CD review
Marcella Giordano
Serena Daolio (Marcella), Natalizia Carone (Clara), Angelica Girardi (Raimonda), Mara D’Antini (Eliana), Maria Rosa Rondinelli (Lea), Danilo Formaggio (Giorgio), Marcello Rosiello (Vernier), Pierluigi Dilengite (Drasco), Giovanni Coletta (Barthélemy), Graziano De Pace (Flament) )
Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia, c. Manlio Benzi
Dynamic CDS 573 (64 minutes)
Amica Mascagni
Anna Malavasi (Amica), Francesca De Giorgi (Magdelone), David Sotgiu (Giorgio), Pierluigi Dilengite (Rinaldo), Marcello Rosiello (MaÎtre Camoine)
Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia, Bratislava Chamber Choir c. Manlio Benzi
Dynamic CDS 574 (78 minutes)
These live recordings derive from the Festival della Valle d’Itria at Martina Franca Festival (reviewed in OPERA, December 2007). As both of these operas are among the least known by their respective composers, the presentation is good, with detailed liner notes. Marcella has not previously been recorded, but Amica, Mascagni’s only opera with a French libretto, was recorded in 1996, with Katia Ricciarelli, in a later Italian version. The recording quality for both operas is constricted and congested, the orchestra often covering voices in moments of climax. Stage noise can be most intrusive, particularly in Marcella where the hushed conclusion is wrecked by clumping footsteps. The conductor, Manlio Benzi, paces and phrases with sensitivity, though the orchestra is too small for these ripe idioms, and sounds increasingly ragged, particularly in Mascagni’s stentorian climaxes. There are a few disconcerting moments when stage and pit part company.
Marcella was not a success in 1907: its most famous aria, Dolce notte misterioso, was added for a 1938 revival with Tito Schipa, who later recorded the aria. The opera charts very stale waters indeed; an incognito prince, a Parisian restaurant and a lovers idyll were over-mined seams for Italian bourgeois opera and despite Giordano’s customary craft and extreme compactness (three acts last just over an hour), every moment recalls situations from a slew of much stronger works: La traviata, Manon(s), bohème(s), and Zazà, as well as pre-empting La rondine. Giordano, who revered Massenet, and whose publisher Sonzogno, promoted many of the French master’s works in Italy, closely modeled the first act’s interplay of café music and orchestra on Sapho (1897), and appropriated the third act prelude of Chérubin (1905) for his own third act. More bare-facedly, Giordano rewrites his tenor hit Amor ti vieta from Fedora in O mia Marcella in Act Two: it is demonstrably a retread, with salient features blunted. Serena Daolio and Danilo Formaggio as the lovers, the only roles with any profile, have attractive youthful timbres, though her top register can be wayward and her tuning occasionally imprecise.
Amica (1905) was Mascagni’s return to composition after the vainglorious stunt of premiering his previous opera, Le Maschere, at six Italian theatres on the same night in 1901, backfired. As if re-launching his career, he signed a contract with French publisher Choudens who provided the librettist, Paul Bérel, a pseudonym for Paul de Choudens, from the family firm. It had a stellar send-off in Monte-Carlo with Geraldine Farrar and Maurice Renaud, but failed to make an impression. Structurally, as a short two-acter with intermezzo, it resembles Cavalleria Rusticana, but its Alpine milieu and wayward heroine recall Catalani’s La Wally. The opera starts promisingly with a passage for tuned cowbells and oboe, and a carefully composed pastoral chorus that turns into a Hymn to the Sun, though much less imposing than that which opens his Japanese opera Iris (1898). As the opera progresses the inspiration grows more fitful and the execution careless, mirroring the increasing lack of structure and psychological credibility in the libretto. The intermezzo is memorable, but climaxes too soon, and the one passage that is intended to bear genuine dramatic weight; an evocation of the lure of the mountain heights, is banal and square; a composite of the Ride of the Valkyries and the avalanche music in La Wally. Mascagni’s attempts to spice his harmonic palette with non-sequitur modulations that tend to lurch back to the home key via commonplace cadences, make for queasy listening, and he imposes no musical structure on the libretto: the opera degenerates into a rant.
Anna Malavasi’s dark soprano is ideal for Amica, and she negotiates Mascagni’s violent declamation with aplomb, though it sounds unidiomatic in French – more Mascagni’s fault than hers. David Sotgiu, as the weakling brother (who nevertheless outruns heroine and macho brother up a mountain side) has a whitish tenor voice that manages the impossibly strenuous tessitura with vulnerability yet not strain, a laudable attempt to do justice to an impossibly conceived role. The remaining cast is not as good, particularly the baritone brother, whose clotted timbre runs roughshod over the score, often a beat or three short of his notated entries. Interesting insights into cobwebbed corners of the repertoire, to be sure, but one cannot argue with history’s implacable verdict on both pieces.
[first published in OPERA magazine]
JULIAN GRANT 2008