Bel Canto Bully: The Musical
Legacy of the Legendary Opera Impresario Domenico Barbaja. Naxos. $9.99.
Hidden Handel. Ann
Hallenberg, mezzo-soprano; Il Complesso Barocco conducted by Alan Curtis.
Naïve. $16.99.
Bach: Cantatas, Volume 28—For
Ascension Day. Monteverdi Choir and English Bach Soloists conducted by John
Eliot Gardiner. SDG. $18.99.
40 Tracks for 40 Years: Delos’ 40th
Anniversary Celebration. Delos. $16.99 (3 CDs).
Solti Centenary Concert.
World Orchestra for Peace conducted by Valery Gergiev. Arthaus Musik DVD.
$24.99.
Here are five novelty items
that will be of interest to those with attractions to specific parts of the
musical past – recent and distant. The most interesting conceptually is Bel Canto Bully, which includes music by
Rossini, Weber, Bellini, Donizetti and Saverio Mercadante – all composers whose
work was strongly influenced by the demands of famed (or notorious) 19th-century
impresario Domenico Barbaja (1777-1841). The CD is actually a companion to a
book of the same title by Philip Eisenbeiss, and will be of greatest interest
to those who read the book and want to associate excerpts from operas of
Barbaja’s time with the impresario’s life. In fact, the booklet notes for the
CD are by Eisenbeiss, just to make the tie-in explicit. Nevertheless, the
musical selections themselves are certainly worth hearing, being a
cross-section of better-known and less-known works of the bel canto era. They include the overture to Weber’s Euryanthe and a number of vocal excerpts
– from Bellini’s Il Pirata,
Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux,
Mercadante’s Elena da Feltre, and
five operas by Rossini: La gazzetta,
Otello, Mosè in Egitto, La donna del lago, and Maometto II. Because a number of these works are little-known and
infrequently performed today, the musical mixture is an enjoyable one in and of
itself; the enjoyment increases when the works are heard in the context of the
story of Barbaja’s life and times.
The attractions of Hidden Handel are similar: Ann Hallenberg
here sings excerpts from nine Handel operas, most of them little-known; in
fact, of the 17 pieces here, 10 are world première recordings. Of course, there is considerable overlap of elements
both instrumental and vocal among Handel’s operas – fostered by the composer
himself – so it is not surprising that a number of these works sound rather
familiar even if they have never been recorded before. Nevertheless, they are
all very well-made – no surprise there –and excellently performed by Hallenberg
and Il Complesso Barocco under Alan Curtis. The operas represented are Pirro e Demetrio, Rinaldo (probably the
best-known), Ottone, Muzio Scevola,
Amadigi, Teseo, Admeto, Berenice and Alessandro.
Short instrumental interludes – Hornpipe
in C minor, Aria for Winds in F, March in G, March in D and March in F – nicely break up the vocal elements,
and the CD as a whole is a treat for Handel fanciers looking for masterly music
that they will not have heard before.
The latest release in SDG’s
ongoing series of Bach cantatas conducted by John Eliot Gardiner is at the same
high level as previous ones, and stands as a tribute to the composer as well as
an ongoing one to Gardiner’s skill in bringing this music to life with suitable
seriousness and close attention to period style. Few listeners will likely want
this CD on its own – at this point, these releases are clearly intended for
people who are collecting them all – but those who want to hear some first-rate
performances of the cantatas will enjoy this disc as much as earlier ones.
Inevitably, each CD contains works that are better-known and less-known; which
are which will depend on each listener’s personal relationship with this
element of Bach’s work. The four cantatas here are Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen, BWV 43; Wer da gläubet und getauft wird, BWV 37; Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein, BWV 128;
and Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen, BWV
11. The four soloists – soprano Lenneke Ruiten, alto Meg Bragle, tenor Andrew
Tortise, and bass Dietrich Henschel – are all in fine voice and all thoroughly
comfortable with period style; and Gardiner’s conducting is, as usual and as in
the prior volumes of this series, poised and careful and idiomatic, resulting
in thoroughly satisfying performances of all the cantatas.
It is not a composer but a
company to which 40 Tracks for 40 Years
pays tribute – this is Delos complimenting itself for its longevity and the
quality of the music it has made available. This is all a bit self-referential
and self-important, but Delos is scarcely the first to do this sort of thing:
Chandos, for example, produced a handsome 30-CD box for its 30th
anniversary in 2009. By that standard, the three-CD Delos offering is quite
modest, and it does contain some very fine performances – but it is hard to
know why listeners will want to buy it. Although the amount of music on each CD
is generous – 76 to 78 minutes – the nature of the enterprise is such that no
extended works can be given in full, and no single artist who has recorded for
Delos can be fully portrayed. Instead, listeners get a bit of this and a touch
of that: some Copland, Verdi, Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky,
Rachmaninoff, Korngold, Hovhaness, Cilea, Handel, Arensky, and others, all
jumbled together and none following any other in any particularly compelling
sequence. The same is true of the performers. Orchestras include the Seattle,
Dallas and New Jersey Symphony Orchestras and others; conductors range from
James DePriest and Zdenek Macal to Gerard Schwarz and Alfred Heller; James Earl
Jones and Michael York are heard as narrators; among the many soloists are Renée Fleming, Dmitri Hvorostovsky,
Dmitri Kogan, Arleen Auger, Ewa Podles, Sandra Lutters, and Gerryck King;
chamber groups include the Brazilian and Los Angeles Guitar Quartets, Shanghai
Quartet and Yale Cellos; and so on. There is a plethora of fine music-making
here, but there is also a huge jumble of largely disorganized presentation,
rendering 40 Tracks for 40 Years more
of a “vanity production” for those associated with or enamored of Delos than a CD
set likely to attract music lovers on the basis of its content.
Solti Centenary Concert might seem like a vanity production, too,
if Sir Georg Solti himself were conducting it, but in fact this DVD is one of a
number of recent memorials to him. Solti (1912-1997) was a larger-than-life
figure in the musical world, and often a controversial one for the intensity he
brought to conducting and the ruthlessness with which he drove his orchestras
(he was nicknamed “the screaming skull” in recognition of his baldness and his
podium manner). This DVD was recorded live on October 21, 2012, and it contains
– like the three-CD Delos offering – a number of well-performed short works
that certainly relate to Solti’s career and interests but that are not
especially compelling in themselves. However, Valery Gergiev does offer two
substantial pieces in full: Richard Strauss’ Don Juan and Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra, both of them very
well played and the latter a genuine tour
de force that does not, however, sound as if Solti himself would have
performed it this way (Gergiev has a very different podium manner, with greater
flair for drama and a somewhat more mercurial approach to the music). The rest
of the concert includes the overture to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the Adagietto
from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 (which never really sounds right when taken out of
context), and opera excerpts sung by sopranos Angela Gheorghiu and Tereza
Gevorgyan, mezzo-soprano Matilda Paulsson, tenor Roberto Gòmez-Ortiz, baritone Ross Ramgobin,
and bass René Pape. The operas
excerpted are The Magic Flute, Don
Giovanni, La Traviata and Rigoletto.
The DVD also includes, as an encore, Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever, and that certainly produces a
festive and celebratory conclusion to what is intended as a celebration of
Solti’s life and skill. The performances are very fine, and the bonus film
about the World Orchestra for Peace – called Solti’s Vision – is a nice extra. But the DVD is more of a souvenir
of the concert than a recording worth having in its own right, for the quality
of the music-making. Those who did not attend this memorial and do not feel
they need to see as well as hear the performers will find equal or better versions
of the music elsewhere.
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