Classical Music

Classical Music

Bayreuth 1952 - Issued from the original source.

This Chandos production must now be first choice for this work.

Welcome to John Gay’s and Benjamin Britten’s romp through some seamy but also colourful and vibrant elements of 18 ^th century London. This work established the ballad opera in which spoken dialogue alternated with musical items. Gay’s satirical words were set to well-known traditional and popular tunes. Two hundred and twenty years later Britten added 20 ^th century accompaniments.

What’s entirely Britten here is the fresh caterwauling Overture (tr. 2) in which the various characters are given brief sound-portraits. There’s an oboe of sinuous sweetness for Polly (0:40), a cavorting clarinet for Macheath (1:29), suave strings and a jocular bassoon for the highwaymen (2:35) and a bantering circus-like master of ceremonies style for Mr Peachum (3:25). It’s all terrifically realized by the City of London Sinfonia who play marvellously throughout.

But what of the songs? Filch’s ‘’Tis woman that seduces all Mankind’ (tr. 5) is a good example of Britten allowing an original tune free rein while giving it modern dress with balmy woodwind and harp. The heroine Polly comes in (tr.12) to strains of her first song over which there are snatches of dialogue. This, like the melodrama which shortly follows (tr. 20), is Britten’s neat way of subverting the claim in the opening dialogue that this opera will have no “unnatural” recitative. Polly’s first song, ‘Virgins are like the fair flower in its lustre’ has as its tune Purcell’s ‘What shall I do to show how much I love him?’ from Dioclesian. Like its original, it is shown by Leah-Marian Jones to be at once wistful and coy. Her duet with Susan Bickley’s Mrs Peachum, ’O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed’ (tr. 15) catches well a cosy lullaby make-believe, aided by the gently rocking strings’ accompaniment. It’s lovely but only fleeting. Another notable accompaniment is the flutter-tonguing flute illustrating Polly’s ‘The Turtle thus with plaintive crying’ (tr. 19).

The highwayman hero Macheath enters and Tom Randle proves courteous enough to Jones’ simpering. The duet between Macheath and Polly, ’Were I laid on Greenland’s coast’ (tr. 22) is sweetly done but I felt the singers were over-conscious of the need to match the flowing orchestration and then the addition of chorus and drum. Some of the natural freshness is lost that’s present in the 1963 Aldeburgh Festival staging on DVD (Decca 074 3329). In this Chandos CD ‘The Miser thus a shilling sees’ (tr. 24) responds better to the typical careful attention of conductor Christian Curnyn’s approach. The disciplined emphasis of rhythm in its thorny progression matches the text’s poetic expression of loss. A pity, however, the second appearance of “Till home and friends are lost at last” (1:54) isn’t, as marked in the score ‘(in the distance)’ as the lovers go their separate ways. It’s an effect achieved in the BBC broadcast recording of the original 1948 production conducted by Britten (Pearl GEM 0225).

The highwaymen’s ’Fill ev’ry glass’ (tr. 26) is a drinking song of the sturdy, resolute variety in 2009 where a lustier abandon was shown in 1948. ‘Let us take the road’ (tr. 28) is infused with eagerness because of the excitement Britten and Curnyn convey in sketching the approach of the coach. Tom Randle’s Macheath has a too cultivated spoken voice but his singing is virile enough. You can hear this in ‘If the heart of a man is depressed with cares’ (tr. 29), marked as a caressing Andante backed by sweetly musing violin solo and rocking clarinet. Again I felt the line was held back a little in deference to the detail of the accompaniment. At this point Macheath is visited by a parade of prostitutes and what’s entertaining in the Decca DVD is rather curious here. With no sounds incorporated of women moving around, squealing and the like , you might think Macheath is imagining it all. I guess this is so as not to detract from Britten’s own variety parade of instruments, a kind of ‘Young Person’s Guide to Women’. There’s a superb tambourine to enliven the headiness of ‘Youth’s the season made for joys’. Randle sings with sunny freedom the ad libitum ‘Ah’s above the chorus repeat, though the top C final phrase is left to a soprano. Now betrayed by the women, his ‘At the Tree I shall suffer with pleasure’ has a disciplined testiness but less venom than Decca’s Kenneth McKellar.

