CD REVIEW: Joseph Martin Kraus – ARIAS AND OVERTURES (M. Groop, Helsinki Baroque Orchestra; NAXOS 8.572865)

JOSEPH MARTIN KRAUS (1756 – 1792): Arias and Overtures—Monica Groop, mezzo-soprano; Helsingin Barokkiorkesteri; Aapo Häkkinen, conductor [Recorded at Sello Hall, Espoo, Finland, 10 – 12 June 2013; NAXOS 8.572865; 1 CD, 62:47; Available from ClassicsOnline, Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

Had Robert Frost been a composer of music as well as verse, he might have described Classical Music as two roads diverging in a wood, one leading to at least a perception of immortality and the other to oblivion. Thus it has proved for so many musicians whose places in history have descended from the glow of the footlights to exile among footnotes. It is perplexing that later generations are so curious about the daily lives of great musical geniuses without allocating any particular interest to the contemporaries they admired and emulated. Some of the most contentious words that can be written about music are any that suggest, however reverentially, that the primacy of Mozart’s place in musical history is slightly overestimated, but even a genius such as Mozart’s did not develop in a vacuum. Among the many names of fellow composers with whose work Mozart was familiar, that of his almost exact contemporary and fellow Freemason Joseph Martin Kraus for more than two hundred years largely escaped notice. Born—like the more famous Salzburger—in 1756, Kraus spent the best years of his short career at the court of the ill-fated Gustav III, where he was celebrated as the Swedish Mozart. That he was not Swedish is established easily enough, but the claim that he was a musical equal of Mozart is less handily dismissed: by the time of his untimely surrender to consumption in 1792, not long after the Verdi-commemorated assassination of his royal patron, Kraus’s standing in the company of Albrechtsberger, Dittersdorf, both Haydns, Holzbauer, and Mozart was widely acknowledged. It is a hard fate for a composer of true quality to be forgotten by the world that created him, but Kraus is gradually reclaiming the recognition to which the merit of his music entitles him. Unfortunately, the selections on this new disc from NAXOS portray Kraus as a composer whose work was derivative to a degree, several of the works recorded here representing his responses to other composers’ creativity rather than providing exposure to manifestations of his own individual genius. This is a splendidly entertaining disc but ultimately one that fails to answer many of the questions that the negligence of history poses about Kraus and the enduring significance of his originality.

​Founded in 1997, the Helsingin Barokkiorkesteri (Helsinki Baroque Orchestra) has developed during its seventeen-year history into one of Scandinavia’s finest period-instrument ensembles, building credentials that include collaborations with a number of Europe’s most renowned period-practice specialists. His leadership of the performances of the music on this disc, which traverses surprising stylistic versatility despite the brevity of Kraus’s career, verifies that Aapo Häkkinen, the orchestra’s Artistic Director since 2003, has earned a place among the ranks of the paragons of the historically-informed performance movement. Not surprisingly for a pupil of Bob van Asperen, his playing of fortepiano, harpsichord, and organ continuo on this disc is superb, and the obvious enthusiasm with which he takes on the thorniness of Kraus’s music permeates every moment of these performances. The musicians of Helsingin Barokkiorkesteri likewise prove the peers of their colleagues in the world’s best period-instrument bands, with no weaknesses in any of the sections of the orchestra. The string playing is appropriately stylish but also delightfully full-toned, and solo lines from violinists Dmitry Sinkovsky and Tuomo Suni, violist Aira Maria Lehtipuu, and cellists Jussi Seppänen and Heidi Peltoniemi are insightfully-phrased and unfailingly beautiful to hear. The woodwind, horn, and trumpet players also temper their unquestionable virtuosity with timbral sweetness. The orchestra’s playing is distinguished by prudently-shaped and consistently-maintained balances, and the musicians’ comfort with Maestro Häkkinen’s guidance engenders performances marked by awareness of the Sturm und Drang vehemence of Kraus’s music that does not impede observance of the underlying formality of these pieces.

The instrumental works offered here present the orchestra with opportunities to exhibit the full panoply of their abilities, and every player answers with a recital of his or her prime accomplishments. In the Overture from Kraus’s one-act opera Proseprin (VB 19), based upon a libretto by Johan Henric Kellgren that was drafted by Gustav III himself, the orchestra’s negotiations of the intricacies of the music are imposingly precise without seeming studied. Likewise, the orchestra’s performance of the Overture from the collaborative incidental music for Johan Magnus Lannerstierna’s comedy Äfventyraren (VB 32) is defined by tautness of rhythm and ensemble but sustains a gratifying element of unpredictability. The Overtures from a pair of Kraus’s musical homages to his royal patron are sharply-contrasted pieces, both of which require a lofty degree of technical achievement from the musicians: in Helsingin Barokkiorkesteri’s performances, the demands of both pieces are met with prowess to spare. The opening movement from the Kantate zum Geburtstage des Königs Gustav III (VB 41) is a suitably jubilant piece, but the ‘Introduzzione’ from Konung Gustav III Begrafnings-kantat (VB 42), Kraus’s musical response to the 1792 assassination of the monarch, invokes the composer’s rage, horror, and sadness—and perhaps also a suggestion of the fear of the terminal illness already gripping him. Kraus made use of music from an earlier ‘sinfonia da chiesa’ that included fugal material borrowed from the Overture to Albrechtsberger’s 1781 oratorio Die Pilger auf Golgotha [sometimes also cited, especially in Eighteenth-Century sources, as Die Pilgrime auf Golgatha], but his harmonic progressiveness goes far beyond Albrechtsberger’s idiom at its most galant. The despair in the music never disrupts the chic allure of the orchestra’s playing, but the zeal of the performance proclaims the momentousness of Kraus’s musical reaction to a national tragedy that was, for him, also profoundly personal.

