Puccini: La Boheme / Nagano, Te Kanawa, Leech, Ambrosian Singers, LSO. Composer: Giacomo Puccini, Performer: Alan Ewing, Richard Leech, Roberto Scandiuzzi, Carlos Chausson, Conductor: Kent Nagano Orchestra/Ensemble: London Symphony Orchestra, Ambrosian Singers, St. Clement Danes Nearly a century after it's premiere in Turin in February 1896 we have a fresh and vibrant new recording of this opera - one of the best known and probably most loved in Puccini's output. Nagano is well able to delineate Puccini's large musical canvas, sweeping the colors of the orchestral scoring and the glorious vocal lines onwards and upwards with an intoxicating, rumbustious swagger. If Te Kanawa had made a recording of this role around the time she sang it at Covent Garden in 1976 (with Pavarotti as Rodolfo) or in the subsequent revival in 1979, it would have made for a fascinating comparison. Amazingly, this is her first recording of Mim� and she has successfully managed to integrate her mature, lustrous sound with the poignant vulnerability and gradually ebbing strength of Mim� to remarkable effect. It is a hauntingly convincing performance. Leech provides an excellent shaping of Rodolfo with a rich, passionate tone. Titus (Marcello) and Gustafson (Musetta) are as finely characterized and vividly sung as one could hope and all the ensemble interplays, especially in Acts III and IV, have a fresh and dynamic intensity.

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

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This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.



WAGNER Der fliegende Holländer • Marek Janowski, cond; Albert Dohman ( Dutchman ); Matti Salminen ( Daland ); Ricarda Merbeth ( Senta ); Robert Dean Smith ( Erik ); Silvia Hablowetz ( Mary ); Steve Davislim ( Steersman ); Berlin RSO & Ch • PENTATONE PTC 5186 400 (2 SACDs: 126:30 Text and Translation) Live: Berlin 11/13/2010


This release marks the beginning of an SACD traversal from PentaTone of the 10 frequently performed Wagner operas. In a charmingly old-fashioned gesture, PentaTone will provide with each of the first nine sets a voucher that, if you collect them all, entitles you to a 50-percent price reduction for the final item ( Götterdämmerung, due in November 2013) or—for free—a “special CD collection box.” A cool marketing idea. I wonder if other Wagnerian promotion schemes were kicked around: “Collect them all, kids, and get a free Tarnhelm!”


Something can be said for concert performances of Wagner’s operas. (Studio recordings, for economic reasons, are largely a thing of the past.) There’s no possibility of directorial malpractice, something that these works seem to attract. I just returned from the 100th Bayreuth Festival where I encountered, among much else of questionable merit, a Lohengrin where the good citizens of Brabant were all laboratory rats, a Parsifal with a transvestite Klingsor sporting black fishnet stockings, and a Tannhäuser set in a chemical plant for no good reason. The focus in concert, by default, is on the music, and this inaugural release has got the goods. Marek Janowski provides dramatic impetus to the proceedings but also assures that the orchestra’s role is never slighted. He lingers appealingly as he plays the excerpt from Senta’s Ballad heard in the overture, and there’s a joyous swing to the Entr’acte leading into Holländer ’s final two scenes. Janowski makes the most of the Italianate aspects of the score, including a lovely, lyrical Steersman’s Lied in act I (courtesy of the excellent Australian singer Steve Davislim) and, of course, the very Verdian finale of act II. The chorus, prepared by Eberhart Friedrich, director of the Bayreuth Festival Chorus since 2000, does its job with an incredible precision that would be impossible in the context of a staged production.


