CD REVIEW: Piano Perspectives — Yuja Wang performs works by Maurice Ravel & Gabriel Fauré (DGG 479 4954) and Valentina Lisitsa plays Alexander Scriabin (DECCA 478 8435)

[1] GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845 – 1924): Ballade in F sharp major for Piano Solo, Opus 19 and MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937): Piano Concerto in G major and Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major—Yuja Wang, piano; Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich; Lionel Bringuier, conductor [Recorded in Tonhalle, Zürich, Switzerland, in April 2015 (Ravel) and Teldex Studio, Berlin, Germany, in May 2015 (Fauré); Deutsche Grammophon 479 4954; 1 CD, 50:15; Available from DGG, Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH SCRIABIN (1872 – 1915): Nuances – Works for Solo Piano, 1885 – 1912—Valentina Lisitsa, piano [Recorded in Britten-Pears Studio, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, UK, 15 – 17 December 2014; DECCA 478 8435; 1 CD, 76:56; Available from DECCA Classics, Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It is difficult to imagine three composers of relative chronological proximity whose methodologies were more fundamentally different than Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, and Alexander Scriabin. Born in the picturesque south of France, Fauré, the elder statesman in this artistic triumvirate, was a product of the traditional French conservatoire system of education and a star pupil of Camille Saint-Saëns, from whom he learned the rudiments of Western music from Bach to Wagner. Ravel, too, was a native of the south of France, in his case a Basque town near the Spanish border, and a student at the world-famous Conservatoire de Paris, where Fauré became director in 1905, but his formal educational experience was more one of rejection than of beneficial tutelage. A native Muscovite, Scriabin studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he successfully matriculated as a pianist but not as a composer because, like Ravel, his recalcitrant unconventionality failed to please his tutors. The foremost point of intersection of the careers of these diverse composers is music for the piano. Fauré enlarged the piano’s solo repertoire with a body of work that remains under-appreciated and lamentably under-explored by pianists of quality. Ravel’s music for piano, though limited in quantity by the notoriously slow rate at which he composed, exhibits all of the originality for which he is renowned. Spanning his entire career, Scriabin’s piano music collectively traverses as broad a spectrum of styles and ambitions as any composer’s efforts in any genre have done, his Sonatas as significant a benefaction to the piano literature as Beethoven’s and Brahms’s. As with recent recordings of unexpectedly complementary works by Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, and Lutosławski, new discs on Universal labels likewise disclose unanticipated parallels in the piano music of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin. Like the composers whose music they espouse, Yuja Wang and Valentina Lisitsa are very different pianists, technically and temperamentally, but these discs, both of which are engineered and produced with meticulous attention to the acoustics needed to give every detail of the composers’ writing its due, confirm that these talented ladies epitomize an abiding commitment to approaching the scores before them with fresh eyes, ears, and fingers. In their hands, the kinships among the dissimilar works of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin are made remarkably apparent. Beauty often dwells in strange places that the layperson can reach only with the aid of a guide capable of discerning what others overlook or ignore. Yuja Wang and Valentina Lisitsa guide the listener into the elusive nuclei of the piano music of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin, and what beauties they discover there!

Beginning with a performance of Ravel’s daunting, high-spirited Concerto in G major, Wang makes a valuable contribution to Deutsche Grammophon’s initiative to record all of Ravel’s orchestral music with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and young French conductor Lionel Bringuier, who possesses qualities that are infrequently encountered among conductors of his generation. He consistently displays an ability to discern among the ledger lines of composers’ scores the elements of the music that transcend the notes. In music as emotionally chameleonic as Ravel’s, he intuitively senses which passages need fire and which need finesse, and he manages instrumental timbres with acuity akin to Baroque masters’ manipulation of counterpoint. It is unfortunate that, in a post-Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan environment, designating an individual a promising conductor can have pejorative connotations, sometimes deservedly so, but Bringuier is a truly promising conductor without willfulness or damaging idiosyncrasies. His approach to conducting Ravel is not unlike Ernest Ansermet’s, his emphases on clarity and delicacy never overriding surges of power when required by the music. The Tonhalle musicians play excellently under Bringuier’s direction, here spotlighting the most minute details of Ravel’s orchestrations without shifting focus away from the overall structure of the music or from the soloist. In the Concerto’s first movement, marked Allegramente – Andante – Tempo I, Wang, Bringuier, and the Tonhalle players balance virtuosity with restraint, refusing to bruise the music with the pomposity with which many performances have assaulted it. Wang’s confident mastery of the tricky writing for the piano is extremely impressive, and she proves herself to be an assured mistress of negotiating the almost schizophrenic, jazz-influenced shifts of mood in the music. The core of tranquility in her playing of the Andante section, answered by instinctive conducting by Bringuier that ideally serves both Wang and Ravel, contrasts with the return to the movement’s initial Allegramente. The Adagio assai second movement receives from Wang and Bringuier a performance shaped by the pianist’s crisp but deeply affectionate phrasing of the extended melodic line. The offensive stereotype of Asian artists focusing on the metronome markings rather than the meanings of music sadly persists, but the Beijing-born Wang’s playing of Ravel’s music reveals the incredible stupidity and shortsightedness of that notion. The brisk Presto movement that ends the Concerto inspires Wang to an exhibition of technical prowess that is far more than a pyrotechnics display. Bringuier and the Tonhalle-Orchester build pedestals of sound upon which Wang places the cornerstones of her interpretation. Then, she and her colleagues string garlands of jubilant sounds across Ravel’s music that illuminate the genius of his writing for both piano and orchestra. Wang and Bringuier offer an unmistakably youthful reading of the Concerto that lacks none of the lucidity and drama of classic interpretations by Jacqueline Blancard, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Martha Argerich.

Commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein after his right arm was lost in the Great War and premièred by him in Vienna in 1932, the Concerto for the Left Hand in D major was, like the G-major Concerto, strongly influenced by jazz, very much en vogue in France in the entre-deux-guerres years. The architecture of the Concerto for the Left Hand remains baffling to many musicians, some advocating a clearly-delineated three-part interpretation and others adhering to Ravel’s assertion that the work was conceived and created as a single, through-composed entity. In their performance on this disc, Wang and Bringuier leave academic analyses of the score to scholars with nothing better to do and simply perform the music. Wang’s visceral account of the opening Lento – Andante – sequence is defined by the pianist’s athletic execution of the opening cadenza, her chiseling of the broad swaths of thematic material from the fine-grained stone of Ravel’s music uncovering surprising niceties of sentiment exegesis. The explosive power of the central Allegro – episode ignites a conflagration fanned by both Wang’s wrists and Bringuier’s baton, the conductor stirring the flames in the orchestra and the pianist soaring through them with the determination of a Brünnhilde of the keyboard. The return to Tempo I redoubles Wang’s already formidable focus, and she and Bringuier build the Concerto’s final pages to an exhilarating climax.

The valley between the peaks of Wang’s performances of the Ravel Concerti is a flexible but rhythmically-taut reading of Fauré’s impeccably-wrought Ballade in F sharp major (Opus 19). The transitions of tempo, beginning in Andante cantabile and moving through Allegro moderato, Andante, Allegro, and Andante before resolving the piece in Allegro moderato, are handled with panache, but the real hallmark of her interpretation of the Ballade is an entrancingly Gallic charm. Whether playing music by Ravel or Fauré, with this disc Wang expands her reputation as an artist capable of fashioning a tremendous range of colors with her palette of black and white keys.