Again more telling in this Chandos production is the more meditative material. The opening song of Act 2, ‘Man may escape from rope and gun’ (CD2, tr. 2), where Randle shows how transfixed Macheath is in his repetition of ‘woman’, savours past joys even while aware they’re the cause of present pain. Sarah Fox, as Lucy Lockit, is scarily efficient in her spite in ‘Thus when a good Housewife sees a rat’ (tr. 3). Polly’s response is the more sensitively elegiac ‘Thus when the Swallow seeking prey’ (tr. 10) and here Leah-Marian Jones is rich, smooth and eloquent. For me, however, Macheath’s ‘How happy could I be with either’ (tr. 11) is taken so fast it becomes too much a tongue-twister virtuoso piece losing some of its whimsy. In 1948 Peter Pears’ lighter touch was more effective. Polly has the easier task of rising above all this with ‘Cease your funning’ (tr.12), whose merging into the chorus and distancing of perspective are successfully achieved before we’re brought back to earth with a vengeance by Lucy’s crisp, snappy ‘Why how now, Madam Flirt!’ (tr. 13). The finale begins with Lucy and Polly showing great resolve. ‘No power on earth can e’er divide’ (tr. 14) is well progressed by Curnyn to an exciting ‘Horay’ trio response from Macheath, Lockit and Peachum. The there’s then increasing speed with a backing chorus in Sullivanesque abandon.

The opening song of Act 3, Lucy’s ‘When young at the bar’ (tr. 16) should be familiar as the tune is Purcell’s ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ from The Fairy Queen. Fox invests it with its original sad yearning while Curnyn points the claustrophobic cloying nature of Britten’s rich scoring of the wry accompaniment. Of a different order and part of the score’s kaleidoscopic variety is the relished archness of Frances McCafferty as Mrs Trapes delivering ‘In the days of my youth I could bill like a dove’ (tr. 21) with relished archness. To this is added the raucous carousing of Lockit and Peachum. Shortly there’s also the poignancy of Lucy and Polly’s ‘A curse attends a woman’s love’ (tr. 25). The paradox that these two candidates for Macheath’s affection can at one moment be united in their shared sense of rejection and understanding of the impossibility of their situation and at the next daggers drawn as rivals and eager still to court Macheath with warm affection at ‘Hither, dear husband, turn your eyes’ (tr. 28) is exploited dramatically. Fox’s pleading for Macheath’s life with ‘When he holds up his hand’ (tr. 31) ought to be the more persuasive, aided by Britten’s obbligato oboe accompaniment. ‘The Charge is prepared’ is a stock, formal chorus considerably pepped up by Mrs Peachum’s triumphant ‘Ah’s and glissando shrieks over its orchestral postlude.

Britten creates a closing scena (tr. 34) with Macheath in the condemned cell at first extolling the virtues of drink when about to die, then recalling pretty women. This gives way to the questioning protest ‘must I die?’. This is well sung by Randle but doesn’t quite have Pears’ grasp of the torment of ever-fluctuating contrasts of mood. Polly and Lucy offer a moving show of support, ‘Would I might be hanged’ to the heavily insistent backdrop of the funeral knell. In 1948 Britten’s knell is less weighty but more searing. Macheath realistically confesses ‘my courage is out’. The spoken dialogue wipes this all away. The highwaymen begin an address directly to the audience to demand the playwright provides a reprieve and all the players join in so the work can end with a dance. This bit of trickery and the rejection of the moral that vice must be punished works better in sound alone than the quicker and tamer removal of justice in the DVD. So you finish the Chandos sound recording remembering the company’s lusty tra-las and Fox’s top C.

