03 Rossini MoseRossini – Mosè
Raimondi; Kabatu; Ganci; Mihai; Polinelli; Veneranca Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano; Francesco Quattrocchi
Cmajor 735308

This was one of the events specially created for the Milan Expo 2015 that coincided with the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification and what better way to celebrate than to perform an opera in the magnificent Gothic cathedral, Duomo di Milano, that took 600 years to build. The majestic interior became awash in cascading multicoloured curtains of light giving an impressive backdrop to the action.

The original opera, well over three hours long, Mosè in Egitto by the 24-year-old Rossini, was written for Naples. He later revised it for Paris and turned it into French (Moise et Pharaon) thereby losing a lot of the originality and freshness of the original. The creators of this particular event in their wisdom used this second version (translated back into Italian) and condensed it into a one-and-a-half-hour “semi-staged sacred melodrama” of overblown and repetitive religious scenes of divine miracles, dispensing with much of the love story, the human drama and the wonderful music that made this opera a success and caused it to survive for nearly 200 years. Fortunately, the immortal Prayer Scene at the banks of the Red Sea was kept, ending the show on a positive note.

This being in Italy and especially Milan, the mostly young singers are all excellent, their voices gloriously resounding in the spacious acoustics of the cathedral. Isabelle Kabatu as Queen Sinaide is especially memorable in her highly emotionally charged scene, and in the title role the venerable Ruggero Raimondi at 74, amazingly enough can still sing the role although his voice is somewhat compromised by now. The young Italian conductor Francesco Quattrocchi, well attuned to the Rossini idiom, brings out beautiful sounds and sonorities. All in all the opera is severely truncated, but still an impressive, visually resplendent show for this special occasion.

04 TannhauserWagner – Tannhäuser
Seiffert; Petersen; Mattei; Pape; Prudenskaya; Sonn; Staatskapelle Berlin; Daniel Barenboim
BelAir Classics BAC122

The exiled and penniless Wagner’s first real international break came in 1860 when Emperor Napoleon III invited him to perform his Tannhäuser in Paris, an event that became the biggest scandal in the history of opera. Riots broke out, people were beating each other up, screaming, yelling and throwing things at the singers while the Emperor and his Empress were sitting in the royal box unable do a thing. Wagner quickly withdrew the score and hurriedly left Paris.

Tannhäuser, Wagner’s tortured dilemma between physical and spiritual love, however, not only survived 150 years but is triumphantly vindicated here in Berlin. The big problem facing directors today is how to make opera relevant in the 21st century; there have been many failures, stupidly conceived updated concepts by second-rate directors. Acclaimed choreographer Sasha Waltz was the Staatsoper’s unlikely but brilliant choice to direct, and with her emphasis on the poetry of movement to underline the drama – exquisitely composed scenes with dancers mingling with the singers – there is constant motion adding excitement and visual splendour.

There is musical splendour of the highest order as well. A superb cast: Peter Seiffert, a strong heldentenor as Tannhäuser, his voice rich, sensitive and expressive with no sign of fatigue through the gruelling four hours. Ann Petersen is a glorious Elizabeth both in joy and later in her suffering. Peter Mattei, probably today’s greatest lyrical baritone is a noble, elegant and aristocratic Wolfram. René Pape (Landgraf) and Marina Prudenskaya (Venus) are also memorable in their lesser roles. Maestro Barenboim conducts the entire score from memory with forward thrust and quickening of pulse in the resplendent and joyful scenes of the second act, broadening into sustained slow tempi in the tragic but sublime third. Wonderful performance, highly recommended.

05 Ravel Heure EspagnoleRavel – L’Heure espagnole; Don Quichotte à Dulcinée
Lombardo; Druet; Antoun; Barrard; Courjal; Le Roux; Orchestre National de Lyon; Leonard Slatkin
Naxos 8.660337

Maurice Ravel loved a challenge. Why else would he embrace the prospect of writing a new take on the comic Italian opera in French, on a Spanish theme? The Spanish Hour, filled with flirtation, comical characters and cuckolds, is far from being a bedroom farce. It is, instead, a great example of Ravel’s musical genius, especially when it comes to orchestration. While he pays homage to the Spanish musical idiom, he also respects the distinct musicality of the French language, whether scoring the straightforward observations of Ramiro, the rapid plotting of Concepción, or the over-the-top buffoonery of Gonzalve and Don Inigo. The result is playful, poetic and impressionistic.

The accompanying work, three songs of Don Quixote sung to Dulcinea, has a much less happy theme – and history. It is the very last thing Ravel composed (in 1933) and was commissioned by the celebrated film director, G. W. Pabst for a new film version of the story of the knight of La Mancha. Alas, as they say in the film biz, it ended up on the cutting room floor and was replaced by Jacques Ibert’s four songs on the same theme. This insult galled Ravel to the point of considering a lawsuit against the producers, but he eventually gave up on this…quixotic pursuit. The film’s loss is our gain, as these songs remain a popular vehicle for baritone voice, as rendered here by François Le Roux, one of the leading exponents of French chanson.

