This selection includes an explanatory commentary of this opera, written by Thomson Smillie and narrated by David Timson.

Recordings of Meyerbeer’s operas are regrettably few, which makes this Naxos release all the more valuable. Although better known for his French grand operas, especially Les Huguenots (1836), Le prophéte (1849), and L’Africaine (1865), early in his career Meyerbeer composed two operas in German and later between 1815 and 1824 six Italian operas in a style imitative of Rossini. It was during this Italian period that Yaakor Liebmann Beer began calling himself Giacomo Meyerbeer.

Semiramide, composed in 1819, was the second of his Italian operatic compositions. Four additional Italian operas followed before his move to Paris and the successful Robert le diable. It is surprising that Meyerbeer’s Italian operas haven’t been better represented in the bel canto revival of the last half century. Opera Rara recorded two of them complete (Il crociato in Egitto and Margherita d’Anjou) and highlights from L’esule di Granata (all studio recorded). A few of Meyerbeer’s Italian operas recorded in performance and an aria here and there occasionally find their way onto disc.

Semiramide, as evidenced by this Naxos, is definitely closer in style to Rossini than to Meyerbeer’s French grand operas. There is lots of ornamentation, recitative secchi, and even the rhythmic crescendo. The arias are tuneful and the ensembles are frequently exciting. Rossini’s Semiramide owes some creative debt to Meyerbeer’s earlier creation in structure, acknowledged by correspondence between Rossini’s librettist Gaetano Rossi and Meyerbeer.

Meyerbeer’s Semiramide was fairly successful, although it garnered more favorable press from German critics than Italians. Meyerbeer, with Rossi, made some changes to the score for performances a year later, expanding the title to Semiramide riconosciuto; however, the altered score has been lost, as has Meyerbeer’s autographed score of the original, a victim of WW II bombing. The score used for the performances captured on this recording is from a “contemporary manuscript copy” and “incorporates a number of cuts and revisions made to suit the vocal talents of the cast involved.” Quotes are from the booklet.

The plot has little to do with the events in Rossini’s opera. The libretto Meyerbeer used is a convoluted hodge-podge of disguises, amorous intrigues and betrayals, plots and counterplots, vengeance, a duel, and general rejoicing. The booklet contains a synopsis tied to tracking numbers, but a note on the back tray liner tells us that a libretto can be obtained from www.naxos.com/libretti/semiramide.htm. However, it is only in Italian. Good luck!

Enjoy this album for the two hours of bel canto singing it provides. The performance is a good one, the audience is not intrusive, and the recorded sound and balances are excellent. I’m glad Bonynge is still bringing us these interesting rarities.

FANFARE: David L. Kirk

Britten: The Turn of the Screw

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensembles: Ensemble Oni Wytars, Ensemble Unicorn.

With this unique programme Hanzhi Wang takes us into the ‘fairy-tale world of the accordion’ in works by Danish composers that explore both the darkness and luminosity of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous stories. Poignant reflection and tragic depiction infuse Martin Lohse’s ‘Menuetto’ and ‘The Little Match Girl’ (dedicated to Hanzhi Wang), while his post-minimalist ‘Passing’ series forms adventurous mobiles of dancing light. From Jesper Koch’s quixotic ‘Jabberwocky’ to Svend Aaquist’s evocative ‘Saga Night,’ this new repertoire for a relatively recent concert instrument is both dramatic and uplifting. Up and coming artist Hanzhi Wang is the accordion’s perfect ambassador. Praised for her engaging stage presence and performances that are technically and musically brilliant, her career has already taken her around the globe with performances in Europe and Asia.

It was Robert Schumann who praised the Anglo-French Georges Onslow, alongside Mendelssohn, as one of the successors to the chamber music legacy of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. His string quintets were intended for a market of cultivated amateurs, with parts for a second cello or bass. No. 10 in F minor, Op. 32 reflects Beethoven’s influence, its Sturm und Drang elements revealing a masterly balance between the stable and unpredictable. No. 22 in E flat major, lively and playful, offers an almost Schubertian songfulness. Of the first volume, Gramphone wrote: ‘these five players make a beguiling case for this music.’ The combination of string quartet with double bass has opened up a richness of tone and distinct soundscape that the Elan Quintet has dedicated to exploring, celebrating works by renowned composers such as Schubert, Dvorak and Cambini, working with contemporary artists in creating new works for quintet, and rediscovering neglected masterpieces by composers including Onslow and Bridge. The members of the Elan Quintet, Benjamin Scherer Quesada, Lelia Iancovici, Julia Chu-Ying Hu, Dmitri Tsirin, and Matthew Baker, formed the ensemble in Valencia in 2014 having worked with each other extensively in the opera orchestra of the Palau de les Arts as well as in masterclasses and in chamber music.

