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More Legendary Voices
Note by Nigel Douglas |
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| When I wrote 'Legendary Voices' in 1992 (the accompanying Nimbus disc has the number NI 7851) my original list of singers had 26 names on it; it soon became evident that this would be too long a book, so I decided to make it a two-volume affair.
The singers in 'More Legendary Voices' are in no sense a second team - it would be hard to imagine any of these names relegated to a place in the reserves! - and once again they are all artists who for one reason or another hold a special place in my personal affections.
In my book I try to draw portraits of them as people; this disc presents them in their most essential guise - as singers.
Nigel Douglas John McCormack was by his own admission 'the world's worst actor', and though in his early years he managed to enjoy considerable success at Covent Garden and with the Manhattan Opera in New York it was as a concert singer that he achieved his full potential. Here he could deploy the beguiling sweetness of his voice and the wide-ranging versatility of his style while remaining what he essentially needed to be as a performer - himself. His popularity on the concert platform was unprecedented and has not been rivalled since - in one season 58,000 people bought tickets to hear him in New York alone - and whether singing Handel or a popular ditty he never lowered his meticulous standards of musicianship. The technical mastery revealed by his version of 'O sleep' is something few other tenors could rival, and the same effortless emission raises the humbler (but by no means simple) number 'I hear you calling me' into a gem in its own right. McCormack's final pianissimo high A seems to hang somewhere in space until with an immaculately poised 'glissando' he chooses to bring the melody gently back to earth. The great Italian conductor Tullio Serafin used to say that though he had worked with dozens of wonderful singers there were three whom he regarded as being in a class apart - Caruso, Ponselle and Ruffo. They were his 'giants', singers whose voices transcended normal limitations, and certainly all three possessed that marvellous quality of 'chiaroscuro', a magical combination of darkness and brilliance in the colouring of the voice. Ruffo was a superb vocal actor, relying not only on the exceptional power of his voice (especially in the upper register) to achieve his effects but also on an infinite variety of tonal shading. Tonio, twisted in body and mind, was one of his most powerful impersonations; as he introduces himself with the words 'Io sono il Prologo' they have the impact of a battle-cry, then comes a mocking, dangerous 'mezza voce' as he slides into the big tune on 'E voi, piuttosto...'. The scene is capped by a high A flat which few other baritones would be able to emulate; not for nothing did his colleague Giuseppe de Luca say of him 'That wasn't a voice, it was a miracle!' Glamorous, temperamental, a lady who could make her own rules, never out of the headlines, frequently in the law courts, worshipped by thousands of opera-goers and dreaded by several famous tenors, Maria Jeritza was everything that is meant by the expression 'prima donna'. Despite a penchant for musical waywardness she was Puccini's favourite Tosca (her trademark was the 'Vissi d'arte' sung lying flat on the floor) and Richard Strauss' first choice for several of his most taxing roles. Another part which she created with sensational success was that of Marie/Mariette in Korngold's Die tote Stadt. It was chosen for her debut at the Met in 1921, and this recording of the opera's most haunting passage displays her voice at its finest - radiant, intense and thrilling as the melody sweeps up to its crowning high B flat. If ever anyone was sent into the world to sing then that person was Beniamino Gigli. Blessed with a voice of irresistible beauty he sang throughout the whole of his long career as if his life depended upon every note, and though critics regularly hauled him over the coals for such lapses of taste as the sob, the gulp and the inserted aspirate the public adored him. This recording of the 'Improvviso' was made soon after his Met debut as Andrea Chénier and I regard it as one of his finest. The voice, essentially lyrical in quality, is so perfectly focussed that it can be employed with riveting dramatic cogency, an effect greatly enhanced by the incisive delivery of the text. An old friend of mine in the Covent Garden chorus once told me that when Gigli made his Covent Garden debut in the same role the whole company was bowled over by the beauty of his 'mezza voce', and as a sample of this it would be hard to beat his version of 'Mi par d'udir ancora'. As I well remember, even at the end of his career these soft tones of his used to carry to the furthest corners of the Albert Hall, filling those cavernous spaces with Mediterranean sunshine. The conductor Josef Krips said of Tauber 'He was first a great musician and second a great singer', and to my mind it is this instinctive feel of Tauber's for the essence of whatever music he happened to be singing, whether it was by Mozart, Schubert, Lehár or Jerome Kern, which was the secret of his extraordinary versatility. He was by common consent the outstanding Mozart tenor of his day and Don Ottavio was widely regarded as his finest role. Covent Garden had to wait until 1939, the year of this 'Il mio tesoro' recording, to hear it, and it was also the role with which, in the most dramatic of circumstances, he took his final bow there eight years later. The role of Paganini was the first of six which Lehár wrote specifically for Tauber, making 'Gern hab' ich die Frau'n gekübt' the first of the famous 'Tauberlieder', numbers which Tauber would repeat as often as the public went on calling for them. This is a perfect example of how to sing operetta, with the skills of the Mozartian, the smooth legato, the elegance of phrasing and the subtleties of nuance, effortlessly grafted onto the élan, the humour and the extrovert charm needed for the selling of the lighter muse. More than any other soprano I can think of Schumann personified that elusive quality, charm. Her voice was light and silvery and she used it with