Few composers have covered more stylistic ground in their work for a single instrument than Scriabin did with his music for solo piano. Strongly influenced at the outset of his career as a composer by Chopin, Scriabin worked in virtually all of the forms that his Polish predecessor essentially redefined: etude, mazurka, nocturne, polonaise, prelude, and waltz. As his career progressed, Scriabin increasingly integrated into his music elements of the mysticism and philosophical interests that characterized his life, moving ever further from mainstream, late-Romantic tonalism and ultimately developing his own conceptualized system of atonalism both similar to and markedly different from the work of the Second Viennese School. Logically, then, the pianist who successfully plays Scriabin’s music must have at the ready an uncommon versatility, and in this regard the composer could hope for no more qualified an exponent than Valentina Lisitsa. In the early works, the precise articulation of her fingering would be equally effective in music by Haydn or Clementi, and the forthrightness of her playing of the later, more obliquely Impressionistic pieces yields many instances in which layers of emotional depth obscured in many performances are drawn to the surface. Lisitsa obviously deliberated repertory choices for Nuances at length, and her knowledge of, affection for, and connection with Scriabin’s music are audible in every bar on Nuances. Presenting the pieces more or less consecutively in order of composition and sampling twenty-seven years of Scriabin’s career, Lisitsa engenders both an uncommonly intimate portrait of the composer and a sort of musical family tree, tracing its roots into the soil from which he grew as a musician and looking beyond its highest branches into the wider grove of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century music into which the seeds of his innovation were dispersed.

The pair of waltzes chosen for Nuances are played with unhurried brilliance, every cascade of notes sparkling with its own individual effect but blending organically with its brethren in the settings of sustained melodic arcs. Waltz in F minor (Opus 1) is clearly an early work, sounding like a lost piece by Chopin or even Schubert, but Lisitsa plays both this and the sentimentally ambiguous Waltz G sharp minor (WoO 7) with the same close attention to the singular accents of Scriabin’s musical language that she devotes to the great masterworks of the composer’s maturity. It is again Chopin who provided the models for Scriabin’s Prélude and Impromptu à la mazur from Trois Pièces (Opus 2) and the Nocturne in A flat major (WoO 3), and Lisitsa pays homage to Chopin without allowing the listener to forget that these are Scriabin’s works.

The Scherzi in E flat major and A flat major (WoO 4 and 5) and Klavierstücke in B flat minor (Anh. 16) inhabit the world of Schumann and Brahms, and Lisitsa again honors the inspirations whilst elucidating the flair with which Scriabin synthesized elements of the music from which he learned into his own distinctive idiom. Recalling Bach, the Fugues in F minor (WoO 13) and E minor (WoO 20) demand concentration no less than what is required by Das Wohltemperierte Klavier and, unsurprisingly, receive it from Lisitsa. No less intense is her playing of the Mazurkas in B minor and F major (WoO 15 and 16), but even among a progression of authoritative performances her accounts of the Nocturne from Opus 9 and Prélude et Nocturne pour la main gauche—a foreshadowing of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand—are exceptional. It is interesting that Nuances was recorded at Aldeburgh as, like Benjamin Britten’s performances of works by Purcell, Bach, and Schubert, Lisitsa’s playing of Scriabin’s music demonstrates a fellow composer’s sensibilities. She prefers the alternative version of Patetico, the twelfth of the Opus 8 Études, and the unaffected gracefulness of her playing wholly justifies the choice.

The Two Impromptus of Opus 14 are marvelously differentiated by the pianist’s insightful approach, the Allegretto piece dispatched with dynamism and its Andante cantabile partner distinguished by open-hearted expressivity that is wholly free of artifice. Both the Allegro de concert in B flat major (Opus 18) and the animated Allegro maestoso Polonaise (Opus 21) are pieces that, though not long in duration, ask for great stamina from the pianist, and Lisitsa delivers in spades. She takes Scriabin’s Presto marking in the Opus 46 Scherzo at face value, charging through the piece with the unstoppable momentum of an avalanche. The Opus 41 Poème is far more contemplative, and Lisitsa plays it with unapologetic emotional honesty. This trait, too, molds her performance of Poème, the first of the Deux Pièces that constitute Opus 59.

Closing with the first and third of the Opus 65 Études, Lisitsa’s survey of Scriabin’s music is enriched by a galvanizing performance of the Allegretto Étude, the spirit of Chopin now more distant but still hovering at the peripheries of the music. The frenetic Molto vivace receives from the pianist a performance that encapsulates the essence of Scriabin’s art: respect and a measure of nostalgia for the past, trust in the present, and a vibrantly original vision of the future.

On the surface, there is little to connect the music of Fauré and Ravel with that of Scriabin. As men, the circumstances of their births, educations, and existences were very different, and as artists they pursued their own individual paths. So, too, do Yuja Wang and Valentina Lisitsa come to the piano with vastly varied experiences at the hearts of their artistic identities, but the ladies’ playing of the music of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin on this pair of wonderful discs confirms anew that music at its best remains a community of shared ideals.

BEST EARLY MUSIC RECORDING OF 2015: MOMENTI D’AMORE (Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, soprano; Pera Ensemble; Berlin Classics 0300664BC)

GIULIO CACCINI (1551 – 1618), FRANCESCO CAVALLI (1602 – 1676), JOAN AMBROSIO DALZA (1508 – ?), ANDREA FALCONIERI (1585 – 1656), GIROLAMO FRESCOBALDI (1583 – 1643), CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI (1567 – 1643), DIEGO ORTIZ (1510 – 1570), GASPAR SANZ (1640 – 1710), BARBARA STROZZI (1619 – 1677): Momenti d’amore—Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, soprano; Pera Ensemble; Mehmet C. Yeşilçay, oud, percussion, and director [Recorded in Munich during Summer 2013; Berlin Classics 0300664BC; 1 CD, 50:58; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

What explanation is there for the fact that denizens of a world made smaller in a figurative sense by innovations and technological advances so often seem to be continually drifting further and further apart? Why do we choose to be offended by coffee cups and holiday-themed garments but ignore children who have no winter coats and villages that lack potable water? Why has the ability to instantaneously interact with people anywhere in the world compelled the de-prioritization of humanity and basic decency? Why are suspicion and bigotry so much easier for us than acceptance and forgiveness? Topical as they are (or seem to be), these are questions that artists have sought to answer since modes of communication were first utilized for purposes beyond the most basic pursuit of survival. From Peri’s Dafne and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo to Nico Muhly’s Two Boys and Jake Heggie’s Great Scott, music for voices and instruments has had as one of its most important objectives the task of examining those elements of humanity that unite and divide people. Whether the individuals involved are Orpheus and Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, or Peter Grimes and Ellen Orford, the circumstances that thwart their efforts at bridging differences are invariably born of cultural misunderstandings and prejudices. Berlin Classics’ Momenti d’amore offers Twenty-First-Century listeners perspectives on the eternal struggles of human minds and hearts drawn from the enchanting, elusive world of Seventeenth-Century Italy. In performances such as those on this disc, even music of poor quality might seem like rediscovered gems, but the pieces chosen for Momenti d’amore are true treasures of their era. Vitally, Momenti d’amore is a disc that proclaims to today’s listeners that complex problems often have simple solutions that have nothing to do with technology or once-per-year charity. The crucial first step on the journey to understanding and thus to peace, Momenti d’amore reminds us, is listening.