Georges Onslow was descended from an aristocratic English family, his paternal grandfather being the first Earl of Onslow. Georges was born in France, where he studied, though he also took lessons from Dussek and Cramer in London. His esteem was such that he later succeeded to Cherubini’s chair of music in Paris. He was famed for his chamber music, and the three Cello Sonatas, Op 16, completed in 1820, were compared with those of Beethoven. They represent some of the finest such sonatas to be written in France in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Includes work(s) by various composers. Soloist: Thomas Bloch.

O MIO BABBINO CARO - FAMOUS SOPRANO ARIAS FROM ITALIAN OPERA

Of Gibraltarian and Andalusian lineage, Ohana spent his childhood in Morocco, Spain and the Basque region. Throughout his life he researched various aspects of flamenco as well as of African and medieval music. All of these strands are to be found in his music. His music for guitar is no exception since this instrument is often associated with Spain and Spanish composers. Ohana went far beyond the superficial aspects of Spanish music, so that his music is free from any stereotypical Iberian clichés.

His earliest work for guitar is the short Tiento that now features in many a guitarist’s repertoire. The music alludes to the Spanish tradition with hints of La Folia, of habanera as well as of De Falla’s Homenaje and Harpsichord Concerto, the whole successfully woven into this very fine work.

The rest of Ohana’s output for guitar lies in two substantial cycles Si le jour paraît … and Cadran lunaire. Composed for Narciso Yepes’ ten-string guitar, as was the guitar concerto Tres Graficos, Si le jour paraît … is a substantial suite in seven contrasting movements. These may at times be compared to Debussy’s Preludes in that most of them serve as short tone poems. The opening Temple is an introduction to the cycle or a ‘tuning-up’. The second movement Enueg (“complaint”) is percussive whereas the following Maya-Marsya is also rather tense alternating fast episodes and slower, more reflective ones. The next movement 20 avril (Planh) commemorates the execution on 20th April 1962 of a political prisoner by the Franco regime. The subtitle Planh (“plaint”) again refers to the world of medieval troubadours. This movement is quite impressive in spite of its concision. La chevelure de Bérénice (“Berenice’s Hair”) is clearly in the form of a tone poem referring both to the constellation known as Coma Berenices and to the classical story of the hair of Berenice II. The title of the next movement Jeu des quatre vents (“Game of the Four Winds”) clearly hints at what the music is about - a brilliant Scherzo. The cycle ends with an evocative Alba (“Dawn”).

Cadran lunaire is another substantial suite in four movements. The title is enigmatic since there is no such instrument as a moon dial. It may nevertheless suggest nocturnal or darker moods. Saturnal evokes the ancient Roman festival celebrating Saturn. Calmer episodes are interspersed with short-lived outbursts and short dance-like sections. The predominant mood is reflective. Jondo refers to canto jondo, music of celebration and lament. Sylva suggests forests, fields and the world of Pan. The final movement Candil (from the Latin ‘candere’ meaning ‘to shine or be white hot’) is a brilliant Toccata rounding-off the suite in a virtuosic and assertive way.

Ohana’s works for guitar are few in number but the quality and imagination of the music are of the highest order. The composer explored the guitar’s technical and expressive potential to the full without ever resorting to any extravagant playing technique. This does not mean that the music is easy to play. As far as I can judge, Graham Anthony Devine clearly loves this music and delivers superb readings in which technique and musicality make the best of these impressive works. They would definitely be heard more often were it not for the many demands they put on performers. The recording is very fine indeed and one of the best guitar sounds that I have ever heard. Ohana’s music may be quite demanding but it definitely repays repeated hearings. This is a very fine release.

