parterre box

122 comments

• 31
  CerquettiFarrell says:

  February 3, 2010 at 2:52 AM

  This is legato singing :

  This is also legato singing :

  ………. and these are very nice too!!!!!!!!!! LOL

  I’ve been trying in vain to find on youtube examples of Tebaldi’s careless phrasing, but all I could find was sheer beauty LOL Makes me very happy.

  But the other two are still the better all around MUSICIANS and it’s not Tebaldi’s fault that the major part of her career blossomed alongside one of the most influential characters in opera.
  • 31.1
    kashania says:

    February 3, 2010 at 1:20 PM

    Thank you for all that lovely legato singing. The Cerquetti Vespiri clip was completely new to me — absolutely lovely! In fact, I’m going to listen to it again right now.
    • 31.1.1
      MontyNostry says:

      February 3, 2010 at 2:32 PM

      That Cerquetti clip is gorgeous. Really classy singing. Is it live?
      • 31.1.1.1
        CerquettiFarrell says:

        February 3, 2010 at 2:51 PM

        Yes it’s live. Ref my comment to Camille below!
  • 31.2
    Camille says:

    February 3, 2010 at 2:06 PM

    Dear Mmes. Cerquetti/Farrell — is that from the same CD which has Cerquetti’s rendition of ‘Mare, o vasto mare’ — maybe the best rendition of same, albeit in italiano –?
    • 31.2.1
      CerquettiFarrell says:

      February 3, 2010 at 2:34 PM

      Dear Camille, in fact no, this is taken from the complete opera under Mario Rossi, 1956 I think it is…. The rest of the cast is not so negligible either : Tagliabue and Christoff. The tenor is Ortica, not terribly good but not that bad either.

      http://www.amazon.com/Verdi-I-Vespri-Siciliani-Giuseppe/dp/B000006NZ9/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1265225231&sr=8-6

      Here is a surprisingly lithe, nimble and unbelievably graceful Merce diletti amici from the same evening. Unbelievable. So she scraps the final D (?) who cares. She certainly gives Maria a run for her money here:

      Camilly I LURV Cerquetti in Oberon but for me the one and only in this is Farrell in her HMV recording under Schippers. WOW
      • 31.2.1.1
        kashania says:

        February 3, 2010 at 4:05 PM

        This is supremely elegant, thank you C/F. I think the final note is an E natural and I don’t care that she doesn’t sing it either. I also don’t require an E-flat at the end of “Sempre libera”. It’s great to have, especially when the singer really nails it, but a great rendition doesn’t need one, IMO.
      • 31.2.1.2
        CerquettiFarrell says:

        February 3, 2010 at 4:13 PM

        yeah, well, E Flat not really come scritto in both cases. But if it’s done well, super.
      • 31.2.1.3
        Camille says:

        February 3, 2010 at 4:43 PM

        Be still my heart! U love Cerquetti’s Ocean aria too? Then we are true soulmates as I’ve known anyone else who is even aware of it! Beati noi!,

        Oh yes, Eileen knocks the socks off it as well, but Cerquetti’s is more lyrical and graceful.

        For my small part, I am so deeply grateful to you for defending the honor of these two very great singers, both so dear to me.

        P.S. What do you think of Sylvia Sass’ Donn’Elvira on Solti’s Don Giovaani, if you please.

        Pps — so srry but I am travelling and do not have access to computer (Blackberry) so I may not hear your examples.
        XXX OOO!!!
        Camille
      • 31.2.1.4
        CerquettiFarrell says:

        February 3, 2010 at 5:05 PM

        Yes I adore both of them… ref my nick!!!!

