Great Irish Voices And Casta Diva
9 December 2011 |
Posted by Anne O'Hare |
Reviews by
George Fleeton
Great Irish Voices
THE pleasure given not only to the ear but to the soul by a supremely experienced female opera voice is sometimes difficult to put into words.
This is especially true of sopranos such as Caballé and Callas, de los Angeles and Freni, Nilsson, Sutherland and Tebaldi.
With mezzo-sopranos, who have a less extensive operatic repertoire, the same can be said too of Baker and Berganza, Fassbaënder and Horne, Ludwig and Von Otter.
Kathleen Ferrier, contralto, is of course in a league of her own.
In that company, two great Irish voices, Virginia Kerr, soprano, and Ann Murray, mezzo, would not be out of place.
On November 04 they gave a recital, hosted by Trinity College Chapel Dublin, to benefit both the city’s Simon Community and Opera Theatre Company (OTC), one of only two opera companies left standing in the Irish Republic which do things differently from one another, and from Wexford Festival Opera (which is a special case).
The other Dublin-based company is Lyric Opera Productions.
The generosity on the night of Kerr and Murray towards both their guests and four of OTC’s young associate artists was palpable and selfless, and it defined a memorable evening of music making.
Who, for instance, would have thought it possible, or even desirable, when Kerr and Murray segued from a Johannes Brahms romantic song cycle (1874) to Irving Berlin’s song Sisters, 80 years later (from the film White Christmas)?
Baritone Owen Gilhooly opened the concert with the Prologue (sung in English) from Leoncavallo’s fairground tragedy I Pagliacci (1892), and he closed the evening with a dramatic, on the hoof entrance, singing Figaro’s knock-about job description cavatina, about being here, there and anywhere, from Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia (1816), the first great bel canto opera of the 19th century.
Between times, the four young associate artists gained some invaluable performance experience, in this inspirational company, with a selection of duets and arias by Mozart and Donizetti naturally, and by French composers Édouard Lalo and Jules Massenet.
One day soon Mairéad Buicke should be added to that august list of sopranos mentioned at the outset.
Something of a Puccini specialist, it would seem, her solos from Turandot and La bohème (Liù and Mimì respectively) were exquisitely given in, it has to be said, a less than sympathetic, echoing acoustic.
She and Gilhooly then closed part one of the evening with Mimì’s duet of despair with Marcello from Act III of Bohème.
The other Kerr/Murray duets were, almost inevitably, from Mozart (Così and Figaro), but their respective solos were the clear-cut highlights of the evening, and that selflessness towards the younger singers, mentioned earlier, meant there wasn’t time for more.
Rusalka is Dvořák’s only successful opera, a lyric fairy-tale from 1901 (it was first heard that year in Prague) and Rusalka’s Song to the Moon, from Act 1, is its best known piece.
Virginia Kerr sang this beautifully.
Every bit as familiar to the ear is Wiegenlied and Ann Murray sang this - the original cradle song, Brahms’ Lullaby from 1868 – exquisitely.
All finally joined voices, having been accompanied flawlessly throughout by pianist David Gowland, for the brindisi from Act 1 of Verdi’s La Traviata, perhaps a toast to a very receptive audience?
*
OTC’s next touring production is Mozart’s Magic Flute which will also be visiting the new Down Arts Centre in Downpatrick on February 11 at 8pm.
Casta Diva
It would be smashing to be as enthusiastic about Casta Diva
presented two nights later (November 06) in Dublin’s National Concert Hall.
But it was not to be.
This was a hollow Maria Callas tribute-type show (her life, loves and music), so full marks to another great Irish voice, soprano Regina Nathan, for raising it, single-handedly, above the level of low-common-denominator, and frequently inaccurate, tittle-tattle.
It is important to deal fairly but squarely with this show.
It sold out in September, was sold out on November 06, and will be reprised yet again on February 15.
Audiences clearly love this, and that has to be fully acknowledged.
My own studies of Callas’ musical career (her life and loves are inextricably woven into that of course) go back about seventeen years, and she is a ‘subject’ that I have been teaching in higher education for the last ten of those years.
That, by no account, makes me an expert.
But a defence of her legacy, against the travesty of the Casta Diva event under review, is unavoidable.
Firstly, a distinction must be made between the audio-visual narration of her life and loves, and some of the music offered on the night.