Mezzo-soprano Monica Groop is one of Finland’s most cherished gifts to the musical world. Now in the third decade of an international career that began with her 1987 professional début as Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther at Suomen Kansallisooppera (Finnish National Opera), she has thrilled audiences with performances of a wide repertory. Her extensive experience in Mozart rôles qualifies her as a natural advocate for Kraus’s vocal music, and from her first note on this disc her connection with these arias is apparent. The pair of Swedish arias sung by Ms. Groop are both reconstructions of lost or incomplete music. ‘Du i hvars oskuldsfulla blick’ (VB 30), intended for insertion into performances of Nils Sparrschöld’s comedy De Mexikanske Systrarna, is a charming piece that could credibly be slipped into the buffa scenes in Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, or any of Haydn’s operas, and Ms. Groop sings it with the skill of a practiced Cherubino. The manuscript of ‘Hör mina ömma suckar klaga’ (VB 26), its text taken from Karl Ristell’s drama Visittimman, was lost to fire in 1827, but Ms. Groop’s sterling performance justifies its resurrection. The Italian aria ‘Ma tu tremi’ (VB 63) is taken from Pietro Metastasio’s cantata La tempesta, and Ms. Groop’s incisive singing aptly reflects the storm-tossed imagery of the text. Another Metastasio libretto, Siroe, rè di Persia, most famously set by Hasse and, via an adaptation by Nicola Francesco Haym, by Händel, is the source of ‘Ch’io mai vi possa lasciar d’amare’ (VB 59). Händel’s version of the aria is likely to remain the more familiar, but Kraus’s aria deserves to be included in gutsy singers’ repertories. Kraus might have written the aria for Ms. Groop: she sings it with such authority that it seems her exclusive property. The Latin motet ‘Parvum quando cerno Deum’ (VB 5) is an appealing contemplation of the Blessed Mother’s exaltation in the presence of her son, and the radiance of Ms. Groop’s performances intimates maternal pride. The rondo ‘Du temps, qui détruit tout’ (VB 58) is Kraus’s only known concert aria in French, and though her French diction lacks the near-native command of her Italian singing she nobly gives voice to the composer’s panegyric to Gustav III. ‘Al mio bene’ (VB 55) is an arrangement of an aria composed by Johann Christian Bach for the soprano castrato Giusto Fernando Tenducci, who tutored Mozart in the art of singing during the composer’s stay in Paris in 1777 – 1778 and was sufficiently admired in Britain to have twice been the subject of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough. Kraus’s adaptation was likely intended for tenor or mezzo-soprano, and it is sung with both substance and subtlety by Ms. Groop. At this point in her career, her Stygian-timbred voice is not absolutely steady on sustained tones: nonetheless, she does not wobble, and the voice remains an evenly-produced, handsome instrument. The difficulties of Kraus’s music scarcely challenge Ms. Groop, but she allocates to her performances on this disc the technical meticulousness familiar from her Mozart portrayals and the interpretive integrity that molds her singing of music by Schubert and Mahler.

The caliber of Joseph Martin Kraus’s compositions was sufficient to earn him the dedicated sponsorship of Gustav III, the admiration of Franz Joseph Haydn, and, perhaps most tellingly, the efforts of a consortium of native Swedish rivals and their champions to prevent his return to Stockholm at the end of his half-decade ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe in the 1780s. As more of Kraus’s music has reentered global circulation in recent years, a fuller picture of the composer esteemed by Haydn as an equal of Mozart has emerged. Though not an ideal representation of the originality for which Kraus was renowned, particularly in works like his Viennese Symphonies in C minor (originally written in the then-rare key of C-sharp minor) and D major and unconventional Flute Quintet in D major, this disc is a commendable supplement to the composer’s expanding discography. It is also a testament to NAXOS’s continuing commitment to giving the music of overlooked composers world-class handling. Next, perhaps NAXOS might consider reuniting Monica Groop, Aapo Häkkinen, and Helsingin Barokkiorkesteri for historically-appropriate recordings of Kraus’s surviving operas…

CD REVIEW: REINCARNATIONS – A Century of American Choral Music (Seraphic Fire; Seraphic Fire Media SFMCD13)

SAMUEL BARBER (1910 – 1981), COLIN BRITT (born 1985), PAUL CRABTREE (born 1960), SHAWN CROUCH (born 1977), DOMINICK DiORIO (born 1984), DAN FORREST (born 1978), MORTEN LAURIDSEN (born 1943) NICO MUHLY (born 1981), JAKE RUNESTAD (born 1986), and FRANK TICHELI (born 1958): Reincarnations – A Century of American Choral Music—Seraphic Fire (James K. Bass, chorus master); Anna Fateeva, piano; Patrick Dupré Quigley, conductor [Recorded at Bower Chapel at Moorings Park, Naples, Florida, USA, 21 – 23 May 2014; Seraphic Fire Media SFMCD13; 1 CD, 77:05; Available from Amazon, ClassicsOnline, iTunes, and major music retailers]

To adapt a clichéd colloquialism to the heady world of the contemporary Performing Arts, Patrick Dupré Quigley and Seraphic Fire are among the rarefied few in the realm of choral music who ‘get it.’ This is to say that Seraphic Fire and Maestro Quigley, the ensemble’s conductor, founder, and Artistic Director, consistently exhibit an innate understanding of the qualities necessary to ensuring not only their own artistic survival but the broader success of Classical Music in general, as well. Foremost, emphasis must always be on maintaining the highest possible musical standards, and whether the music at hand is the work of Monteverdi, Brahms, Barber, or Muhly the artists who comprise Seraphic Fire adopt as their task performing with style, eloquence, and humanity expressed through song. In these politically-correct times, too many performances of choral repertory are the musical equivalents of embalming corpses: the lifeblood is drained and replaced with numbing antiseptic, ensembles too frightened of being accused of having ulterior motives to sing with true passion. Everyone involved with Seraphic Fire proves more than ever in their performances of the selections on Reincarnations that, whether singing of God or goblins, the only viable agendum in the interpretation of choral music is the unapologetic realization of composers’ intentions. This seems such a simple, puerile concept, but it is one that is as elusive as important new compositions for choir. There is some very good music on Reincarnations, but there are also several instances in which Seraphic Fire’s performances are far stronger than the material before them. This is the uncommon sort of singing of which this wonderful group of musicians is capable, and the dedication of the singing on Reincarnations is never diluted, dissipated, or diverted.