The guiding principal of Pera Ensemble, founded in 2005 by Mehmet C. Yeşilçay and Mehmet İhsan Özer and named to honor the Greek term for Istanbul’s artistically- and ethnically-diverse Beyoğlu neighborhood, is thoughtful fusion of Eastern and Western musical traditions. Pera Ensemble’s musicians—James Hewitt on Baroque violin, Serkan Mesut Halili on qanun, Christoph Sommer on lute, theorbo, and Baroque guitar, Franziska Grunze on viola da gamba, and percussionist Murat Coşkun—are dedicated to blending the exotic sounds of traditional Middle Eastern instruments with the timbres—sometimes equally exotic to modern ears—of instruments prevalent in European Early Music. In several widely-acclaimed previous recordings for Berlin Classics, Pera Ensemble’s defining precept has proved a thrilling impetus for unforgettable music-making, but Momenti d’amore is an exceptionally effective recording in which playing of rollicking exuberance reveals the refined discernment of the concept. Under Yeşilçay’s impassioned direction, tempi are chosen with care in each selection to facilitate performances of technical mastery and near-ideal expressive impact. The marvel of the results achieved by Pera Ensemble is that these pieces sound as though they would be equally at home in the ancient streets of Istanbul and the crumbling palazzi of Venice. It is a boon in the context of this disc that so little primary-source information about instrumentation and the realization of continuo survives. Yeşilçay and Pera Ensemble are therefore able to allow their imaginations to soar without trampling on composers’ intentions. The traversals of the music on Momenti d’amore are not ‘safe,’ unadventurous performances that adhere to innocuous notions of historically-appropriate performance practices: this is playing informed by visceral responses to the music, not by having read in books how it ought to be performed.

True to the disc’s title, the quintet of instrumental pieces on Momenti d’amore provide plentiful moments to love, Pera Ensemble’s playing exuding not just technical but also expressive virtuosity. The piquant Passacalle by Andrea Falconieri is delivered with an incredible rhythmic vitality that makes it not a stylized dance but an actual one, the energy of the musicians’ playing igniting the combustive melodic lines. Falconieri’s Ciaccona is traversed with equal poise and panache, the piece—and Pera Ensemble’s playing of it—proving an ideal companion for the Passacalle. Gaspar Sanz’s expertly-crafted Zarabande is also rousingly played by the Ensemble. Joan Ambrosio Dalza’s dazzling Piva and Diego Ortiz’s Recercada segunda are fantastic pieces that create their soundscapes with primary colors, and Pera Ensemble’s spirited performances bring both numbers to life with stunning immediacy. Bolstered by the invigorating pulse of Yeşilçay’s and Coşkun’s percussion, the ensemble’s playing coruscates with ingenuity, innovation, and the simple joy of making music.

The most exquisite instrument in Pera Ensemble is the voice of Italian soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, a singer for whom the listener’s experience is as important as the fulfillment of her own musical goals. Many young singers are concerned solely with having the notes required by a piece in their voices, but this young singer is equally committed to ensuring that she also has the emotions evinced by the music in her heart. The dividends paid by this investment in expressivity are invaluable, not least in performances of stylized music like that heard on Momenti d’amore. Here, though, Lombardi Mazzulli follows the examples of her Pera Ensemble comrades by leaving the tired, dry ‘traditional’ manner of performing this music to less-imaginative singers. There is nothing unstylish about the soprano’s singing on this disc, however. Gorgeous singing is always stylish, and few performances of music of the vintage of that heard on Momenti d’amore are as gorgeously sung as Lombardi Mazzulli’s, her intonation unerring and the full compass of her voice splendidly even. One of the most gladdening aspects of this disc is its prevailing sense of cooperation: there is never a suggestion of a diva and her accompanists, only of seven brilliant musicians combining their talents like perfectly-fitted puzzle pieces.

Barbara Strozzi is one of the most intriguing figures of the early Italian Baroque. Likely the daughter of a servant and perhaps a courtesan herself, she enjoyed the patronage of a father who recognized and, somewhat atypically in their era, valued her musical talent. Strozzi’s cantata L'Eraclito amoroso (Op. 2, No. 14) is a work of considerable histrionic power, virtually a summation of the expressive capacities of Seventeenth-Century Italian vocal music. Responding to the red-blooded playing of her colleagues, Lombardi Mazzulli sings the tortured phrase 'Ogni tristezza assalgami' with beguiling intensity, the darker sentiments of the text ultimately seeming all the more poignant for being voiced with such beauty and sensuality. A celebrated singer as well as a composer, Strozzi set words with great clarity and effectiveness, and Lombardi Mazzulli’s singing elucidates these qualities in L’Eraclito amoroso. Falconieri’s ‘Cara è la rosa e vaga’ from Il primo libro di Villanelle, first published in Naples in 1616, comes near to matching the level of inspiration evident in Strozzi’s cantata, and Lombardi Mazzulli’s performance of it, supported by superlative playing by her colleagues, bathes every nuance of the music in the liquid ease of her vocalism, the golden tone floating through Falconieri’s ornaments with the grace of a spring zephyr rustling flower petals.

Justly or unjustly, Claudio Monteverdi is widely regarded as the first ‘great composer’ in the history of Western music. It is now established beyond doubt that Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, though inarguably the earliest score still performed with some frequency, was not the first opera in the modern sense as was often erroneously stated in previous generations, but it is difficult to dispute the notion that Monteverdi was the first composer to unite words and music in a manner that has retained its potency. Hearing Pera Ensemble perform ‘Qual sguardo sdegnosetto’ from Scherzi musicali cioè arie et madrigali, no. 2 (SV. 247) and ‘Ohimè ch'io cado’ from the 1624 Quarto scherzo delle ariose vaghezze confirms the legitimacy of Monteverdi’s exalted reputation. Lombardi Mazzulli phrases ‘Qual sguatdo sdegnosetto’ with a poet’s intelligence and intuitive feel for words’ meaning, and her tonal colorations take on chameleonic hues as dictated by the music’s sentimental meanderings. Her ‘Ohimè ch’io cado’ is a masterclass in the art of allying sequences of ravishingly-produced notes with subtly-inflected articulation of text. Girolamo Frescobaldi was no less masterful than Monteverdi at the art of making poetry sing, and his aria di passacaglia ‘Così mi disprezzate?’ is a pinnacle in his output. Lombardi Mazzulli and Pera Ensemble scale the musical and emotional heights of Frescobaldi’s aria with the surefootedness of world-class climbers. Perhaps ‘Ohimè ch’io cado’ is no Everest, but the vista provided by Lombardi Mazzulli’s performance of it is phenomenal.

