Baroque Reigned In Munich: Alcina CD From the 2005 Munich Opera Festival
Written: Oct 09 '07 (Updated Oct 11 '07)
Product Rating:
Pros: Complete uncut recording. Magnificent singing by all principals. Great packaging.
Cons: More fire can be had from the conductor's podium, but not bad here either.
The Bottom Line: One of the greatest performance of Händel masterpiece. Complete recording. Harteros & Kasarova make Bonnie & Clyde a pair of tamed pussy cats!
smorg's Full Review: Handel: Alcina / Bolton, Kasarova, Prina, et al
Baroque Reigned In Munich: Alcina CD From the 2005 Munich Opera Festival
This is a 3CD set of Händel’s Alcina (click link for a long synopsis of the opera) recorded at the Prinzergententheater at the Bavarian State Opera during the annual Opera Festival in 2005. I’m sorry to report that the ‘reigned’ in this review’s title is in past tense. This beautiful and intellectual staging of Alcina saw its last performance at the BSO this past July, as the theater management moves further away from the Baroque opera and is focusing more on opera from the Romantic period.
The story is of the liberation of Ruggiero, a Saracen super-knight (he is one of the superman-like heroes of the Orlando Furioso epic, the one who would go on to form the Este family line) who finds himself struck by a love spell by the sorceress Alcina on her enchanted island. Alcina has a rather unpleasant habit of blinding her handsome lovers with her own vision of reality, and then turning each of them into various artefact (animals included) once she is bored with them. Who knows what would have befell Ruggiero had his faithful and feisty fiancée Bradamante (along with her magical advisor Melisso) no turn up looking for him? At any rate, that Bradamante comes disguised as her handsome twin brother Ricciardo complicates things somewhat. Both Alcina and her sister Morgana take quite amorous interest in the ambiguous newcomer... much to the distress of the demented Ruggiero and Morgana’s boyfriend, General Oronte. Adding even more twist to the already fantastic story is the addition of Oberto, a boy who has been roaming around the island in search of his father, Osfolto (who, alas, has been turned into a lion after failing to keep Alcina romantically interested in him. This is a non-singing role). Neither Oberto nor Osfolto appear in the original epic.
CAST:
Alcina ::: Anja Harteros (soprano)
Ruggiero ::: Vesselina Kasarova (mezzo soprano)
Bradamante/Ricciardo ::: Sonia Prina (contralto)
Morgana ::: Veronica Cangemi (soprano)
Oronte ::: John Mark Ainsley (tenor)
Melisso ::: Christopher Purves (bass)
Oberto ::: Deborah York (soprano)
Ivor Bolton conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera
To see a video clip of this production, go to http://www.bayerische.staatsoper.de/570--~kosmosoper~search_video.html (the music is the Act I ballet and the A section of Alcina’s Act II ‘Ah, mio cor, schernito sei’). If you right click on the monitor, you can view it in full-screen mode.
Being a live recording, the sound quality is superb and well balanced (a remarkable feast, especially in the case of Kasarova, whose voice is so glowy and plump now that recording microphone tend to have a hard time capturing it without too much distortion on the upper notes). The audience is awesomely quiet, though you can hear a lot of stage noise (this is quite an action-pack stage production for a Baroque opera). If you don't allow the background grunting and footsteps to bother you, they'd even make you appreciate how good the singing is even more, considering what these singers are doing as they are coping with this music!
The German soprano Anja Harteros is a magnificently regal and rich-voiced Alcina. She is also a fantastic singing story-teller whose every patho oozes out of every note she sings (when she loves you, all is divine. And when she hates you, run for the nearest exit!). Her perfect command of her voice allows her to cope very nicely with some really slow tempi set by Maestro Bolton (especially during the Act II ‘Ah, mio cor’). This is one of the rare singers these days who can float pianissimo on the breath and has a good trill! It is a real treat that her Ruggiero is the equally expressive actress and a fantastic singer, the Bulgarian mezzo Vesselina Kasarova. One only need to listen to see how this Ruggiero develops through the course of the opera. He is an insecure and jealous lover of Alcina who is blinded to everything else in the beginning, but as doubts about the 'reality' of his situation creep in he becomes more introspective and purposeful. And once he has broken completely with the beautiful witch, he is the gallant warrior worthy of Ariosto's epic.