        Humbly admit to not having heard Solti’s first Giovanni after the Ottavio Anna duet… It seemed so cold and totally not in style… I’ll try to get Sass’ Elvira though. In Mozart the conductor is so much more important IMHO than the individual singers. A good / excellent Mozart conductor is able to coerce an OK cast into a stellar ensemble (ref Busch’s Giovanni). An excellent cast will not work on its own without a very strong personality on the podium. Especially not in Giovanni!
      • 31.2.1.5
        CerquettiFarrell says:

        February 3, 2010 at 5:12 PM

        And reg Mozartean style my sympathies are totally with the chamber (or even, heaven forbid, HIP practice) aesthetics, an Anathema, I know, to many music appreciators in America. That doesn;t mean I don’t love Busch, Fricsay, E Kleiber, Szell, Davis, Rosbaud, Krips in Mozart. I adore all of them for their individual style and special way of balancing the texture and keeping everything smart and on the move. And all of them had were very ‘expressive’ conductors. But I tend to regard the mid 90s HIP recordings as reference in Mozartean style and what I prefer to hear in Mozart.
    • 31.2.2
      CerquettiFarrell says:

      February 3, 2010 at 2:55 PM

      BTW Cerquetti’s greatest singing on that live Vespri comes in the act 2 duet (unbelievable!) and the great ensemble in act 3(?) -- addio dolce mia terra or something like that…

      And around 30 tears later Susan Dunn very nearly managed to achieve the same kind of greatness. Luckily for us, it was televised and is commercially available. The phrasing is not as classy and patrician as La grande Cerquetti but the legato is ravishing, the tone luminous and the control legendary. And there’s plenty of warmth and feel for the idiom and Verdi’s line.
      • 31.2.2.1
        iltenoredigrazia says:

        February 3, 2010 at 5:10 PM

        Is that really Susan Dunn? I don’t remember ever hearing her do singing of that quality. (The makeup and costume looks rather old.)
      • 31.2.2.2
        Sanford says:

        February 3, 2010 at 5:29 PM

        Well, she didn’t last long, but when she was good, she was great. I have the Werner Herzog-directed Giovanna D’Arco with her, and she doesn’t really achieve anything close to that in terms of line.

        But as the Vicar would say, she’s no Astra Desmond!
      • 31.2.2.3
        CerquettiFarrell says:

        February 3, 2010 at 6:14 PM

        Around 1990 it was basically over. Such pity!
        I love her Decca debut recital. So many things are really impressive. A great Ernani involami, sketchy trill, but everything else is great. Very good Ah! perfido and good stab at Dich teure Halle. I think the top went pretty quickly (a similarity there with Cerquetti) and maybe she lost interest. I really don’t know what went wrong.
    • 31.2.3
      CerquettiFarrell says:

      February 3, 2010 at 2:56 PM

      ugh, I meant 30 years, of course
• 32
  wladek says:

  February 4, 2010 at 2:32 PM

  mrsjohnclaggart– nice going
  you really had to be there .I heard all her Met work sorry to say – but the interesting thing was you really wanted her to be a sensation to
  live up to all the press nonsense -and
  when you finally did hear her -she was dreadful in comparison to others.It was another age -the 1st
  Lucia was 2nd, rate and the others not much better – it was in a way
  the changing of the old guard , not
  that the Pons Lucia was something to cheerish .As for Tebaldi she was
  the last of the old school .Since
  not all sounded good on recordings
  no matter how “adjusted ” -you are
  correct in the thought “you had to hear them in the house ” to get a measure of their talent, otherwise
  it is silly chatter .
  • 32.1
    mrsjohnclaggart says:

    February 4, 2010 at 9:00 PM

    Wladek I applaud your courage. I do keep hearing that I saw only the bad performances at the Met (except for the Norma, which nearly all concede was a disappointment and apparently on the first night Callas made a point of applauding Barbieri at the curtain calls — perhaps to diffuse some hostility toward herself). Some say this or that Traviata or Lucia was terrific. Though of course I have known many like you — whatever she accomplished in Italy, Chicago and Dallas she did not match at least in NY as far as I can tell, though of course one or another performance might have been very good. My impression was that the Old Met was too large a house for her voice, and the (literally) dusty productions none of which were carefully rehearsed did not play to her particular strengths as a stage animal.