Lombardi Mazzulli shone as the Moorish queen Zelemina in Spoleto Festival USA’s 2015 modern-première production of Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona, and her singing of Giunone’s aria ‘Dalle gelose mie cure incessanti lacera’ from Act Two of the same composer’s La Calisto is one of the principal glories of Momenti d’amore. She is never less than superb in any of the selections on the disc, but her experience with Cavalli’s music [she has also recorded the title rôle in Cavalli’s Artemisia] facilitates an interpretation of Giunone’s aria that blazes with dramatic intensity. The character’s jealousy simmers in Lombardi Mazzulli’s singing, and Pera Ensemble’s boisterous playing provides a brightly-lit stage upon which her surprisingly complete characterization plays out. Extracted from Giulio Caccini’s 1601 Le nuove musiche, no. 21, ‘Odi, Euterpe, il dolce canto’ is indeed a ‘sweet song,’ made all the sweeter by the dulcet tone with which Lombardi Mazzulli sings it. Crossing the Mediterranean from Italy to Spain, the lilting ​Sephardic lullaby ‘Durme​’ makes an euphonious finale to Momenti d’amore, a last moment of love of the purest variety. Lombardi Mazzulli’s voice caresses the anonymous text like a mother’s hand soothing her child. Here, too, though, Pera Ensemble’s performance defies expectations: rather than shaping ‘Durme’ as a song designed to gently accompany a child into the land of dreams, this is a lullaby that conjures its own exotic dreamscape.

Early Music is seemingly regarded by many musicians and listeners as an impenetrable fortress of rigid, inviolable doctrines that discourage the participation of all but the most specialized of performers. Different cultures, too, often seem to be viewed as walls that cannot be overcome. Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,’ and Momenti d’amore is a voyage that demands that even the most casual and complacent listeners shut out all distractions, abandon preconceptions and prejudices, and follow where the music leads. Not even the finest recordings can resolve the troubles of a deeply-flawed world, but a disc like Momenti d’amore serves as a profoundly engaging testament to what music can achieve. Music is a dialogue, one that ideally eschews faith, race, and every source of divisiveness. Owing to the open-hearted sincerity of these performances by Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli and Pera Ensemble, it is not necessary to understand Italian to feel every emotion that flows through the selections on Momenti d’amore. If only this inspiring, haunting, emboldening disc could prove to every pair of ears on earth that we need not understand one another’s languages, religions, or ways of life in order to love, trust, and foster peace among us.

BEST CHORAL RECORDING OF 2015: James Dunlop — ASCENSION (Portsmouth Cathedral Choir; Riverwood Air Music RAWCD01)

JAMES DUNLOP: Ascension – Alice Burn, Northumbrian smallpipes (Hunting Hall Suite); Portsmouth Cathedral Choir; Dr. David Price, Director [Recorded in Portsmouth Cathedral during October 2015; Riverwood Air Music RAWCD01; 1 CD, 44:54; Available from Riverwood Air Music and major music retailers]

Cited most often in reference to the respective French, German, and Italian operatic repertories, national schools of composition and musical expression are now seldom encountered in the world’s theatres and conservatories except in scholarly tomes. With a history measured not in mere years but in centuries and millennia, the English choral tradition is both one of the most enduring and among the most beloved of national ‘schools’ of musical training and performance practice. From Tudor courts to the dark days of the World Wars, English composers from Thomas Tallis and William Byrd to Sir Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten have given voice to the cares of their generations in music for choir. Few environments nurture the careers of composers of choral music as affectionately and discerningly as the British Isles, where the endeavors of cathedral and university choirs, community choral societies, and choir festivals are testaments to a deep-rooted national pride in the cultivation and quality of choral singing. Even under such hospitable conditions, however, traditions cannot survive without periodic rejuvenation. Splendidly recorded in Portsmouth Cathedral, Riverwood Air Music’s Ascension is representative of the kind of rejuvenation that keeps both English choral music and Classical Music in general vital and thriving: uniting the creations of a masterful composer with the work of an accomplished choir and one of Britain’s best chorus trainers and conductors, Ascension breaks new ground for a genre built for centuries upon the imperishable handiwork of guardians of England’s emblematic choral legacy.

Much is made of young composer James Dunlop’s Royal Marine service, but it should not be supposed that this is in any way a marketing ploy as cynicism born of observation of today’s Classical Music industry might insinuate. From the first bars of Ascension Fanfare, it is apparent that Dunlop possesses an artistic voice that earns him a position among the ranks of important advocates of contemporary choral music and places him in the glorious lineage of English composers for massed voices. Indeed, much should be made of Dunlop’s military service, but it is his compositional arsenal that here commands admiration. Ascension Fanfare is a difficult piece, but the Portsmouth Cathedral Choir and Dr. David Price conquer its demands with unflinching and unfailingly musical attack, drawing the listener into the disc’s very personal explorations of the theme of Christ’s Ascension. Making insightful use of words from John 16:5 – 7, I Must Leave evinces both the anguished intimacy of a lute song by John Dowland and the concentrated intensity of Sir Michael Tippett’s settings of African-American spirituals in A Child of Our Time. Dr. Price displays a wonderful gift for managing balances among voices whether in four- or six-part harmony, and his comprehension of the architecture of Dunlop’s music enables the choristers to communicate the angst of I Must Leave without ignoring the delicacy that also characterizes the piece. The reverent awe with which Dunlop communicates the wonder of Christ’s Ascension from the midst of his disciples in Presence of Eleven is sonorously manifested in the chorus’s performance, the pianissimo conclusion lofted heavenward with pure, perfect intonation.

Ingeniously incorporating the familiar tones of the ‘Westminster chimes’ into its musical soundscape, Westminster Quarters is an intriguingly original piece, here performed with aptly bell-like tones by the Portsmouth Cathedral choristers. The tenors and basses intone Dunlop’s plainchant setting of ‘Ave Maria’ with the precision of a single voice, honoring the praxis of the Sarum Use prevalent in England since the early Middle Ages.

Written for Northumbrian smallpipes and chorus, Hunting Hall Suite is an invigoratingly innovative work, one in which both traditions and expectations are delightfully turned on their heads. In both of the Suite’s movements, ‘Awakening’ and ‘Ceilidh in the Piggery,’ smallpipes virtuoso Alice Burn plays superbly, her mastery of the ferociously difficult instrument lending Dunlop’s music an added layer of exuberant expression. In ‘Awakening,’ smallpipes and choir duel provocatively, conjuring a primordial scene of both man’s and nature’s rejection of darkness. The frolicsome cèilidh of the second movement places the listener at the center of festivities at a Gaelic wedding, the music so cleverly written as to seem wholly extemporaneous in this performance. The uninhibited liquidity of Burn’s playing and the choir’s singing flows through Dunlop’s music with unmistakable joy. There is a unmistakable specificity in the sonic landscape of Hunting Hall Suite, but this is music that might resound along the banks of the Tees, from the shores of Cape Breton, or among the forests of the Blue Ridge.

The evocatively eloquent Deal is dedicated to the memory of the eleven Royal Marine musicians killed in the 1989 IRA bombing of the Royal Marines School of Music then housed in the East Barracks in the Kent town of Deal, near Dover. Dunlop pays tribute to his fallen forebears in music of somber but optimistic solemnity, the voices used with telling economy that heightens the poignancy of the text. In all of the performances on Ascension, the choristers’ diction is a model of clarity, but the unaffected crispness of their articulation of the text in Deal highlights both the piece’s abiding ethos and the subtle nuances of Dunlop’s word settings. Windrush, a setting of lines from John Keats’s ‘A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever,’ is distinguished by the contrast achieved by offsetting the low writing for the sopranos with the tenor soloist's ascents to top A, beautifully sung by Adrian Green. The altos’ repetitions of the word ‘searching,’ their careful enunciations of the consonants halting the sound, create an extraordinary expressive effect. The pathos of Ascend finds a tremendously touching outlet in the choir’s singing, the cadences of the music resolved with a final ‘mmm’ redolent of emotion too raw for words. The sopranos’ beautiful harmony in thirds on the ascending line of ‘Who has gathered up the wind in the hollow of his hands’ in Miracle, the words taken from Proverbs 30:4, lifts the spirits both of the music and of the listener, echoing the most basic human hope in the benevolence of Providence.

