Document

  1995
    November 1995
        Opera and music theatre
                Rossini Tancredi.

Rossini Tancredi. Ewa Podles (contr) Tancredi; Sumi Jo (sop) Amenaide; Stanford Olsen (ten) Argirio; Pietro Spagnoli (bar) Orbazzano; Anna Maria di Micco (sop) Isaura; Lucretia Lendi (mez) Roggiero; Capella Brugensis; Collegium Instrumentale Brugense / Alberto Zedda.

Naxos (Super budget price) (CD) 8 660037/8 (two discs: 147 minutes: DDD). Notes and Italian text included.

Tancredi is a seminal work in the Rossini canon, a work which mingles a new-found reach in the musical architecture with vocal and instrumental writing of rare wonderment and beauty. It is a difficult opera to stage (dramatically it is flawed, and its colours are as delicate at times as a butterfly's wings); yet until now, and the appearance of this exceptionally fine new recording, it has never been available on record in anything other than live theatre or concert performances. The best of them – never 'officially' available – was the one starring Marilyn Horne and the young Katia Ricciarelli, with Eve Queler conducting Philip Gossett's new Critical Edition of the score.

That is the edition which is used on this new Naxos recording, albeit somewhat pragmatically, by Alberto Zedda. Zedda is an old Rossini hand and one of Gossett's fellow editors, though it is interesting to speculate how his pick-and-choose way with the Tancredi text will be regarded in scholarly circles. Zedda encourages, most effectively, the use of a cello and double-bass as dramatic underpinning in the secco recitatives but the recitatives themselves are quite severely pruned. This may or may not be a concession to popular taste. What undoubtedly is a concession to popular taste is the decision in Act 2 to mix up the original Venice and Ferrara versions of 1813. What Zedda gives us is the opera's original ending, the happy ending written for Venice, as opposed to the revised 'tragic' ending written for Ferrara ("the fashionable ending", as Lady Bracknell might have said). However, he prefaces the original ending not with the original Gran Scena di Tancredi written for Venice but with the immensely popular Rondo "Perche turbar la calma" which Rossini provided as part of the wholesale revision of the Act 2 finale for the Ferrara version.

Still, the proof of the pudding and all that; there is no denying that the Rondo is memorably sung by Ewa Podles. But, then, the singing is splendid throughout, with a cast that is unusually starry. Podles herself has sung the role of Tancredi (to acclaim) at La Scala, Milan; and the Amenaide, Sumi Jo, is too well known to need further introduction here. I thought Jo a touch cool at first, too much the pert coloratura but this is not an impression that persists. This is a performance of wonderful vocal control and flowering sensibility.

If you have heard Podles, you may be wondering how well matched she and Jo are in the opera's great nodal duets. Podles, a smoky-voiced Pole with something of Marilyn Horne's ability to turn herself into one helluva guy, likes to go her own way at times. In recitatives, rests are ignored and emphases freely redistributed. In arias, it is not unusual to find the pulse beating faster or slower as the musical temperature rises or falls. In the event, though, she and Sumi Jo work well together, and they sound marvellous. Podles also manages, chameleon-like, to adjust to the purer, more obviously stylish Rossini manner of a singer who is very unlike herself, the young American tenor Stanford Olsen. His portrait of the conscience-stricken father Argirio matches singing of grace and impetus with great fineness of dramatic sensibility. As a result, something like the scene of the signing of his daughter's death-warrant emerges here as the remarkable thing it is. There could have been trouble in the duet in Act 2 between Argirio and Tancredi, where Zedda allows Podles to sing her solo lines at a slower tempo than Olsen. Ultimately, though, it all seems to work perfectly well.

Zedda is lucky to have at his disposal another of those wonderfully stylish chamber orchestras and chamber choirs that Naxos seem able to conjure at will. The aqueously lovely preface to Tancredi's first entrance is a fairly representative example of the players' ear for Rossini's delicately-limned tone-painting. And the recording itself is beautifully scaled. It is a recording, I should add, innocent of production 'effects'; the very reverse of Naxos's radiophonically electrifying Il barbiere di Siviglia (3/94), which was packed to the gunnels with them.

As usual with Naxos, you get a multilingual synopsis plus an original-language libretto without translation; but in the case of an opera like Tancredi, where it is very much a case of 'Prima la musica', this is not a great disincentive to buy.

