Higher and higher
On the recommendation of tipster La Malipasta, La Cieca presents a snippet or two from a January 14 performance of Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto at the Teatro Fenice. Heard in a duet from the first act of this rarity are two sopranos of differing genders, Michael Maniaci and Patrizia Ciofi.
Part One Ah non ti son piu caraPart Two Non v'e per noi piu speme
POSTED at
1:23 PM
26 Comments:
Ciofi makes a funny-sounding Susanah. She's a bit too baroque-sounding for bel canto, though.
Opera Chanteuse,
do you EVER have anything vaguely pleasant to say? Are any singers, any operas, any conductors worth anything in your (modest) opinion?
Just Another Tenor:
Actually I do have a thing or two to say about opera, visit my blog, by clicking my name and there you'll read my "homages" to Gheorghiu, Caballe, et al. And hopefully my "modest" opinions will enlighten, dazzle and enthrall your highness.
Wowza. I'm not the biggest fan of Meyerbeer, but this sounds great. Anyone know if its going to be broadcast and if so, where?
Masckadd/Chapel Hill, NC.
Re. Meyerbeer
A recent La Cieca clip was an excerpt from Roberto Il Diavolo with Renata Scotto. I liked what I heard so much that I actually sent for the entire recording. I love it. It's now my favorite Meyerbeer work. A surprise considering that tried as I may, I never managed to be overwhelmed by Il Prophete or Les Huguenotes. (Except for the Corelli - Simionato duo, of course !!!)
Who knows, there may be other hidden Meyerbeer treasures out there.
OH HELL YEAH!!!
Actually, I'm pretty wild/crazy about that recording -- especially the disenchantment scene, which can get stuck in my head for days. And I just got Meyerbeer's "Semiramide," which I'm listening to a lot... although not as much as JDF recorded off the radio and on CD. I actually don't like the timber of his voice, but God his technique makes me happy. Deeply happy.
So much for the notes from the bel canto junkie.
And BTW, thanks to everyone for their suggestions about subscriptions at the Met. There's part of me that wonders why they can't make it easy and offer themed subscriptions -- bel canto, for example. I understand the headache, although I don't think I'm crazy. But y'all seem to be saying you can make the themed subscription yourself. I may work up the energy to do it. Or I may just call the ticket broker....
regarding Meyerbeer, just listened to the Met's b'cast of Prophete with MacCracken, Horne, Scotto, and i was pleasantly surprised. i really liked the music. my only previous experience with Meyerbeer was that mess called L'Africaine, from covent garden, (both the Bumbry, Domingo pairing and Bumbry, Bonisolli).
adi,
this is from a LaScala radio b'cast.
It was broadcast in Italy on radio and TV - there will be a DVD released by Dynamic, apparently.
This performance is on operashare -also the 2nd cast.
Check out the Maniaci Exsultate and Xerxes aria at the same time.
After hearing singing like this certain countertenors (and especially one famous ex countertenor) known for their intense distain of male sopranos mast be spitting nails.........
Having heard some European male sopranos recently I can understand that disdain. However Maniaci is different - he can sing properly throughout his range. Which ex CT? How does one become an ex-Ct? You mean reverted to root voice or just retired?
If you mean people like Manzotti I agree....he ruined several recordings of very rare opera's including Pergolesi's Prigoniero and Treatta's Ippolitto.
You can be an ex ctenor if you take up a career as a very successful conductor - need I say more - and acquire a reputation for pleasantry to rival Battle's.
Check out the homage site at www.meyerbeer.com for a discography. Opera Rara (UK) has done two terrific Meyerbeer bel canto works in their entirety. "Il Crociato" is on 3 disks with the fantabulous Bruce Ford in the heroic tenor role. Then there's "Margharita d'Anjou," which features one of the most exquisite soprano/violin duets I've ever heard in opera,or elsewhere.
I listened to the whole thing. Maniaci can sing throughout his whole range? I found both of them to have very fluttery, wobbly sounding voices (vibrato is simply too fast and intrusive on top), and ascents to the top sound awkward for both of them. Also, neither of them possess a particularly attractive timbre, although that may just be the recording, which is rather muffled.
Too baroque for bel canto? Sounds funny... baroque IS bel canto... :)
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Hmmmm? Bitter exCT now conducting...must be Rene Jacobs
Flavio83: Uh, uh, bel canto is NOT baroque, or vice versa, you got me all confused. Do you categorize Mozart with Bellini and Rossini? See, there IS a difference.
opéra chanteuse,
Ciofi's a bit too baroque-sounding for bel canto?
