The Magic of Kasarova (RCA Red Seal- 2004)

This audio CD is a compilation of 10 mezzo soprano opera scenes divided into 13 tracks (2 of which are live recordings from actual opera performances).

’Eine Opera ist ein absurdes Ding.
Befehle werden singend erteilt,
ueber Politik wird im Duett verhandelt.
Man tanzt um ein Grab,
und Dolchstiche werden melodisch verabreicht.
(Opera is an absurd thing.
Orders are given in songs,
Politics are discussed in duets.
Man dances on the grave,
And deliver stabs in the melody.)”
- Richard Strauss, Capriccio


The quote above aptly describe the weirdness of opera. It takes an extraordinary artist to make an art form like this seems real, and Vesselina Kasarova is one of the very few singers who can really make you forget reality and be transported into even the most far-fetched of opera scene.... even ones written more than 2 centuries ago.

The voice is very unusually androgenic mezzo soprano of many colors, all behind a thin layer of smokiness (not hoarse, mind... like a woodwind... like A clarinet that extends up to brilliant English horn-like top notes). It is a lyrical voice with magnificent spinto thrust (she can overcome a blaring orchestra when she turns up the volume, but prefers to sing softly... using the acute loudness as a very effective contrast to highlight forceful emotions). I don't know how she does it, but she can even manipulate the amount of vibrato (natural pulsation in the voice) to highlight just the right phrases makes exquisite use of volume control (mezza di voce) even on high notes. The plumpness of the voice also does nothing to inhibit her extreme agility. Not only can she sing many notes in fast succession (coloratura), she does so without blurring each note and knows how to use these virtuoso tricks as communicative tools to enhance her story-telling rather than to show off her own virtuoso capability.

1. MOZART: La clemenza di Tito: Deh, per questo istante solo
From her Mozart Arias CD conducted by Sir Colin Davis, this is a spectacularly dramatic opening to this set. The Roman nobleman Sesto had given in to his girl-friend and attempted to kill his childhood friend the Emperor Tito (Titus Vespasiano). Thinking himself sentenced to death in the arena, Sesto now pleads with his old friend and emperor to remember their old love and friendship and understand how sorry he feels for his treason. It is a long and harrowing aria that starts with a most dignified soul searching opening phrase (terrifyingly exposed for the singer since it is done while the orchestra stays very quiet, and the audience knows exactly what notes she is supposed to sing since the woodwinds had telegraphed it immediately before). Many mood shifts as Sesto battles his inner demons, alternating between feeling remorse for his deeds and resentment for Tito’s apparent disbelief of his repentance, and ending in a spectacularly agitated cadenze that can be interpreted in many ways (either mad at himself or at Tito or fate altogether).

I dare say that you won’t find a more revealing rendition of this aria than here. If I were Tito, I’d pardon her... but there’s enough indignation injected in her Sesto that I would definitely be keeping her on a short leash afterward.


2. ROSSINI: La Cenerentola: Tutto e deserto/ Una volta c’era un re/ Un soave non so che
Taken from her Rossini Arias and Duets CD with Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez, this scene depicts the 1st encounter between Angelina (Cenerentola, or Cinderella) and Ramiro (Prince Charming), who is under disguise as his own valet. His is the first voice you hear entering the apparently vacant household musing of being tipped off that he might find one of the inhabitants a suitable bride, and what does he find but a pretty young servant lost in her own thought. Their mutual surprise turn into love at first sight of the uncertain kind before she takes her leave to go fetch her more legitimate step-sisters and their father. It is astounding that this is a studio recording since both singers do a marvelous job of being totally in character and displaying more spontaneity than I’ve heard in many a live in performance recordings.


BELLINI: I Capuleti e i Montecchi:
3. Siam giunti
4. Ecco la tromba
5. Deh! Tu bell’anima
From the complete CD of the opera from 1998, this is a harrowing scene in Act II where Romeo, believing his beloved Giulietta (Juliette) had died, comes to mourn at her tomb. It opens with a choral accompaniment of Romeo’s Montague folks who had helped him breaking into the Capulets’ tomb. The devastating aria Deh! Tu bell’anima is surely one of the most beautiful songs in bel canto opera (and just about as exposed as they come. The orchestra never gets above piano in its accompaniment of the voice). With a singer as apt at projecting her feelings into her voice without compromising the legato line (smooth transition between notes) as Kasarova... make sure you have a full box of Kleenex handy before playing it or you might cause a flood. She never mimes sobbing, but there is no mistaking that Romeo is weeping his eyes off in this rendition.


6. THOMAS: Mignon: Connais-tu le pays?
From her Nuit resplendissante CD, this is a song the expatriate Mignon sings in recalling her homeland to her lover. Some homeland it must be indeed with all the nostalgia displayed. The flutes miming the birds hopping about on tree limbs or the bees flirting with the flowers in the field, and the strings miming the waves softly brushing the shoreline. And if anyone can understand the homesick Mignon, the Bulgarian Kasarova who now lives in Switzerland surely does (Switzerland is a wonderful place, but there is no place like home, is there?).


MASSENET: Werther:
7. Act III Prelude: Werther! Qui m’aurait dit la place?
8. Je vous ecris de ma petite chambre (Charlotte’s Letter Scene)
From the complete recording of the opera from 1999... All nostalgia must end at some point, might as well end it with a startling jolt of this darkly premonitive scene that opens Act III of Massenet’s tragic opera (taken from Goethe’s tragedy The Sorrows of Young Werther). Charlotte loves Werther but she is married to Albert, and in their time divorce was a big taboo. That doesn’t deter Werther from sending her love letters, resulting to their appointment to meet on Christmas’ Eve. Now the day has arrived and Charlotte sits alone in her den re-reading Werther’s many letters and her mood shifts from the good memories that they recall to the dark realization that this relation with the man she really loves must end.