All in all, then, this is a fine set; the first-ever studio recording of Tancredi, and a palpable hit. It is a set that has been aimed at a wide constituency of music lovers, yet it makes no compromises with the quality of the music-making.

RO



		Tancredi is a seminal work in the Rossini canon, a work which mingles a new-found reach in the musical architecture with vocal and instrumental writing of rare wonderment and beauty. It is a difficult opera to stage (dramatically it is flawed, and its colours are as delicate at times as a butterfly's wings); yet until now, and the appearance of this exceptionally fine new recording, it has never been available on record in anything other than live theatre or concert performances. The best of them – never 'officially' available – was the one starring Marilyn Horne and the young Katia Ricciarelli, with Eve Queler conducting Philip Gossett's new Critical Edition of the score.



		That is the edition which is used on this new Naxos recording, albeit somewhat pragmatically, by Alberto Zedda. Zedda is an old Rossini hand and one of Gossett's fellow editors, though it is interesting to speculate how his pick-and-choose way with the Tancredi text will be regarded in scholarly circles. Zedda encourages, most effectively, the use of a cello and double-bass as dramatic underpinning in the secco recitatives but the recitatives themselves are quite severely pruned. This may or may not be a concession to popular taste. What undoubtedly is a concession to popular taste is the decision in Act 2 to mix up the original Venice and Ferrara versions of 1813. What Zedda gives us is the opera's original ending, the happy ending written for Venice, as opposed to the revised 'tragic' ending written for Ferrara ("the fashionable ending", as Lady Bracknell might have said). However, he prefaces the original ending not with the original Gran Scena di Tancredi written for Venice but with the immensely popular Rondo "Perche turbar la calma" which Rossini provided as part of the wholesale revision of the Act 2 finale for the Ferrara version.



		Still, the proof of the pudding and all that; there is no denying that the Rondo is memorably sung by Ewa Podles. But, then, the singing is splendid throughout, with a cast that is unusually starry. Podles herself has sung the role of Tancredi (to acclaim) at La Scala, Milan; and the Amenaide, Sumi Jo, is too well known to need further introduction here. I thought Jo a touch cool at first, too much the pert coloratura but this is not an impression that persists. This is a performance of wonderful vocal control and flowering sensibility.



		If you have heard Podles, you may be wondering how well matched she and Jo are in the opera's great nodal duets. Podles, a smoky-voiced Pole with something of Marilyn Horne's ability to turn herself into one helluva guy, likes to go her own way at times. In recitatives, rests are ignored and emphases freely redistributed. In arias, it is not unusual to find the pulse beating faster or slower as the musical temperature rises or falls. In the event, though, she and Sumi Jo work well together, and they sound marvellous. Podles also manages, chameleon-like, to adjust to the purer, more obviously stylish Rossini manner of a singer who is very unlike herself, the young American tenor Stanford Olsen. His portrait of the conscience-stricken father Argirio matches singing of grace and impetus with great fineness of dramatic sensibility. As a result, something like the scene of the signing of his daughter's death-warrant emerges here as the remarkable thing it is. There could have been trouble in the duet in Act 2 between Argirio and Tancredi, where Zedda allows Podles to sing her solo lines at a slower tempo than Olsen. Ultimately, though, it all seems to work perfectly well.



		Zedda is lucky to have at his disposal another of those wonderfully stylish chamber orchestras and chamber choirs that Naxos seem able to conjure at will. The aqueously lovely preface to Tancredi's first entrance is a fairly representative example of the players' ear for Rossini's delicately-limned tone-painting. And the recording itself is beautifully scaled. It is a recording, I should add, innocent of production 'effects'; the very reverse of Naxos's radiophonically electrifying Il barbiere di Siviglia (3/94), which was packed to the gunnels with them.



		As usual with Naxos, you get a multilingual synopsis plus an original-language libretto without translation; but in the case of an opera like Tancredi, where it is very much a case of 'Prima la musica', this is not a great disincentive to buy.



		All in all, then, this is a fine set; the first-ever studio recording of Tancredi, and a palpable hit. It is a set that has been aimed at a wide constituency of music lovers, yet it makes no compromises with the quality of the music-making.