I must totally disagree. Ciofi is definitely a very light voice and has, IMHO, a scintillating timbre but it only makes her bel canto repertoire more fresh.
The fact that late classical and romantic opera is, in general, more lavishly conceived than baroque doesn’t need to be interpreted by dressing it up with more lavish voices … at least on the other side of the big water it’s not necessarily the way, luckily (theatres around Italy are *not THAT lavish* , you know … isn’t it agonising to have to make yourself heard in virtually a half-stadium… )
Notably, Ciofi sings almost exclusively Italian bel canto, rarely allowing, and she regularly pleases us with it. Her Lucy was splendid. Her Marie was splendid. Her Fanny was splendid. Her singing is splendid. Definitely among the clearest I ever heard.
...
And in case Trebs(my favourite spinto wannabe) has trouble with any of the stuff she seems to aspire to futurely / presently / has lately aspired, she would only need to *watch*, not even listen. Ciofi in action is a mobile technical workshop (but those faces she makes!!! OMG!!! LOL).
But anyway, Ciofi vs Trebs?... totally astray
Forgive me for being an asshole, but I've been carrying a certain rage since some jerk named AC (his idiot blog is linked here) attacked 'bel canto'.
It's a popular term, and even Philip Gosset uses it in his great book Divas and Scholars. But the proper term is prima ottocento.
It's important because this was a definite school and in fact it was crucial to the invention of romanticism in music.
Rossini was papa, first period Verdi brought up the rear. It lasted 60 years, but the influence of one of its composers lasted far longer.
The composers included Rossini, Pacini, Mercadante, Vaccai, Costa, The brothers' Ricci, the Italian Meyerbeer, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.
They moved farther and farther away from the form bound opera seria or drama giocosa of Mozart, or the operas of Haydn, or the less sophisticated work of Gluck. Instead they invented their own forms, which involved less repetition, greater exploration of sonority, a freer harmonic sense, and the use of shorter musical forms to make more 'realistic' dramatic realizations and reversals.
Rossini had started this is in the 1790's with his wonderful farse; Pacini (much too little studied) wrote 70 operas and tried many formulas to liberate himself from the classical models. Mercadante probably invented the rhythmically driven 'big tune' made to seem inevitable by the orchestra pounding out a waltz, march, mazurka or what was called a polacca (for cabalettas). Donizetti and Verdi took this much farther, but it actually influenced Chopin, Berlioz, and Schubert just for starters.
The great talent though (after the world genius Rossini) was Bellini. He pretty much invented the romantic elegiac mode, that was heard throughout the 19th century. He did this through a free harmony, flexible rhythms, exploration of sonority and of course through those long, expertly built and brilliantly sustained melodic lines.
He influenced Chopin directly, they were friends, and Chopin -- who hated just about all living composers - admired Bellini. So did Wagner, so did Verdi.
The end of Norma, with his rising sequences and increasing orchestral sound, its clever repeats of melodic material is heard as an obvious model for the end of Gotterdammerung, the start and end of the love duet in Tristan, and is heard as far away as the Fifth symphony of Tchaikovsky, and most of the music of Glinka. I could go on and on and bore people more but I just had to get it out of my system.
But it is important to remember 'bel canto' (io tremo) was a school with enormous influence, and was by Mozart's standards for example, avant garde (also crude).
Mrsjohnclaggart, are you refering to me? If you are, I didn't "attact" the bel canto repertoire. I adore Bellini, perhaps, even more than Verdi. I was simply having a hard time classifying Mozart with bel canto.
And one more thing, When I said that Ciofi "made a funny sounding Susanah", I actually meant it as a compliment, listen to her Figaro recording with Jacobs and you'll know what I mean.
Oh, No Opera Chanteuse -- I was just flying off the handle about someone who has a blog and whose first initials are AC. It had nothing to do with you.
I do think Cioffi can sound rather pinched. It's very noticeable on the Villazon Monteverdi disk where Haim tunes at A=481, an amazing choice and poor Patrizia has to really neigh through her nose on some attacks.
(Alessandroni, one of the great Monteverdi scholar-performers has argued the pitch was MUCH lower, perhaps in the A=415 range.These arguments can never be won -- some people take church organs as the way of establishing common pitch but I think that's unreliable and unrealistic -- it was a time of tenors (this is Venice 1630-60), high (French called them haute contre), medium and low.