An excellent cast was assembled for this live recording that documents a single performance at the Berlin Philharmonie on November 13, 2010. Leading the charge are Albert Dohman, highly regarded for his Wotan (as heard on Et’Cetera SACDs with Harmut Haenchen, and on Opus Arte with Christian Thielemann from Bayreuth) and Matti Salminen, one of the world’s go-to basses for Gurnemanz, Marke, Hagan, and Hunding. Salminen sings a hearty Daland and makes the most of Wagner’s songful passages. His aria toward the end of act II (“Mögst du, mein Kind”) has a Mozartean grace and fluidity. Dohman’s performance is equally impressive. His voice, like Salminen’s, is inherently appealing yet imbued with the tortured quality the role demands; we sense the same anguish that Wotan radiates in act II of Die Walküre or the beginning of Siegfried ’s last act. The Dutchman’s bitterness and sorrow are powerfully portrayed without scenery-chewing.


To my taste, Ricarda Merbeth’s soprano is a bit squally and insufficiently youthful-sounding. There could be more of a sense of “ever-increasing agitation” (“immer zunehmender Aufregung fort”) as she progresses through the three stanzas of Senta’s Ballad. On the other hand, Kansas-born Robert Dean Smith’s handsome Heldentenor instrument—he’s been Bayreuth’s Tristan since 2005—assures that Erik is a more compelling character than is often the case.


As usual, PentaTone’s high-resolution sonics are superb. Multichannel makes clear a mid-hall audience perspective that still provides plenty of involving impact, but places offstage horns way off in the distance. (Spatially, the sound is still more than satisfactory in stereo.) PentaTone’s 140-page booklet is bound into the cardboard package and there are heavy paper sleeves attached as well to hold the two discs. There’s a German/English libretto that, unfortunately, isn’t indexed to the tracks on the discs. The booklet also includes substantial liner notes by Steffen Georgi, the dramaturge for the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, which is to say that he gives lectures before many of the ensemble’s concerts. Recommended—and don’t lose that voucher!


FANFARE: Andrew Quint

KURKA: Good Soldier Schweik (The)

Basic Highlights (Die Ganze Welt der Klassik)

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Musicians and critics realized soon after it's 1829 Paris Op�ra premiere that Rossini's Guillaume Tell was a far-reaching masterpiece. And yet some of the features that made it so unique have militated against it entering the standard repertory. The 1992 critical edition made a "complete" Guillaume Tell, even an ur-Tell possible, but still not many companies have performed the work without substantial cuts. The first complete DVD release of the work's original version finds the Rossini in Wildbad Festival, celebrating it's 25th anniversary, performing Tell for the first time in it's entirety.

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MASSENET BASTIANINI; FORTI; SCARLINI; TOFFOLO (COND) THAIS- RECORDED LIVE IN TRIESTE, 1954; PUCCINI: II TABARR0 (FINALE)- RECORDED IN HAMBURG, 1953

PONCHIELLI UDOVICH; F. LBAO; A. PROTTI; N. SCOTT; MIGNON DUNN; CARLO FELICECILLARIO LIVE 1960 LA GIOCONDA

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France.

Zimmermann, U.: Schuhu Und Die Fliegende Prinzessin (Der) [O

Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948) is best known for his comic operas, and his works based on plays by Carlo Goldoni, one of which is featured on this recording. Il campiello is a three-act opera based on the comedy of the same name penned for the Venietian Carnival by playwright, Carlo Goldoni. The work is influenced by Mozart, and is referred to as a commedia lirica. This recording is performed by the Orchestra Regionale Filarmonia Veneta, under the direction of Stefano Romani.

Music for Opera Lovers

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Considered an outlier in the history of the twentieth century operatic theater for her comparatively small discography, the Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani was nonetheless internationally acclaimed for her performances during a career of over twenty years, with her extraordinary stage presence and strikingly golden coloratura voice. The third CD of the collection "Il Mito dell'Opera" is dedicated to Zeani and features the arias from the roles that were a prominent part of her repertoire. From her signature role, Violetta of La Boheme which marked her 1948 debut through the Verdi heroines which allow the full bloom of Zeani's acting and singing abilities this collection is a valuable addition to the operatic diaspora providing vivid insight into the singer who influenced many of the generation that followed including Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Angela Gheorghiu among others and was deeply respected by her peers which included Maria Callas and Dame Joan Sutherland.