Seraphic Fire’s exploration of a century of American choral music via Reincarnations is a perfect storm in which musical fronts collide in vibrant artistic displays worthy of the canvases of El Greco. Pivotal in the stylistic unity of the ensemble’s approaches to the divergent idioms of the selections on the disc is the superb playing of Russian-born pianist Anna Fateeva. She may have been born into the tradition of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, but she inhabits the musical environs of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American music with unmistakable comfort. Any pianist with a modicum of talent can spend an afternoon at the keyboard mastering the details of a particular piece, but the unerring ease with which Ms. Fateeva’s playing captures the differing spirits of Shawn Crouch’s Light of Common Day and Morten Lauridsen’s Mid-Winter Songs is evidence of deeply personal refinement. Playing of quality less than what Ms. Fateeva provides would be a disservice to the singing of Seraphic Fire. Sopranos Megan Chartrand, Lianne P. Coble, Sara Guttenberg, and Molly Quinn, altos Amanda Crider, Reginald L. Mobley, and Virginia Warnken, tenors Steven Bradshaw, Brad Diamond, and Patrick Muehleise, and basses James K. Bass, Cameron Beauchamp, and Charles Wesley Evans form an ensemble of impeccable balance and tonal blend. Remarkably, these thirteen singers can both summon the robust sounds of much larger choirs and concentrate their sound into a captivating whisper. The singers, Ms. Fateeva, and Maestro Quigley all consort with the spontaneous discernment of chamber musicians. Their performances on Reincarnations define excellence in the execution of choral music of any musical style or era, but as a journey through the traditions that ushered American choral music into the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries they establish new standards by which the success of future presentations of similar repertory will be judged.

Nico Muhly’s I Cannot Attain Unto It, a setting of verses six and seven of Psalm 139, is a gorgeous, astutely-constructed piece, the ‘stuttering’ effects in the vocal lines movingly conveying the psalmist’s wonder. The power of Muhly’s music is intensified by the forthright probity of Seraphic Fire’s singing, and the vocalists’ lucid but unstilted diction heightens appreciation of the shrewdness of the treatment of the text; indeed, in I Cannot Attain Unto It and all of the pieces on Reincarnations. The combination of Ms. Fateeva’s pianism and Seraphic Fire’s singing makes a stunning effect in Shawn Crouch’s setting of lines by William Wordsworth, Light of Common Day, a poignant homage to the composer’s late mother-in-law and, on a broader scale, to three centuries of American choral customs. The composer’s subtle manipulations of rhythm and tempo, reflected in the piano accompaniment, provide continuity as the nuances of the text lure the vocal lines into unexpected tonalities, and this performance shimmers with the simple beauty of the poet’s language. Heard in succession, there is an intriguing kinship among Wordsworth’s earthy verses and the texts of the Shaker hymns that serve as companions to Paul Crabtree’s setting of words by Mother Ann Lee. ‘Give good gifts one to another’ from the 1893 Mount Lebanon Hymnal is stirringly sung, and the energy that the singers—not least Ms. Quinn, Ms. Crider, Mr. Muehleise, and Mr. Beauchamp in quartet—devote to their performance of Philip R. Dietterich’s arrangement of ‘Followers of the Lamb’ lends the hymn meaning that goes far beyond didactic rhetoric. Ending with Mother Ann Lee’s words ‘Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow,’ the opening texts of Crabtree's Death and Resurrection from The Valley of Delight are drawn from traditional American verses and ‘Dedication’ in Lynn Emanuel's Noose and Hook. Here, too, Seraphic Fire’s performance is augmented by a solo quartet, and the voices of Ms. Quinn, Mr. Mobley, Mr. Diamond, and Mr. Bass emerge from the choir hauntingly.

Samuel Barber's Opus 6 Reincarnations is a cornerstone of the American choral repertory but one that is more frequently cited as a musical treasure than substantiated accordingly in performance. Though credited in the liner notes as the original work of James Stephens, the texts with which Barber’s music is entwined are, in fact, Stephens’s translations of Irish poetry by Antoine Ó Raifteiri. The subject of ‘Mary Hynes' is known in Irish lore as ‘the shining flower of Ballylea,’ and Barber’s setting of the text coruscates with the legendary young wan’s pulchritude. So, too, does Seraphic Fire’s singing of the piece. The world of ‘Anthony O'Daly,’ a historical Whiteboy activist hanged in 1820, is understandably darker, but the choir’s singing never sags under the emotional weight of the words. The sentiments of ‘The Coolin’ are bizarrely touching, and the unforced grace of Seraphic Fire’s articulation of the text lends the piece a singularly American spirit of resilience despite the provenance of the verse.

The starkly comforting text of Dan Forrest’s Good Night, Dear Heart is taken from Australian poet Robert Richardson's 1893 poem ‘Annette,’ long misattributed to Mark Twain because of the famous verse’s appearance as the epitaph on his daughter Susy’s tombstone. Forrest’s music imparts both the sting of loss and the burdened blessing of carrying on with greater fluency than even Twain’s words might have done, and the spareness of the vocal lines inspires the singers to special intelligibility. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘To Kathleen’ provides the poetic conceit for Colin Britt’s As there are flowers, and his setting of the exquisite lines ‘Beauty that may not die as long / As there are flowers and you and song’ luxuriates in the simple efficacy of the text. Seraphic Fire’s rendering of Britt’s music reflects the ethos of both music and words, and the firmness of the choir’s singing at the top and bottom of the compass creates a foundation upon which the ingeniously-sculpted harmonies are built with razor-sharp accuracy.