Really, if you are in a depression, avoid these 2 tracks at all cost. Massenet must have been in a heck of a dark mood when he composed the thing, and if the orchestral painting of a tunnel without any light at the end of it isn’t enough to send you to the deep end, to the deep end you will go in a hurry once Kasarova starts singing. How she sings like that without going nuts herself is beyond me. Maybe that’s why she is so perky when she isn’t singing... having dumped all the dark mood into the recording and ran out of her share of depression for perhaps another century (lucky us we get to inherit it listening to this thing).


9. BERLIOZ: La damnation de Faust: D’Amour l’ardente flamme
This is a live recording from a performance of the opera (from another Goethe story, of course) at the 1999 Salzburg Summer Festival (captured on the DVD also). Marguerite believes that she has been abandoned by Faust, and now she sits by the window airing her longing for the love that should be and wondering if he would ever return. It is a long and darkly romantic piece (with the oboe solo caressing the vocal line, echoing Marguerite’s longing for love).

This song requires an intensely dramatic singer who can sustain the drama over a long period (11:32min), or it would be a very effective form of a sonic sleeping pill. Intensely dramatic is what you get in this rendition. There is a certain ‘wildness’ in her upper register that makes this Marguerite’s passion and raving of the many things about Faust that turns her on very bitingly vivid. And those chesty ‘Ah!’ she does are sonically at least R-rated. Make me wonder what a fool Faust is to think that he would need to sell his soul to the Devil to get the girl...


10. ROSSINI: Tancredi: Perche turba la chalma di questo cor
From the complete CD of the opera conducted by Roberto Abbado, this is the lesser known Act II aria where the Syracusian knight Tancredi takes leave of his love Amenaide whom he thought had betrayed him. The chorus of soldiers are waiting for him to lead them out to fight the enemies besieging the city, and Tancredi is determined to lay as much guilt on the girl as possible before going out heroically to his final battle (a kamikaze mentality, if you will). What can I say, it’s an opera seria full of characters apt to feel sorry for themselves. And no matter how smug and James Bond-ishly chauvinistic Kasarova’s Tancredi is, she is so heroic in her glory-seeking coloratura passages that one has to root for the guy.


11. MOZART: Cosi fan tutte: Ah scostati!/ Smanie implacabili che m’agitate
From her Mozart Arias CD, this is a harebrained song of exaggerated desperation sung by the rather shallow and prone to exaggeration Dorabella, whose soldier fiancé Ferrando and his buddy Guglielmo (her sister Fiordiligi’s fiancé) had apparently gone off to the frontline. Dorabella now bursts into a spectacular indulgence of rather phony desperation to the audience of her more sane sister and their seen it all maid Despina. A good scene this Dorabella puts up, too. You just have to love the girl for her deliciously bird-brainedness.


12. GLUCK: Orphee et Eurydice: Qu’entends-je? Qu’a-t-il dit?/Amour, viens rendre a mon ame
This track is a live recording from a performance at the Bavarian State Opera in 2003. It is not from the performance captured on the DVD of the opera. Orphee (Orpheus), whose wife Eurydice had died from snake bite has been given a second chance by his patron god Apollo in allowing him to follow his wife into Hades and retrieve her to the land of the living if he could calm the furies who guard the land of the dead with his music... under the condition that he may not look at Eurydice before they have crossed the River Styx back again, nor could he explain this condition to her.

The lead-in sung speech sees Orphee voicing his premonition of the fuss Eurydice will put up with his avoiding her eyes and how trying the efforts involved in this rescue would be. He accepts the challenge; nonetheless, and summons Amour (the god of love) to render him the strength to rise to the task and bring his wife back again safely. It is a wonderfully dramatic bravura aria that features a spectacular ending coloratura cadenze that was written and sung by the celebrated contralto/composer Pauline Viardot-Garcia. As virtuosic as any coloratura cadenze comes and the only person who has done it better than the version captured here is Vesselina Kasarova herself in the DVD version (which is available on the CD called ‘Das Bayerische Staatsoper: Live 1997-2005’). The Viardot Cadenze run isn’t as clean as in the DVD, but this is still the best of all the other versions I’ve heard (including the Italian versions by other celebrated mezzos and counter-tenors).


13. HAENDEL: Rinaldo: Or la tromba in suon festante
From her A Portrait CD, this is a martial aria the Crusading Rinaldo sings near the end of the opera as to pep talk his fellow Christians before riding to the final battle to reclaim Jerusalem. It is a short burst of a bravura song with the highly heroic coloratura passages where the singer and the virtuoso trumpet feeding on each other’s adrenaline with the effect of rendering the listeners the high feeling of invincibility and obliterate any doubt in the triumphant outcome. Her coloratura in the repeat finale (da capo) isn’t as elaborated as I’ve heard in a few other renditions, but her conviction and optimism is as infectious as the winter flu. Obliterating any hope of using this CD as a bedtime sleep-inducing device.... After this number you’d have to have a serious case of narcolepsy to be any more sleepy than a caffeine-overdosed road-runner.


I can’t seem to keep any review of a recording of Kasarova short. She is that kind of singers whose singing you will either fall head over heel in love with or you’ll hate it. She isn’t singing as much as she is telling the story of each operatic scene as if she is re-living it with each sung note. If you are looking for just 1 recording of this singer to buy, this is a good choice. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.


1 CD. Booklet comes with a fascinating interview with the diva about her wide-ranging repertoire (has gotten even wider since the CD came out) in German with translations in English and French. Libretto for each track is provided in original language and English translation.

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Listening