Opera
CD and Other Review

Review: Verdi: Otello (Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia)

Last month we reviewed the 1954 Rigoletto, not an opera one normally associates with the thrilling tenor, but this recording of Verdi’s Otello from the same year on Decca’s budget Eloquence label features Mario del Monaco in a role which fits him like a glove and which he made very much his own in the 1950s and ‘60s. And it pairs him with Tebaldi as Desdemona. You can tell straight away, despite the obvious drawbacks of a mono recording, exactly why this partnership set the opera world alight for two decades. Their musical chemistry is still potent 60 years on. Alberto Erede conducts the magnificent Accademia di Santa Cecilia with dramatic verve and gusto. Italian baritone Aldo Protti, so compelling as Rigoletto on the companion disc, is equally impressive as the wilily conniving Iago, while tenor Piero de Palma (Cassio) and mezzo Luisa Ribachi (Emilia) give great support. But this is all about Tebaldi and Del Monaco. They had recorded Aida two years earlier so their partnership was well established, but the Decca executives must have been rubbing their hands with glee to have found such a magnificent double act whose true worth would flower with the emergence of stereo…

October 22, 2015
Opera
CD and Other Review

Review: Rossini: Guillaume Tell (Teatro Comunale di Bologna)

How extraordinary, when you think about it, is Guillaume Tell in the career of Gioacchino Rossini? At the age of 37, at the very height of his powers, he writes his longest, grandest, and probably his greatest French opera, only to then fall silent for decades except for a few naughty piano works and the odd bon mot. He must have known (or feared) that he could do no better and, listening to it all over again, his final opera is a very fine thing indeed. This outing comes from the admirable and ambitious annual Rossini Festival in Pesaro, and if there’s one thing they invariably do well it’s pick a cast. I really can’t imagine a better sung bit of bel canto than this. Add to that a magnificently detailed reading of the score, plus a thoughtful production, and this is nigh on four hours of operatic heaven. Graham Vick’s neatly politicised staging shifts the action from late medieval times to the Swiss ‘Downton Abbey’ era, focusing on the class oppression that was running its course round about then rather than on the stark nationalism of the original. Against a bleak, white set, the drama is played out effectively…

October 12, 2015
Opera
CD and Other Review

Review: Anne Sofie von Otter: 10 Classic Albums

Anne Sofie von Otter has crossed more genre boundaries than most and with effortless ease, so when DG marked her 60th birthday by asking her to pick her best 10 albums it was no surprise that she would come up with this stunner. The set, branded “10 Classic Albums”, lives up to the name. We get lavish helpings of Brahms, French chansons, late-Romantic lieder and Scandinavian songs alongside von Otter’s brilliant collaboration with Elvis Costello, and we are given a bonus with her 1997 arias from Handel’s Ariodante, her first collaboration with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre. They also collaborated on an all-Offenbach album, done with wit and elan and even if it’s not your aperitif of choice von Otter’s ability to inhabit the music will impress you. English conductor John Eliot Gardiner is another regular partner and their 1994 Kurt Weill tribute, Speak Low, represented another outstanding departure. Two further jewels in the set are her Baroque ventures with Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antiqua Köln, Lamenti and (my favourite) Handel’s Marian Cantatas. But it is her 30-year association with fellow Swede, pianist Bengt Forsberg, which is the beating heart here. Their broad musical landscape takes in Cécile Chaminade’s…

October 12, 2015