The sheen of Ms. Quinn’s soprano is put to radiant use in I Am, Dominick DiOrio’s setting of Baltimore-born Mary Elizabeth Frye's 'Do not stand at my grave and weep,' one of the most familiar poems in the American popular canon despite never having been published or copyrighted by its author. Employing recurrent melodic figures almost in the manner of the Flemish masters of Renaissance polyphony, DiOrio’s music conjures an atmosphere of unsettling serenity in which Seraphic Fire’s tonal vividness reveals every harmonic metamorphosis. Ms. Chartrand’s singing is no less lustrous in Fear Not, Dear Friend, Jake Runestad’s tranquil adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's celebrated poem, to which the choristers devote linguistically-flawless singing that suffuses their performance with the conviction of the closing lines, ‘And we, who have learned greatness from you, we, / Your lovers, with a still, contented mind, / See you well anchored in some port of rest.’ This mood persists in their singing of Frank Ticheli's Earth Song, and the singers’ voicing of the composer’s subdued entreaty for peace is overwhelming.

The work of one of the icons of Twentieth-Century American choral music, Morten Lauridsen’s Mid-Winter Songs is an arena in which novelty and praxis converge revealingly. The carillon-like fanfare with which ‘Lament for Pasiphaë’ opens gives way to suspended harmonies reminiscent of Debussy and the generation of American composers influenced by his music. Shadows of Gershwin and Stravinsky flutter through ‘Like Snow,’ and the tonal ambiguity of ‘She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep’ injects the piece with a disquieting aura of uncertainty. ‘Mid-Winter Waking’ tingles with the ebullience of a madrigal written for a collegiate glee club, but the dissonant unease underlined by the pedal point-like bass notes in the piano part in ‘Intercession in Late October’ closes the cycle, the texts of which are by Robert Graves, with vague suggestions of malaise. Lauridsen’s way with the final couplet of the cycle, ‘Spare him a little longer, Crone, / For his clean hands and love-submissive heart,’ is schemingly duplicitous: both desolation and jubilation emerge from the musical textures. The same notion applies to Seraphic Fire’s singing of Mid-Winter Songs: the occasional bleakness of the music does not prohibit total enjoyment of the performance. Like all of the selections on Reincarnations, Lauridsen’s music makes formidable demands on the singers, and they rise to the occasion unflinchingly. Therein lies the core of what makes Reincarnations such a gratifying disc: every performance is a genuine occasion, and every note is not merely sung but completely ‘sold.’

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s words perfectly express the impact of Reincarnations. The future of American choral music is the ‘Beauty that may not die as long / As there are flowers and you and song.’ The recent compositions on this disc affirm that America’s choral tradition, though an upstart in comparison with the millennium-old groves of European music for voices in ensemble, remains a viable garden in its own right. As long as there are flowers like the best pieces on Reincarnations and song like that of Seraphic Fire, the beauties of America’s choral heritage will never fade.

IN MEMORIAM: la verista ultima – Italian soprano Magda Olivero, 1910 – 2014

Io son l’umile ancella del genio creator: Italian soprano Magda Olivero, 1910 – 2014

MAGDA OLIVERO

25 March 1910 – 8 September 2014

I never heard the legendary Italian soprano Magda Olivero in an opera house or concert hall, but on recordings I have never heard anyone else quite like her. As Liù in the September 1938 EIAR recording of Puccini’s Turandot, the first studio account of the opera, she radiates both fragility and unflappability; in her singing of the title rôle of Mascagni’s Iris the aroma of chrysanthemums mingles with the stench of death; her Minnie in La fanciulla del West is one of the few portrayals of this voice-wrecking part that manage more than survival of the tessitura; her Carlotta in Massenet’s Werther, sung in Italian, combines Italianate expressivity, Gallic poise, and the Teutonic rectitude of Goethe’s Lotte; her Katiusha in Risurrezione blows through Alfano’s score with the force of a typhoon; her Kostelnička in Janáček’s Jenůfa at La Scala dominates even the steel-willed Jenůfa of Grace Bumbry. Then there are her Tosca and Adriana Lecouvreur: one a great prima donna of the operatic stage and the other the doyenne of the Comédie-Française, both are characters with whom Ms. Olivero identified virtually on a cellular level. Certainly, her performances of these rôles transcended the efforts of even her most prodigiously-gifted rivals. When she introduced her Tosca to the Metropolitan Opera in in April 1975, Harold C. Schonberg wrote in the New York Times that her performance represented ‘the art of singing rather than singing itself.’ Audiences who heard her ten MET Toscas—three in New York, the others on tour in locales as far afield as Atlanta, Dallas, and Memphis—did not quite agree. Rewarded on the evening of her début with an ovation that even Mr. Schonberg conceded was one of the most prolonged in MET history, she won the hearts of audiences whose ears were prepared to deny her. Lifelong opera lover James Forrest, himself an esteemed critic and authority on the great singers of the Twentieth Century, as well as a friend and mentor from whom I have learned much, still recalls hearing her Tosca in Minneapolis in May 1969. Now, after forty-five years, details of her musical and dramatic impersonation of Victorien Sardou’s feisty diva remain etched in Mr. Forrest’s memory: such can only have been the work of an irreplaceable artist.