All too soon is the telling of Callas’ life story ‘through the roles that made her famous’ sacrificed to unbelievable and forced comparisons between:
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the predicament of Lauretta in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi versus Callas’ decision to marry a husband called Meneghini, 27 years her senior;
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the arrival of Onassis in to her life at a party in 1957 as against the start of Violetta’s and Alfredo’s tragic love affair in Verdi’s La Traviata; and
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the operatic characters of Mimì, Carmen, Leïla (in ThePearl Fishers), Cio-Cio-San, and Manon Lescaut v. incidents from Callas’ personal life - yet she had rarely performed,by deliberate and conscious choice, many of these roles on stage.
It gets worse.
For Meneghini is associated or identified with Rodolfo and Cavaradossi; the 1959 Callas-Onassis cruise on the Mediterranean with the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana; Onassis and Meneghini are then cast as the Pearl Fishers, and Onassis is cast as Escamillo, as Pinkerton and as Figaro.
Into this stew is dropped: Schubert’s Ave Maria, as post- mortem homage; Maddalena’s great aria from Andrea Chénier (just because Tom Hanks tried to explain this to Denzel Washington in Philadelphia?); and Nessun dorma.
So Deo gratias that the great, signature Callas roles that defined opera in the mid 20th century survived all this intact - Norma, Violetta and Tosca- all very finely sung by Regina Nathan, who warmed to her task, after an initial cool edge to her voice.
And she was able to rise above this dross, but remained noticeably detached from it, almost studiously ignoring the narrative (commented on above), with her well rehearsed and safely produced set pieces celebrating Puccini’s heroines, his piccole donne inamorate, his little women in love.
In fairness to all involved there may have been too much Puccini in this programme.
He was not Callas’ favourite composer.
And so we missed Lucia and Medea, Aida and the two Leonoras, Lady Macbeth and Amelia the lover of Gustavus/Riccardo.
There was no mention either of how she (and Visconti) rescued from near-oblivion many bel canto operas such as Anna Bolena, Amina the sleepwalker and Elvira the Puritan bride.
All in all, the disservice to Callas was probably misguided rather than intentionally mischievous.
Yet the tempi signalled to the fit-up chamber ensemble were frequently much too slow, although some of the reduced orchestrations were quite effective.
Niall Morris, who created, wrote and narrated Casta Diva, notes, correctly, that she was ‘the ultimate operatic heroine’ whose life was ‘the culmination of the roles she played on the stage … ‘
But let’s take that a bit further because it will help us to understand better what informed her choice of roles and why she drove herself so hard.
Her professional singing and recording career lasted barely 18 years (say, 1947-65), about one third of her allotted life span.
Her electrifying stage presence is the standard by which all other divas are measured, and no one comes near, then or now.
Her iconic status went far beyond the greatest opera houses in the world and her influence on opera in performance today, 35 years after her death, is immeasurable.
But who can quantify the personal pain and heartbreak that suffused the roles she chose to sing?
This somewhat unctuous Casta Diva event came nowhere near addressing such fundamental enigmas of Maria Callas.
It chose instead the road of trivia and gossip, of mean little men who exploited her ruthlessly, both financially and emotionally,
The big men in her life were Serafin and Visconti, more so than Di Stefano and Zeffirelli, both of whom eventually betrayed her.
(Just think for a moment of the latter’s dreadful film, Callas Forever, a fiction about her final years in Paris).
Her voice was a wondrously flexible and proficient instrument with unparalleled dramatic power, trained in Athens during the war by de Hidalgo.
But it was not a golden voice, like Tebaldi’s, except when she sang softly.
Which was not often because her attack was ferocious, the tone sharp and cutting, strained even when she was passionate and intense, for she looked and acted so brilliantly, better than all her contemporaries put together.
She was the most intelligent opera soprano of the 20th century, not the best voice.
She was a scholarly musician to her fingertips, an outstanding natural actress who would have been totally at home in the theatre, and she completely mastered the classical Italian style, winning unanimous approval, as a foreigner, at La Scala, the opera world’s most difficult and unforgiving audience, and so making it possible for others to follow her on that route.
Why was she so temperamental?
Firstly she was born that way and secondly she took no prisoners anywhere or at any level in the world of opera in her single-minded pursuit of excellence.
She was simply unique, a one-off, unrepeatable, having no like, equal or parallel.
© George Fleeton mmxi