To establish so high a tuning almost mandates countertenors or castrati -- though I will say that Villazon, having to bring his voice forward sounds much better than usual (IMO) on record. But Monteverdi would never have used a counter-tenor, and there is some debate about whether castrati were involved in his operas (Ottone in Poppea may have been a castrato because the historical Otho was described as ill shaped with long bandy legs and a weird head, which pretty much is how castrati looked -- the literate audience would have been in on the joke. But Nero? I believe this might have been a high tenor who could use a re-enforced falsetto to blend with Poppea -- the lines over lap so it's clear that they're fucking but also to blend with Lucano in act two ("Hor che Seneca e morto) -- 'pur ti miro '(not by Claudio I'm certain) needs the soprano blend, but the Lucano duo needs for the men to sing in thirds not tenths (which happens with a counter tenor or soprano).
Wheew! What a relief. Thanks for clarifying.
My two-cent opinion about bel canto:
BC is a term usually employed rather loosely to define a type of singing, an aesthetics of singing if you want, which seems connected to, or perhaps even required by, Italian operas composed between the early eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, say Alessandro Scarlatti to Bellini/Donizetti. Of course the compositional style and dramaturgy of works composed in this ca. 140 years changed enormously, but the basic approach to singing didn't really. The big change seems to have come in the 1830s and 1840s. That's why many singers who perform Pergolesi and Handel also perform Mozart, Rossini and Bellini, but not Verdi, Wagner, Puccini or Strauss. Ciofi is a perfect example of this attitude. This doesn't mean that operas composed after 1830/1840 cannot be approached from a bel canto standpoint. But negotiations will have to take place when this happens. As for definitions, it's hard to come up with a satisfactory one. Here is what I found in the latest edition of Grove's dictionary:
"Generally understood, the term ‘bel canto’ refers to the Italian vocal style of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the qualities of which include perfect legato production throughout the range, the use of a light tone in the higher registers and agile and flexible delivery. More narrowly, it is sometimes applied exclusively to Italian opera of the time of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. In either case, ‘bel canto’ is usually set in opposition to the development of a weightier, more powerful and speech-inflected style associated with German opera and Wagner in particular."
Apolgies, I am sometimes possessed by a malign spirit called Albert, and then what terror!!!!!! Eman I think the problem is the 'general' use of the word, which most people take to refer to florid singing.
But the 'period' about which my nemesis AC was pontificating on Opera-L, is from roughly 1800-1860. It doesn't only concern vocal line, but the entire approach a composer takes to creating a long term form. Gone after 1800, for example was the sonata allegro act finale (of which Mozart was the greatest master), in fact the use of sonata form to establish emotional/dramatic context was done away with (Mozart does this in 'ah taci ingiusto core' from Don Giovanni). Also there is a very different view of sonority and much freer use of arioso within recitative (this had occured in the first operas too but the sound of it in the prima ottocento is different). Finally sonority and sequences become very important -- the sonority richer than before, the use of sequences (instead of 'development) was frowned on before 1800. Finally the deliberate use of dancing or marching rhythms was largely an invention of the Italian school of the prima ottocento but can be found in Chopin, Schubert, Verdi, the younger Wagnerm Mendelssohn's lyric pieces (the songs without words), much of Liszt's first period piano writing, a lot of Berlioz and so on.
To speak of styles of singing is complicated, partially because we don't have recorded evidence of what people sounded like.
However, 'bel canto' as a term for singing won't do for the first hundred years of opera. What was required there was 'recitar cantando' and the words were crucial, they could be declaimed off the note (Monteverdi in letters to his librettist friend Striggio and to singers) insists his notes, and their values be ignored if they impeded declamation.
Though florid ability was a given in the first hundred years, scores require much more -- there are long recitatives, there is a kind of stychomachia called the stille concitato (an invention of Monteverdi's taken up widely), there are recitatives with little songs sometimes used as refrains, or as end points (these are called ariettas). The fluent movement of the vocal line from declamation through all kinds of singing is one of the remarkable aspects of this period.
The ended with the rise of opera seria, which shortly became very rigidly enforced. There recitative was confined to secco, and the vocal lines were written with florid passages composed, with room for further decoration in the da capo (which did not exist in its extended form before the opera seria). The great composer of opera seria in its most popular form was Alessandro Scarlatti.
Handel has been discovered where Scarlatti mostly hasn't been, but Handel took a much freer view of the seria format.
There is a vast difference in the treatment of vocal lines between Bellini and Donizetti let alone the two of them and A. Scarlatti.
Also Verdi imitated both Bellini and Donizetti very heavily in his first period into his second (compare Lucrezia Borgia and Rigoletto), compare Madre Pietoso Virgine to many of Bellini scenas.
I think the 'basics' of what you are calling bel canto continued until the first world war. Just listen to Plancon or Escalais, an Otello who can handle runs and trill wonderfully or the mezza voce and florid brilliance of Battistini. But enough of me for one year!!!!
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