Born according to most sources in the town of Saluzzo in Piemonte, not far from Torino, on 25 March 1910, Ms. Olivero was a musical being almost from birth. Like those of Maria Callas, her earliest efforts garnered little praise or encouragement, but she persevered and, barely out of her teens, launched her career with performances for Italian radio. Possessing a voice that extended with ease to the interpolated E♭6 in Violetta’s ‘Sempre libera’ in Verdi’s La traviata, she quickly developed a technique that enabled her to take on a wide repertory without exacerbating the flaws in her natural instrument. At the start of her third decade, she married and retired from performing, but her legacy was already established. It was at the request of Francesco Cilèa, who longed to again hear her sing his Adriana Lecouvreur, that she resumed her career. Cilèa died in November 1950, just months before Ms. Olivero’s return to the stage, but the rejuvenation of her artistry was a wonderful supplement to the composer’s bequest to the musical world. From the time of the start of the second phase of her career in 1951 until her final retirement from the stage at the age of seventy-one, Ms. Olivero sang an astonishing array of rôles. A 1964 Zagreb performance of La bohème, unfortunately preserved in very poor sound, partnered her delicate Mimì with the Rodolfo of Juan Oncina, an unlikely pairing that nonetheless produced a searing enactment of the Bohemians’ lot. Her Classically-molded portrait of Cherubini’s Medea brought her to Dallas, where she was given a Texas-sized welcome. The enterprising Alfredo Silipigni lured her to New Jersey for Adriana Lecouvreur, Fedora, and Mefistofele, and ports of call for her well-traveled impersonation of Puccini’s—and, as the histrionic intensity of her famed 1970 Arena di Verona performance opposite Plácido Domingo suggests, Abbé Prévost’s—Manon Lescaut also included Amsterdam and Caracas. The murky document of a 1961 Naples Madama Butterfly verifies the authenticity of her Cio-Cio-San: other sopranos brought greater vocal amplitude to Puccini’s vocal lines, but probably no other Twentieth-Century singers except Licia Albanese and perhaps Geraldine Ferrar embodied the betrayed geisha with equal grit. Her Naples and Florence Giorgettas in Puccini’s Il tabarro, a decade apart, disclose a character study that was fully-formed in 1960 and remained astonishing unchanged, vocally and dramatically, in 1970. Sampling recordings of her Torino, Trieste, or Venice performances of La fanciulla del West facilitates as complete an acquaintance with the Bible-quoting, gun-toting Minnie as the opera’s discography permits. Even Mariya in Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa—sung in Italian, of course—proved a congenial part, and her espousal of Twentieth-Century opera, particularly the scores of Sandro Fuga, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Renzo Rossellini, Nino Rota, Flavio Testi, and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, legitimized the endeavors of avant garde composers. Among so many missed opportunities for studio recordings almost certain of setting new standards, one of the most regrettable is the failure of a thoughtful label to preserve her Elle in Poulenc’s La voix humaine: she was riveting in Cocteau’s French at San Francisco Opera in 1979, and in her native Italian she was crushing.

Only Ms. Olivero’s unsurpassed traversal of Giordano’s Fedora was recorded commercially in its entirety, and the resulting DECCA set, which couples Fedora with excerpts from Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini with Ms. Olivero and Mario del Monaco (also her Loris in Fedora) that are perhaps even more lustfully sung, served as my introduction both to Ms. Olivero and to Fedora, an opera that I love without shame. Fusing the toughness of Maria Caniglia’s Fedora with the sweetness of Renata Tebaldi’s, Ms. Olivero brings the calculating Princess to life with startling variety. Central to her interpretation are the suggestions in Act One that her liaison with the mortally-wounded Count Vladimir is her last chance at any meaningful kind of love and in Act Two that she is genuinely taken aback by her recognition of her love for Ipanoff. Sentiments that in the performances of many sopranos seem witless and forced are in Ms. Olivero’s Fedora not only credible but inevitable. She enriched her recorded legacy in 1993 when, at the age of eighty-three, she recorded selections from Adriana Lecouvreur [some sources suggest that the complete opera was recorded but that only excerpts were released by the Bongiovanni label] with piano accompaniment in Milan. The voice, never an exceptionally opulent instrument, remained on stunningly good form. Unlike the legions of singers who have squandered fantastic natural voices, Ms. Olivero knew what she had from the start and quickly learned how to manage those resources. She benefited from the informal tutelage of Tullio Serafin, from whose advice she eventually diverged, but the essence of her artistry as a singer and an actress is summarized by a remark that she made in an interview with Stefan Zucker: ‘you always have to make a choice—you try to make the best one.’

Magda Olivero’s career was a study in making the best choices. Vocally, there were compromises: artistically, there were none. Though she sang music in a staggering potpourri of styles, she was wise in choosing rôles in which she was confident of her proficiency. For her, the concern was not having the notes but how to sing them. Above all, she was the composers’ servant, and how miraculous was her service.

Vissi d’arte: Italian soprano Magda Olivero, likely depicted as the heroine in Puccini’s Tosca, circa 1966 [Photo credit and vintage uncertain]

CD REVIEW: Johannes Brahms – DIE SCHÖNE MAGELONE (Daniel Behle, tenor; Sveinung Bjelland, piano; Capriccio C 5203)

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833 – 1897): Lieder including Romanzen aus ‘Die schönen Magelone,’ Op. 33—Daniel Behle, tenor; Sveinung Bjelland, piano; Hans-Jürgen Schatz, narrator (Wundersame Liebesgeschichte der schönen Magelone und des Grafen Peter von Provence) [Recorded in Radiostudio Zürich, Switzerland, 4 – 6 March 2013; Capriccio C 5203; 2CD, 140:51; Available from Amazon, ClassicsOnline, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

​It has sometimes seemed in the past decade that the music of Johannes Brahms has been in danger of going out of fashion. The four Symphonies, once the cornerstones of many orchestras’ repertories, are now heard with less frequency, and the chamber music is encountered only slightly more regularly. Ein Deutsches Requiem and the potent Vier ernste Gesänge cling to currency, but the greater portion of the composer’s vocal music goes unheard. In comparison with Berlioz and Wagner, Brahms was a quiet genius, one who was aware of his own significance as a musical innovator but pursued his career with greater humility. The novelty of Brahms’s genius lies in his enlargement rather than a concerted subversion of the traditions that he inherited from his music ancestors. Careful analysis of his music suggests that, for Brahms, discarding conventions was not necessarily indicative of ingenuity: sometimes those who color outside of the lines are simply messy. In his Lieder, Brahms took up the examples of Beethoven, Schubert, and his beloved Schumann and enriched them with his own mastery of harmony and concentrated dramatic expression. At their best, Brahms’s Lieder possess the formal symmetry of Beethoven’s finest songs, the tuneful fecundity of Schubert, and the rhapsodic wildness of Schumann. Above all, Brahms’s Lieder are a gift to singers but sadly one that too few of them are willing to accept. Tenor Daniel Behle’s Capriccio recording of the fifteen Romances from Ludwig Tieck’s Die schöne Magelone and other Lieder not only welcomes the bequest but goes a step further by presenting the Romances both as individual works and in the broader context of Tieck’s narrative, provided by noted German actor Hans-Jürgen Schatz. Any recording of this music is a windfall received with gratitude, but this recording is an especial gift to the listener who thinks Brahms a capable but uninspired composer of Lieder.

