

The original Pyramid Scheme: Ars Minerva will resurrect Frà Daniele da Castrovillari’s 1662 La Cleopatra at San Francisco’s Marines’ Memorial Theatre in March 2015

Remembered almost solely for the lament ‘A Dio regni, a Dio scettri,’ a piece introduced to modern audiences by its inclusion in Cleopatra-themed concerts by Cecilia Bartoli, Frà Daniele da Castrovillari’s La Cleopatra was first performed at Venice’s Teatro San Salvatore—today’s Teatro Goldoni—in 1662. A setting of a libretto by Giacomo Dall’Angelo, whose libretti for L’Aureliano and Il Demetrio were written for Carlo Pallavicino, one of the most popular composers in 1660s Venice, La Cleopatra is one of three documented operas by da Castrovillari: sadly, the composer’s manuscripts of Gl’avvenimenti d’Orinda and La Pasife have been lost. Presumably not heard since the Seventeenth Century, La Cleopatra will be resurrected in a pair of performances on 14 and 15 March in San Francisco’s Marines’ Memorial Theatre by Ars Minerva, an enterprising organization celebrating the first milestone in its mission to explore the rich but neglected vein of music inspired by and composed for the legendary Carnevale di Venezia.

Founded by internationally-acclaimed mezzo-soprano Céline Ricci, who will sing the title rôle in La Cleopatra, Ars Minerva brings together a team of exceptional artists with wide-ranging expertise. With an Advisory Team anchored by noted historian Dr. Theodore Raab, soprano Sheri Greenawald, and mezzo-sopranos Vivica Genaux [whom Ms. Ricci will join in reviving Pier Francesco Cavalli’s 1652 Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona at Spoleto USA 2015] and Frederica von Stade, Ars Minerva aims to recreate the storied atmosphere of Venetian Carnevale in the Seventeenth Century by involving modern listeners with the art and music of the era. ‘As a Baroque singer,’ Ms. Ricci recently said from San Francisco, ‘I’ve been involved in [the revivals of] several forgotten operas, and I immediately thought that it would be very exciting to play those operas [of the Venetian Carnevale] again and bring them to everyone.’ Her zeal is reflected both in the mission statement of Ars Minerva and in the organization’s inaugural events. ‘As a musician, it is part of my core values to keep past music alive, especially the music that has been forgotten,’ she remarked. ‘With the help of the Italian Cultural Institute, we are inviting a representative of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, who will give a talk on February 12. This presentation is crucial for the revival process.’

In addition to Ms. Ricci, the cast of Ars Minerva’s production of La Cleopatra will include countertenor Randall Scotting as Marc’Antonio, sopranos Nell Snaidas as Ottavia and Jennifer Ellis Kampani as Coriaspe, mezzo-soprano Molly Mahoney as Arsinoe, tenors Michael Desnoyers as Filenia and James Hogan as Domitio, and baritones Igor Vieira as Clisterno, Spencer Dodd as Dolabella and Arante, and Xavier Rivera as Augusto. ‘The team is quite young,’ Ms. Ricci commented. ‘Many former students of the San Francisco Conservatory will be singing and playing. We think that it is extremely important to include young artists in our production—and also to bring opera and [especially] Baroque opera to young crowds.’

Among so many forgotten operas originating in Seventeenth-Century Venice, why choose La Cleopatra for Ars Minerva’s first production? ‘First of all, La Cleopatra is an amazing opera,’ Ms. Ricci said. ‘The music is very varied, with interesting, captivating, and contrasted tunes. Every character is unique, important to the plot, which is quite twisted and unexpected. The end of the opera is totally in the spirit of Carnevale!’ Not surprisingly, the journey from conceiving the central focus of Ars Minerva to bringing La Cleopatra to the stage has been almost as suspenseful as the opera itself. ‘I came across [La Cleopatra] a little bit by chance,’ Ms. Ricci confided. ‘I was at UC Berkeley’s music library. I like to go there and look for music. I was in the microfilm department, opening the drawers, and I discovered Venetian operas that had never been played since their creation for the Carnevale season, including La Cleopatra. The manuscripts of La Cleopatra and a number of these operas are at La Biblioteca Marciana in Venice.’ The senses of adventure and discovery that inspired the decision to revive La Cleopatra are pillars of Ms. Ricci’s philosophy as a performer and musical trailblazer. ‘As I said, I had the immense privilege to be involved in [the revivals of] several forgotten operas, and to me it is the most thrilling thing I have ever done. It is natural to me to have the will of sharing this excitement with everyone. The excitement of bringing music back to life [is] a testimony of our past. It is a musical adventure but also a human adventure.’