​Dedicated to the D-Day Museum Trust, ​the serene Adagio ​Heroes' Tide​ receives from Dr. Price and the singers under his direction a performance that churns with surging, stirringly-voiced imagery borrowed from the diaries of Britons who landed on Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches on D-Day. Throughout the piece, Dunlop’s manipulations of dynamics are executed by Dr. Price and the choristers with fidelity that enhances the impact of words and music. The disjointed sentiments of the text recall the confusion of battle, and the expressivity of the statement of ‘Thank the lord for saving us’ in the piece’s final bars is profoundly touching. The depth of Dunlop’s connection with the text is apparent, and the choristers sing Heroes’ Tide as if telling their own stories of survival.

From Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, there is a singular power in English choral music that is found in no other repertory. It is perhaps pedantic to suggest that the essence of the nation reverberates in the singing of its choirs, but there is in the pieces on Ascension a vein of musical individuality that is as perceptive a reflection of an unique Zeitgeist as any culture might hope to claim as its own. A listener need not be English in order to be moved by Ascension, however. Perhaps the real power of choral music, English or not, is its implicit universality, the necessity of cooperation among voices regardless of their owners’ differences. James Dunlop harnesses this power as sagaciously as any of his musical ancestors, and Ascension is inspiriting evidence of the undiminished capacity of song to unite and uplift.

RECORDING OF THE MONTH / November 2015 — MACEDONIAN SESSIONS (Corinne Morris, cello; Macedonian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Morris Music Productions MMP1307)

WOLDEMAR BARGIEL (1828 – 1897), MAX BRUCH (1838 – 1920), MANUEL DE FALLA (1876 – 1946), GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845 – 1924), JULES MASSENET (1842 – 1912), CORINNE MORRIS, ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (born 1921), CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835 – 1921), PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840 – 1893), and JOHN WILLIAMS (born 1932): Macedonian Sessions—Corinne Morris, cello; F.A.M.E.’S. Macedonian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Philip Hesketh, conductor [Recorded in F.A.M.E.’S. Project Studio M1, Skopje, Macedonia, 29 June – 1 July 2013; Morris Music Productions MMP1307; 1 CD, 61:08; Available on CD and in digital form from Amazon UK]

There is not in medicine, science, or religion any remedy to the maladies of men more restorative than music. Music has the capacity to comfort as neither the words nor the deeds of men can do, a capacity to, as Beethoven described it, go from heart to heart, undiluted and without need for translation or interpretation. There are also in music sparks that, when exposed to the proper elements, ignite resilience on a scale that obliterates adversities internal and external. The healing powers of music are epitomized both by gifted cellist Corinne Morris and by her remarkable disc Macedonian Sessions, so named because the disc was recorded in Skopje, Macedonia, with F.A.M.E.’S. Macedonian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Philip Hesketh. It is virtually impossible—and patronizing—to attempt to recreate with feeble words the ‘darkness visible’ into which Morris was plunged when a debilitating injury separated her from the cello, but the joy of her return to the instrument, facilitated by a corrective procedure developed for the treatment of athletes, sprints through every bar of Macedonian Sessions. There are a few moments on the disc in which the cellist’s intonation is not completely perfect, but there is not one stroke of her bow that does not reach the listener’s heart with a jubilant, profoundly grateful cry of ‘I am back!’

Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei (Opus 47) is the most substantial piece on Macedonian Sessions, and it offers at the disc’s start a wonderfully complete overview of Morris’s artistry. Demanding both virtuosity and expressivity, the Protestant Bruch’s 1880 setting of Jewish themes, taking its title from the Aramaic prayer recited at the start of Yom Kippur, is played by Morris with vitality and emotional sincerity. Bruch’s intentions in composing Kol Nidrei were solely musical rather than religious or sentimental, and Morris’s avoidance of saccharine affectation enhances the raw impact of the music. Camille Saint-Saëns’s Allegro Appassionato (Opus 43) is also a piece in which feeling and fleet passagework are combined with ingenuity, and Morris brings an appealing Gallic airiness to her performance of the piece, complemented by the effervescent charm evinced by Hesketh and the Macedonian musicians, who prove to be wonderful, infallibly musical companions on Morris’s journey throughout Macedonian Sessions.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne (Opus 19, No. 4) is a sublime masterpiece in miniature, and Morris’s dulcet but dramatic style finds an ideal outlet in the piece, the cellist’s burnished tones extracting every thread of meaning from the tapestry of the music. Adapted from the second movement of the composer’s Opus 11 String Quartet No. 1, the famously plaintive principal theme of Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile, here played in an arrangement that honors its origins in the Quartet, is derived from Russian folksong. So poignant is Tchaikovsky’s representation in sound of the collective Russian soul that it is recorded in the composer’s own correspondence that Leo Tolstoy was moved to tears by hearing the Andante Cantabile for the first time. His response to hearing Morris’s shimmering performance of that haunting subject might have been the same, his tears blending with exclamations of joy at the rebirth of so valuable an artist. Morris’s vibrato gently caresses melodic lines rather than obscuring pitches, and, especially in the Tchaikovsky selections, she finds the emotions within the music instead of arbitrarily establishing moods and then molding her performances to adhere to them.

The name Woldemar Bargiel is now virtually unknown even to curious musicians, and were he not Clara Schumann’s half-brother he might be wholly forgotten. The quality of Bargiel’s Adagio (Opus 38), played with sonorous tone and emotive phrasing by Morris and the orchestra, prompts curiosity about Bargiel’s work, not least his seldom-performed String Quartets. A well-crafted piece that validates the influence of Bargiel’s acquaintance with the work of his half-sister and her husband, Robert Schumann, as well as Felix Mendelssohn and even the young Brahms, the Adagio receives from Morris and her Macedonian colleagues a reading of depth and heartfelt intensity, the orchestra’s strings creating a halo of sound in the center of which Morris’s playing gleams.

The iconic Theme from John Williams’s score for Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film Schindler’s List, so memorably played on the motion picture soundtrack by Itzhak Perlman, has rightly transcended the context of the film and assumed a place in the concert repertory. Hopefully, Morris’s performance on Macedonian Sessions will inspire other cellists to add the piece to their repertories. Like the Hebraic themes in Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, the indelible melody of Williams’s Schindler’s List Theme possesses a bizarrely disquieting dignity, and there is an almost Klezmer-like cadence to Morris’s playing. Through the resounding warmth of her cello, an 1876 instrument by Claude Augustin Miremont, the contrasting optimism and pathos of the music are subtly but resolutely disclosed. Here and throughout the music on Macedonian Sessions, Morris’s marvelous bowing technique is allied with an intuitive grasp of the structures of each piece, the latter being a trait that Hesketh shares.