06 Alec RothAlec Roth – A Time to Dance
Ex Cathedra; Jeffrey Skidmore
Hyperion CDA68144

Alex Roth’s A Time to Dance is divided into four major sections, each representing a season and time of day, with each featuring a different soloist: soprano for Spring Morning, tenor in Summer Noon, alto for Autumn Evening and bass in Winter Night. Adding choir and orchestra, the hour-long cantata, uses almost the same instrumentation as Bach’s Magnificat; thus the two works were paired for the cantata’s premiere performance by Ex Cathedra in 2012.

With texts drawn from biblical verse as well as well-loved poets such as Blake, Dickinson, Donne, Manley Hopkins, Marlowe and Yeats, a fertile groundwork is provided for a great variety of expression in the music. The piece opens with the bass and choir singing from Ecclesiastes (To everything there is a season). Through Roth’s deft characterization, soprano Grace Davidson evokes the beauty of spring; tenor Samuel Boden the romance and sensuality of summer, alto Matthew Venner the ripeness of autumn and bass Greg Skidmore the gravity of winter. All come together for the marvellous Epilogue followed by an exuberant After-dance in which Roth expects the singers to hand-clap as well as actually dance.

The other pieces included on the recording are a little more conventional and reserved, though still lovely; Roth’s Magnificat and Nunc dimittis is set for a smaller choir with a chamber organ part for left hand only; Men and Angels, for unaccompanied choir, showcases Ex Cathedra’s thoughtful and meticulous delivery.

01 Handel AcisHandel – Acis and Galatea
Boston Early Music Festival; Paul O’Dette; Stephen Stubbs
CPO 777 877-2

There have been several fine recordings of Acis and Galatea in the recent past. I myself am especially fond of the recording conducted by John Eliot Gardiner with Norma Burrowes and the late Anthony Rolfe Johnson in the main parts (on Archiv). Still, this new recording is something else. It is fast-paced and light on its feet. The singing and the playing are exceptional. I especially enjoyed the tenor Jason McStoots, who sings Damon, the lovely oboe playing by Gonzalo X. Ruiz and the virtuoso sopranino recorder obbligato by Kathryn Montoya in Hush, ye pretty warbling quire! It was also a pleasure to hear our own Dominic Teresi, the principal bassoon of Tafelmusik.

The recording seeks to reconstruct the first performance of 1718 and uses not a choir in the modern sense of the word but a group of six singers, five of whom are also soloists. The minimum number of orchestral players needed is seven; this recording uses ten, presumably because an archlute, a theorbo and a double bass have been added. The recording includes the chorus Wretched lovers, which signals the arrival of the Cyclops Polyphemus and marks the shift from rural innocence to impending violence. Here the directors have not been altogether consistent as that chorus is a later addition and is generally thought to have been added in 1739.

The record also includes a substantial bonus in the cantata Sarei troppo felice (1707), beautifully sung by soprano Amanda Forsythe.

02 Mayr SaffoJohann Simon Mayr – Saffo
Brown; Schafer; Yun; Papenmeyer; Ruckgaber; Preis; Bavarian State Opera; Franz Hauk
Naxos 8.660367-68

Review

Johann Simon Mayr was born in Bavaria in 1763 but moved to the northern Italian city of Bergamo in 1787. He spent the rest of his life there and in Venice. Saffo was his first opera: it was commissioned by the then new La Fenice in Venice and first performed there in 1794. From our perspective Mayr can be seen as a transitional figure, transitional that is between the reforms of Gluck and the revolutions of Rossini.

That Mayr is to some extent still working in the opera seria tradition is most obviously seen in the fact that the role of the male protagonist was written for a castrato, in this case the famous Girolamo Crescentini. On these CDs it is beautifully sung by the soprano Jaewon Yun. The plot would seem to lead logically to Sappho’s suicidal leap from a rock but in the opera she is saved at the last moment by the lover who had previously rejected her. The happy ending is also a standard item in most, though not all, opere serie.

On the other hand, gone are the da capo and exit arias. The tenor has become important (as had already been the case in Mozart’s Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito), the chorus is now more substantial and many of the recitatives are given orchestral accompaniments (there are precedents for that, including, again, Idomeneo).

Mayr wrote almost 70 operas. Someday I would like to hear some of the others, especially if they are as well sung and played as Saffo is on this recording.