The thrill of connecting neglected music with Twenty-First-Century audiences is apparent in every word that Ms. Ricci speaks about La Cleopatra and Ars Minerva’s plans for the future. It would be difficult to spend a few minutes in her presence without being completely won over by her enthusiasm. ‘I hope that the audience will be totally surprised by the singularity of La Cleopatra and the beauty of the music,’ she rhapsodized. ‘I also hope that everyone will feel the electricity of a revival in the air.’

If Ars Minerva’s performances of La Cleopatra possess the electricity of Ms. Ricci’s passion for the music and its rediscovery, they are certain to ignite Carnevale pyrotechnics in the audiences’ imaginations!

To learn more about Ars Minerva, visit the organization’s website.

To purchase tickets for Ars Minerva’s 14 and 15 March performances of Frà Daniele da Castrovillari’s La Cleopatra, phone 415.392.4400 or visit the City Box Office website.

Illustration from the title page of Giacomo Dall’Angelo’s libretto for Frà Daniele da Castrovillari’s 1662 La Cleopatra [Image from the collection of the Musikgeschichtlichen Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom]

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Giacomo Puccini – TURANDOT (O. Graham, C. Tanner, D. Kuznetsova, K. Langan; Opera Carolina, 2 February 2015)

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): Turandot—Othalie Graham (Turandot), Carl Tanner (Calàf), Dina Kuznetsova (Liù), Kevin Langan (Timur), Giovanni Guagliardo (Ping), Gianluca Bocchino (Pang), Joseph Hu (Pong), John Fortson (Un mandarino), Johnathan Stanford White (L’Imperatore Altoum); Opera Carolina Chorus; Charlotte Symphony Orchestra; James Meena, conductor [Directed by Tom Diamond; Production Direction, Projections, and Lighting Design by Michael Baumgarten; Sets by Anita Stewart; Costumes by Anna Oliver; Wig and Make-up Design by Martha Ruskai; Opera Carolina, Belk Theater, Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Charlotte, North Carolina – 2 February 2015]

The première of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot at La Scala on 25 April 1926, seventeen months after the composer’s death, is one of the most famous occasions in opera. Conducted by Arturo Toscanini, whose association with the operas of Puccini from the podium began with his pacing of the première of La bohème in Torino in 1896, the first performance was an emotional homage to the composer. The performance ended with Liù’s death in Act Three, the last scene that Puccini left in complete form: Toscanini turned to the audience and said, depending upon which source one believes, something along the lines of, ‘We stop here because it was at this point that the composer laid down his pen.’ At the second performance, which—again, sources differ—may or may not have been conducted by Toscanini, the completion of the opera’s final scene by Franco Alfano was also sung. The composer of successful operas such as Cyrano de Bergerac, La Leggenda di Sakùntala, and Risurrezione, Alfano was himself an expert musical craftsman and not at all unworthy of being entrusted with the formidable task of completing Turandot except in the sense of no one but Puccini being fully able to realize the ultimate fruition of what was his most ambitious endeavor. As in the case of Süßmayr’s completion of Mozart’s Requiem, it is foolish to condemn Alfano’s work with the statement that Puccini would have done better. The fact is that he did not, and, unlike Hemingway’s ostensibly unfinished but bizarrely resolved The Garden of Eden, Turandot without the final scene is a wondrous body without its head. Furthermore, subsequent efforts at re-scoring the final scene have proved no more successful than Alfano’s, so fidelity to the work of an artist who knew and respected Puccini and his style is surely the most logical path. Directed by Tom Diamond, Opera Carolina’s production of Turandot employed the Alfano ending but made it seem an unusually organic part of the score. The seams that are all too apparent in the transition from Puccini to Alfano in many performances were here mitigated by the decision to take a brief pause at the end of Liù’s death scene, signaling the point at which the composer’s completion of the score was cut short. Nevertheless, the most brilliant staging of Turandot with poor singing is an unredeemable failure, and in this realm, too, Opera Carolina had a triumph. One no longer expects to hear Turandot without at least occasionally cringing at curdled tones and missed pitches, but this performance defied those expectations. Continuing the company’s trend in recent productions of other repertory, Opera Carolina could teach many of the world’s larger, more renowned opera companies quite a lot about casting, preparing, and performing Puccini’s Turandot.