This Chandos is the fullest version of the three currently available in the UK, playing at 117:52 in comparison with Decca’s 93:50 and Pearl’s 79:03. The differences are largely down to the Chandos including more of Gay’s spoken dialogue with alterations and additions by Tyrone Guthrie though even here I’d guess about a quarter of the dialogue published in the full and vocal scores has been cut. I don’t think this is a disadvantage because there’s a good deal of repetition in the text anyway. However, some musical numbers are also cut in the other recordings: Mrs Peachum’s ‘If Love the Virgin’s Heart invade’ (CD1 tr. 9) can only be heard here. To see the piece staged is a benefit. On the DVD the dialogue generally has a touch more pace and life, being less self-conscious in delivery. In the same vein the switch from dialogue to music flows more seamlessly and the folksong origins of many of the tunes are delivered with a more disarmingly innocent directness. The feeling between the characters is clearer in the ensemble numbers. The 1948 recording is striking for the verve of Britten’s direction, the charm of Pears’ light heroic manner and the lovely unforced upper register of Nancy Evans as Polly. Listen to her in ‘The Miser thus a shilling sees’. On the other hand it also at times adopts an over-romantic style, as in ‘O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed’ or is too patrician as in ‘Virgins are like the fair flower’.

To conclude, then, although sometimes more studied and deliberate than it might be, including careful points of emphasis within the dialogue, this Chandos production must now be first choice for this work. It also offers you in most luxuriant detail the colour and density of Britten’s orchestration.

-- Michael Greenhalgh, MusicWeb International

The father of Domenico Scarlatti (he of the 555 harpsichord sonatas), Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), a successful musician in his own right, composed a number of popular opera serie in his day, Griselda (1721) being the last. Bruno Maderna (1904-75), one of the finest Italian composers of the 20th c., understood this music intimately, and his conducting, rarely captured, is often wondrous. Complimented by a cast of singers including Mirella Freni, Heinz Ruhfuss and Ernst Haefliger, this 1960 Hannover performance of Griselda is a rare market sighting and offers true listening enjoyment.

Classical Music

Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa' has long been in need of reconsideration. The Pulitzer Prize-winning opera is a remarkable study of sex, delusion and disillusionment. Enthusiastically received at its start-studded premiere (the director was Gian Carlo Menotti; the designer, Cecil Baeton; the conductor, Dmitri Mitropolous and the tenor part of Anatol was taken by the young Nicolai Gedda), it sparked controversy - some reckoned that the score, undeniably influenced by Puccini and Strauss, was too European to be a model for contemporary American opera. Leonard Slatkin is one of the greatest champions of the works of Samuel Barber. He conducted an all-star concert performance of 'Vanessa' at the Barbican last year - one of the few performances of the work ever to be staged in the UK, and the only one to assemble the calibre of cast worthy of this work. It received extraordinary reviews. It was from this concert that this recording is taken.

The 2002 production of Berg's Lulu by Richard jones is generally agreed to be one of the best things to come from troubled English National Opera in recent years. Chandos has done everyone a favour by transferring its 2005 revival lock, stock and smoking revolver from the opera house to the studio...This is important for several reasons. Lulu can seem forbidding to the uninitiated. Its amoral characters, its sordid plot, its enigmatic anti-heroine, its complex (and masterful) formal design: all these aspects repel some as much as they attract others. Yet cabaret burlesque is as integral to the opera's make-up as high operatic tragedy. Paul Daniel and the Chandos engineers don't let us forget it. Piano, saxophone and vibraphone get the prominence they deserve...Richard Stokes has rendered Wedekind's demotic text aptly and brilliantly...For Lulu in the raw, a Rosenkavalier with no underwear, I'll take this.
- Peter Quantrill, THE GRAMOPHONE

Chandos presents the English language recording premiere of 'Wozzeck', Berg's powerful and fatalistic tragedy, now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century opera. Paul Daniel and the Philharmonia Orchestra receive consistently excellent reviews in this series, and are aided by a superb cast and theatrical Chandos sound. Recorded in: Watford Colosseum 14-18 July 2002 Producer(s) Brian Couzens Sound Engineer(s) Ralph Couzens Michael Common (Assistant)

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

In a really committed performance like this Flavio stands out as one of Handel’s best operas.