disarming skill, always radiating her own sense of joy in the act of singing. In her prime she was a celebrated Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro but in her early days as a member of the Hamburg Opera it was the girl-crazy page-boy Cherubino who fell to her lot, and this exquisitely vocalised version of the song which he addresses to the Countess and her maid is typical of Schumann's Mozart style - lively, mischievous but totally free from any form of exaggeration. As a singer of operetta she was irresistible, and Zeller's immortal number about the effects of the nightingale trilling down in the valley (actually a tenor song) gives her a perfect excuse to display her favourite party trick. As a child she had learned to imitate the whistling of the family canary, and for once it is legitimate to describe her performance by using that overworked word 'unique'. After surviving appalling hardships in his early life Chaliapin rose to become a dominating figure in Russian artistic circles and in due course one of the most widely discussed theatrical figures in the world. His insistence that every aspect of an operatic performance - production, decor, lighting, make-up and so on - should be dedicated to the dramatic and psychological essence of the work in hand was in those days revolutionary. Apart from being a 'basso cantante' of the first rank he was an actor of mesmeric potency, and in this recording his genius for characterisation is demonstrated by his singing Sancho Panza as well as the Don, each role with its own distinctive vocal colouring. He himself found the role of Don Quichotte so moving that when Massenet first went through it with him he could not control his tears; when he played it on stage many members of the public found it hard to control theirs. When Supervia died in childbirth at the age of 40 the world of opera was robbed of one of its most charismatic figures. A bubbling, glamorous and intensely feminine creature she had started her career at the astonishingly early age of 14, and she was still only 16 when she treated her native Barcelona to a double dose of Gallic seductiveness, appearing there as Bizet's Carmen and Saint-Saëns' Delilah. Her performance of 'Printemps qui commence' is a heady evocation of the score's languorous eroticism, the characteristic flutter in her tone shamelessly employed to cajole the unfortunate Samson; while her Cherubino presents a total contrast to Elisabeth Schumann's embodiment of the same role. Where Schumann enchants by the limpid purity of her tone Supervia injects the vocal line with spurts of Iberian passion; she is a Cherubino in a headlong sexual whirl. Muzio was a real child of the theatre, many of her early days being spent backstage in the various international opera houses in which her father worked as stage manager. Tall, handsome and intensely theatrical in her vocal style she was regarded as one of the finest operatic actresses of her day; certainly in this recording of the tragic Margherita's mental wanderings after her abandonment by Faust Muzio justifies by vocal means alone her nickname of 'the Eleanora Duse of song'. She made this recording less than a year before her death at the age of only 47, and though by then her voice, famously described by the tenor Lauri-Volpi as 'made of tears and sighs and restrained inner fire', had lost some of its tonal magnificence it was still a marvellous instrument for the expression of emotion. By many of her contemporaries she was regarded almost with reverence; as the great mezzo Ebe Stignani put it 'Muzio was above all comparisons - to me she was on an altar'. Lauritz Melchior, otherwise known as The Great Dane, remains unchallenged as the outstanding Heldentenor of the century. A huge man, much given to eating, drinking and playing the fool, his voice was an apparently tireless instrument which would sound as fresh at the end of a performance of Tristan or Siegfried as it had at the beginning, and the quality which I particularly relish is that he uses this enormous voice in a lyrical fashion, with never a bark or a shout. It is an essential aspect of the Meistersinger Prize Song that it should be sung with a conscious air of triumph - what happens to the opera if Walther does not wipe the floor with the opposition? - and from the first note to the last Melchior's Walther knows that nothing can stop him winning the hand of the lovely Eva. He gives a glorious display, the voice aglow with vitality, surging through the great melodic phrases with an energy that is positively unstoppable. During a career which spanned little more than a decade Kathleen Ferrier, through the beauty of her voice, the unaffected charm of her personality and the spontaneity of her musicianship, won a place in the hearts of the public such as few British singers have been privileged to attain. The voice was a true contralto, rich in quality but with a brilliant shine on it, quite without the 'hoot' which has been known to cloud some of the deeper female voices of the past. Despite outstanding successes as Gluck's Orfeo and Britten's Lucrelia it was not in opera but in oratorio, recitals and concerts that she felt most at home; and despite the essential 'Englishness' of her background and style she became, often in partnership with Bruno Walter as conductor or accompanist, a renowned interpreter of Schubert, Brahms and Mahler. No opera singer since the Second World War has engendered more excitement or stirred up more controversy, either as an artist or as a human-being, than Callas, and the circumstances in which she first came to sing I Puritani encapsulate much of what set her apart from other singers. In the first few years of her career she had appeared in the heaviest dramatic repertoire - Brünnhilde, Isolde, Turandot and so on - but in 1949 she rescued a production of I Puritani in Venice by learning Elvira, usually the domain of a light coloratura soprano, in one week (a week which included 3 Walküre Brünnhildes!) and she scored a triumph. This recording, to my mind one of her finest, was made a few months later, and it demonstrates not only a flexibility astonishing for so large a voice but also a musical and theatrical imagination way beyond those of most other singers. |
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