Scenically, Turandot is one of the most difficult operas in the Italian repertory to produce effectively. The grandeur of the music demands equal dramatic largesse, but there is a real danger of sacrificing the human depth of the opera to the extravagant pageantry of the monumental public scenes. With projections and lighting designs​ by Michael Baumgarten, Opera Carolina’s production shrank from none of the gargantuan spatial effects required by the score but also concentrated focus on the intimate interactions between Liù and Timur and, eventually, Turandot and Calàf. ​Martha Ruskai​’s wig and make-up designs were particularly effective, and ​Anita Stewart​’s sets and ​Anna Oliver​’s costumes placed the action in a visually stimulating, fancifully colorful Forbidden City. The costumes for Ping, Pang, and Pong were unusually inventive, mirroring the ‘elevated’ habits for the Nymphs in Elijah Moshinsky’s Metropolitan Opera production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. The vocal challenges of Turandot render it an opera in which hoary stand-and-sing blocking is typical, but Opera Carolina’s production avoided the worst of the ‘parking and barking’ traditions while also placing the singers for optimal projection during key passages. The stage tableaux depicting the moonrise in Act One and sunrise in Act Three were especially lovely, and it was an imaginative touch in Act Two to pull away the mobile scaffolding that elevated the Emperor and Turandot, leaving Turandot physically and symbolically isolated after Calàf’s solving of the riddles. At her first appearance in Act One, however, Turandot was so heavily veiled that Calàf’s description of her ‘divina bellezza’ must indeed have been the product of hallucination as the Maschere later suggest. The projections and stage pictures eloquently evoked Puccini’s China—which of course is not quite the same thing as historical China—and made use of space to cleverly create the impression of an even more expansive setting.

From a musical perspective, Turandot is one of the great operatic masterpieces of the Twentieth Century. Puccini rarely receives the acknowledgement that he deserves for the originality of his orchestrations, and only in La fanciulla del West and Il tabarro did he write anything rivaling the modernity of the orchestrations in Turandot. Under the baton of James Meena the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra delivered an awe-inspiring performance of the score. The exposed passages for xylophone in the opera's opening scene, repeated at key moments throughout the drama, were played with total accuracy, and the important harp figurations were gracefully executed and, owing to Maestro Meena’s thoughtful management of orchestral textures, always audible. There were a couple of breakdowns in ensemble at the start of Act Three, but recovery was rapid, bolstered by especially fine playing from the strings. Maestro Meena’s conducting was notable for the manner in which, like the great past interpreters of the operas of Richard Strauss, he coaxed sounds from the orchestra that compellingly fulfilled the lush late-Romantic promise of the melodic lines while also always sounding like an opera composed in 1924. The influence of Debussy has almost never been more discernible than in Maestro Meena’s handling of the score. His work in Charlotte has been consistently perceptive, but he found in Turandot—a score by which many conductors have been defeated—an ideal outlet for the controlled ecstasy of which he is a master.

Augmented by students from the Choir School at St. Peter's, the singers of the Opera Carolina Chorus have surely never sung better than in this performance of Turandot. The sheer enormity of their sound in Act One was fantastic, and the contrasting delicacy of their invocation to the moon was alluring. The children sang ‘Là, sui monti dell'Est la cicogna cantò’ with touching purity and near-perfect intonation. The funeral march ‘O giovinetto,’ sung as the Principe di Persia is led to his execution, was more differentiated than in many performances from the choir’s bloodthirsty utterances earlier in the act. In Act Two, neither the sobriety of ‘Gravi, enormi ed imponenti col mister dei chiusi enigmi’ nor the perilous tessitura of ‘Diecimila anni al nostro Imperatore!’ upset the choristers, and the children again rose to the challenge of their ‘Dal deserto al mar non odi mille voci sospirar.’ The eruption of joy upon Calàf’s successful response to the final riddle, ‘Gloria, gloria, o vincitore,’ was thrilling. At the beginning of Act Three, the tenors who voiced the Araldi were occasionally uncertain in ‘Così commanda Turandot: "Questa notte nessun dorma in Pekino,’ but, after lustily demanding that she divulge Calàf’s name, the full chorus demonstrated substantial emotional sincerity in ‘Ombra dolente, non farci del male! Perdona, perdona!’ after Liù’s self-sacrifice. Countless performances of Turandot have been undermined by poor choral singing. Conversely, Opera Carolina’s performance was a reminder of how mightily superb choral singing can enrich enjoyment of Turandot.