HANDEL Flavio • Christian Curnyn, cond; Tim Mead ( Flavio ); Rosemary Joshua ( Emilia ); Renata Pokupi? ( Vitige ); Hilary Summers ( Teodata ); Iestyn Davies ( Guido ); Thomas Walker ( Ugone ); Andrew Foster-Williams ( Lotario ); Early Opera Company (period instruments) • CHACONNE 0773 (2 CDs: 146:23 Text and Translation)


Flavio , Handel’s fifth opera for the Royal Academy of Music, had its premiere in 1723. It was only moderately successful, achieving eight performances. One possible reason for this lack of success is the nature of the score itself. The music is written in a lighter vein than the heroic operas Handel had heretofore written for the Royal Academy of Music. Its style harkens back to his Venetian opera Agrippina . The music itself is of high quality, and the opera certainly does not deserve the neglect it has been subjected to over the centuries. Handel revived it only once, in 1732, for four performances, after which it remained unheard until 1967. This is only its second recording.


Christian Curnyn leads a very good performance that does full justice to this neglected work. He paces the work well and is respectful of Handel’s score. Although he occasionally tends to overuse the theorbo, substituting it for harpsichord at times, he is less guilty of this failing that René Jacobs in the competing recording. Da capo ornaments are generally tasteful and idiomatic. The orchestra plays with precision. Handel does not give the orchestra much of a chance to shine; most numbers are accompanied only by strings and continuo, with occasional use of flute or oboe.


The cast is also very good. Rosemary Joshua sings with accuracy and beautiful tone; she is dramatically involved in the role, as are the other members of the cast. Joshua’s performance is preferable to that of Lena Lootens on the Jacobs recording; although Lootens sings reasonably well, her voice has a hollow, white tone to it. Hilary Summers has a rather dark sound for a mezzo-soprano. She is quite good in her role, but she would have made an even better candidate for either of the two castrato roles; her tone is more masculine than either of the two countertenors on this recording. I prefer the more feminine sound of Bernarda Fink on the Jacobs recording. Honors are evenly divided between the Vitige of Renata Pokupi? here and Christina Högman for Jacobs.


Of the two countertenors, Iestyn Davies, singing Guido, the role written for the star castrato Senesino, is excellent, with an evenly produced voice of great suppleness. I prefer him to Jacobs’ Derek Lee Ragin, whose voice is not as well controlled or as attractive an instrument. In the secondary castrato role of Flavio, Tim Mead and Jeffrey Gall offer performances of equal value. The lesser roles for tenor and bass are capably handled by Thomas Walker and Andrew Foster-Williams.


David Johnson reviewed the René Jacobs recording in Fanfare 14:1. He found it to be a “splendid realization of this little-known Handel opera” but thought the work itself uneven. As usual, Jacobs fiddles with the score. At scene changes, he inserts a few bars of harpsichord improvisation or even orchestral sinfonia (but where the music comes from I’m not sure). His misuse of the lute is far more glaring than anything Curnyn does. But, like Curnyn, Jacobs’s da capo ornaments are mostly tasteful and idiomatic.


For any first-time purchaser of Flavio , I have no hesitation in recommending Curnyn as a first choice. Those who already own Jacobs’ recording need not rush to replace it. Both recordings give a very good account of an unjustly neglected work.


