Warning: lousy sound alert! Also, this is 1962, and the voice has developed those issues which prevent many people from listening to her – the spread at the top etc. Despite this, it’s a lesson in operatic acting, and an unexpected one. Watch her body when the horns make their stabbing sounds at the beginning – it’s as if she’s been stabbed. Again at the strings leading into ‘O regina’ and again at each subsequent transition, the body is one with the music.
Compare, if you like, someone like Elena Obratsova in performance (http://youtu.be/mguac0EuQoU). Music in the pit, acting on the stage, little connection. ‘Ti maledico’ might be addressed to someone else. Or compare her gesture at the final ‘O belta’ to Callas’s conventional-seeming but subtle folded hands.
Sometimes I think that there’s no such thing as an easy song. This chestnut by Dvorak ought be straightforward: two pages, nine phrases, not technically taxing, ever-popular. Listening to a dozen or so performances on YouTube changed my mind.
There’s the accompaniment, notated in 6/8 against the singer’s 2/4. Lots of three against two then, no problem, except that the LH of the piano is syncopated, there are integral grace notes and almost everyone uses lots of rubato. Too much of that and the song loses its pulse – Dvorak marks it andante con moto – and becomes a series of stop-starts. We have a tendency to feel phrases as working towards the middle and then away. but these have their weight at the end, and they mustn’t become lead boots.
Then there are the markings, which most people at least seem to have glanced at. There’s nothing to stop you interpreting, of course – no one right way – but it seems to me that the markings all indicate that Dvorak wanted a certain quality to the song - think of it as confiding, inward. (If you don’t want to do it the composer’s way, at least be clear what you don’t want to do.) He directs the singer to start the first stanza piano and mezza voce and the second pp. Did I say there were no technical difficulties? Well, piano, mezza voce rising to a high G – that’s not so easy. Again almost everyone makes it simpler technically by opening out on the G, singing it more loudly than the rest of the phrase.
Then there is the question of how to treat the two added bars in the second stanza, that lovely expansion of the melody at the song’s climax. Do you attach them to the phrase before, or the phrase after? Where’s the breath? Do you reinforce the feeling con expressione or can you let the phrase expansion do that for you?
Published first as one of a set of Gypsy Songs, and first sung by a tenor, the song was designed for domestic, small-scale performance. It’s unfortunate that people choose it as as an encore with orchestra and still more unfortunate when they help out poor Dvorak by adding half a stanza.
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Netrebko would like to make an announcement.
In complete contrast, here’s the girl from Richmond, keeping those Gs and F#s right in line and observing the pp in the second stanza. Oddly, she doesn’t bother with the crescendos much.
Not much feeling there, though? – more of a demonstration.
If you’d like to sample the dozen, here’s the playlist. There’s a good version by Magdalena Kozena, a lovely, simple one by Kiri Te Kanawa and a heartfelt one from Sutherland, marred by a deeply unfortunate introduction and horror visuals. But the pick of the bunch, for me, is someone who sings the first stanza as Dvorak wrote it, and alone amongst my dozen, attaches the extra bars to the phrase before. Like Sutherland and Kiri, she brings to it the inwardness and tenderness the song requires.
Norman Lebrecht writes (again) about the slow death of the symphony orchestra, now gathering pace: the Philadelphia itself is threatened. On the positive side, he says that the orchestras are woven into the social fabric of our cities through out-reach programs etc, and seems to think that this will help to save them. It hasn’t helped the Church of England. He praises the concert hall as a refuge from our distracted lives. Fairly expensive way of escaping your iPhone – most people would choose a sauna, or a round of golf.
He contemptuously dismisses the belief that listening to ‘good’ music makes you a good person, as if that were still the stock argument for the defence. Does anybody still use it, I wonder? Certainly not in the world of grant applications and fund-raising campaigns. For some time now the stock arguments there have concerned ‘access’ and ‘identity’.
Orchestras formed in a stratified society and appealed to connoisseurs. The kind of democracy we enjoy levels itself against hierarchies of taste and substitutes what passes for relativism: YMMV, IMO – all that. It also produces a large number of people who actively hate the high arts – relativism has limits. Since the 1960s, the education system has been conquered by various anti-elitist beliefs. One teacher I met who worked in our western suburbs scorned the very idea of providing kids with stringed instruments: ‘irrelevant’. At present, the private schools and some few government schools hold out, but even there I notice that the musical interludes at ceremonies tend to be from the big-band repertoire: mainstream jazz is our new posh.
So I don’t see a big future for the symphony orchestra. Does anyone?
Local choral societies are no longer the backbone of musical Britain that once they were, partly on account of gut-scraping fatwas issued against Handel performance that might violate narrow, bogus notions of ‘authenticity’.
GBS once said that “the Handelian chorus must be put down, if necessary by military action”. He could not have foreseen death by aspic.
Amongst the little comparison-cults on YouTube there’s one for Olympia’s aria, as you’d expect, since every coloratura soprano wants to sing it. Sumi Jo is there, and Sutherland (late performances – don’t go there) and the recent crop of French divas.
Don’t miss Natalie Dessay in rehearsal for her first Olympia, where the voluble director is Roman Polanski. Dessay marks most of the time, taking instruction from choreographer, director, conductor, but we get a bit of it at pitch when Hugues Cuenod enters. You get to hear the underlay of the voice.
There’s also a brief clip from that performance:
And (unmissable!) Dessay singing the whole piece in a production at Orange.
Finally, a contrasting product from Patricia Petibon in what must have been a hugely enjoyable recital.