​Baritone John Fortson was a Mandarino of vocal strength and ramrod authority, imposingly tossing off the profusion of C♯s at the top of the staff in his proclamations of 'Popolo di Pekino! La legge è questa.’ His towering presence made him a suitably majestic representation of imperial clout.

Perched high above the stage on a golden throne, L’Imperatore Altoum presided over his scenes like a benevolent deity. His declarations in Act Two were delivered with apt authority by tenor Johnathan Stanford White, who had the distinction of not sounding as though he had already lived the bulk of the ten thousand years of which the chorus often sings. There was genuine regret in his voicing of 'Un giuramento atroce mi costringe a tener fede al fosco patto,' and he conveyed tenderness in his exchanges with Turandot. Significantly, he evinced an indication of relieved joy when Calàf solved the riddles. Mr. White used his compact, reedy timbre to excellent effect.

Fermo! che fai? T’arresta: (from left to right) Tenor Gianluca Bocchino as Pang, tenor Carl Tanner as Calàf, tenor Joseph Hu as Pong, and baritone Giovanni Guagliardo as Ping in Opera Carolina’s 2015 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot [Photo by jonsilla.com, © Opera Carolina]

Puccini’s comic Maschere, Ping, Pang, and Pong, often inspire more wincing than amusement, and Opera Carolina’s production did not wholly avoid slightly uncomfortable pseudo-Chinese stereotypes, but baritone Giovanni Guagliardo as Ping and tenors Gianluca Bocchino and Joseph Hu as Pang and Pong earned their laughs and sang handsomely. Starting with their ‘Fermo! che fai? T'arresta!' in Act One, Ping's line littered with top E♭s and Fs, all three gentlemen made the most of their jaunty music. Mr. Guagliardo gave Ping’s ‘Lascia le donne! O prendi cento spose’ wry humor, and his launching of the wonderful scene at the start of Act Two with ‘Olà, Pang! Olà, Pong!’ was delightfully exasperated. There was true wistfulness in the gentlemen’s lament for the current state of their homeland, ‘O China, o China, che or sussulti e trasecoli in quieta,’ and Mr. Guagliardo’s phrasing of the beguiling ‘Ho una casa nell'Honan con il suo laghetto blù’ was endearingly noble. Their unison top G was rousing. Mr. Bocchino and Mr. Hu revealed bright upper registers in their scene with Calàf in Act Three, ‘Tu che guardi le stelle, abbassa gli occhi,’ their frustration growing as they gleaned that their appeals were falling on deaf ears. All three singers played their parts with gusto, brightening the mood of every scene in which they appeared.

Bass Kevin Langan sang Timur with absolute vocal and dramatic security, ably depicting the deposed King of Tartary’s—historically and geographically, slightly different from the supertitles’ suggested Mongolia—blindness. The elation of Timur’s unexpected reunion with his son in Act One was movingly conveyed by Mr. Langan’s powerful enunciation of ‘O mio figlio! tu! vivo?!’ His recounting of the events that led to his exile, ‘Perduta la battaglia, vecchio Re senza regno e fuggente,’ was mesmerizing, the security of his top Ds increasing the impact of the music. The bass brought a flood of anguish to his singing of ‘O figlio, vuoi dunque ch'io solo, ch'io solo trascini pel mondo la mia torturata vecchiezza,’ seeming to already surmise that there was no reasoning with Calàf. In Act Three, this Timur’s reaction to Liù’s death was almost unbearably heart-rending. Mr. Langan’s entreating ‘Liù! Liù! sorgi! sorgi! È l'ora chiara d'ogni risveglio!’ was pained, and his singing of ‘Ah! delitto orrendo!’ was harrowing, the climactic top F and E♭ shot into the auditorium with unanswerable severity. The quiet sadness of his phrasing of ‘Liù! bontà! Liù! dolcezza!’ defined the very personal tragedy of Liù’s sacrifice. In terms of quantity of notes, Timur is not a large rôle, but Mr. Langan devoted sonorous tone to every one of those notes, and he made the old king more tellingly a ‘padre augusto’ than the exalted Imperatore.