Originally intended as the slow movement for a sonata that was never completed, Gabriel Fauré’s C-minor Elégie (Opus 24) was written for cello and piano and later orchestrated by the composer. The inimitable Catalan cellist Pau Casals premièred the orchestrated version, and Morris’s playing of the piece on Macedonian Sessions brings to mind the rhythmic solidity and polished-garnet timbre that characterized Casals’s mature artistry. The contrast between the bittersweet wistfulness of the piece’s first subject and the red-blooded energy of the tempestuous central section is heightened by the instinctive differentiation of Morris’s approach, her varied playing looking far beyond mere changes of tempo. The familiar strains of the gorgeously lyrical ‘Méditation’ from Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs are no less effective when played on the cello than on the violin. Indeed, so lovely is Morris’s playing of the piece’s ethereal harmonics that only the most attentive of casual listeners might perceive the change in instrumentation. The French portion of Morris’s soul soars in her graciously idiomatic playing of the music of Fauré and Massenet.

Originally written for the composer’s beloved bandoneón, Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion transforms the Skopje studio and the listener’s imagination into a deserted bar in Buenos Aires. It is just after closing, when the sounds of a new day begin to disturb the weary barkeep’s reverie. Morris’s bewitching performance of Piazzolla’s music steals in with the determined playfulness of day chasing night into the corners, illuminating the dark peripheries of the piece. The transcription of the ‘Ritual Fire Dance’ from Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo employed by Morris is no less effective in its conjuring of a specific but universal atmosphere. The earthy qualities of de Falla’s witty tone painting scintillate in Morris’s performance, and her efforts are seconded by particularly cogent work from Hesketh and the young Macedonian musicians.

The arrangement for cello and orchestra of Morris’s own song ‘Un’ ultima volta’ has an unapologetic Romantic lushness that transports the listener to Italy in the 1950s, to windswept towns by the Mediterranean and piazze baked by the sun. Composed for voice and orchestra whilst Morris was unable to play the cello, the song’s gentle melancholy is beautifully conveyed by the unmistakably ‘vocal’ cello line. Like Bargiel’s Adagio, ‘Un’ ultima volta’ whets the appetite for more of Morris’s compositions. Not surprisingly, there is an aura of authoritativeness to her playing of ‘Un’ ultima volta,’ but this is true of her performances of every selection on the disc. In filling the fluid melodic lines of the song, she becomes the Renata Tebaldi of the cello, the reserves of power bolstering the tone always audible but never obtrusive. This is music that embraces late-Romantic, Italianate tonalism as affectionately as Gian Carlo Menotti did in Amelia al ballo and The Last Savage, and Morris plays as enjoyably as she composed.

Macedonian Sessions is in many ways as much a statement of individual triumph as it is a musical experience. Above all, though, it is a love story told in eleven pieces via which a master musical communicator regains and rejuvenates her power of speech. As spoken by Corinne Morris and her cello, music is a language not of words but of responses to life both too intimate and too intricate to be verbalized. For all of the egotism, vanity, and cut-throat competition that afflict today’s Performing Arts community, it remains a quintessentially Existential environment in which, as John Donne might have suggested, one artist’s incapacitation is a loss inflicted upon all artists and laypeople alike. Not least owing to Macedonian Sessions, Corinne Morris’s reunion with the cello is likewise a felicitous occasion that enriches the Arts beyond measure. Solely from a musical perspective, though, few ‘Welcome Back’ celebrations are as delectable as Macedonian Sessions.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Gioachino Rossini — SEMIRAMIDE (J. Pratt, V. Genaux, T. Stayton, W. Tigges, E. Hughes, W. Wu; Washington Concert Opera, 22 November 2015)

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Semiramide—Jessica Pratt (Semiramide), Vivica Genaux (Arsace), Taylor Stayton (Idreno), Wayne Tigges (Assur), Evan Hughes (Oroe), Natalie Conte (Azema), Patrick Cook (Mitrane), Weí Wu (L’ombra di Nino); Washington Concert Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Antony Walker, conductor [Lisner Auditorium, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA; Sunday, 22 November 2015]

In the simplest essence of a wondrously complicated art form, opera is a study in the surrender of reality to imagination. Audiences in Raleigh, Rome, or Riyadh are asked to accept that, with composers and librettists as their travel agents, they are whisked in the relative comfort of their seats to locales known and unknown. There are women who look like men, men who sound like women, and women dressed as men impersonating women. Barbers in Seville somehow speak Italian, Veronese youths converse even from distant balconies in perfect French, and Spanish noblewomen and their English maids spout defiance at Turkish pashas auf Deutsch. Gods descend from the heavens, volcanoes erupt, towns are swallowed by seas, and avalanches end mountainside liaisons. Amidst all of these peculiarities and improbabilities, among the dwarves and dragons, however, there are veins of emotional truth and humanity that surge through the layers of artifice like geysers. Beyond the stage, people rarely pause to sing five-minute arias as they die, but people die—of disease like Violetta and Mimì, in tragic misadventures like Gilda and Siegfried, and by their own hands like Werther and Cio-Cio San. People betray and are betrayed, love and are loved, fear and are feared. At its core, opera is neither obviously relevant nor a straightforward means of escape from reality. The most gifted composers of opera created scores that inspire audiences to think, and it is in the thinking that the relevance and escape are born. Audiences cry for Violetta and Mimì not because they know Violettas and Mimìs but because there are in virtually every life stories like theirs. Many critics and musicologists exclude Gioachino Rossini from the ranks of great composers of opera, but the listener willing and able to look beyond the farcical comedy in Il barbiere di Siviglia finds a timeless tale of young people in love. In Le siège de Corinthe, there are the painfully modern collisions of passion and faith. In Semiramide, premièred at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice on 3 February 1823, the volleys of roulades yield a drama shaped by warped relationships, political ambitions, hidden identities, and assassinations realized and thwarted. His final opera composed for an Italian theatre, Semiramide is the culmination of the lyric art that Rossini inherited from Händel and Hasse via Jommelli, Mysliveček, Mozart, and Cherubini. With its litany of intrigues and power-brokering, could any opera be better-suited to being brought to life in the American capital by Washington Concert Opera than Semiramide?