The concept of coupling Brahms’s Romances from Die schöne Magelone with readings that establish the sentimental atmosphere from which the songs emerge is intriguing, and it is to the credit of everyone involved with this recording that the experiment succeeds so thoroughly. Renowned for an extensive career in German television, Ms. Schatz has a mellifluous voice ​that is virtually ideal for narration. In this performance, he immerses himself in the text, revealing both the presiding ethos of the narrative and specific details of interpretation—the forest and the trees, as it were—without resorting to overwrought melodrama. Still, Brahms’s music is the raison d’être for this release, and it was clever programming on Capriccio’s part to offer Brahms’s Romances from Die schöne Magelone on separate discs, with and without the linking narration. In both the Romances and six other Lieder, pianist Sveinung Bjelland is a distinguished interpreter of Brahms’s music in his own right and a fitting partner for Mr. Behle. Brahms’s melodic strands are coarser than Schubert’s and Schumann’s, and approaching Die schöne Magelone, Brahms’s sole self-contained Lieder cycle, as though it is an extension of Die schöne Müllerin or Frauenliebe und -leben imperils realization of the singular impact of Brahms’s creativity. In truth, many performances—or, more appropriately, many of the few performances—of Die schöne Magelone are dull, but this performance by Mr. Behle and Mr. Bjelland engages the imagination throughout its duration. In essence, Brahms’s accompaniments synthesize Schubert’s close support of the vocal line with Schumann’s greater independence, exercising considerable freedom of thematic development within formal boundaries. In his robust but flexible playing, Mr. Bjelland finds the rowdiness beneath the polished surfaces of Brahms’s music. Crucially, he clearly understands that performances need not be prissy in order to be poetic. So fine is Mr. Bjelland’s playing, technically and interpretively, that the most artfully-crafted Lieder on this disc seem like artlessly organic modes of expression.

The unaffected expressivity of these performances is also owed in no small part to Mr. Behle’s ardent, youthful singing. Still in the early years of his international career, he has the musical world at his feet, but he is a singer who conquers with charm rather than brute force. There is a streak of titanium in the voice, giving strength but not heaviness, but the primary impression made by Mr. Behle’s singing is one of athletic lyricism in the tradition of Peter Anders and Fritz Wunderlich. His account of ‘Meine Liebe ist grü​n​​’ (Op. 63, No. 5) shimmers with the freshness of the fragrance of lilac blooms on the twilit air, and the sense of wonder that floods his singing of ‘Juchhe!’ (Op. 6, No. 4) elucidates the text’s celebration of the awe-inspiring beauty of the earth. The brooding nocturnal atmosphere of Goethe’s text for ‘Dä​​mmrung senkte sich von oben’ (Op. 59, No. 1) is evoked with subtle shading of the timbre, Mr. Behle darkening his vowels without impacting his patrician phrasing. ‘​Liebestreu’ (identified in Capriccio’s liner notes as Op. 6, No. 3, but actually Op. 3, No. 1*) introduces elements of unrestrained anguish, which Mr. Behle explores poignantly without weakening the intellectual asperity of his interpretation. The beautiful ‘An die Tauben’ (Op. 63, No. 4) is an impassioned depiction of lovesickness: the healthiness of Mr. Behle’s tone contrasts meaningfully with the increasing misery of the text, and the liquidity of his phrasing suffuses the song with a touching sense of yearning. The singer’s tone makes the climax of ‘Von waldbekränzten Höhe’ (Op. 57, No. 1) a cry of despair but an exceptionally secure, attractive one. Throughout the performances on this disc, Mr. Behle sings with near-complete control of his voice, the few moments of stress resulting from his refusal to sidestep difficulties. He uses words as springboards for emotional propulsion as well as anyone singing in German today and, indeed, better most singers of past generations. His way with Brahms’s Lieder ushers him into the exalted company of Heinrich Schlusnus, Alexander Kipnis, and Aksel Schiøtz.

The Romanzen from Die schöne Magelone present a plethora of challenges to both singer and pianist. Though conceived and presented as a coherent cycle, the individual songs cover a great deal of philosophical territory. Unlike a cycle such as Schubert’s Winterreise, in which there is at least a thread of discernible narrative linearity, Die schöne Magelone is a work of ambiguous sentiments that flurry and fade. Past performances have intimated that Brahms’s invention in Die schöne Magelone was inconsistent, but Mr. Behle’s and Mr. Bjelland’s performance reveals a splendidly even level of musical achievement. The opening song, ‘Keinen hat es noch gereut,’ is sung magically by Mr. Behle, the compact harmonies focusing attention on the subtleties of the vocal line. The wry wit of ‘Traun! Bogen und Pfeil sind gut für den Feind’ is highlighted by Mr. Bjelland’s playing of the darting piano part, and both singer and pianist submit themselves to the ambivalence of ‘Sind es Schmerzen, sind es Freuden.’ ‘Liebe kam aus fernen Landen’ and ‘So willst du des Armen?’ are two of Brahms’s most plaintively introverted songs, and Mr. Behle sings them with intensity that does not spill over into saccharine whimpering. The barely-contained excitement of ‘Wie soll ich die Freude, die Wonne denn tragen?’ ripples through Mr. Behle’s and Mr. Bjelland’s performance, their limning of the enthusiasm in Brahms’s music echoing the poet’s fervor. There is a beguiling hint of irony in ‘War es dir, dem diese Lippen bebten,’ brought to the surface by Mr. Behle’s straightforward performance. Perhaps because of the implications of a musician lamenting a forced separation from his beloved lute, there is particular verve in both tenor’s and pianist’s treatment of ‘Wir müssen uns trennen.’ Another gem of the cycle is ‘Ruhe, Süßliebchen, im Schatten,’ and the serenity of the music is ideally served by Mr. Behle’s composed vocalism. Each of the last six songs in Die schöne Magelone is a small-scale masterpiece, beginning with the turbulent ‘So tünet denn, schäumende Wellen’ (‘Verzweiflung’), the titular despair expressed in this performance not through moping but in tones of scorn. As dictated by the text, Mr. Behle’s singing of ‘Wie schnell verschwindet so Licht als Glanz’ inhabits a world obscured by shadows, and the heartbreak of ‘Muß es eine Trennung geben’ throbs in his euphonious tones. Complementing his colleague’s sweetly vinous negotiation of the vocal line, Mr. Bjelland pertinently divulges the ‘wandering feet’ that tread through the accompaniment in ‘Geliebter, wo zaudert dein irrender Fuß?’ Undertones of regret and resolve impart a deeply moving vulnerability in the final pair of songs, ‘Wie froh und frisch mein Sinn sich hebt’ and ‘Treue Liebe dauert lange,’ and Mr. Behle and Mr. Bjelland bring the cycle to a close with a genuine sense of catharsis. In their hands, Die schöne Magelone is truly an unified entity rather than merely a sequence of vaguely homologous songs.