    Still, De Sabata’s son told me that he (papa) respected her work ethic and seriousness but didn’t love her, while he adored Tebaldi. Of course Countess Wally Castelbarco (nee Toscanini) chose Callas as diva of her cabal and drove first de Sabata out, and then Tebaldi, so de Sabata fils may have had an ax to grind. However, when I asked Gavazzeni about female singers he said, “the greatest dramatic soprano was Cobelli; Caniglia had talent but no pitch; Tebaldi had the most beautiful voice and was simpatica, perhaps too much so; and the greatest talent is La Scotto, though Freni (around the corner in her dressing room) has ability.” And Callas, I asked. “She worked very hard and some loved her,” he said.

    I asked Mo. Muti whose patron had been Antonino Votto about various singers. According to him among the females Votto (who had been Toscanini’s first assistant) had loved Arangi-Lombardi, Scacciati (”she smelled,” he said) Cobelli, Pacetti, Cigna (though ‘pazza’), Pampanini, loved Caniglia’s voice and temperament but couldn’t bear a lot of her singing, Tebaldi and Freni and Scotto, though the later was deemed difficult and there were divisions of opinion about her among the La Scala staff and public at the time. And Callas, I asked? “She was as you say in America, well connected but he said she was a great professional.”

    I don’t think the best records/pirates are frauds really but I do think it was a very short prime, and that perhaps after 55 she needed ’special handling’ to do her best. That she was the greatest musician EVER among singers is something I’ve seen here and elsewhere and there I am struck dumb, since even with her voice waning she could have done so much had she possessed the genius of say, De Gaetani, a stunning and amazing musician. She could have skipped the Carter and Crumb scores (though Jan’s handling of them was amazing, and her singing qua singing was very much part of the magic) but found other new work (she had the clout and backing to commission works for her limits), and of course have explored the more or less standard song rep (Berlioz, Gounod, Chabrier, Chausson, Massenet, Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, Poulenc — she had good French.)
    • 32.1.1
      Camille says:

      February 4, 2010 at 10:25 PM

      Mrs. J. Claggart — if you please — it interests me very much that these two great Maestros should mention Giuseppina Cobelli, in the first instance, as “the greatest”. In my attempts to track her down I have only happened onto dribs and drabs; an appallingly noisy bit of Tristan and another album with a couple of arias “Voi lo sapete, o Mamma”, is all that springs to mind. Do you happen to know if she has recorded anything else? I gather she died rather young and was deaf toward the end, but still sang. If you know something more would you care to illuminate me?

      Much obliged and my fond regards to you.
• 32.1
  daviddc says:

  February 1, 2010 at 7:10 PM

  Never having had an opportunity to hear her live — she was before my time — I am forced to rely on recordings. For many years, I just didn’t pay any attention because she didn’t make an impression. Yes, shoot me, she just didn’t. At some point, someone made me listen to the very first recordings, including the Lohengrin Elsa, and I was able to understand the sheer beauty of her voice and extrapolate what an amazing experience as sound qua sound it must have been to hear her in the theater. Plus she was by all accounts good and loud, which is something very much NOT to be sneezed at.

  I do think as a creature of the stage, rather than entirely as a vocal phenom, she gets a lot of praise for sincerity and similar adjectives of the type Sonia objects to in “The Seagull.” Not quite as bad as “she had beautiful hair” but in that vein. Which is another reason I think I probably wouldn’t have gotten it.

  I’m don’t mean to condescend to her. My personal lack of interest would be of less than zero significance to her, and obviously her artistry spoke to a lot of people. I just never find her, for want of a better word, “incisive” and I think that’s something I value in a musician that I don’t hear from her. Something about the rhythm and how she hears the beats in the music. My loss, obviously.

  OK CF, now they can kill us both. [Listening to Mirielle's Melisande]
• 32.1.1
  iltenoredigrazia says:

  February 1, 2010 at 7:38 PM

  I never thought of Tebaldi as “loud.” She could produce volume when called for but she was most comfortable in middle register and soft singing.