-- Hubert Culot, MusicWeb International

Jacques Offenbach is best remembered for his operettas, but the dramatic Ouverture a grand orchestra is a rarely heard early piece that presages his future in musical theatre. The enduring popularity of Orpheus in the Underworld is due in no small part to the Can-Can, now one of the most iconic pieces in Western classical music. Orpheus was Offenbach’s first full-length operetta, and The Drum-Major’s Daughter was to be his last, those in between including the popular vaudeville of Monsieur et Madame Denis, humorous satires on Parisian life, and La Belle Helene, an instant success that enjoyed an initial run of 700 performances.

Classical Music

REVIEWS:

It is difficult to pin down just what makes this opera so appealing; let’s just say that it is an opera, like Nixon, in which everything works. This performance is a fine one; in particular, the two men speak and sing so clearly that an English speaker needs no libretto.

– Fanfare

This performance is a fine one; in particular, the two men speak and sing so clearly that an English speaker needs no libretto. “Neurology’s favourite term is deficit. The word denotes impairment, or incapacity of neurological function. Loss of language, memory, vision, dexterity, identity and a myriad of other lacks and losses of specific function.” One could not find many opera libretti that begin with words that would seem more at home in The Lancet; but, then again, Michael Nyman’s The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is no ordinary opera. It is based on an essay of the same name published in 1985 by the distinguished neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks (1933?2015), who, alongside Christopher Rawlence and Michael Morris, was also responsible for Nyman’s libretto. Largely dependent as it is on notes made by Sacks about an actual case, the opera has no real plot as such. It simply depicts two meetings between a neurologist (called Dr S.), a patient, and his wife. The first meeting takes place in the neurologist’s surgery, the second, longer one in the patient’s home. During these encounters it gradually becomes clear that the patient, a distinguished singer and teacher called Dr P., is suffering from a condition called visual agnosia, which in essence prevents him from recognizing or understanding what he sees. Both his hearing and, bizarrely, his actual eyesight are fine, his voice and musicality are undimmed, and he can play a mean game of imaginary chess; but his “mental blindness” results, for example, in him asking directions of a parking meter, trying to shake hands with a music stand and, heartbreakingly, thinking his wife is actually his hat. At one point in the opera the neurologist asserts that there is “no trace of dementia” in Dr P.’s behaviour; but Oliver Sacks subsequently stated that the symptoms suffered by the real-life patient on whose case the work is based were related to the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease – an insight which, for many listeners, will lend this twenty-year-old opera an eerily contemporary feel.

Knowledge of this clinical background might lead the prospective listener to expect an unrelievedly grim work. But that is not really the case. Not only are there moments of black, indeed Kafka-esque humour, but there is much also about compassion and love. The neurologist, for example, could hardly be more different from, say, the cruel, inhuman sawbones of Berg’s Wozzeck. At the very beginning he expresses dissatisfaction with neurology’s tendency to focus on “everything that patients aren’t, and nothing that they are”, wishing instead to “restore the human subject at the centre”; and he retains a genuine interest in and compassion for Dr P., assuring him, for example, at the end that “I cannot tell you what is wrong… But I know what is right.”

Then there is Mrs P., the singer’s wife. She emerges as a thoroughly sympathetic character, who is forced to undergo an emotional journey into which the listener is drawn and with which he or she can fully identify. Initially Mrs P. seems in denial (or perhaps is simply being over-protective), when she tells the neurologist that her husband is “as fit as a fiddle” and just “makes silly mistakes, more like practical jokes”. Later on, though, we become more clearly aware of her very real love and admiration for her husband: she continually praises him and his singing, expresses vicariously hurt pride when the neurologist suggests that changes in his painting style are due to his illness rather than any process of artistic maturation, and cannot hide her all too understandable fears for his future.

Finally, this opera is to some extent also a hymn of praise to the power of music. Music is, quite literally, all that keeps Dr P. going: his musical gifts are still very much intact; he sings to himself all the time; and, as the neurologist says at the end, in essence he uses music to organize his life, so that the only relevant prescription can be: “More music”. Not, of course, that this can lead to an entirely happy ending. The opera’s last words, spoken by the neurologist in retrospect, are: “To this inner soundtrack he moved, he acted, Fluently. Cogently. But, when the music stopped… so did he”. So music can’t be or do everything; but while there’s music, there’s hope.