The pair of Harteros and Kasarova inject such passion and conviction into their part that even the longest arias by either just keep finishing too soon. And if you want to see the difference between an acting singer and a singing story teller, just listen to how these gals breath life into their recitative! They make it seems as though people sing to each other rather than talk in real life (which I'm glad they don't, or I'd be a mute)!
The Bradamante/Ricciardo of the young Spanish mezzo-contralto Sonia Prina confirms the very good first impression this singer made on me as the title role of the totally sucky staging of Mozart’s Ascanio in Alba from the 2006 Salzburg Festival. Her dark and youthful voice (not a true contralto, but very comfortable in the lower register) is very fitting of the female warrior status of Bradamante.... and the agility she displays (especially the furiously speedy Act II ‘Vorrei vendicarmi’) is simply jaw-dropping... Though it does come at the expense of expressiveness (the faster she does the coloratura, the less drama each note expresses). She is dramatically involved during the recitative, however. Veronica Cangemi is also one of the best Morgana on record. I love Natalie Dessay’s performance in the Gardiner CD set, but this Morgana is a different breed. She has a richer voice that can transform the virtuoso aria ‘Tornami a vegheggiar’ into something more dramatically engaging than just a usual coloratura show-off number for a human canary.
As the jealous Oronte is John Mark Ainsley, a wonderful voice actor who also copes effortlessly with his florid music while carving out his own characterization of Oronte in the recitative. Christopher Purves is the most vocally competent Melisso I’ve heard yet. His low notes are very convincing and he sings with an authority befitting a good magician. Deborah York’s innocent Oberto starts off a tad tentatively, but is all warmed up and in top form by the time of her Act II ‘Tra speme e timore’. That works out nicely as Oberto goes from the lost boy to the young man who could see through Alcina’s trap at the end of the opera.
Maestro Ivor Bolton seems to realize that with this exemplary a singing cast, he doesn’t need to do much more than accompanying the voices in his leading of the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra. That is exactly what he does. I quite like the slower tempo he sets for most of the recitatives, which really paint a more realistic picture in my mind of what is going on in the opera. Some arias get to be a bit draggy for it, however, especially Alcina’s Act II ‘Ah, mio cor’ (though Anja Harteros copes magnificently with it). I don’t know who the lead violin player is, but his/her solo in several arias (ex: Morgana’s Act II, ‘Ama, sospira’, etc.) deserves much praise. I’m of the opinion that Ruggiero’s Act II ‘Mio bel tesoro’ is a funny chunk of music/scene and even though I can only listen, Kasarova does such a wonderful job of smirking vocally with her ‘Ma non con te (but not to you)’ refrains. Even with the rather solemn accompaniment from the orchestra, I would expect the audience to let out a few laughs, but none appears on the recording (and I wish the winds accompaniment is a bit funnier for this number).
This most complete recording of the work is simply the CD set of Alcina to buy. The musical performance just doesn’t get any better than this and the packaging is very attractive (lots of photo on box, booklet, and the hard paper CD sleeves). Even those who are new to opera would likely find it very easy to enjoy this performance (and that is saying a lot for this Baroque opera). Thanks, also, to Studio Farao for putting the recitatives and the arias on separate tracks... I keep harassing them for a DVD release but they keep denying that such taping had been done. Shame...shame... I bet there's an in-house video of it, though. The sooner that surfaces on the market the better!
3 SACD-CD. Sung in Italian. Booklet contains: cast list, track list, synopsis and a brief note on the opera and this particular production in German and English, printed libretto in German, English, and Italian.
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