Daniel Behle is clearly a superb singer, but this recording of Die schöne Magelone and a selection of six representative Lieder also confirms his ascendancy as a noteworthy crusader for the preservation of the endangered Art of Song and as a exemplary interpreter of the music of Johannes Brahms. Singing of this quality is no trick of the recording studio: it can only be achieved when voice, technique, intellect, and insight are firing on all cylinders and operating in absolute balance. Sveinung Bjelland’s top-tier playing completes the musical experience, enabling these Lieder to uplift the spirit of the listener. The real winner here is Brahms, however: hopefully, this recording will prompt more young singers and pianists to explore Brahms’s Lieder, but, having heard these performances, it is understandable if they do not feel up to the task.

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*In the ClassicsOnline listing for this release, track 4 of the first disc is identified as ‘Spanisches Lied,’ Op. 6, No. 1. This is also incorrect, as the song on offer is, in fact, ‘Liebestreu,’ Op. 3, No. 1, the text of which begins with the line ‘O versenk’, o versenk’ dein Leid, mein Kind, in die See.’

CD REVIEW: HANDEL ARIAS (Alice Coote, mezzo-soprano; Hyperion CDA67979)

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Arias from Alcina (HWV 34), Ariodante (HWV 33), Giulio Cesare in Egitto (HWV 17), Hercules (HWV 60), and Radamisto (HWV 12a); Alice Coote, mezzo-soprano; The English Concert; Harry Bicket, conductor [Recorded in All Hallows, Gospel Oak, London, UK, 6 – 9 June 2012 and 6 – 7 September 2013; Hyperion CDA67979; 1CD, 68:31; Available from Hyperion, harmonia mundi USA, Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers]

As acknowledged even by some of today’s finest artists, at the heart of the alleged diminution of opera in the first fourteen years of the new millennium is a dearth of the truly grand singing that made nights at the opera in years past events of indelible substance. Thirty years ago, when Georg Friedrich Händel’s Rinaldo was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera, the first of the composer’s operas to grace the MET stage in its then-101-year history, Händel’s barnstorming score shared glory with the company début of Samuel Ramey, whose Argante brought to Händel’s music the sort of vocal star quality familiar to MET patrons in the operas of Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini. Particularly revealing in the context of today’s operatic quandaries is Donal Henahan’s assessment in the New York Times of Marilyn Horne’s performance of the title rôle. Though she was judged to have been marginally off her best form, it was noted that ‘Miss Horne’s second best is anybody else’s triumph.’ Innovative productions and daring repertory are important components of opera’s imperative quest to attract and retain audiences, but the perseverance of the genre depends upon these kinds of singers and singing. Opera is an art form that must flourish: mere endurance is perhaps a worse fate than extinction. As the career of Cheshire-born mezzo-soprano Alice Coote has advanced during the past decade, opera has thrived whenever and wherever she sang. In an exceptional array of styles ranging from Monteverdi to Muhly, Ms. Coote’s versatility has been equaled only by the consistency of her vocal comfort in each niche of her repertoire. Acclaimed as one of today’s foremost Händelians, she is both in her sovereign grasp of Händel’s idiom and the warmth and intelligence of her singing of music by Schubert, Elgar, Mahler, and Richard Strauss the heir to the position carved out in the vocal Pantheon by Dame Janet Baker. Only an extraordinary artist could be worthy of comparison with Baker, and Ms. Coote has ratified her petition with her Nerone and Messaggera, Maffio Orsini and Hänsel, Komponist and Octavian, Meg Page and Anne Strewson. In this new disc of arias from five of Händel’s best scores, she fully manifests her merit as a singing actress. Whether impersonating the wife of a hero of Antiquity, the son of a Roman consul, the consort of a Thracian prince, a Saracen knight, or a vassal prince betrothed to a Scottish princess, she sings persuasively. Her singing emanates the tranquility of earned technical assurance: in the arias on this recording, she knows where she is going and how to get there and therefore is liberated to savor the voyage.

Under the direction of Händel authority Harry Bicket, the musical sorcerers of the English Concert again justify the esteem in which they are held by aficionados of historically-informed playing by conjuring precisely the right atmosphere for each of Ms. Coote’s interpretations. These musicians cooperate so constructively that leadership is hardly necessary, but they respond to Maestro Bicket’s direction with keenness that mirrors the camaraderie between the conductor and singer. The performances on this disc are not instances of singer following conductor or vice versa: Ms. Coote and Maestro Bicket manage the music as dialogues rather than dictations. The understated continuo provided by Maestro Bicket’s duties at the harpsichord and the unfailingly elegant theorbo playing by William Carter builds a solid foundation while also magnifying attention on the inventive ways in which Händel’s orchestrations support and in some cases counteract the vocal lines. All of the instrumentalists play with the unwavering grasp of Händel’s style expected of them, but what makes their performance so gratifying is its daredevil spirit. This is not ‘sit back and relax’ accompaniment: this is playing that is itself a wordless character in each dramatic microcosm.