As to Nyman’s music ? well, predictably enough, it consists in the main of recitative-like vocal lines supported by a repetitively chugging chamber group consisting of two violins, a viola, two cellos, a harp and a piano. But there is much more to it than that. There are certainly some operatic subject-matters to which a basically minimalist style would not be suited; but here it works well. Nyman’s steady rhythms and additive processes here create a sense of inexorable nervous tension, which has the effect of reflecting very vividly the gradual but relentless loss of Dr P.’s powers of cognition. By way of contrast, this nervous tension is frequently interrupted by slower, more lightly scored passages, which tend to accompany reflections on proceedings by the neurologist, but can also involve less predictable elements, such as a full performance of Schumann’s ‘Ich grolle nicht’ from Dichterliebe, which Dr P. delivers to his wife’s piano accompaniment. A particularly good example of Nyman’s ability to vary his musical material within a consistent style comes in a five-minute passage towards the end of the scene in the neurologist’s surgery: the tempo accelerates as Dr P. describes the “darting details” (a sunflower, a snowflake, a map of Dresden, a dinosaur) that flash fleetingly into his mind; this gives way first to an almost arioso passage where he imagines a river and an idyllic guest house, and then to a more heavily scored, faster one that climaxes in his bizarre yet humanly tragic misidentification of his hat. Cumulatively, the music gives expression to a mixture of ongoing tension and emotional ups and downs which will strike many listeners as sensitively reflecting the experience of observing and accompanying a person afflicted with a degenerative illness.

The new Naxos performance of Nyman’s work is based on a production given by Nashville Opera in November 2013. Indeed, one of its functions is clearly to provide a souvenir of that occasion: there is a brief note by the director, John Hoomes, and a veritable smorgasbord of credits naming everyone even remotely associated with the production, from the pianist’s page turner through the make-up artist to every conceivable luminary of the Nashville Opera Association. That said, there is nothing to suggest that the CD itself was recorded ‘live’: the sound is of excellent ‘studio’ quality, and there are no audience or stage noises.

The three young singers generally acquit themselves well. Curiously, given that one sings the Duke of Mantua and the other Sparafucile, the (pleasingly) baritonal tenor, Ryan MacPherson and the bass, Matthew Treviño initially sound rather like each other – a situation which isn’t helped by the seeming misattribution of some of their lines in the online libretto. But that impression doesn’t really last, and both clearly have the measure of their roles, combining expressiveness with excellent diction. The rather brittle, fluttery soprano of Rebecca Sjowäll will not please all ears, but she gives a vivid performance as the unfortunate wife, rising well to her occasional ‘big moments’ ? such as her anguish when, following a period of relative lucidity, Dr P. fails to recognize a photograph of his mother, and her anger when the neurologist speaks seemingly unkindly of her husband’s painting. Dean Williamson and his musicians give a thoroughly sound and sensitive account of the score, though one which seems to me rather to underplay its humour.

Overall, it would be idle to pretend that this new recording supersedes that on CBS Masterworks (MK 44669) featuring such seasoned campaigners as Emile Belcourt and Frederick Westcott, and conducted by the composer. I have seen no evidence, however, to suggest that this 1987 issue remains generally available, or that there have been any other recordings since. In that context especially, the Nashville recording can be warmly welcomed and recommended. One could do with slightly older singers, and the performance as a whole perhaps lacks something in characterful individuality; on the other hand, there is nothing seriously wrong with it, the sound is good, and – above all – it restores to the catalogue a highly unusual work of real craftsmanship and considerable depth.

– MusicWeb International (Nigel Harris)

Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release

The people of Poland have lived through often impossible conditions over the last three centuries, and this album is Polish-American composer Mark Nowakowski’s tribute to their spirit of survival. Songs of Forgiveness is both a meditation on anger and grief and a lamentation on the stark realities of a society riven by tragedy. “Blood, Forgotten” is a multimedia memorial for the victims of Nazi and Soviet aggression during World War II, the electronic soundtrack using sounds from an instrument that survived one of the concentration camps. Partly written as a memorial for Henryk Gorecki, “Grandfather Songs also includes the surreal element of a recording of Nowakowski’s family singing the war song “Hej Ulani.” These deeply moving works are a highly personal tribute to the spirit of the people of Poland.

NORWEGIAN VIOLIN FAVOURITES