Tanto amore segreto, e inconfessato: soprano Dina Kuznetsova as Liù (center) in Opera Carolina’s 2015 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot [Photo by jonsilla.com, © Opera Carolina]

Moscow native Dina Kuznetsova created a vulnerable but fearless Liù who held the audience’s sympathy in the palms of her hands from her first note. At her entrance in Act One, her plea for help with the fallen Timur, ‘Il mio vecchio è vaduto,’ was spun like the finest Chinese silk, and her phrasing of ‘Chi m'aiuta, chi m'aiuta a sorreggerlo’ was exquisite. She was the model of humility in her singing of ‘Nulla sono...una schiava’ (‘I am nothing, only a slave’), and her top B♭ on ‘mi hai sorriso’ (‘you smiled at me’) was radiant. Ms. Kuznetsova sang the aria ‘Signore, ascolta!’ with heartwarming restraint, caressing the repeated top A♭s and B♭. In Liù’s death scene in Act Three, the soprano’s grasp of Puccini’s arching melodic lines was intuitive, and her singing of ‘Tanto amore segreto, e inconfessato,’ its top As and B taxing but on pitch, was magical. The apotheosis of her performance—as should be true of every Liù—was her sumptuously-sung ‘Tu, che di gel sei cinta,’ her final top B♭ suggesting the serenity of an impressionable but indomitable young woman who dies knowing that she has fulfilled her destiny with courage and honor.

If only Calàf were more deserving of Liù’s sacrifice! Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, did not succeed in making Calàf a fully genial hero, but Carl Tanner gave his all to portraying a Calàf of uncompromising integrity and romantic magnetism. He bounded onto the stage at his Act One entrance with the brio of an impassioned teenager, and the exuberance of his ‘Padre! Mio padre!’ matched Timur’s glee at their meeting. Mr. Tanner’s top B♭ on ‘O padre, sì, ti ritrovo!’ and B♭♭ on ‘T'ho pianto, padre...e bacio queste ma ni sante!’ were confident and ringing. The vehemence of his denunciation of Turandot’s cruelty in ‘Ch'io ti veda e ch'io ti maledica!’ was juxtaposed by the sudden softening of his sentiments with ‘O divina bellezza, o meraviglia,’ his ascent to top A♭ elucidating Calàf’s budding infatuation with Turandot. Proclaiming his character’s suit for the princess, his repetitions of Turandot’s name cresting on top B♭, Mr. Tanner’s voice soared into the theatre exhilaratingly. There was an air of mystery in his ‘Si profuma di lei l'oscurità,’ but his phrasing of the aria ‘Non piangere, Liù!’ left nothing unsaid: though unable to return Liù’s chaste love, he was sensitive to magnitude of her devotion. In Act Two, the calmness of Mr. Tanner’s singing of the three statements of ‘Figlio del cielo, io chiedo d'affrontar la prova!’ was striking. He sailed bravely to the unison top C with Turandot on ‘Gli enigmi sono tre, una è la vita!’ His vocal and dramatic engagement escalated to feverish intensity in the Riddle Scene, Mr. Tanner’s shining top B♭s on ‘Il mio fuoco ti sgela: Turandot!’ leaving no doubt of his triumph. He brought phenomenal swagger to ‘No, no, Principessa altera! Ti voglio tutta ardente d'amor!’ without hectoring, and he gently stroked the phrases prefiguring ‘Nessun dorma’ on ‘Il mio nome non sai!’ Though in strictly musical terms ‘Non piangere, Liù’ is the better aria, it is Calàf’s Act Three aria ‘Nessun dorma’ that many listeners eagerly await. Mr. Tanner sang it sweepingly, sustaining the most famous top B in opera—a sixteenth note in Puccini’s score, incidentally—valiantly. He displayed true sorrow in ‘Ah! Tu sei morta, tu sei morta, o mia piccola Liù’ and tempestuous indignation in ‘Principessa di morte! Principessa di gelo!’ In the opera’s final scene, his ardor was rapidly transformed into respect and emotional intimacy. Following the performance, it was revealed that Mr. Tanner was very ill with bronchitis, and it is indicative of his artistic rectitude that there was virtually no evidence of his indisposition in any aspect of his performance. No announcement requesting the audience’s indulgence was made: rather, Mr. Tanner took the stage and sang with undeterred professionalism. In so doing, he created a vocally and dramatically outstanding Calàf.