Concert performance is an ideal medium for Rossini’s Semiramide. Setting a libretto based, like that of his 1813 Tancredi, upon a drama by Voltaire, Rossini had in Semiramide a subject that engaged his imagination on an exalted level. Unusually for Rossini, the Overture—joyfully played in Lisner Auditorium by the Washington Concert Opera Orchestra—makes use of thematic material from the opera, perhaps the finest manifestation of which is the sublime ​Andantino for ​a quartet of ​horns​. The wealth of musical invention in Semiramide is extraordinary by any standard but truly remarkable for Rossini, who, though only thirty years old at the time of Semiramide’s première, had lost patience with the whims and caprices of Italian opera and its practitioners. In Washington Concert Opera’s March performance of Guntram, Artistic Director Antony Walker established himself as an insightful interpreter of the music of Richard Strauss, but pacing Semiramide enabled him to return to the bel canto repertory of which he is an acknowledged master. Walker is an animated conductor who puts his whole body at the service of the music, so there is nothing dainty about his bel canto: when Rossini requested extremes of volume and dramatic thrust, Walker complied unhesitatingly. Moments of lyrical restraint were handled with equal imagination, and the singers were clearly encouraged to take risks in a supportive, nurturing environment. As in the Overture, the orchestral musicians played capably throughout the performance, their confidence more noticeable than in several WCO performances in the recent past. Rossini is rarely cited as an innovative orchestrator despite the ingenuity of his part-writing, but how marvelously he composed for the woodwinds in Semiramide! Fortunately, the WCO wind players met the demands of Rossini’s score exuberantly, and their high level of musical excellence was undermined by only a few mishaps. [The sources of several awkward squeaks and squawks in quiet moments were mysterious. Was the shade of Nino lurking, poltergeist-like, among the horns?] Gita Ladd’s leadership of the cello section remains a trove of mellow tone and artful phrasing. Trained by Bruce Stasyna, the singers of the WCO Chorus were, as ever, to be commended for both their preparation and the gusto of their performance. In Act One, they sang with rousing pagan piety, and their account of ‘Di plausi qual clamor giulivo eccheggia’ was aptly evocative of trepidation. ‘Un traditor, con empio ardir’ at the start of the Act Two finale was exhilaratingly delivered, and the choristers’ closing thoughts, ‘Vieni, Arsace, al trionfo, alla Reggia,’ were expressed with celebratory musicality. Undoubtedly owing both to conscientious rehearsal and genuine affection for Rossini’s score, this Semiramide was, in terms of orchestral playing, choral singing, and conducting, among WCO’s finest performances, one that not only satisfied in the moment but also intensified appreciation of Rossini’s genius.

As is often the case in WCO performances, the choristers’ ranks were mined for singers for secondary rôles, and the results in this Semiramide were indeed gems. Taking the part of Mitrane, the captain of the guard, tenor Patrick Cook sang strongly, the timbre attractive and the technique capable of fulfilling all of Rossini’s requests. He was particularly noteworthy in Act Two, articulating ‘Alla Reggia d’intorno, canto Arbace dispone I tuoi più fidi’ ​and ‘Calmati, Principessa’ with clear diction and equivalent dramatic clarity. The princess Azema has far less to sing than her importance as the object of Arsace’s, Idreno’s, and Assur’s affections would seem to warrant, but soprano Natalie Conte sang every note entrusted to her impressively, effortlessly filling the auditorium with gleaming sound. She might well prove a worthy Semiramide.

L’ombra e l’assassino: Bass Weí Wu as L’ombra di Nino (left, foreground), bass-baritone Wayne Tigges as Assur (center, on stage), Maestro Antony Walker, and the WCO Chorus and Orchestra in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, 22 November 2015 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

Having Chinese bass Weí Wu, a galvanizing presence as Friedhold in WCO’s Guntram, on hand to intone the warnings of L’ombra di Nino, the ghost of Semiramide’s murdered husband (and, it is eventually revealed, Arsace’s—né Ninia—father), was the epitome of luxury casting. His is a voice destined for Sarastro and Gurnemanz, and he used the instrument to tremendous effect in Nino’s dire pronouncements from the tomb, music obviously influenced by the scene for the Commendatore’s effigy in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

A commanding presence both vocally and physically as Oroe, the High Priest of the Magi, young bass-baritone Evan Hughes brought muscle and nuance to the considerable range of his music. Beginning with a sinewy account of the recitative​ ‘Si, gran Nume, t’intesi’ in the opera’s Introduzione, he proceeded to a fiery voicing of Oroe’s lines in the quartetto with Semiramide, Assur, and Idreno, 'Di tanti Regi, e popoli.' In Act Two, his scene with the chorus, ‘In questo augusto soggiorno arcano,’ was sung with blazing intensity. The zeal with which Hughes’s Oroe incited Arsace to exact revenge on Assur was viscerally conveyed by the flinty grandiloquence of his singing. Hughes sounded as though he could have sung Assur on a moment’s notice, but his Oroe was the sonorously-sung dramatic spine of the performance.

The duplicitous Assur was portrayed with smug smirks and big, bold tone by bass-baritone Wayne Tigges, a singer whose versatility and snarling, somewhat nasal timbre recall Norman Treigle. Throughout the performance, Tigges’s singing possessed towering impact despite his occasionally seeming under-rehearsed. The voice was slow to warm up, but in the quartetto with Semiramide, Idreno, and Oroe in Act One he sailed through Assur’s roulades fearlessly if not always accurately. In the duet with Semiramide in Act Two, a prototype for the duet for Nabucco and Abigaille in Act Three of Verdi’s Nabucco, Tigges’s Assur prodded and threatened his queen with relish. Assur’s mad scene, one of the finest scenes in the opera and a prefiguring of Macbeth’s encounter with the apparition of Banco in Verdi’s Macbeth, drew from Tigges his best singing of the evening. The aria, ‘Deh! ti ferma,’ was phrased with subtlety and finesse, and the hateful character could for a moment almost be pitied. The cabaletta, ‘Que’ Numi furenti, quell’ombre frementi,’ was voiced with electrifying machismo. Not all of Tigges’s passagework was executed cleanly: the defining quality of his Assur was bravado rather than bravura, but it was a characterization of unmistakable malevolence. Even in music for which it is not ideally suited, the pleasures of hearing such a hearty, healthy voice used with flair are self-recommending, and Tigges provided many moments of edge-of-the-seat vocal excitement.

Il re di Rossini: Tenor Taylor Stayton as Idreno in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, 22 November 2015 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

A native Ohioan and an alumnus of Philadelphia’s star-making Academy of Vocal Arts, tenor Taylor Stayton is carving a place for himself among the celebrated tenori di grazia of his generation. His singing of Idreno in Washington Concert Opera’s Semiramide, his début in the rôle, expanded that place, furthering the reputation as a bel canto stylist confirmed by his recent performances as Percy in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at the Metropolitan Opera.​ Even by Rossini’s standards, Idreno is an extraordinarily difficult rôle, his bravura demands on par with the most challenging music ever composed for the tenor voice. From his appearance in Act One in the terzetto with Oroe and Assur, ‘Là, dal Gange, a te primiero,’ his coloratura is often terrifying, but Stayton’s performance exuded confidence. ​So confident was his singing, in fact, that the loss of Idreno’s magnificent aria in Act One, ‘Ah dov’è, dov’è il cimento,’ with its pair of top Cs and climactic top D, was truly lamentable. Semiramide constitutes a long evening, of course, but cutting ‘Ah dov'è’ deprived Stayton of an opportunity to further display his Rossinian mettle. The Act Two aria con coro ‘La speranza più soave’ littered the tenor's path with musical hurdles, however, and he cleared every one of them with the assurance of an Olympian. Negotiating the ferocious coloratura with the appearance of ease, he rose to top B and C​ with ringing enthusiasm. Looking the part of the calm, collected, debonair leading man, Stayton’s fantastically-vocalized performance exuded suavity and swagger.