FANFARE: Ron Salemi


Flavio was one of the operas Handel wrote for the Royal Academy of Music’s company at the King’s Theatre on the Haymarket. It has a character all of its own, very different from that of “Giulio Cesare” which followed it in 1724. Although the plot similarly concerns power and sex, these subjects are treated in a wholly different manner. Some commentators have seen it as almost a comedy. Certainly there are moments that might bring a smile to the face of the audience. These include two successive revenge arias for outraged fathers at the start of the second Act. Also one of the main plot devices relates to who is to have the difficult job of Governor of Britain. There is little else that might be seen as comic to anyone other than many modern opera producers.

The plot is too complex to be set out in full, but in essence it concerns the rivalry of two elderly counsellors to the King of Lombardy. It is set in a legendary time when Lombardy ruled Britain. Their children and other courtiers are linked in various ways and the plot is set in motion by the King’s roving eye. The libretto was adapted by Nicola Haym from one by the Venetian Matteo Noris from 1682. Having heard and greatly enjoyed this recording I very much regret not having seen the version recently toured by English Touring Opera as part of their Handel opera series.

Nonetheless although it does not appear to derive from stage performances, the most distinctive aspect of this recording is its strongly theatrical feel. The recitatives in particular are paced and sung with real dramatic flair, and although my limited Italian meant that I needed to follow the text in the booklet there was at all times a feeling of real dramatic interaction. This is no mere concert performance and I felt as though I was watching a live event. Whilst always staying within the appropriate limits of period style (no verismo shouting here) all of the cast project a distinct set of characters with real feelings. The dramatic context is also projected in the arias - the only ensembles are duets at the start and end and a final chorus for all the surviving characters. All of the roles are well taken and it would be invidious to mention them individually, although the three female singers are particularly good, especially Renata Pokupi? as a courtier in love with the woman with whom the King has himself fallen in love. All of the singers reserve decorations for the da capos, leaving the first time round as the composer wrote them. This is much to be preferred to the alternatives of either omitting decorations altogether, which is dull, or decorating both times, in which case the listener is never able to distinguish which is by the composer and which by the singer. The decorations are well considered and for the most part the singers manage to avoid making them sound too obviously rehearsed. The orchestra, on period instruments, play with great panache under Christian Curnyn without indulging in the sort of exaggeration which some recent recordings of Handel operas seem to find necessary. The recording is clear if somewhat unatmospheric.

In the end it is the work itself that most impressed me. I had not heard it before, but I was wholly transfixed by it. Perhaps its relative brevity, and that of many of the arias, attracted me, together with a more interesting plot than most (albeit equally complex). Each of the three Acts has a distinct character, starting with a relatively light First Act, with many arias in triple time, but ending in a Third Act where the characters’ real feelings and difficulties are apparent. The very beautiful and affecting final aria for Guido is in the unusual key of B flat minor. There are composers who seem to gravitate towards remote keys when particularly touched by a situation - Sullivan is a prime example, but I had never thought of Handel in that way - I will look out for it in future. In a really committed performance like this Flavio stands out as one of Handel’s best operas. It should be in the collection of anyone who wants to experience the full range of his operatic creations. Collectors of recordings of his operas will obviously want this set, but it would be an ideal introduction to the riches of these works for anyone previously unconvinced of their merits.

-- John Sheppard, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Its style falls a good distance from the historical niceties of our modern era’s historically informed performance standards, but yet it still lands squarely in the most enjoyable listen category. Sir Colin Davis is near the beginning of his brilliant career to come when this Glyndebourne Festival live 1960 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte was staged. He leads a cast including Richard Lewis, Pilar Lorengar, Heather Harper, Geraint Evans and Hungarian bass Mihaly Szekely as Sarastro, whose formidable presence on opera house stages had been overwhelming audiences since the 1920s.

Classical Music

Recorded in: Goldsmith's College, New Cross, London 9-14 August 1994 Producer(s) Brian Couzens Sound Engineer(s) Ralph Couzens Richard Smoker (Assistant)

Classical Music

Classical Music