In the three incarnations of Radamisto that greeted Londoners in the 1720s, the part of Zenobia, the title character’s wife, was taken in succession by three of the finest singers with whom Händel worked during his long career: Anastasia Robinson, Margherita Durastanti (who sang Radamisto in the opera’s first production), and Faustina Bordoni. Ms. Coote’s singing of Zenobia’s aria ‘Quando mai, spietata sorte’ from Act Two places her in the company of these great artists of the composer’s time. The singer duets rapturously with the oboe obbligato, expansively phrased by Katharina Spreckelsen, shaping the principal theme—reminiscent of the famous ‘Ombra mai fù’ from Serse—with subdued anguish. Ms. Coote’s command of Italian is excellent, avoiding the artificial vowels and glassy consonants heard from many English-speaking singers in Italian repertory, and in her performance of ‘Quando mai, spietata sorte’ she ornaments very discreetly, a welcome practice from which she does not deviate in any of the arias on this disc.

Ruggiero’s ‘Mi lusinga il dolce affetto’ from Act Two of Alcina prompts Ms. Coote to further intensification of her skills as a musical raconteuse. She intuitively employs Händel’s austere vocal lines as vehicles for concise psychological expression but does so without ever placing a single note beyond the boundaries of good taste. The celebrated ‘Verdi prati, selve amene’ is sung with emotional absorption that honors Händel’s lofty inspiration without exaggerating the aria’s sentimentality, and the steadiness of Ms. Coote’s tone permits full appreciation of the depth of the composer’s dramatic adroitness. In the rousing ‘Stà nell’Ircana pietrosa tana tigre sdegnosa’ from Act Two, its bellowing horn parts played splendidly by Ursula Paludan Monberg and Richard Bayliss, Ms. Coote unleashes her formidable bravura technique, confirming that her excursions into the music of Mahler and Strauss have robbed her of none of her trademark flexibility in Baroque coloratura. Her delivery of Händel’s passagework is free from disruptive aspirates, and she is among the few singers capable of maintaining textual sharpness when the vocal lines burst into fireworks displays.

The vocal opulence that Ms. Coote unfurls in Händel’s music for Dejanira in his dramatically electrifying Hercules recalls the singing of perhaps the rôle’s most fire-breathing recorded interpreter, Sarah Walker. Like Walker, Ms. Coote is a very womanly Dejanira with a steel edge, and the histrionic ardor of her delivery occasionally permits a slight ungainliness to emerge. She keeps this under control, however, and even uses it to her advantage. Good English diction by native speakers is something that cannot be taken for granted, and Ms. Coote enunciates Dejanira’s words nobly without sounding as though she is delivering an address before Parliament. Sensitively supported by Mr. Carter and the bewitchingly sonorous playing of cellist Joseph Crouch, her performance of ‘There in myrtle shades reclined’ from Act One is almost unendurably poignant, the euphoric, excruciating beauty of the voice lending Dejanira’s contemplation of conjugal bliss special luminosity. The recitative ‘Dissembling, false, perfidious Hercules’ and aria ‘Cease, ruler of the day, to rise’ from Act Two are delivered with comparable force, but it is in ‘Where shall I fly?’ from Act Three that Ms. Coote transforms herself into an expert tragédienne. Dejanira’s horror and remorse at having machinated her blameless husband’s death drew from Händel’s imagination one of his most original scenes. Ms. Coote clutches every note with the desperation of a woman clinging to her lover’s dying breaths, and the prevailing humanity of her singing of ‘See the dreadful sisters rise’ startlingly conveys Dejanira’s heartbreak. Furthermore, solely as vocalism her portrayal of Dejanira is momentous.

The serenity with which Ms. Coote sings Sesto’s piercingly lovely ‘Cara speme, questo core’ from Act One of Giulio Cesare, reinforced by Mr. Carter and Mr. Crouch, is delightful. The aria is a moment of repose in the operatic life of an impetuous character, and there is a strange irony in the tenderness with which he sings of having sanguineous revenge. Ms. Coote devotes her energy to singing the aria and lets the dramatic implications fall where they may: refusing to allow her aim to be diverted from straightforward vocalism, she hits the target dead in the center of Sesto’s volatile spirit.

Her singing of the title character’s ‘Con l’ali di costanza’ from Act One and ‘Dopo notte atra e funesta’ from Act Three of Ariodante further asserts that, in terms of accurate, dexterous negotiation of rapid-fire divisions, Ms. Coote remains a world-class Händelian. In both of these arias, her security throughout her range makes a great effect, and her restraint in cadenzas is far more impressive than the historically-inappropriate flamboyance in which many singers indulge in this music. Her singing of the familiar ‘Scherza infida!’ from Act Two, preceded by an incisive account of the recitative ‘E vivo ancora? E senza il ferro?’ that again benefits from Mr. Carter’s collaboration, throbs with confusion, exasperation, and resolve. That this is one of Händel’s finest arias is obvious, but even the celebrated Giovanni Carestini, Händel’s first Ariodante, is unlikely to have sung it better than Ms. Coote.

In the decades since the global resurgence of interest in the composer’s operas, many precocious Händel singers have emerged. Sadly, so, too, have a number of singers who should have left Händel repertory to their more suitably-talented colleagues. Some of the most successful Händelians of previous generations—Dame Janet Baker, Margreta Elkins, Maureen Forrester, Monica Sinclair, and Sarah Walker, for example—were those who did not approach Händel’s music in isolation. Alice Coote is another singer for whom the road to singing Händel is not a dead end: rather, it is a scenic route that curves through four centuries of music for the mezzo-soprano voice. The kind of adaptability demanded of modern singers, unprecedented in the history of opera, often breeds a disheartening anonymity, a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ plainness that holds listeners at arm’s length. In the performances on this disc, Alice Coote enclasps Händel’s music with the full strength of her artistry, and these eleven arias lavishly reciprocate her embrace.

Non ha più che temere: (from left to right) mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon as Cornelia, countertenor Christophe Dumaux as Tolomeo, and mezzo-soprano Alice Coote as Sesto in David McVicar’s production of Georg Friedrich Händel’s Giulio Cesare at the Metropolitan Opera in April 2013 [Photo by Marty Sohl, © The Metropolitan Opera]