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Malpopita was the second of Goehr's radio operas - opera for a new medium...A pleasure to make the acquaintance of Goehr's tangy satirical radio fable. I would like to hear more of Goehr’s music. You will too.

Walter Goehr, the father of composer Alexander Goehr, was busily engaged in providing music for Berlin Radio in the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s he had studied with Schoenberg and Krenek.

Malpopita was the second of Goehr's radio operas - opera for a new medium. Here it is revived from the piano score and given new instrumentation by Andrew Hannan.

The premiere of Malpopita took place in Berlin on 29 April 1931 when the conductor was none other than Erich Kleiber. The next year Goehr, with his wife the pianist Laelia Rivlin, left to take up a position in London with the Columbia Gramophone Company. He was soon to become its musical director. After the second world war he had a similar position with the American Concert Hall label. He toured widely throughout Europe and made many recordings. He was said to be most proud of his world premiere recording of Bizet's symphony in C. Extremely active in broadcasting, during the war he was famed, under the pseudonym George Walter, for his radio series beamed to occupied Europe. After the war his conducting of a wide range of music continued including revivals of Monteverdi's Vespers and Incoronazione di Poppea. He also presided over broadcasts of the Brecht-Weill Berliner Requiem, Britten's Serenade, Tippett's Child of Our Time and Concerto for Double String Orchestra, Messiaen's Turangalila and Seiber's Ulysses. In film music he may be best known for his score for David Lean's Great Expectations (1946). Phenomenally energetic and driven, he died 'in harness' in the cloak-room of Sheffield Town Hall after a performance of Handel's Messiah.

Goehr's musical language in Malpopita is at times redolent of Weill as in the accordion contribution to Gestrandet (tr. 11). The factory scenes at the start (tr. 1 and 2) have the stamp, thunder and iterative regularity of great machines. The thunder and ring of metal is the signature and is bound to make us think of Mossolov and of Fritz Lang's humanity-servitude foundry scenes in the film Metropolis. It's a style that returns in tr. 14 (Oil Oil Oil). The sleazy-romantic bier-keller culture can be heard in tr. 4. The opera mixes speech and singing - mostly singing and even the spoken sections have a sung effect. There is nice use made of spatial effects in tr. 10 for the wreck of the Esperanza. The female chorus in Das Dicke Ende even gives us a Honolulu sway - a sort of Honoluluation - alongside the mechanistic roll-call stuff which finally grinds down even Adam.

The plot is as follows: Adam has been in the drudgery of factory work for ten years. He has had enough, picks up his cards and takes to the open road. He fetches up at a port and is signed on for a voyage on a yacht significantly called ‘Esperanza’. He and the other crewmen hymn the paradise of the South Sea island of Malpopita. Adam finds rapturous love with Evelyne. It becomes apparent that the boat is engaged in smuggling and they are pursued by government vessels. The yacht runs aground on the reefs of Malpopita. The island is the paradise ideal of liberation and freedom. The island idyll is short-lived as an exploratory team disappear and as Richard decides he wants Adam got rid of so he can take Evelyne for himself. The crew find oil. Despite Adam's warnings that exploiting oil will bring disaster the rest including Evelyne now move into oil extraction and processing. The great cycle turns again and the music of the opening scenes returns as the simple society fades before the glories of factory servitude and wage packets. All hope is gone. Even Adam returns to the pay packet roll-call and his number 937. Remind you of 1984?

Malpopita is a compact work lasting 66 minutes here presented in fifteen separately tracked scenes. The remaining 10 minutes is taken up by the final track comprising a Deutschland Radio Kultur feature on Goehr and the Malpopita-Project. It is in German and there is no translation.

The set is well documented although the slender font, small print and design background make legibility difficult.

Design issues aside this is a well presented set packaged in a slip case for the standard jewel box and the dumpy booklet.

A pleasure to make the acquaintance of Goehr's tangy satirical radio fable. I would like to hear more of Goehr’s music. You will too.

- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Italian Opera Arias

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