03 Rossini BruschinoRossini – Il Signor Bruschino
de Candia; Lepore; Aleida; Alegret; Orchestra Sinfonica G Rossini; Daniele Rustioni
Opus Arte OA 1109 D

For your next vacation, why not go to Pesaro on the sunny beaches of the Adriatic and if you are an opera lover, to the Rossini festival, a really fun destination judging by this video. Venice is not too far away either where the 20-year-old Rossini spent his first creative period writing operas for a near bankrupt theatre company that took a chance on the young fellow with no previous experience in writing anything, let alone opera. Amusingly, the elders of the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro did much the same thing in trusting this revival of Il Signor Bruschino to a young theatre group, Teatro Sotteraneo, with no previous experience in opera. The directors of the group are all in their 20s and full of ideas, energy and fun.

The scene for this one-act farsa giocosa is a modern-day theme park complete with Coke machines, popcorn, balloons and silly hats. Tourists of all ages wander in and out snapping photos and are invited to join in the even sillier plot where everyone lies except the poor put-upon protagonist, Bruschino. In fact they confuse him so much that he ends up wondering who he is and there is typical Rossinian mayhem, except for the wonderful music and the singing. The polished cast are mainly young people such as the soprano, Maria Aleida, spectacular in her high register, and her suitor, David Algret, a fine tenor. The principal baritones: Roberto de Candia (Signor Bruschino) and Carlo Lepore, the guardian of the bride, who arrives on a Segway, singing his cavatina riding on it up and down the stage, are a bit older and undoubtedly best in show. In charge of it all is the conductor Daniele Rustioni who is barely out of his teens, just like the composer.

04 Verdi MacbethVerdi – Macbeth
Zeljko Lucic; Anna Netrebko; René Pape; Joseph Calleja; Metropolitan Opera; Fabio Luisi
Deutsche Grammophon 073 5222

For me the most sublime moment in Macbeth is the Gran concertato just after the murder of King Duncan when out of the anguished a cappella chorus the orchestra finally joins in with a melody direct from heaven (and how beautifully did Sinopoli do it!), but that was nothing compared to the intense joy and outburst of the Met audience following Vieni! T’affretta, Anna Netrebko’s first salvo as Lady Macbeth. And that Sleepwalking Scene! Oh my! It was an inspired decision to revive Macbeth for the 2014 season with Netrebko as the lead soprano. The woman had never sung the role before, her voice more suited to the lyrical and coloratura repertory or so people thought. But they didn’t know Netrebko! After 2007, when she sang a few bel canto roles at the Met, she went back to Europe scoring triumph upon triumph in the most challenging prima donna roles: Manon in Berlin, Anna Bolena in Vienna, Donna Anna at La Scala. Nevertheless, here she is, Lady Macbeth in New York, seductive in her silk chiffon dress, packing the house again to capacity, her voice extending to a high D flat and also extending the Met’s sagging profits.

Fortunately, the rest of the cast is not outclassed by Netrebko’s radiance. The great basso René Pape (Banquo) is a distinguished credit to a rather short role (as he gets killed quickly) and so is the tenor, Joseph Calleja (Macduff), but at least he survives. Serbian baritone Zeljko Lucic (Macbeth) is a fine character actor with a strong voice, but no match for the great Italian baritones (e.g. Leo Nucci or Renato Bruson) of yesteryear. Exciting yet sensitively refined conducting by new Met principal conductor Fabio Luisi amply compensates for the still unsurpassed legendary Sinopoli reading.

05 Krol RogerSzymanowski – Król Roger
Kwiecień; Jarman; Pirgu; Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House; Antonio Pappano
Opus Arte OA 1151 D

It took almost a century from its premiere in Warsaw in 1926 for Król Roger (King Roger) to reach the stage of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London. Belated though it is, this debut is nothing short of a triumph. It is by far the finest production of this modernist opera that I have seen. The great strength of Szymanowski’s music is its exuberant, ecstatic orchestral colour, making it more neo-romantic than modernist. Mariusz Kwiecień, whose portrayal of King Roger may be a career-defining moment, put it like this: “To compose this music, you must be either on drugs or mad.” Think Ravel, Scriabin, Bartók, but also Górecki. In the past, infrequent as they were, many productions of the opera faltered on stage because of its halting rhythms. The work jumps from bacchanal celebration to a standstill oratorio within its slim, 90-minute timeframe. Director Kasper Holten brilliantly unites the two polar opposites, with some help from the gorgeous set designed by Steffen Aarfing. Among the many charms of this work are wonderful choral passages and showcase arias for the female protagonist, Queen Roxana, masterfully delivered by Georgia Jarman. Saimir Pirgu as the Shepherd is beguiling and free. All the cast benefit from having a native Polish speaker (Kwiecień) on hand – the language coaching is well beyond the typical, cringe-inducing sound imitation that plagues the productions of many Czech, Polish and Russian operas in the West. Antonio Pappano not only conducts the work, he breathes Szymanowski’s music. This production will likely propel King Roger into the sphere of interest of the major opera houses in the world. Bravi!

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