Dame Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton have teamed up for another interesting recital album. It’s quite varied. It starts with Chausson’s La Poème de l’amour et de la mer which is actually two songs with a piano interlude. It’s very fin de siècle chanson with the piano line rather more interesting than the vocal line but pretty decent stuff, if a bit emotionally overwrought.
Barber’s Three Songs Op.10 are quite well known, especially the last; “I hear an army”. They are dark and dramatic and suit Connolly’s voice very well. Next is the often heard Debussy piece Trois Chansons de Bilitis which purports to be settings of translations of actual Sapphic texts but which sound exactly like a 19th century Frenchman would imagine a Sapphic text to be; i.e languorous. Nicely done though. Next we come to a pair of declamatory songs by Copland; “The world feels dusty” and “I’ve heard an organ talk sometimes”. Definitely a welcome change of pace. Continue reading
Infinite Voyage is billed as the final album from the Emerson Quartet capping a long and illustrious career. It’s also a collaboration with Barbara Hannigan so it’s perhaps not surprising that it includes music by Berg, Schoenberg and Hindemith though Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle belongs to a rather different style.
Layla Claire is one of a handful of young Canadian singers making something of a splash on both sides of the Atlantic with major roles in Glyndebourne, Zürich, Toronto and Salzburg and an upcoming Pamina at the Met. Her debut recital CD Songbird, with pianist Marie-Eve Scarfone, was recently issued on the ATMA Classique label. It’s an interesting and varied collection of songs though never straying very far from familiar recital territory. It’s tilted towards French (Gounod, Chausson, Debussy, Fauré, Bizet) and German (Wolf, Strauss, Brahms, Liszt) repertoire but there’s also Quilter, Barber, Argento and Britten (the comparatively rare Seascape which is, oddly, omitted from the CD liner).
Not too many CDs of new opera recordings, at least of mainstream repertoire, come my way these days. Studio recordings have become rare and the usual medium is a video recording, itself a spin off from a live broadcast; TV, cinema or web, of a live performance. This makes sense to me. Just listening to an opera has always seemed a second best. Anyway, that’s all by way of saying that I was a bit surprised to find myself listening to a CD edition of a live recording of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut from the 2016 Salzburg Festival. How did this recording happen you ask? The answer is on the box, where Anna Netrebko in the title role, gets top billing, even over the composer.
American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, 2013 winner of Cardiff Singer of the Year, sang at Koerner Hall last night with veteran Bradley Moore at the piano. Her first set; Joaquin Turina’s Homenaje a Lope de Vega gave us a pretty good idea of the basic value proposition. She has a fantastic instrument. There is power to burn, a pleasing dark tone, accuracy and musicianship. She never sounded remotely strained even while pushing out a very impressive sound. The rest of her first half programme; Chausson’s Three Melodies and four of Schubert’s Goethe settings showed that there was more than just a big accurate voice. Basically, it’s all there. She can vary colours and scale vibrato up and down. There’s some agility. She can float quiet high notes and she can tell a story. Her diction was clear in all three languages. I would say at this point the only question mark I had was around her ability to engage the audience. If I were to judge by the very highest standards, and I’m think Bryn Terfel or Karita Mattila, there was something just the merest shade cold and technical. The second half would see whether she could, as it were , lighten up a bit.
operaramblings 