L'uomo più piuttosto della festa: Mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux as Arsace in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, 22 November 2015 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

In a career now spanning two decades, mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux has made a specialty of Rossini’s travesti rôles, having credibly evinced masculinity while dispatching coloratura with astounding technical faculty in parts like Falliero in Bianca e Falliero, Malcolm in La donna del lago, Néoclès in the La Scala version of Le siège de Corinthe, and the title rôle in Tancredi. As Arsace in WCO’s Semiramide, her coloratura singing was a marvel, but no less remarkable, particularly in a concert performance, was her nuanced acting. Her Arsace seemed truly shocked by turns of events, and Genaux’s reading of Nino’s letter describing the circumstances of his death should be a model for all interpreters of Verdi’s Lady Macbeth and Violetta. The quiet awe of her singing of Arsace’s opening recitative, ‘Eccomi alfine in Babilonia,’ was intriguing, and the Andantino ‘Ah! quel giorno ognor rammento’ was magnetically sung. Her 'Oh, come da quel di tutto'​ ​was musically and dramatically magical. Genaux declaimed Arsace’s recitatives with wide-eyed wonder and joined Tigges in a darkly suggestive performance of the duet ‘È dunque vero,’ her shaping of the line in ‘Bella imago degli Dei’​ appropriately amorous and her comment to Assur that he does not understand love youthfully sincere rather than mean-spirited. ‘Serbami ognor sì fido il cor,’ the first of Arsace’s duets with Semiramide, the pinnacles of Rossini’s genius and veritable templates for Bellini’s duets for Norma and Adalgisa and Donizetti’s scene for Anna Bolena and Giovanna Seymour, united mezzo-soprano and soprano in a vocal exhibition of the art of bel canto, the ladies’ breath control enabling outstanding feats of sustained phrasing. Genaux’s singing was equally accomplished in ‘Alle più calde immagini.’​ ​Again duetting with Semiramide in Act Two, the mezzo-soprano’s singing in ‘Se la vita ancor t’è cara’ personified a nobility of spirit made even more apparent in ‘Quella, ricordati.’ The triplets in ‘Ma implacabile’ were delivered with astonishing degrees of rhythmic precision and synchronization. ​The Washington audience obviously felt that Genaux’s performance of Arsace’s aria con coro ‘In sì barbara sciagura’ was the zenith of the performance, and the imperturbable dexterity with which she dashed through the fiendish coloratura in the bottom octave of the voice proved them right. The final duet with Semiramide, ‘Ebben, a te, ferisci,’ was engagingly sung, the desperation and fear in ‘Giorno d’orrore, e di contento!’ reaching exalted heights of expression in the perfectly-executed trills and coloratura in thirds. Genaux infused ‘Madre, addio!’​ with far more emotion than two words could ever be thought to express. There were passages in mid-range in which Genaux’s voice seemed to lose support, but she compensated with especially rich tones at the bottom of the voice. Musically and dramatically, her performance was moving and revealing: it was to possible to fully appreciate the extent to which Arsace is a man in crisis because the voice was under such meticulous control.

Figlio e madre: Mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux as Arsace (left) and soprano Jessica Pratt (right) in the title rôle in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Rossini’s Semiramide, 22 November 2015 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]

It was only a short time ago that English-born, Australian by relocation, and now Italian by adoption soprano Jessica Pratt sang the title rôle in Semiramide for the first time, but her comfort with Rossini’s music was greater than some interpreters of Semiramide have acquired after many years of experience. Appearing like a goddess from a Botticelli painting after the male-dominated start of Act One, Pratt regally took command of her music from her first phrase in the quartetto with Idreno, Oroe, and Assur, ‘Trema il tempio, infausto e vento,’ her voice unfurling above the men’s voices like the Stars and Stripes above the nearby White House. The opera’s most familiar vocal number, the cavatina con coro ‘Bel raggio lusinghier,’ was delicately sung, not even the slightest suggestion of nervousness audible in Pratt’s sumptuously-phrased cantilena, but the weakness of the lower voice was evident. She caressed the text of ‘Dolce pensiero, di quell’istante,’ and the meteoric interpolated E6 with which she crowned the aria ​may well have been heard on the opposite bank of the Potomac. Partnering Genaux in the ​duet ‘Serbami ognor sì fido il cor,’ she increasingly sang with the assurance of a true mistress of bel canto confident of being in the company of an equal. She and her colleagues blended their voices stunningly in the quintetto in the Act One finale, ‘Giuri ognuno, a’ sommi Dei,’ she, Genaux, and Stayton building wonderful arcs of sound upon the unshakable foundation laid by Hughes and Tigges. Most at ease at the top of her range, where the voice rang out with amplitude uncommon for a singer with Pratt’s coloratura ability, she voiced ‘Qual mesto gemito da quella tomba’ in the middle of the voice with credible dramatic apprehension but a lack of the brawn that the music needs. Her voice stood out in the frenetic stretta, ‘Ah! Sconvolta nell’ordine eterno,’ ending Act One with a laser-bright starburst above the imposing wall of sound. Beginning Act Two with a resolute ‘Assur, I cenni miei fur sacri, irrevocabili,’ Pratt portrayed an endearingly feminine Semiramide who nonetheless would endure none of Assur’s treacherous threats in their duet, intrepidly engaging Tigges in a match of vocal wills. Then, she regained the falsely safer ground of conversing with Arsace, her voice growing fuller and more piercing as she learned that the man she loved was, in truth, her long-absent son. Her fluency in Rossini’s difficult triplets matched Genaux’s—no small achirvement!​​ In ‘Ebben, a te, ferisci!’ and ‘Giorno d’orrore, e di contento!’ the soprano’s bravura technique shone: not since Dame Joan Sutherland​—who Pratt’s tonal plushness and billowing light-auburn hair bring to mind—sang the title rôle opposite Giulietta Simionato, Lauris Elms, Monica Sinclair, and, legendarily, Marilyn Horne have Semiramides and Arsaces been as evenly-matched in terms of raw ability as Pratt and Genaux were in Washington. Pratt’s traversal of Semiramide’s Preghiera, ‘Al mio pregar t’arrendi,’ was beguilingly-phrased, but here, too, the relative pallor of the lower voice betrayed the singer’s first-rate intentions. Meeting her demise as the unintended victim of her son’s sword, this Semiramide sang gloriously in the terzetto with Arsace and Assur, ‘L’usato ardir.’ The notion of a character being misunderstood is often invoked comically, but Pratt’s interpretation of Semiramide suggested that there are far greater depths to the lady than other singers’ performances have suggested. Whatever she has done, she is no scheming Lucrezia Borgia. Compelled by the concert setting to seek the woman solely in Rossini’s score, Pratt brought her to life with a significantly wider spectrum of emotions than many staged productions have allowed the complicated queen. Such is the truest measure of a singer’s artistry, and Pratt’s performance qualified her as a rewardingly expressive artist.

Semiramide is a difficult opera—difficult to sing, difficult to conduct, difficult to stage; or, in the context of Washington Concert Opera’s performance, difficult to bring to the stage. That an opera company large or small can assemble an ensemble of conductor, choristers, instrumentalists, and renowned singers, some of whom have never before performed their assigned rôles, and, in the span of a week, prepare an opera like Semiramide for performance is little short of miraculous. That the performance that resulted from Washington Concert Opera’s preparations was as enjoyable as this Semiramide is, in reality, anything but a miracle. Opera is not an art of perfection. Above all, it is an art of collaboration and communication, achieved not by miracles but by motivation. Not every note was perfect, but the performance that transpired on the stage of Lisner Auditorium was a collaboration of committed artists that communicated the exquisite potency of the opera with which Rossini bade Addio to his native land.

Il Maestro: WCO Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker during Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, 22 November 2015 [Photo by Don Lassell, © by Washington Concert Opera]