In questa reggia: Tenor Johnathan Stanford White as L’Imperatore Altoum (left) and soprano Othalie Graham as Turandot (right) in Opera Carolina’s 2015 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot [Photo by jonsilla.com, © Opera Carolina]

The description ‘a natural Turandot’ seems a contradiction of terms, but Canadian-born soprano Othalie Graham deserves the designation more than almost any other soprano singing today. A svelte, beautiful lady, she moves with confidence and uses her expressive face to mirror the emotions of which she sings. Turandot is not an easy rôle to master, dramatically: the necessity of almost continuous full-throttle singing limits many sopranos’ abilities to connect with the character on a plane beyond the concern for getting the notes out. The profundity of Ms. Graham’s identification with Turandot was evident from the first phrase of ‘In questa reggia.’ What was also obvious from the first lines that she sang was that Ms. Graham’s command of the rôle’s two-octave range is comprehensive. Her singing of ‘Principessa Lou-Ling, ava dolce e serena’ seethed with fury, the top B on ‘Quel grido e quella morte!’ unleashed with zeal. Her phrasing of ‘Ah, rinasce in me l'orgoglio di tanta purità!’ exploded with umbrage. Ms. Graham gloriously joined Mr. Tanner on the unison top C on ‘No! No! Gli enigmi sono tre, la morte è una,’ and she shaped the Riddle Scene with glacial singing of ‘Straniero, ascolta!’ and ‘Percuotete quei vili!’ The biting irony of ‘Su, straniero, il gelo che dà foco, che cos'è?’ inspired the soprano to singing of frightening potency, offset by her glowingly feminine delivery of ‘Figlio del cielo! Padre augusto!’ The power of her pair of top Cs trumpeted over the chorus on 'Mi vuoi nelle tue braccia a forza riluttante, fremente!—the second of them doubled by the sopranos in the chorus—was stupendous. Turandot’s gradual awakening to love was clearly indicated by Ms. Graham’s singing of ‘Che mai osi, straniero!’ She brought to Turandot’s ‘La mia gloria è finita!’ an element of catharsis that cemented the passage’s kinship with the decisive ‘Son io’ in the penultimate scene of Bellini’s Norma. The repeated top As and hair-raising top B in ‘Del primo pianto’ embodied this Turandot’s blossoming sensuality. After so much extraordinary singing, the top B♭ on ‘Il suo nome è Amor!’ as Turandot reveals to her father and the people of Peking that she has discovered her unknown swain’s name—Love—perfectly crowned Ms. Graham’s performance. Dramatically, she was the unique Turandot who made the character a woman, not an archetype. Vocally, she was, as bears repeating, a sensationally natural Turandot.

Among the world’s good regional opera companies, performances of Puccini’s Turandot are infrequent, but even in the world’s most acclaimed opera houses performances of Turandot of the quality of Opera Carolina’s are rarer still. There is tremendous significance in the fact that, when Turandot was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera seven months after its La Scala première, the production costs and salary for the leading lady, Maria Jeritza, were the highest ever paid for performances at the Old MET on Broadway in the company’s then-four-decade history. The first performance of Turandot was also the highest-grossing show of the MET’s 1926 – 1927 season. These statistics document both the difficulties and the enticements of staging Turandot. Whether or not the company’s production of Turandot was a financially lucrative enterprise for Opera Carolina, it was an artistic tour de force. It was also a fresh reminder of the fabulous reality that Charlotte has become a major destination for some of the world’s premier singers.