  For me what made her very special onstage was her feminity / vulnerability. She just seemed to look and feel the character. It was hard not to love her.
• 32.1.2
  iltenoredigrazia says:

  February 2, 2010 at 8:59 PM

  davidc, try listening to her Elizabetta in Tanhauser with Bohm conducting. You’ll like it.
• 32.1.2.1
  richard says:

  February 1, 2010 at 8:04 PM

  Indeed, her audiences did love her. I only saw Tebaldi from the late 60s on, the top was hard and often constricted. Often the middle was still rolled out with melting sound but sometimes there was so much tension in her singing that she would rush the beat on the higher notes, her jaw dropped down on her chest and her palms pushed together.

  But the audiences didn’t really care about the flaws.
  She was really one of those stage perfomers that had a kind of magic, she communicated openly with her audiences and they responded directly to her.

  I saw one of her Met Fanciullas. Her singing was almost poor, so much of the music was yelled and very flat. But it was impossible not to love her Minnie, who would fight to the death for the man she loved. The audiences simply roared their approval.

  It was really amazing for a newbie to see this kind of excitement, especially if you took into account that much of the singing itself was no longer on the level of her earlier days.

  I agree with a some of the comments of CF. Her use of aspirates compromises some of her Verdi singing and often she used simply slowing down as an expressive device. But I accept these kind of flaws as part of the package she was able to offer which was pretty amazing.
• 32.1.2.1
  Will says:

  February 1, 2010 at 8:05 PM

  Oh, but she could be loud when she wanted. At a December 30, 1965 METBoheme opposite Konya, the big second act ensemble was moving to its climax when her voice came sailing up and over everybody else like a descant, then she nailed and held the high note thrillingly. There was no strain, no yelling, just full, rich tone. The place went wild.
• []
  Often admonished says:

  February 2, 2010 at 4:14 AM

  The Decca stereo Boheme captures just that soaring sound in her Act 3 duet with Bastianini. Incredible.
• []
  iltenoredigrazia says:

  February 2, 2010 at 12:15 PM

  I agree. When she sang out full voice, it was a very big sound. And she knew when not to be upstaged, like in the ensemble at the end of Act 2 of Boheme. Musetta would be at center stage at that point but Tebaldi was not about to be ignored.

  I remember jumping in my seat when she started Suicidio! They probably heard her in the real Venice.
• []
  Tamerlano says:

  February 2, 2010 at 2:13 PM

  Yes, and her “sono andati” on that recording is remarkable in that her sound is soooo beautiful, even, affecting. Her’s is the sound that mean “italian soprano” for me…something in the dark, velevetty, femininity of the middle voice — from about G to F…the passagio was always a bit of a problem.
  I think she was one of the great Puccini sopranos.
• []
  Harry says:

  February 2, 2010 at 2:36 PM

  The Decca stereo Boheme with Tebaldi ….My first opera recording(on vinyl, too)……and I still love the bloody thing (on CD) as much as when I first got it.
• []
  Tamerlano says:

  February 2, 2010 at 2:52 PM

  I bought the highlights on CD years ago (remember CD’s???). Dramatically, she could sound a tad detached in the studio, and so she is here, but the sound is luxe, luxe, luxe. And the sense of style — knowing how to COLOR a line, how the slightest dip into chest can make all the differences (as in “sono andati”). This kind of thing is soooo important to the music, and makes it live, and so few sopranos do it anymore. Fleming tries, but it sounds pasted on, inauthentic, ham fisted. Perhaps only Georghiu still sings this way, and Trebs when she plugs in. Great voices still exist, but the style is absent. I once sat in on a coaching of Boheme in college in which the coach was insistent that you not sing any portamenti, everything come scritto, it was a nightmare and it made Puccini sound like shit. Style makes all the difference, and what a disservice she was doing…one of the singers was Dimitri Pittas, and I don’t remember him actually following any of the rules she laid down. Good boy.
• []
  mrmyster says:

  February 2, 2010 at 10:38 PM

  Yep – “loud” is better.
  thanks, digrazia, for making my point.